[myrmidon]

Decreasing working hours increases labor availability (=> so you'd expect people to get paid less as a result), but higher headcount for comparable output is also totally undesirable for an employer: The only potential benefit is some limited redundancy (bus factor), but this comes at the cost of communication overhead (meetings), decreased software design coherence, no "single source of truth" (person), all of which cost money/time to mitigate.

I don't like it, but I understand why we ended up here...

[casey2]

We need a new business structure that allows decentralized workers. Ironically these systems exist, and are called play, and are often used to get around child labor laws. The Queen Ants own the forever games (Roblox, LOL, Fortnite, Minecraft). A less playful example is Open Sores. These systems are mostly decentralized, but we need a design that only allows groups to form in specific blocking situations, like ants building a bridge.

[apothegm]

And the link between health insurance and work that we have in the US makes that math even uglier.

[1over137]

For software maybe, but that’s just one industry.

[myrmidon]

You have very similar mechanics elsewhere though. More people => invariably more communication/HR/information management overhead pretty much regardless of what they do, and you grow the labor supply also (=> more people willing to work shorter hours).