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Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

theguardian.com

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Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#81

Post by astrange »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #68
choeger wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everywhere. There are many professions that do not take part in the growth of productivity. Medical Doctors for instance (even though some radiologists try hard to) are limited by interactions with their patients. The same holds for employees at points of sales, they only take part indirectly by selling more higher-priced goods. So a shop owner that wants to stay open sees a 20% reduction in attendance by their e…

> Medical Doctors for instance (even though some radiologists try hard to) are limited by interactions with their patients Strongly disagree, productivity increase is everywhere, surgery recovery times have been drastically decreased in the past decades, and recovery protocols accelerated across the board. Just because doctors have a limit throughput of how many patients per day they can see, it doesn't mean that hos…

> The key point GP is highlight is that productivity has basically decoupled from salaries since the 1970's, i.e. we are all collectively producing more value whilst collectively getting payed less in proportion to the value generated.

This thread is about Spain (which certainly has a lot of economic problems along with the rest of the EU), but wasn't that research mainly about the US?

My impression is some but not all of the cause is because "productivity" numbers are very confused because of how much exponentially more efficient computers have gotten. If you measure in 1970s computers, someone building a PC in 2020 has a million times more productivity.

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#82

Post by astrange »

daptaq wrote: post #7
ladyanita22 wrote: post #4

Oh, beautiful Spain, playing experiments with an unemployment rate of 16.13%... I love how my country hugs the poverty closer and closer each year that passes by.

Aren't fewer workdays better for employment, because more people can be employed? I'm guessing it's more complicated, but is there some clear tendency?

If you make the definition of fulltime worker 30 hours a week instead of 40 hours a week, it certainly does make more people fulltime employed, but it also seems like cheating.

In the US underemployment was blamed on laziness, lack of training, etc etc for years but the actual cause is the Fed setting interest rates too high, and when they stopped we got more employment than ever (as of Jan 2020). If you simply make employers compete more to hire people, they will do a good job training them, making them more productive, ignoring minor criminal records and so on.

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#83

Post by astrange »

airhead969 wrote: post #13
eric4smith wrote: post #10

It seems that we're slowly heading to a place where salaries are going to be much lower, because of less working hours and loss of the kinds of jobs that paid a good living wage. Or those same jobs will just pay a lower salary. It could be good or bad. The good part is, less buying. Less shopping. Smaller homes. Lower needs. etc. The bad part, all of that part of the economy that was depending those incomes is going…

There are more people because of population trends. Simultaneously, there are fewer jobs due to automation. Wages will continue to decline with an oversupply of labor.

Automation does not reduce jobs. It is impossible to run out of jobs, because 1. demand is infinite 2. jobs are based on "comparative advantage", and people have comparative advantage with automation because they're the same species as their customers.

Also, this isn't even happening. It's mostly an artifact because productivity of e.g. computer manufacturing looks super efficient if you measure each 2020 computer as containing a million 1970s computers.

> Wages will continue to decline with an oversupply of labor.

This is called the "lump of labor" fallacy. Increasing the number of people increases both supply and demand, and therefore improves the economy, and therefore may raise wages.

(Economists don't simply use supply and demand for the labor market anyway, they consider things like monopsony and search models.)

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#84

Post by wwupt »

choeger wrote: post #33
tsimionescu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that wages have never kept up with productivity increase. Companies are extracting more and more productivity out of their employees, which translates to ever increasing profits. But this is not an economical law. It's absolutely possible to sacrifice ever increases in growth for more worker time.

Not everywhere. There are many professions that do not take part in the growth of productivity. Medical Doctors for instance (even though some radiologists try hard to) are limited by interactions with their patients. The same holds for employees at points of sales, they only take part indirectly by selling more higher-priced goods. So a shop owner that wants to stay open sees a 20% reduction in attendance by their e…

On the question of MDs, here (in Europe, YMMV) we have doctors who have either have their own practice, and therefore work as little or as much as they want, or are part of hospital staff which is under its own separate legal regimen for work time (with more work hours than the average person, usually). In either case, I think they are not likely to be affected directly by changes to the "typical" work week.

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#85

Post by astrange »

Rule35 wrote: post #25
jonplackett wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

House prices not necessarily. House prices are driven by demand and by ability to borrow. If everyone takes a pay cut, everyone can pay less and house prices should go down. The only reason house prices have gone so silly recently is insanely cheap credit has let everyone bid against each other to drive house prices up.

Real estate rarely goes down, outside of a total bubble deflation. People just hold onto it longer, unable to profitably sell, further trapping others in a cycle of rent. The current bubble will drain money from producers to the value-empty mortgage sector for decades.

Your model that people can afford to hold onto an asset with maintenance costs forever seems like it can't be true. It's possible for your primary residence, but that's because homes have a use - you can live in them. If you're using it and paying the mortgage then it doesn't matter if you're underwater.

Anyway, this can be solved by waiting for them to die, and in the meantime building more houses with more efficient land use.

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#86

Post by brmgb »

mattmanser wrote: post #69
joaodlf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem in Spain is how prevalent these attitudes are, in a macro context where good opportunities have been scarce for decades This really nails it. I'm originally from Portugal (now living and working in the UK). Staying late and maintaining presence was a really big thing in Portugal. You really are looked down on when you leave early, it's a really terrible work culture, it genuinely felt like people would…

The irony of this and the parent comment is the UK regularly come up as a country that the exact same problem happens in. The UK has notoriously low productivity compared to Europe and the US, and longer average work hours than the rest of Europe. These are larger aggregate studies. I wonder why both your experiences of the UK seem so at odds with the observed studies? Is it just the field you're in? Some examples: h…

> The UK has notoriously low productivity compared to Europe and the US, and longer average work hours than the rest of Europe.

You should be very wary of productivity statistics coming from Europe.

I have worked most of the past decade in France. Like most highly educated employee in France, my contract is in days and not in hours. Officialy and legally, I have no set hours but for accounting purpose I have always officialy worked 37.5 hours a week. In reality, I have never worked less than 42.5 hours and weeks above 45 hours are both common and expected.

This is the norm not the exception.

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#87

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

choeger wrote: post #41
jonplackett wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

House prices not necessarily. House prices are driven by demand and by ability to borrow. If everyone takes a pay cut, everyone can pay less and house prices should go down. The only reason house prices have gone so silly recently is insanely cheap credit has let everyone bid against each other to drive house prices up.

That's only part of the story. Current house prices are so high that only the absolute top of the income class can afford to pay off a mortgage. Just an example: In Berlin you will pay around 850.000EUR for a newly-built single family home of around 160qm on a 600qm plot. With realistic interest rates of around 1.5 to 1.8% it will take you around 4.8% per year to pay this off in the (roughly) 25 to 30 years you have…

>So what drives these prices is actually inherited wealth.

This is so true for Germany/Most of Western Europe. Buying property is a pipe dream at this point, even for white collar professionals, if you have no help from the bank of mom and dad.

Building has just not kept up with demand (can't build and dilute the value of established NIMBY property owners) and wages have not kept up with the rising property prices.

And rent freezing for the established ones further increases the cost for those new to the market. So good luck building wealth for a mortgage when you'll be paying over half of your net income for big city rent.

I feel like unless something changes, we're looking at some massive revolts in the next decades if things continue along this path of squeezing the middle and lower classes to further transfer their wealth to the rich, all carefully enabled by the ruling politicians.

That's why so many desperate young ones are gambling their savings on GME and other memes, since they realized that unless you're born into wealth, the game is rigged against you building wealth no matter how hard you work. So then, why bother working hard as that just makes the rich even richer but not you.

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#89

Post by vidarh »

brmgb wrote: post #86
mattmanser wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of this and the parent comment is the UK regularly come up as a country that the exact same problem happens in. The UK has notoriously low productivity compared to Europe and the US, and longer average work hours than the rest of Europe. These are larger aggregate studies. I wonder why both your experiences of the UK seem so at odds with the observed studies? Is it just the field you're in? Some examples: h…

> The UK has notoriously low productivity compared to Europe and the US, and longer average work hours than the rest of Europe. You should be very wary of productivity statistics coming from Europe. I have worked most of the past decade in France. Like most highly educated employee in France, my contract is in days and not in hours. Officialy and legally, I have no set hours but for accounting purpose I have always o…

People in the UK "officially and legally" have much the same situation, and in reality most people still work longer than the officially stated hours.

Most of the numbers I can find for Europe is from surveys of employees, not gathered from data on labour contracts.

E.g. pretty much all of the EU numbers draws on the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS)

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#90

Post by dalbasal »

vidarh wrote: post #74
dalbasal wrote: post #63

"The Workweek" is, surprisingly, a really deep topic. Keynes' 15 hr work week prediction, for example, is a fascinating rabbit to travel down. The typical economics professors' "why it failed" explanations (at least circa 2005) are tellingly evasive. They preserve all Keynes' premises^ with a " what "happened " scenario that threads a tiny needle. IMO, regardless of which rabbit hole you follow, it turns out that wor…

When my grandparents entered the workforce in Norway, the working week was typically 54 hours. When my parents entered the workforce it was limited to no more than 45 hours, and a couple of years later it was down to 42.5 hours. By the time I was born it was 40 hours. Before I entered the workforce, it was down to 37.5 hours for most employees (it is legally limited to 40 hours, but 37.5 has been the norm since 1986)…

I think you may be misunderestimating the original prediction.^ He predicted those drastic reduction in working hours within a generation or two, writing in 1930... It was supposed to happen by 1980.

The prediction was widely head, and relied on two non controversial ideas: income effect and substitution effect. Higher hourly wages make working more worthwhile, so people work more; Higher overall wages allow people to trade work less opt for leisure. It also relied on efficiency and gdp growth predictions which did really come true.

The orthodox reasoning for why the prediction failed is basically: We invented all this awesome new stuff. People prefer to work more, and buy more of this new stuff rather than work less. I don't believe this holds up, but it's what I was taught at uni.

Anyway... my point is that looking at the history of employment, it doesn't seem like these "economic" (in the literal sense) explanations have any predictive power. Actual changes in working patterns seem to be governed by "outside factors." Women joined the workforce. Children exited the workforce. People go to uni more. Retirement became statistically more common. Laws change. Norms change. Culture changes. Those things do affect how much we work. Economic factors like efficiency don't.

Norway is a small-sih country, and often an outlier, so IDK if it makes a good example. That said, I imagine that these changes in working hours were caused by rule changes: labour laws, union demands or somesuch. They aren't economic.

My point is that the model of the economy and the model of a worker used by Keynes to make the prediction, and by most commenters on the topic since are clearly bad models.At the margin, it doesn't even make sense to most workers. We (most of us) don't choose our work hours. We don't work 8% less because 92% of the money is enough. That marginal choice doesn't even exist. We work a job, and job hours are defined by convention.

Efficiency, GDP growth and such, over the last 91 years, haven't affected the number of hour we work. Work hasn't been static. It's just governed by other things.

If you met Keynes in 1930, you would be right to say "No. How rich we get, how technologically advanced or how productive our industries are will have no effect on how much we work...." You would have been correct. Keynes, and every economist from austrians to marxists would have been wrong.

Even today, after the prediction has long-failed empirically, economists have a hard time facing this.

http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

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