Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

https://www.am1st.com/another-reason-companies-fail/

(It's also a jab at the intellectual bankruptcy of Atlas Shrugged)

The alternatives that I can think of:

Enjoying the work and similar motivations: This tends to only apply to certain jobs. In addition, just because I'm intrinsically motivated to work on programming, for example, that doesn't mean that I'm motivated to program the things that society wants me to.

A sense of duty: I think this motivation tends to have limitations and is likely hard to achieve consistently without propaganda, nationalism, or a state religion.

Social status: Call me cynical, but I think this only works if someone can use their social status to get the things they want; in which case it doesn't seem that different from capitalism.

I think this speaks to your own lack of understanding of these jobs. Just because the general goal is set by someone higher up, does not mean that there is not hidden variation for the exact task, as well as a lot of places for 'hidden mediocrity'.

Take cleaning the toilets, for example. The general order given is "clean the toilets". Think, however, about how this task has to be broken down. The small things like cleaning the tap heads, under the rim of the seat, etc. that most people might not explicitly think of without being reminded. The person has to do those small tasks, possibly hundreds of times, while dealing with any unexpected obstacles.

Or take something less unsavory, like baking bread. Anyone who has baked bread understands that, while the general instructions _sound_ simple, there is a lot of complexity that is not accounted for, and a lot of room for variability of skill.

Sure, anyone can train for a month and play X tune on the guitar, but are you going to pay for someone who has spent simply one month training, or someone who can really play the tune that has been playing for years? If they are interchangeable then there needn't be thousands of threads submitted to hacker news about how to hire "10x developers".

> Small businesspeople in particular are a backbone of society in a way that most workers really are not.

The matter of fact is that once a company has been established, it can float for a long time without the business owner contributing much whatsoever. I can think of more than a couple of companies that have changed CEOs three times in the last 5 years, while the actual inputs and outputs of the company remain steady. Direction only matters in a vague sense until you hit bad economic times. The ultimate truth is that 'fungibility' has nothing to do with 'value'.

It’s preferable to have more production, which could be one person working 60 hours or two working 30 hours. Sometimes due to lower switching and communication costs and returns to specialisation/learning by doing 60 hours will be more productive. Sometimes the costs are low and the returns to one person working more hours will be low and it won’t be. If there are fixed costs to employing a single worker this will militate against splitting up the work.

> So reducing workload to increase employment rates is completely unacceptable to those who own society.

Then the German system of Kurzarbeit[1] during economic downturns should be unworkable. It isn’t, it’s just difficult to coordinate.

> Wage presure from near full employment is also undesireable to them but must be considered the lesser of two evils and is fairly fudge-able by changing the definition of employed.

Changing definitions do not affect whether there are too many or too few workers for the production demanded. If there’s an increase in demand for labour some people will work more and some people will come out of unemployment as wages are bid up by the greater demand.

[1]https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/08/01/anthropology-of-financi...

> In the 2008-9 recession, in response to falling orders, German firms reduced labour utilisation by cutting back work hours rather than by laying off workers. In fact, a whopping 90% of the drop in total labour inputs in the German economy in the Great Recession is to be explained by reduction of hours per worker ! This kind of “labour hoarding” does not normally happen during recessions in other countries, but did happen in Germany this time. This mini-miracle now has people on the centre-left all over the world seeking ways to replicate it in other countries, and has spawned a substantial literature.

> In Germany, firms face restrictions on sacking workers in the first place, but in case of economic difficulties, they can apply to the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit) for “short time” or Kurzarbeit. (Not the same as the 35-hour work week made famous by France, which is a statutory definition of full-time work.) The application entails a protocol for reducing work hours per worker, with the request triggering a process of consultations between the BA, management and works councils inside firms. After an agreement, workers can receive unemployment compensation in proportion to the loss in working hours.