[AnthonyMouse]

Right now we have a lot of jobs that are extremely low efficiency, if not outright net negatives. These are the sorts of jobs that markets tend to eliminate, because the company that gets rid of them can charge lower prices than the one that doesn't. But that doesn't work when the job exists as a result of regulatory rules, or the company is a monopoly not subject to competitive pressure.

What does work is to improve the efficiency of the regulations. For the ones that are net negative you can just get rid of them. For the ones that are net positive but still poorly constructed, you can reduce their overhead.

This doesn't increase economic output, it reduces waste. Then you can work half as many hours for the same money, or the same number of hours for twice as much, not because anything more is being created but because people are spending half as much time on useless tasks. If they then spend that time doing something productive, output would increase, but that's a personal choice. If you could work 10 hours a week and that was enough to earn a living and own a home, would everybody still want to work 40 hours just so they could also own six cars and two boats? Some people would, which is fine, but some people wouldn't.

[Ajedi32]

Sure, if you can somehow find a way to double the efficiency of labor then you can either double your standard of living or half your number of hours. We've already done that multiple times since the industrial revolution. That's why modern first world society is so rich compared to the past.

And there are certainly significant inefficiencies created due to government regulation, though probably not enough to double our productivity even if you did have the knowledge and political capitol fix all those issues perfectly. It is also worth noting that sometimes regulations, though costly and inefficient, can still be nice things to have. Building codes undoubtedly make housing significantly more expensive, but I'd still rather live in a society with expensive housing where I don't have to worry about the floor collapsing on me than a society with cheap housing where I do. There's a balance there obviously, but my point is sometimes the extra expense can be worth it even if its not "net positive" in a purely economical sense.

> If you could work 10 hours a week and that was enough to earn a living and own a home, would everybody still want to work 40 hours just so they could also own six cars and two boats?

I think you'd be surprised. There are so many things we consider necessities now that would be considered luxuries 100 years ago. I see no reason why things won't continue to move mostly in that direction as technology improves.

I know a lot of people who earn enough that they could match my standard of living working only 10 hours a week. They mostly don't, and instead spend the extra wealth on things like larger houses, fancier cars, exotic vacations, etc.

[AnthonyMouse]

> And there are certainly significant inefficiencies created due to government regulation, though probably not enough to double our productivity even if you did have the knowledge and political capitol fix all those issues perfectly.

Keep in mind that a lot of these rules are multiplicative. Zoning rules limit the amount of new housing construction and increase construction costs because now you have to e.g. replace a 10 story building with a 20 story building, bulldozing the 10 story building, instead of replacing a single family home with a 10 story building to add the same number of units. Professional licensing apprenticeship requirements limit the supply of licensed tradesmen, increasing construction costs. These multiply together: You have to do more construction and the construction has a higher labor cost.

Then housing costs more, so you have to pay higher salaries for the same cost of living -- including to tradesmen, which makes construction cost even more, multiplying the effect again. But not just tradesmen, also the salaries of compliance bureaucrats needed by any other form of regulation, and the cost of commercial real estate for their offices.

Double is, if anything, an underestimate. These costs are quadratic.

> Building codes undoubtedly make housing significantly more expensive, but I'd still rather live in a society with expensive housing where I don't have to worry about the floor collapsing on me than a society with cheap housing where I do.

The building codes from decades ago were sufficient to prevent buildings from collapsing. Since then they've been accumulating cruft. Many of these individual requirements each add hundreds to thousands of dollars to the cost of a new house in exchange for a marginal safety improvement with a negative expected value.

And then you don't even get the safety improvement, because making new construction prohibitively expensive causes people to continue to live in old houses that weren't subject to the new requirements anyway. All you do is make housing more scarce.

> There's a balance there obviously, but my point is sometimes the extra expense can be worth it even if its not "net positive" in a purely economical sense.

"Net positive" is the measure of if it's worth it. You have a measure that can prevent a 1 in 1000 chance of $50,000 in damage but it costs $1000. You're spending an average of $1,000,000 to prevent $50,000 in damage. It's not worth it.

> There are so many things we consider necessities now that would be considered luxuries 100 years ago. I see no reason why things won't continue to move mostly in that direction as technology improves.

Most of these things are things that didn't previously exist, like cellphones or computers. Now you need one because it has replaced certain ways of interacting with people and institutions and the old ways are no longer available.

But let's suppose the definition of necessities expands over time. It used to be food and shelter, then we added medicine and transportation, then we added internet. Maybe tomorrow we add a personal robot or something else. But what if all of those things together cost $10,000/year? Would everyone choose to work full time if the surplus was solely to purchase luxury goods?

> I know a lot of people who earn enough that they could match my standard of living working only 10 hours a week. They mostly don't, and instead spend the extra wealth on things like larger houses, fancier cars, exotic vacations, etc.

There are also people who sell their startup and then choose to retire in their 20s or 30s. Different people make different choices.

[Ajedi32]

It seems to me like we're mostly in agreement. I agree regulations can have compounding negative effects, though whether that's enough to account for a potential 2x improvement in overall economic output is something I would still dispute without any hard numbers to back up that claim.

I also think you've misunderstood my point about regulations. What I'm saying is that sometimes regulations can serve as a sort of "luxury good", where even if they're a net negative economically (like in your example of the uneconomical safety improvements) the quality of life benefits can still make them worth the cost in a society that's wealthy enough to absorb those costs.

I'm not saying that's always the case. Sometimes the costs clearly aren't worth it even factoring in subjective benefits. Just that its another thing to consider.

I also agree that there's probably a certain point where people would start to value their time more than what we today would consider "luxury goods". Just that that point is probably a lot further out than you might expect, because what's considered a luxury is relative to the cultural standards of the society you live in. Some people do chose to retire in their 30s, but I know a lot more people who didn't do that even though they probably could have.