There’s an odd goal with “productivity” by CEOs in recent years under some obsession to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I suspect in the US where it’s shown time and time again businesses don’t value human lives we will not see this which is sad. Humans could improve so much if we chose to.
Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)
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Re: Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)
#12Quite a few fallacies in the article the largest relating to evolution. Sure we aren't evolutionary predisposed to work, but Europeans, North Africans, Asians are genetically and we have plenty of ancestors and examples of life that spend their whole lives working
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)
#13Decreasing working hours increases labor availability (=> so you'd expect people to get paid less as a result), but higher headcount for comparable output is also totally undesirable for an employer: The only potential benefit is some limited redundancy (bus factor), but this comes at the cost of communication overhead (meetings), decreased software design coherence, no "single source of truth" (person), all of which…
We need a new business structure that allows decentralized workers. Ironically these systems exist, and are called play, and are often used to get around child labor laws. The Queen Ants own the forever games (Roblox, LOL, Fortnite, Minecraft). A less playful example is Open Sores. These systems are mostly decentralized, but we need a design that only allows groups to form in specific blocking situations, like ants building a bridge.
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)
#14"Less work" is productivity. Economists are absolutely obsessed with it.
Now, as far as reducing the hours we work, there's a problem. If we decide to take our productivity gains to work only 20 hours per week, someone else can "undercut" us by working 30. Or 40. And so on.
And part of the obsession with job creation is the fact we've taken on so many immigrants who need jobs lest they become a major drag on the economy.
Anyhow, if we want to work less, it's almost inevitable it has to come through government regulation. Put a cap on how many hours a job can require. Minimum vacation amounts. Etc... but then how do you deal with entrepreneurs? Or ensure that a single job can provide a decent standard of living even if it's a low productivity job. And so on...
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)
#15[flagged]
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)
#16They have name for “Less work for same pay” : inflation.
Seems like today's more-work-less-pay model also leads to inflation, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.
The thing being hinted at is there is an already an English term to describe the notion of the value of a unit of something decreasing over time, which is “inflation”. Not causation, just definition.
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)
#17Four-day week trials, for example, keep showing productivity holds or improves — Iceland ran the biggest pilot, the UK had 61 companies in their trial, Microsoft Japan saw a 40% boost. The data is there. Yet I know a CEO who suggested implementing a four-day week if the least productive 10% of workers came in an extra day instead. Just bonkers.
The extreme cognitive dissonance in these types is so odd - on the one hand, they claim that CEOs are these money-hungry evil tycoons who want to get as much out of their employees as possible, yet on the other hand, they also claim 4 day work weeks are supposedly so amazing and effective and improve productivity.
So .. why wouldn't these horrible CEOs who want to leech everything possible out of their employees gladly/immediately choose to implement 4 day work weeks, when they would supposedly make their employees more productive for the same cost? Why would they refuse to take that?
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)
#18Quite a few fallacies in the article the largest relating to evolution. Sure we aren't evolutionary predisposed to work, but Europeans, North Africans, Asians are genetically and we have plenty of ancestors and examples of life that spend their whole lives working
It's hard to know how long evolution takes to work in some of these things. Are we still better adapted to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, even if we have hundreds of generations with agriculture now? This is essentially the same question that adherents of "primal" or "paleo" diets and lifestyles ask.
On the one hand, humans are pretty adaptable. We had colonized a large part of the world even before the invention of agriculture. Some adaptations, like loss of skin pigmentation in Europeans, happened relatively quickly, we think.
On the other hand, other adaptations, like the ability to digest lactose into adulthood relied on specific mutations that still haven't spread through the whole population.
I suspect that we would be happier with less work, and more time socializing, singing and dancing, and more time in nature, but how would you ever prove it?
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like today's more-work-less-pay model also leads to inflation, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.
The thing being hinted at is there is an already an English term to describe the notion of the value of a unit of something decreasing over time, which is “inflation”. Not causation, just definition.
This is confused. Less work for same pay means each unit of work is more valuable, in other words deflation.
Re: Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)
#20Four-day week trials, for example, keep showing productivity holds or improves — Iceland ran the biggest pilot, the UK had 61 companies in their trial, Microsoft Japan saw a 40% boost. The data is there. Yet I know a CEO who suggested implementing a four-day week if the least productive 10% of workers came in an extra day instead. Just bonkers.
The extreme cognitive dissonance in these types is so odd - on the one hand, they claim that CEOs are these money-hungry evil tycoons who want to get as much out of their employees as possible, yet on the other hand, they also claim 4 day work weeks are supposedly so amazing and effective and improve productivity. So .. why wouldn't these horrible CEOs who want to leech everything possible out of their employees glad…
I'm not sure which types you have in mind? The most strident critics of CEOs I know say they're not just money hungry; they're power and status hungry, and will happily trade off additional money for opportunities to show that they're high status or exert additional power over the little folks. If that's what you value, directing your employees' lives for an extra day every week may be worth leaving a lot of money on the table.