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Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

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Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#81

Post by goodcanadian »

RivieraKid wrote: post #32
FD3SA wrote: post #6

Capitalism`s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The profit motive is so strong that it often ends up creating irrational scenarios such as the economic situation we have today. European countries seem to have struck a far better balance by harnessing the profit motive of capitalism while preventing disasters such as for-profit healthcare, for-profit education, for-profit government policies (for the ric…

Why do you think private healthcare isn't working? Free market is typically inefficient if 1) there's not enough competition or 2) customers don't make optimal market decisions. Which one is it in private healthcare?

In a nutshell, because the American private healthcare is not free market. It is a fragmented socialized system run by insurance companies and private hospitals. I am not absolutely convinced that free market medicine is bad, but I am absolutely convinced that the U.S. doesn't have it. As another commenter pointed out, I am not really free to go to any provider I like. I go to the providers dictated by my insurance company and my insurance company is dictated by my employer.

I am Canadian, but living in the States. I have experienced both systems, and I can say unequivocally that I vastly prefer the Canadian socialized system. The quality of care that my family has received has been about the same with very little out of pocket in either case, but in Canada, I simply don't have to think about healthcare, ever. It is simply there for me [EDIT: even if I am unemployed].

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#82

Post by zodiac »

wyager wrote: post #8
FD3SA wrote: post #6

Capitalism`s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The profit motive is so strong that it often ends up creating irrational scenarios such as the economic situation we have today. European countries seem to have struck a far better balance by harnessing the profit motive of capitalism while preventing disasters such as for-profit healthcare, for-profit education, for-profit government policies (for the ric…

Please explain how for-profit education is a disaster. By all measures, private schools in the US are superior to public schools, and the US's private universities are consistently rated best in the world. You also can't generalize about e.g. for-profit healthcare based on the American situation, because the regulatory environment is so extreme as to have to created a government-controlled crony-capitalistic oligopol…

Schools like Harvard, MIT, Princeton (which I assume you're thinking of) are non profits.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#84

Post by ajcarpy2005 »

cousin_it wrote: post #68
privong wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure there is an institutional or global solution. But I am also not convinced it is an institutional or global problem. There are certainly individual solutions—accepting a different standard of living in exchange for fewer working hours, selecting careers which have better working hours—but I have trouble envisioning a global change (short of a cultural attitude shift) which would "solve" this "problem".

Sorry, tragedies of the commons don't have individual solutions. If everyone else is overfishing the common supply, you overfish as well, or go out of business. If everyone else is using performance enhancing drugs, you use them as well, or drop out. If everyone else is working 80 hour weeks and thus bidding up the price of houses, you do the same, or you can't buy a house. These things are very well studied in game…

Individual liberty may be a resource being depleted by an emergently enforced necessity to work.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#85

Post by avz »

cousin_it wrote: post #71
privong wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this issue really a tragedy of the commons though? What resource is being depleted?

The market value of labor, relative to other goods. Also see the book "Two-Income Trap", it basically describes how households didn't become better off from making both partners work, because that just bid down the price of labor relative to housing and education. Everyone ended up in the same position as before, but now they work 2x more and cannot opt out. Also the non-working partner in the family provided a safet…

> Everyone ended up in the same position as before, but now they work 2x more

Surely the extra people working produced more output (e.g. ~twice as many bugs fixed/year or ~twice as many new anti-cancer drugs/year). Supply of some things would remain constraint and their prices would be bidden up, but many others would have their supply increased and prices could even fall (e.g. due to capital costs spread over a larger number of units). We definitely have not ended up in the same position as before.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#86

Post by SupremumLimit »

inscrutablemike wrote: post #66
RivieraKid wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forcibly reducing the workday doesn't sound like a good idea, the optimal number of work hours depends on your specific situation. If I love my job, I could be ok with 9 hours a day. If I hate my job but it pays really really well, I could be ok with 4 hours a day or less.

You have to understand that no proposal for the government to enforce specific outcomes is ever an attempt to solve an actual problem. It's always, in every case, someone's attempt to make reality conform to their own ideological prejudices.

You have to understand that no comment is about describing reality as it is, but rather someone's attempt to make reality conform to their own ideological prejudices.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#87

Post by RivieraKid »

goodcanadian wrote: post #81
RivieraKid wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think private healthcare isn't working? Free market is typically inefficient if 1) there's not enough competition or 2) customers don't make optimal market decisions. Which one is it in private healthcare?

In a nutshell, because the American private healthcare is not free market. It is a fragmented socialized system run by insurance companies and private hospitals. I am not absolutely convinced that free market medicine is bad, but I am absolutely convinced that the U.S. doesn't have it. As another commenter pointed out, I am not really free to go to any provider I like. I go to the providers dictated by my insurance c…

Yeah, it's similar here in the Czech Republic, healthcare is basically free for everyone (with some exceptions). But I wonder if a free market healthcare with the right regulations wouldn't be more efficient.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#88

Post by dpweb »

sp332 wrote: post #13

Universal basic income is the case that gives the rich, ruling class the maximum power over everyone else. Everyone gets dependent on government money, and it takes an act of Congress to increase the baseline pay.

It's a horrendous idea for several reasons. Are we so out of ideas to fix our problems, we're now saying that working less and giving away money to people is the answer?

When you give away money without the commensurate work in a capitalist economy, prices explode, and inflation is the same as lower wages. We get away with subsidizing food. Food is cheap, there's a massive supply.

Things that we've declared human rights and there is not an unlimited supply.. Medical care and college tuition. Both we've directed massive capital inflows towards. We don't even raid the treasury for the latter, we put the crushing debt on the kids. At best, permanently making their future a little dimmer.

This basic income crap is not the answer. These people need to learn something about how capitalism works. Only giving value to others is compensated. Do some powerful folks extract too much from the system. Yes. Nothing a tweak of the tax code wouldn't fix. We need some laws changed for sure. They won't do it though, too many cowards.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#89

Post by waps »

avz wrote: post #61
bmj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there /is/ a solution to the problem? Or is this just one of the side effects of capitalism? I'm not trolling here...just curious. My own mind tends to go in the direction of the parent, but, I also see how enforcement would be next to impossible.

I think you're trying to solve a wrong problem. Work isn't a problem. Work is what propelled humanity to explore, understand and conquer the world around us. Human work is a requirement for the development of medicine, greener technologies, safer transportation and even space exploration and colonization. If there are any problems about work, they are about making it more enjoyable, making good work more widely acces…

That is the exact problem with the 4 hour workday and other forms of part-time work. As I've heard many people describe part-time work : 40% of the pay for 80% of the work.

Until that changes, I would not expect part-time work to happen for anyone but really high up managers where such a trade may actually make sense.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#90

Post by programminggeek »

spiritplumber wrote: post #80
programminggeek wrote: post #50

Poor negotiation and group think stole the 4 hour workday. I've seen companies where you can have 2 devs working on the same project, one making say $30,000-40,000 and one making like $60,000-70,000. They do the same work, but have wildly different valuations because of their ability to negotiate. If people negotiated higher rates and fewer hours, that is entirely possible to achieve and eventually could be the norm,…

It puzzles me how Americans don't want to discuss how much they make with coworkers.

Well, bosses have been known to threaten to fire workers if they are found to be discussing how much money they work. People act as if it would be impossible to work at a company where people could know what other people make.

Yet, public school teachers have a pay schedule that is pretty cut and dry, government workers' salaries are public record, etc. Somehow people manage to work those jobs without any kind of mutiny due to freely available information. I'm sure there are other companies where this works out just fine.

Mostly, companies take advantage of the information asymmetry to pay as little as they possibly have to. It works for them as long as people don't find out their getting screwed. If people find out, they negotiate better. Ultimately, that probably leads to people getting paid better or getting a better paying job.

If companies just took care of the employees well to begin with, it wouldn't matter if people knew how much other people were getting paid. At the end of the day, it's a problem of greed, and that's an unsolvable problem as long as humans are involved.

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