The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor
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Re: The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor
#2Just imagine what we'll do to the labor supply if we can figure out a way to keep the poors working 24/7 and have them not suffer any ill effects from it!
Re: The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor
#3Those in the study were low-income adults in Chennai, India who sleep only 5.5 hours per night on average despite spending 8 hours in bed.
The key takeaway was:
> increased nighttime sleep had no detectable effects on cognition, productivity, decision-making, or well-being, and led to small decreases in labor supply.
Re: The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor
#4Those in the study were low-income adults in Chennai, India who sleep only 5.5 hours per night on average despite spending 8 hours in bed. The key takeaway was: > increased nighttime sleep had no detectable effects on cognition, productivity, decision-making, or well-being, and led to small decreases in labor supply. I find the result surprising. When I get under 6 hours I see a clear drop off in performance.
Good grief. It almost makes me question what information is missing from the abstract since I don't know how one can consistently run on fumes without it affecting cognition, productivity or decision making.
Re: The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor
#5Those in the study were low-income adults in Chennai, India who sleep only 5.5 hours per night on average despite spending 8 hours in bed. The key takeaway was: > increased nighttime sleep had no detectable effects on cognition, productivity, decision-making, or well-being, and led to small decreases in labor supply. I find the result surprising. When I get under 6 hours I see a clear drop off in performance.
> increased sleep duration by 27 minutes per night by inducing more time in bed
Maybe 27 minutes is just not enough? I’m sure the results would be different if they started to get 7 hours instead of 5.5.
Re: The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor
#6Those in the study were low-income adults in Chennai, India who sleep only 5.5 hours per night on average despite spending 8 hours in bed. The key takeaway was: > increased nighttime sleep had no detectable effects on cognition, productivity, decision-making, or well-being, and led to small decreases in labor supply. I find the result surprising. When I get under 6 hours I see a clear drop off in performance.
Good grief. It almost makes me question what information is missing from the abstract since I don't know how one can consistently run on fumes without it affecting cognition, productivity or decision making.
The insane stress levels from being in their situation also affects cognition.
So I am not surprised if merely looking at sleep amounts fails to explain differences.
Re: The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor
#7Looked initially like a ripe candidate for the ignobel prize. But, it seems to distinguish sleep from hours in bed and finds that less sleep than time-in-bed doesn't seem to affect them much. Wonder if the type of work was the reason for their different conclusion - assuming that the poor were involved in more physical labor kind of work while the other studies it mentions were probably not.
Edit: adding the link to an article I happened to have open: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our...
Re: The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor
#8Those in the study were low-income adults in Chennai, India who sleep only 5.5 hours per night on average despite spending 8 hours in bed. The key takeaway was: > increased nighttime sleep had no detectable effects on cognition, productivity, decision-making, or well-being, and led to small decreases in labor supply. I find the result surprising. When I get under 6 hours I see a clear drop off in performance.
The sentence before that is: "Contrary to expert predictions and a large body of sleep research".
Was this study better science that disproved the existing body? Or poorer science? Or is there something problematic about sleep in Chennai? Or special about the people in Chennai?
The full paper states:
> An enormous body of research, mostly conducted in sleep labs in rich countries, documents severe negative impacts of sleep deprivation on a range of outcomes from attention and memory to mood and health (Lim and Dinges, 2010; Banks and Dinges, 2007).
> While experimental evidence on the impact of increasing sleep in field settings is scarce, there is a widely-held belief among researchers and the public that reducing sleep deprivation would lead to improvements in economic outcomes (Walker, 2017).
> To document these priors, we surveyed 119 experts from sleep science and economics who predicted sizable economic benefits, including a 7% increase in work output, of increasing sleep by half an hour per night from the low levels observed in our setting.
Social science is fun.
Re: The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor
#9Here's the full study pdf:
Re: The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor
#10Those in the study were low-income adults in Chennai, India who sleep only 5.5 hours per night on average despite spending 8 hours in bed. The key takeaway was: > increased nighttime sleep had no detectable effects on cognition, productivity, decision-making, or well-being, and led to small decreases in labor supply. I find the result surprising. When I get under 6 hours I see a clear drop off in performance.
Good grief. It almost makes me question what information is missing from the abstract since I don't know how one can consistently run on fumes without it affecting cognition, productivity or decision making.
Throwaway as I don't want to admit that I feel permanently cognitively impaired.
Anecdotal, but I spent years not sleeping through university and sleeping in airports or on the train. Studied engineering and did a lot of hackathons and events and stuff. I figured out then that I didn't need full cognition or excellent decision making. I needed more hours cranking out work. I spent years sleeping just a few hours and often not sleeping on Saturday at all.
I do a lot less of that now as work never has 2AM deadlines but it is as though I am permanently in that 80% functionality state. I never felt that I got out of that state. I have never regained my ability to be detail oriented. I am still reliant on the crutches of spell check and Grammarly and my IDE to make sure I don't do something stupid. I use task lists for every little thing in my day.
So it is not that it does not impact cognition (at least in my case), it is that you get used to that impaired state and can't find a way back.
Only a year and a half removed from that, so maybe it takes more time, but I still feel heavily optimized for output over quality, even though that is no longer needed.
My baseline cognition was already impacted. More sleep just did not repair it.