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

244 points by azemda 7y ago

astazangasta 7y ago
Neat! Gray is the person who first pointed me towards anarchism (back in 1999, wow) as a political philosophy, after reading about his Sudbury Valley School and following a link to the Anarchist FAQ. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-ed...
rmdashrfstar 7y ago
...or how about let's just create more jobs?
- spaceprison 7y ago
  I'm not sure your read the article...
Can_Not 7y ago
They're also under concerned about useless and wasteful jobs.
mruts 7y ago
I dunno, I like working. I don't think I would want to go on an extended period without working hard. In fact, retiring early increases mortality[1]. [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/627711 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/627711
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Surveys indicate you’re in the minority. Most people don’t enjoy their job, or want to work less. We’re long overdue to move past “maximizing employment” at an economic policy level (looking at you US Federal Reserve).
  - Konnstann 7y ago
    The problem is how to incentivize companies to pay workers the same amount for less work. A lot of people, for example, the service industry, can't just work shorter shifts for the same pay. If your job is delivering a product then you can, and a lot of people do, work hard enough to deliver and then goof off for the remaining time. Take a Starbucks employee: They get paid per hour worked, so if they want to work less, they need more money. Now Starbucks needs to pay more people more money to maintain the same hours. This circles back to the popular discussion of automation and UBI or whatever, where Starbucks now has robots and the employees don't exist anymore. On another note, I'd rather work a job I don't enjoy than be unemployed, I've had periods of unemployment and they were pretty bad.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      Raise the minimum wage while reducing the work week to 4 days for full time employment (this brings the minimum wage closer to where it should be after not being raised for decades, while also giving labor a share of the productivity gains they should’ve been receiving since the 70s). You squeeze Capital with labor law and regulation. Any reduction in employment due to rising wages can be fixed with social support systems funded by corporate taxes that were previously tax breaks or deductions on automation expenses. The wealth in the system exists to do this. It’s a distribution issue.
      - dTal 7y ago
        This is the right answer. The only reason we don't work 80 hour weeks for 2 bucks an hour is because the law forbids it.
        mruts 7y ago
        This is just false. Approximately only 2% of American workers are paid minimum wage. Everyone else makes more.
        7y ago
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  There is probably a lot of selection bias there.
- tuesdayrain 7y ago
  I hate to admit it, but my life just seems to be more productive and organized when I have a job eating up most of my time and forcing me to make the most out of what's left. I took a year off from work to start my own business..after about 2 weeks I was spending probably 95% of my time relaxing. I recently started a traditional job again and the amount of progress I'm making with ~2 hours of free time is greater than what it was when I had no job. It really gave me some respect for the willpower required to run your own business.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    You're dealing with a mind virus, one that I'm familiar with myself: We feel like we need to spend our free time productively. I'm actively trying to get this out of my head. Not saying that I want to slack off, but I definitely need to slack off from time to time, and I struggle with allowing myself to do it.
    - deadA1ias 7y ago
      This effect is particular prevalent in the US. As someone who moved here from the UK it was quite a cultural shock to realise that being "idle" was, for some reason, considered "bad".
    - tuesdayrain 7y ago
      > You're dealing with a mind virus, one that I'm familiar with myself: We feel like we need to spend our free time productively. I'm undecided on whether I see that as a "mind virus" or just the right choice to maximize happiness in the long run. My impression is that spending my time doing unproductive things that I strongly enjoy (like videogames) is somewhat of a local maxima in terms of the happiness it can bring me. One day my favorite game servers will be shutting down, or scraping along with a small fraction of players as everyone's moved on to the next game, and I will have virtually nothing to show for all the time spent. In the best case I'll have a handful of memories that I enjoyed, in the worst case I'll have a deep regret that I spent my most capable years on something that is of no use to me anymore. Presumably by being productive I can avoid that regret, and I'll have skills, money, or creations will be useful to me for much longer. That's my theory of how sacrificing some happiness in the short term should make me much happier in the long term.
- dqpb 7y ago
  I also like working. But I don't particularly like working to make someone else rich.
  - andrenth 7y ago
    Create your own company then.
- kachurovskiy 7y ago
  Sometimes I think that decades of spending all our productive time in a 'work' setting make people feel like they like it, might be a basic psychological adaptation mechanism. In fact, being an able human and having months of time at my disposal is scary :)
- klyrs 7y ago
  > In fact, retiring early increases mortality[1]. I suspect that has a lot to do with the structure of our society, and our relationship with work. From TFA: > In fact, quantitative studies revealed that the average adult hunter-gatherer spent about 20 hours a week at hunting and gathering, and a few hours more at other subsistence-related tasks such as making tools and preparing meals (for references, see Gray, 2009). Some of the rest of their waking time was spent resting, but most of it was spent at playful, enjoyable activities, such as making music, creating art, dancing, playing games, telling stories, chatting and joking with friends, and visiting friends and relatives in neighboring bands. Even hunting and gathering were not regarded as work; they were done enthusiastically, not begrudgingly. Because these activities were fun and were carried out with groups of friends, there were always plenty of people who wanted to hunt and gather, and because food was shared among the whole band, anyone who didn’t feel like hunting or gathering on any given day (or week or more) was not pressured to do so. It's quite possible to like work. But that isn't really true in a lot of jobs. People who are overworked and underpaid; low-level bureaucrats; middle managers... there's a lot of thankless, unrewarding jobs out there, where people can't see a benefit to their work, where people see a negative impact of their work on society.
  - badpun 7y ago
    Sounds lovely, I wonder why they abandoned it for agriculture.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      Because at the beginning they got an increase in food security for a small increase in hours worked. Then as time went on their population grew larger and they became better able to divide into agricultural, administrative and violence specialists and with their greater population and capacity for violence they expanded. The greater population and military prowess meant that in a competition with hunter gatherers for land and other resources the agriculturalists generally won. They couldn’t revert to hunter gathering without huge loss of life due to the loss of food and over time their population grew until they were near the carrying capacity of agriculture and sometimes overshot and died in famines or wars. Agriculture is great for a small number of generations for everyone and then you can’t go back without mass death.
- thrower123 7y ago
  There's so much other "work" that needs to get done that I could easily fill it up if I didn't have to be at work so much. As it is, I've put in 20 hours this weekend around the house and I've barely put a dent in my todo list; I've got to go back to work tomorrow to get some rest.
- antisthenes 7y ago
  Or people in poor health are forced to retire early because they can no longer work.
rini17 7y ago
Theoretically it's fine, why not. In practice, who would opt to coordinate twice as big group of people with halved worktime?
- majewsky 7y ago
  That's the big problem. If you cut your work week down to 20 hours, it can be tough to get anything done at all. The amount of meetings is not going to decrease because (most) managers need to waste other people's time to feel important.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  Why don’t we have half as many people working 80 hours then?
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    Because employers aren’t generally willing to pay the premium necessary to get workers to do that. In some fields they are and the workers do, e.g. law, investment banking, medicine.
pjdemers 7y ago
Economists are obsessed with job creation because the leading ones started their careers in the late 70s and early 80s when the number of jobs was shrinking, but the number of people who wanted a job was growing faster than ever.
- embersbreaking 7y ago
  "70s and early 80s when the number of jobs was shrinking" That's very interesting. Got any cites for that? Would like to explore. Thx.
neilwilson 7y ago
The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth). We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume. But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people that are actually required to make enough stuff and stop work on Tuesday - having the rest of the week off. So we all give up full weeks of our finite lives in solidarity with those who we need to give up full weeks of their finite lives if we're actually going to get the goods and services we need to live. And that's because we're a species that tallies our debts with each other - the reciprocity principle (https://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2016/paulus_socialcapital.html https://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2016/paulus_s...) Or to put it in other words, sharing out the needed work is rather more difficult in practice than it is in theory where fungibility is largely assumed. And the more advanced our technology, the harder the sharing becomes and the more difficult it is to maintain the illusion of sufficient reciprocity.
- deadA1ias 7y ago
  This is exactly right, and I wish I could have put it as succinctly as you. I fear it will take longer than expected for society to adapt to this dynamic.
- petra 7y ago
  The Israeli Army is mostly made out of 18 year old people who get drafted for 3 years, reserves that come for a few weeks a month, and a small percent of career employees. Many of those people fullfil complex , Critical roles, successfully. But most of it's "employees" are easily replaceable. So why won't this work in the general economy ?
  - perfmode 7y ago
    the command structure consists of lifers.
  - sooheon 7y ago
    A draft does not guarantee efficiency or efficacy of work. The Korean military has a monopoly on labor of a certain age (and gender), any roles it needs will of course be filled, but from experience the arrangement is rather far from peak human output.
Proven 7y ago
If you want less work, get a part time job or quit. Which of these works in mysterious ways? All right, we know the question is really "How do I work less, or not at all, and still get paid?", but that's being tackled by MMT and Universal Basic Income "economists."
bantersaurus 7y ago
Time for a period of degrowth, the only way we are going to deal with depleting natural resources and global warming.
ameliaquining 7y ago
Are economists obsessed with job creation? Government economists tend to focus on it because that's literally their job, but my sense of academic economists has always been that they're pretty good at not eliding distinctions like between employment and economic value.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
  100% employment is possible. Just look at any U.S. military base. Without poverty, capitalists lose some of the leverage over the working class which makes the current levels of exploitation difficult to maintain without massive price hikes. I think the U.K. had an experience with mass employment that convinced capitalists to raise the prices of their goods just to maintain the exploitation which poverty allowed.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    Capitalists can't just raise the price of goods, unless they're in a cartel which is illegal in most of the western world. They'd be unable to coordinate thanks to competition. It's a double-edged sword, they can't coordinate to save the earth or uplift humanity, but they also can't coordinate to stamp down the proletariat.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    Or maybe the increase in employment created surplus demand for goods and services which would raise the market-clearing price.
  - atemerev 7y ago
    Sure, we once had an entire country with 300 million population, living like on a military base: barracks as residences, the same assortment available in department stores, symbolic salaries, some involuntary labor, and no freedom of movement. It was the USSR. Not everyone liked this lifestyle. At least the personnel on military bases know when their contract ends, so they could return to life of freedom and opportunity.
cryptica 7y ago
If market competition wasn't so aggressive, we could start to focus more on value creation. Right now the economy is all about capturing existing value, monopolizing markets to keep competitors out and using targeted advertising to divert people's attention away from real value. Journalism is in such bad shape that if an independent scientist invented a cure for cancer, most people probably wouldn't hear about it and that scientist would end up homeless. If there is no big money behind something, nobody cares! Try starting an open source project these days; your chance of getting any traction is close to zero. Influencers are unlikely to help you to spread awareness of your project unless there is something in it for them financially; they're more likely to help promote an enterprise competitor who will pay them. Journalism is dead, now everything we believe in is decided by so-called 'influencers' but these are typically the most shallow, superficial, scheming, manipulative individuals that have ever walked the face of the earth. These people wouldn't know how to tell the difference between real value and a steaming pile of shit. Most influencers are just idiots with rich friends. Capital has replaced our values. We need to bring back real values like honesty, integrity, humility, experience, pursuit of knowledge, empathy, efficiency...
- badpun 7y ago
  > Try starting an open source project these days; your chance of getting any traction is close to zero. Influencers are unlikely to help you to spread awareness of your project unless there is something in it for them financially; they're more likely to help promote an enterprise competitor who will pay them. This is interesting. You're saying you would be giving away something valueable for free, and yet there would be no takers? Maybe it's not so valueable after all then? Stuff that is genuinely solving some yet unsolved pain or problem should, given time, take on its own, without influencers.
  - cryptica 7y ago
    >> Stuff that is genuinely helpful and valueable and unique should, given time, take on its own, without influencers. This is completely false. It depends entirely on your social network. My main OSS project has over 5K stars on GitHub; it's used by thousands of companies and has been growing steadily but I'm certain that if it hadn't been on the front page of HN 5 years ago, nobody would be using it today. These days it accumulates more GitHub stars every day and I don't do any marketing at all. GitHub stars compound like dollars in a bank account. It got to this point because of HN. Being a useful product was just the prerequisite. There are plenty of potentially very useful products which no one will ever use because people are poorly informed. Some niche projects are obviously useful, but there is a significant category of projects which are highly valuable but whose value is not immediately obvious; in these cases it can take years to build momentum and you NEED influencers to help you to get that once in a lifetime chance to make even a small impact in your industry. Also, the opposite is true; there are projects that seem valuable at a glance and which can get a lot of attention (if promoted by the right influencers) but they are an anti-pattern and they provide negative value in the medium and long term. I've seen many great projects go nowhere and I've seen really terrible projects become exceedingly popular. The masses are not rational at all; most decisions are based on shared delusions. How many times in human history have huge amounts of people believed things that were proven to be completely false. Too many to count. There are many things that we believe today which will someday be proven to be false. Humanity has not gotten smarter over the past few decades, if anything, we've become complacent and as a result we've developed tunnel vision and have become dumber.
40acres 7y ago
Outside of a autocratic, centralized economy I would wager that it's natural for an economy to "find new work" for labor. The fact that we have increased automation does not mean that the labor force should shrink along with it, it should mean that over generations people do new things. An office supply company in the 70s would bet big on fax machines, with the ubiquity of email a comparable company today might focus on ergonomic office supplies.
_vk_ 7y ago
Economists aren't "obsessed with job creation". Politicians are.
- jvm 7y ago
  …and they are obsessed because _voters_ are.
topkai22 7y ago
Less work is harder then it sounds because (in advanced economies) MOST jobs are skilled jobs, even the ones that don't seem that way, and developing skill takes time, skill, and practice. As others have noted, labor isn't nearly fungible as we often pretend, and two workers doing 20 hour schedules generally aren't as productive as one worker doing a 40 schedule. This shows up in the "part time penalty" for workers amongst other things, but should resonate with anyone who's had to onboard others to a team or project. There is also obviously a point where more effort out of individual workers is counter productive (see Ford and the 40h work week), but it seems 32-40h weeks may be near optimum generally.
cleandreams 7y ago
I live in SF and I have been in and out of the tech industry, so I know the city from both perspectives. (I now work at one of the big tech companies.) So many people outside of the industry work more than one job. They need to. Wages are too low. That is the problem, wages. Focus on that, economists, so ordinary people can get by on one job's wages.
- dvtrn 7y ago
  Wish there were more comments about this. Like you, I too worked in an industry that wasn’t technology (home repair services, carpenters, electricians and plumbers), and saw it for what it was. It’s atrocious what some of these people are asked to do and the wages they’re expected to perform at. But beyond that, even wages aren’t even the entire picture. I live in Chicago. I managed a fleet of workers who not only had to content with a company that paid laughable wages, workers were on their own for parking, vehicle maintenance, equipment and materials, ancillary costs of maintaining their tools. End of the day the $25 we paid to our licensed and insured electrician translated to $12/hr coming home. I fought for a year to get those fellas better pay. Our managing company was hearing none of it. The guy who ran the entire operation took home six figures. I know this because I saw the books.
  - totablebanjo 7y ago
    Labor’s been screwed the last 50 years. What kind of six figures are we talking, mid?
    - dvtrn 7y ago
      What kind of six figures are we talking, mid? The kind that go into his bank account? Is there another kind I'm unaware of presently-I'm unsure how to answer your question here?
      - hardwaresofton 7y ago
        I think the commenter was trying to ascertain just how deep the implied inequality was -- if the guy who ran the entire operation is barely clearing $100,000, then as far as I understand, in the context of San Francisco the owner is struggling as well -- that says something else about the economic situation of the company.
nerder92 7y ago
"Band hunter-gatherers, who, as I said, lived a life of play, are famous among anthropologists for their eagerness to share and help one another" I can find a lot of similarities with the IT industry, or at least in the early days. This is what other industries misses a lot. "Work less. Play more" I totally buy this slogan, our life is about us and our loved ones at the end.
TomMckenny 7y ago
In principle from a capital stand point, it is always better to have one unemployed person and one over worked person who is terrified of becoming unemployed than two employed people. So reducing workload to increase employment rates is completely unacceptable to those who own society. 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.
- dahfizz 7y ago
  That's a pretty big claim you're making with nothing to back it up. Do you think it's the "terror" that makes that situation prefferable from a "capital stand point"? In times of historically low unemployment, I hardly think the general populace is holding such terror. And even so, why would splitting the work reduce this terror?
  - TomMckenny 7y ago
    >That's a pretty big claim you're making with nothing to back it up. It includes the following assumptions: Low unemployment causes upward wage pressure. Organizations are aware of this. Organizations cooperate politically to achieve their goals. >In times of historically low unemployment, I hardly think the general populace is holding such terror. Exactly. Lower unemployment increases confidence. (and reduced hours would lower unemployment) Higher up in this thread is a suggestion that: 1) almost all productivity comes from a few workers and 2) it is impossible to reduce their work load and 3) employers retain low productivity workers for long hours to encourage them. All of these assumptions are highly dubious but the theory is popular because it appeals to comforting, entrenched ideas. Which is why no one notices that is a big claim with nothing backing it up.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  > In principle from a capital stand point, it is always better to have one unemployed person and one over worked person who is terrified of becoming unemployed than two employed people. 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-financial-crises/ 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.
handedness 7y ago
“The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.” --Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1932) http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
- vivekd 7y ago
  I disagree. I think it largely depends on the work you do. If you are doing something you dont enjoy.or don't find meaningful, the work is just a means to an end. But for many people a job is something they derrive meaning from, many craftspeople have notions of pride in their work. I think probably the best example is people who work with the mentally handocapped, studies reveal they tend to be the happiest and most fulfilled, likely because they are getting that sense of fulfillment from their work. I think the author is wrong about our work culture impaacting peoples need for work. I think people actually want to feel like they are contributing to society, like they are useful. The question to me isnt how do we create less work, its how do we make work more meaningful for people
  - Viliam1234 7y ago
    I don't need a job to give my life meaning. Thanks, but I already have friends, family, hobbies, etc. It's the need to have a job to pay my bills, that reduces the time I can actually spend with my friends, family, hobbies, etc. So, the current system gives meaning to some, and takes meaning from some. I'd have to see some math first, in order to believe it is actually a net benefit on average. > many craftspeople have notions of pride in their work Yeah, the job keeps me advancing at my craft; I think alone I would be doing similar things anyway, but probably more slowly. At the same time, the job often forces me to cut corners; alone I would prefer to do things properly, rather than hurry up towards a bullshit deadline only to fix things later when they start falling apart. Again, the pride is both given and taken. > I think people actually want to feel like they are contributing to society, like they are useful. But that's quite different from having a job. With more free time, I could contribute to society in ways that are not predictably profitable (which is why I am not doing as a source of income now), but would probably have more meaning that what I am doing now. > how do we make work more meaningful for people If you make it voluntary, at least the smart people will have freedom to optimize it towards more meaning. Maybe stupid people will need more guidance. If so, let there be some provided, but again, make it a bit more voluntary than "obey or starve".
chewz 7y ago
Worth reading on Keynes famous prediction that productivity gains will result in 15 hours workweek. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequality-work-hours/422775/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequal...
ptah 7y ago
for many, it is a huge ideological taboo to even consider distributing resources outside current investment/wage model
sproketboy 7y ago
How about fuck you lazy fucks.
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
There already was great efficiency growth that would have enabled "less work". It was all taken by the ruling "elite".

244 points by azemda 7y ago

Neat! Gray is the person who first pointed me towards anarchism (back in 1999, wow) as a political philosophy, after reading about his Sudbury Valley School and following a link to the Anarchist FAQ. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-ed...

rmdashrfstar 7y ago

...or how about let's just create more jobs?

spaceprison 7y ago
I'm not sure your read the article...

Can_Not 7y ago

They're also under concerned about useless and wasteful jobs.

mruts 7y ago

I dunno, I like working. I don't think I would want to go on an extended period without working hard. In fact, retiring early increases mortality[1]. [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/627711 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/627711

toomuchtodo 7y ago
Surveys indicate you’re in the minority. Most people don’t enjoy their job, or want to work less. We’re long overdue to move past “maximizing employment” at an economic policy level (looking at you US Federal Reserve).
- Konnstann 7y ago
  The problem is how to incentivize companies to pay workers the same amount for less work. A lot of people, for example, the service industry, can't just work shorter shifts for the same pay. If your job is delivering a product then you can, and a lot of people do, work hard enough to deliver and then goof off for the remaining time. Take a Starbucks employee: They get paid per hour worked, so if they want to work less, they need more money. Now Starbucks needs to pay more people more money to maintain the same hours. This circles back to the popular discussion of automation and UBI or whatever, where Starbucks now has robots and the employees don't exist anymore. On another note, I'd rather work a job I don't enjoy than be unemployed, I've had periods of unemployment and they were pretty bad.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Raise the minimum wage while reducing the work week to 4 days for full time employment (this brings the minimum wage closer to where it should be after not being raised for decades, while also giving labor a share of the productivity gains they should’ve been receiving since the 70s). You squeeze Capital with labor law and regulation. Any reduction in employment due to rising wages can be fixed with social support systems funded by corporate taxes that were previously tax breaks or deductions on automation expenses. The wealth in the system exists to do this. It’s a distribution issue.
    - dTal 7y ago
      This is the right answer. The only reason we don't work 80 hour weeks for 2 bucks an hour is because the law forbids it.
      - mruts 7y ago
        This is just false. Approximately only 2% of American workers are paid minimum wage. Everyone else makes more.
        7y ago
JamesBarney 7y ago
There is probably a lot of selection bias there.
tuesdayrain 7y ago
I hate to admit it, but my life just seems to be more productive and organized when I have a job eating up most of my time and forcing me to make the most out of what's left. I took a year off from work to start my own business..after about 2 weeks I was spending probably 95% of my time relaxing. I recently started a traditional job again and the amount of progress I'm making with ~2 hours of free time is greater than what it was when I had no job. It really gave me some respect for the willpower required to run your own business.
- majewsky 7y ago
  You're dealing with a mind virus, one that I'm familiar with myself: We feel like we need to spend our free time productively. I'm actively trying to get this out of my head. Not saying that I want to slack off, but I definitely need to slack off from time to time, and I struggle with allowing myself to do it.
  - deadA1ias 7y ago
    This effect is particular prevalent in the US. As someone who moved here from the UK it was quite a cultural shock to realise that being "idle" was, for some reason, considered "bad".
  - tuesdayrain 7y ago
    > You're dealing with a mind virus, one that I'm familiar with myself: We feel like we need to spend our free time productively. I'm undecided on whether I see that as a "mind virus" or just the right choice to maximize happiness in the long run. My impression is that spending my time doing unproductive things that I strongly enjoy (like videogames) is somewhat of a local maxima in terms of the happiness it can bring me. One day my favorite game servers will be shutting down, or scraping along with a small fraction of players as everyone's moved on to the next game, and I will have virtually nothing to show for all the time spent. In the best case I'll have a handful of memories that I enjoyed, in the worst case I'll have a deep regret that I spent my most capable years on something that is of no use to me anymore. Presumably by being productive I can avoid that regret, and I'll have skills, money, or creations will be useful to me for much longer. That's my theory of how sacrificing some happiness in the short term should make me much happier in the long term.
dqpb 7y ago
I also like working. But I don't particularly like working to make someone else rich.
- andrenth 7y ago
  Create your own company then.
kachurovskiy 7y ago
Sometimes I think that decades of spending all our productive time in a 'work' setting make people feel like they like it, might be a basic psychological adaptation mechanism. In fact, being an able human and having months of time at my disposal is scary :)
klyrs 7y ago
> In fact, retiring early increases mortality[1]. I suspect that has a lot to do with the structure of our society, and our relationship with work. From TFA: > In fact, quantitative studies revealed that the average adult hunter-gatherer spent about 20 hours a week at hunting and gathering, and a few hours more at other subsistence-related tasks such as making tools and preparing meals (for references, see Gray, 2009). Some of the rest of their waking time was spent resting, but most of it was spent at playful, enjoyable activities, such as making music, creating art, dancing, playing games, telling stories, chatting and joking with friends, and visiting friends and relatives in neighboring bands. Even hunting and gathering were not regarded as work; they were done enthusiastically, not begrudgingly. Because these activities were fun and were carried out with groups of friends, there were always plenty of people who wanted to hunt and gather, and because food was shared among the whole band, anyone who didn’t feel like hunting or gathering on any given day (or week or more) was not pressured to do so. It's quite possible to like work. But that isn't really true in a lot of jobs. People who are overworked and underpaid; low-level bureaucrats; middle managers... there's a lot of thankless, unrewarding jobs out there, where people can't see a benefit to their work, where people see a negative impact of their work on society.
- badpun 7y ago
  Sounds lovely, I wonder why they abandoned it for agriculture.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    Because at the beginning they got an increase in food security for a small increase in hours worked. Then as time went on their population grew larger and they became better able to divide into agricultural, administrative and violence specialists and with their greater population and capacity for violence they expanded. The greater population and military prowess meant that in a competition with hunter gatherers for land and other resources the agriculturalists generally won. They couldn’t revert to hunter gathering without huge loss of life due to the loss of food and over time their population grew until they were near the carrying capacity of agriculture and sometimes overshot and died in famines or wars. Agriculture is great for a small number of generations for everyone and then you can’t go back without mass death.
thrower123 7y ago
There's so much other "work" that needs to get done that I could easily fill it up if I didn't have to be at work so much. As it is, I've put in 20 hours this weekend around the house and I've barely put a dent in my todo list; I've got to go back to work tomorrow to get some rest.
antisthenes 7y ago
Or people in poor health are forced to retire early because they can no longer work.

rini17 7y ago

Theoretically it's fine, why not. In practice, who would opt to coordinate twice as big group of people with halved worktime?

majewsky 7y ago
That's the big problem. If you cut your work week down to 20 hours, it can be tough to get anything done at all. The amount of meetings is not going to decrease because (most) managers need to waste other people's time to feel important.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
Why don’t we have half as many people working 80 hours then?
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Because employers aren’t generally willing to pay the premium necessary to get workers to do that. In some fields they are and the workers do, e.g. law, investment banking, medicine.

pjdemers 7y ago

Economists are obsessed with job creation because the leading ones started their careers in the late 70s and early 80s when the number of jobs was shrinking, but the number of people who wanted a job was growing faster than ever.

embersbreaking 7y ago
"70s and early 80s when the number of jobs was shrinking" That's very interesting. Got any cites for that? Would like to explore. Thx.

neilwilson 7y ago

The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth). We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume. But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people that are actually required to make enough stuff and stop work on Tuesday - having the rest of the week off. So we all give up full weeks of our finite lives in solidarity with those who we need to give up full weeks of their finite lives if we're actually going to get the goods and services we need to live. And that's because we're a species that tallies our debts with each other - the reciprocity principle (https://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2016/paulus_socialcapital.html https://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2016/paulus_s...) Or to put it in other words, sharing out the needed work is rather more difficult in practice than it is in theory where fungibility is largely assumed. And the more advanced our technology, the harder the sharing becomes and the more difficult it is to maintain the illusion of sufficient reciprocity.

deadA1ias 7y ago
This is exactly right, and I wish I could have put it as succinctly as you. I fear it will take longer than expected for society to adapt to this dynamic.
petra 7y ago
The Israeli Army is mostly made out of 18 year old people who get drafted for 3 years, reserves that come for a few weeks a month, and a small percent of career employees. Many of those people fullfil complex , Critical roles, successfully. But most of it's "employees" are easily replaceable. So why won't this work in the general economy ?
- perfmode 7y ago
  the command structure consists of lifers.
- sooheon 7y ago
  A draft does not guarantee efficiency or efficacy of work. The Korean military has a monopoly on labor of a certain age (and gender), any roles it needs will of course be filled, but from experience the arrangement is rather far from peak human output.

Proven 7y ago

If you want less work, get a part time job or quit. Which of these works in mysterious ways? All right, we know the question is really "How do I work less, or not at all, and still get paid?", but that's being tackled by MMT and Universal Basic Income "economists."

bantersaurus 7y ago

Time for a period of degrowth, the only way we are going to deal with depleting natural resources and global warming.

ameliaquining 7y ago

Are economists obsessed with job creation? Government economists tend to focus on it because that's literally their job, but my sense of academic economists has always been that they're pretty good at not eliding distinctions like between employment and economic value.

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
100% employment is possible. Just look at any U.S. military base. Without poverty, capitalists lose some of the leverage over the working class which makes the current levels of exploitation difficult to maintain without massive price hikes. I think the U.K. had an experience with mass employment that convinced capitalists to raise the prices of their goods just to maintain the exploitation which poverty allowed.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Capitalists can't just raise the price of goods, unless they're in a cartel which is illegal in most of the western world. They'd be unable to coordinate thanks to competition. It's a double-edged sword, they can't coordinate to save the earth or uplift humanity, but they also can't coordinate to stamp down the proletariat.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  Or maybe the increase in employment created surplus demand for goods and services which would raise the market-clearing price.
- atemerev 7y ago
  Sure, we once had an entire country with 300 million population, living like on a military base: barracks as residences, the same assortment available in department stores, symbolic salaries, some involuntary labor, and no freedom of movement. It was the USSR. Not everyone liked this lifestyle. At least the personnel on military bases know when their contract ends, so they could return to life of freedom and opportunity.

cryptica 7y ago

If market competition wasn't so aggressive, we could start to focus more on value creation. Right now the economy is all about capturing existing value, monopolizing markets to keep competitors out and using targeted advertising to divert people's attention away from real value. Journalism is in such bad shape that if an independent scientist invented a cure for cancer, most people probably wouldn't hear about it and that scientist would end up homeless. If there is no big money behind something, nobody cares! Try starting an open source project these days; your chance of getting any traction is close to zero. Influencers are unlikely to help you to spread awareness of your project unless there is something in it for them financially; they're more likely to help promote an enterprise competitor who will pay them. Journalism is dead, now everything we believe in is decided by so-called 'influencers' but these are typically the most shallow, superficial, scheming, manipulative individuals that have ever walked the face of the earth. These people wouldn't know how to tell the difference between real value and a steaming pile of shit. Most influencers are just idiots with rich friends. Capital has replaced our values. We need to bring back real values like honesty, integrity, humility, experience, pursuit of knowledge, empathy, efficiency...

badpun 7y ago
> Try starting an open source project these days; your chance of getting any traction is close to zero. Influencers are unlikely to help you to spread awareness of your project unless there is something in it for them financially; they're more likely to help promote an enterprise competitor who will pay them. This is interesting. You're saying you would be giving away something valueable for free, and yet there would be no takers? Maybe it's not so valueable after all then? Stuff that is genuinely solving some yet unsolved pain or problem should, given time, take on its own, without influencers.
- cryptica 7y ago
  >> Stuff that is genuinely helpful and valueable and unique should, given time, take on its own, without influencers. This is completely false. It depends entirely on your social network. My main OSS project has over 5K stars on GitHub; it's used by thousands of companies and has been growing steadily but I'm certain that if it hadn't been on the front page of HN 5 years ago, nobody would be using it today. These days it accumulates more GitHub stars every day and I don't do any marketing at all. GitHub stars compound like dollars in a bank account. It got to this point because of HN. Being a useful product was just the prerequisite. There are plenty of potentially very useful products which no one will ever use because people are poorly informed. Some niche projects are obviously useful, but there is a significant category of projects which are highly valuable but whose value is not immediately obvious; in these cases it can take years to build momentum and you NEED influencers to help you to get that once in a lifetime chance to make even a small impact in your industry. Also, the opposite is true; there are projects that seem valuable at a glance and which can get a lot of attention (if promoted by the right influencers) but they are an anti-pattern and they provide negative value in the medium and long term. I've seen many great projects go nowhere and I've seen really terrible projects become exceedingly popular. The masses are not rational at all; most decisions are based on shared delusions. How many times in human history have huge amounts of people believed things that were proven to be completely false. Too many to count. There are many things that we believe today which will someday be proven to be false. Humanity has not gotten smarter over the past few decades, if anything, we've become complacent and as a result we've developed tunnel vision and have become dumber.

40acres 7y ago

Outside of a autocratic, centralized economy I would wager that it's natural for an economy to "find new work" for labor. The fact that we have increased automation does not mean that the labor force should shrink along with it, it should mean that over generations people do new things. An office supply company in the 70s would bet big on fax machines, with the ubiquity of email a comparable company today might focus on ergonomic office supplies.

_vk_ 7y ago

Economists aren't "obsessed with job creation". Politicians are.

jvm 7y ago
…and they are obsessed because _voters_ are.

topkai22 7y ago

Less work is harder then it sounds because (in advanced economies) MOST jobs are skilled jobs, even the ones that don't seem that way, and developing skill takes time, skill, and practice. As others have noted, labor isn't nearly fungible as we often pretend, and two workers doing 20 hour schedules generally aren't as productive as one worker doing a 40 schedule. This shows up in the "part time penalty" for workers amongst other things, but should resonate with anyone who's had to onboard others to a team or project. There is also obviously a point where more effort out of individual workers is counter productive (see Ford and the 40h work week), but it seems 32-40h weeks may be near optimum generally.

cleandreams 7y ago

I live in SF and I have been in and out of the tech industry, so I know the city from both perspectives. (I now work at one of the big tech companies.) So many people outside of the industry work more than one job. They need to. Wages are too low. That is the problem, wages. Focus on that, economists, so ordinary people can get by on one job's wages.

dvtrn 7y ago
Wish there were more comments about this. Like you, I too worked in an industry that wasn’t technology (home repair services, carpenters, electricians and plumbers), and saw it for what it was. It’s atrocious what some of these people are asked to do and the wages they’re expected to perform at. But beyond that, even wages aren’t even the entire picture. I live in Chicago. I managed a fleet of workers who not only had to content with a company that paid laughable wages, workers were on their own for parking, vehicle maintenance, equipment and materials, ancillary costs of maintaining their tools. End of the day the $25 we paid to our licensed and insured electrician translated to $12/hr coming home. I fought for a year to get those fellas better pay. Our managing company was hearing none of it. The guy who ran the entire operation took home six figures. I know this because I saw the books.
- totablebanjo 7y ago
  Labor’s been screwed the last 50 years. What kind of six figures are we talking, mid?
  - dvtrn 7y ago
    What kind of six figures are we talking, mid? The kind that go into his bank account? Is there another kind I'm unaware of presently-I'm unsure how to answer your question here?
    - hardwaresofton 7y ago
      I think the commenter was trying to ascertain just how deep the implied inequality was -- if the guy who ran the entire operation is barely clearing $100,000, then as far as I understand, in the context of San Francisco the owner is struggling as well -- that says something else about the economic situation of the company.

nerder92 7y ago

"Band hunter-gatherers, who, as I said, lived a life of play, are famous among anthropologists for their eagerness to share and help one another" I can find a lot of similarities with the IT industry, or at least in the early days. This is what other industries misses a lot. "Work less. Play more" I totally buy this slogan, our life is about us and our loved ones at the end.

TomMckenny 7y ago

In principle from a capital stand point, it is always better to have one unemployed person and one over worked person who is terrified of becoming unemployed than two employed people. So reducing workload to increase employment rates is completely unacceptable to those who own society. 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.

dahfizz 7y ago
That's a pretty big claim you're making with nothing to back it up. Do you think it's the "terror" that makes that situation prefferable from a "capital stand point"? In times of historically low unemployment, I hardly think the general populace is holding such terror. And even so, why would splitting the work reduce this terror?
- TomMckenny 7y ago
  >That's a pretty big claim you're making with nothing to back it up. It includes the following assumptions: Low unemployment causes upward wage pressure. Organizations are aware of this. Organizations cooperate politically to achieve their goals. >In times of historically low unemployment, I hardly think the general populace is holding such terror. Exactly. Lower unemployment increases confidence. (and reduced hours would lower unemployment) Higher up in this thread is a suggestion that: 1) almost all productivity comes from a few workers and 2) it is impossible to reduce their work load and 3) employers retain low productivity workers for long hours to encourage them. All of these assumptions are highly dubious but the theory is popular because it appeals to comforting, entrenched ideas. Which is why no one notices that is a big claim with nothing backing it up.
barry-cotter 7y ago
> In principle from a capital stand point, it is always better to have one unemployed person and one over worked person who is terrified of becoming unemployed than two employed people. 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-financial-crises/ 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.

handedness 7y ago

“The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.” --Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1932) http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

vivekd 7y ago
I disagree. I think it largely depends on the work you do. If you are doing something you dont enjoy.or don't find meaningful, the work is just a means to an end. But for many people a job is something they derrive meaning from, many craftspeople have notions of pride in their work. I think probably the best example is people who work with the mentally handocapped, studies reveal they tend to be the happiest and most fulfilled, likely because they are getting that sense of fulfillment from their work. I think the author is wrong about our work culture impaacting peoples need for work. I think people actually want to feel like they are contributing to society, like they are useful. The question to me isnt how do we create less work, its how do we make work more meaningful for people
- Viliam1234 7y ago
  I don't need a job to give my life meaning. Thanks, but I already have friends, family, hobbies, etc. It's the need to have a job to pay my bills, that reduces the time I can actually spend with my friends, family, hobbies, etc. So, the current system gives meaning to some, and takes meaning from some. I'd have to see some math first, in order to believe it is actually a net benefit on average. > many craftspeople have notions of pride in their work Yeah, the job keeps me advancing at my craft; I think alone I would be doing similar things anyway, but probably more slowly. At the same time, the job often forces me to cut corners; alone I would prefer to do things properly, rather than hurry up towards a bullshit deadline only to fix things later when they start falling apart. Again, the pride is both given and taken. > I think people actually want to feel like they are contributing to society, like they are useful. But that's quite different from having a job. With more free time, I could contribute to society in ways that are not predictably profitable (which is why I am not doing as a source of income now), but would probably have more meaning that what I am doing now. > how do we make work more meaningful for people If you make it voluntary, at least the smart people will have freedom to optimize it towards more meaning. Maybe stupid people will need more guidance. If so, let there be some provided, but again, make it a bit more voluntary than "obey or starve".

chewz 7y ago

Worth reading on Keynes famous prediction that productivity gains will result in 15 hours workweek. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequality-work-hours/422775/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequal...

ptah 7y ago

for many, it is a huge ideological taboo to even consider distributing resources outside current investment/wage model

sproketboy 7y ago

How about fuck you lazy fucks.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago

There already was great efficiency growth that would have enabled "less work". It was all taken by the ruling "elite".