[jbxntuehineoh]

> Everyone wants more

Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat and would be much, much happier for it. Unfortunately that option isn't available to me, nor to most people.

[georgeecollins]

> Everyone wants more

John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want their own cars, their own lavish houses filled with appliances, extensive wardrobes, fancy food. As a westerner you do not feel like you live an opulent lifestyle but compared to almost any person in 1900 you do.

Why is this? Advertising continually raised people’s expectations. Now social media does. People are naturally competitive.

It’s obvious that things don’t really make a person happier except in extreme cases. Also, historical comparisons show we are happy with or admire those that have more and when everyone has a thing contentment is not achieved.

It’s easy to imagine different values and lots of social movements have eschewed materialism. Now there is lying down. There used to be hippies living on communes.

[throw0101c]

> John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want […]

This is incorrect: Keynes thought with productivity gains people could eventually satisfy their material needs working very few hours, but their wants could be "insatiable":

> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.

* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)

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

An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):

* https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/ke...

[georgeecollins]

TIL! Thank you.

Let’s try: George Collins believes that people can satisfy their material needs by working only a few hours. People usually want more. But at many times and within many social movements— religious, political, artistic— people have chosen to want less. Maybe that is part of the answer.

[well_ackshually]

>George Collins believes that people can satisfy their material needs by working only a few hours

And George Collins is wrong. My rent (for two people) is 1000€ (60m²), electricity is 150, food is 600, internet 50, total of about 2000. Say 1000 since we split that in half, and maybe i'll even reduce those needs, live in a smaller space, heat myself less in winter so it goes down to 800.

That's about 35 hours of work for the absolute bare minimum, 70 including my wife. That means no car, using my bike for everything, eating objectively worse food for my health (not talking about caviar there), get rid of pets, etc, etc.

one full week of worth each to cover the bare minimum. and let's be honest, I'm quite well off there. People on median income would _die_. They already do, working the full month.

George Collins would do well to read more sociology and not generalize.

[throw0101c]

> That's about 35 hours of work for the absolute bare minimum, 70 including my wife.

2000/month is 24k/year in expenses.

Doing some rough math, one person working 35/week would be working for about 13/hour to handle that; for two people it would be 6.5/hour each (US federal minimum wage, which hasn't change in decades, is US$ 7.25/hour).

In the EU wages vary by countries, so minimum wages go from Bulgaria's €620/month to Luxemburg's €2700/month:

* https://eures.europa.eu/minimum-wages-eu-2026-what-they-are-...

(You don't say where you are.)

[chadgpt3]

The real killer is the lowest possible rent in the city. You can't opt out of that without exiling yourself.

[bluGill]

You can opt out by having roommates.

[Windchaser]

You're getting downvoted, but roommates used to pretty common (meaning, multiple people in each bedroom).

I'm happy to work more to have my small flat to myself; the lifestyle creep is worth it to me here. But I'm still aware that this is lifestyle creep.

[chadgpt3]

That lowers the lowest possible rent, not to zero.

[smallmancontrov]

This is a wildly incorrect take that I thought was now exclusive to Boomers who last balanced a budget 30 years ago and now spend all day listening to Fox News while repeatedly refreshing their house price estimate on Zillow. Evidently not. Let's review.

Things are cheap. Health care, housing, and education are expensive. The median financed iPhone is $30/mo, health care is $500/mo, college is $800/mo, median rent is $1500/mo. You can get three 75" TVs for the cost of one month of median US rent. The average Millenial does not eat three $15 avocado toasts every day, but the average house actually does appreciate by 10*$15 every day (smoothed). This works in reverse, too: you must forego two 75" TV purchases and an iPhone purchase every month to pay rent. Obviously, unless you have a TV factory in your apartment, this is an extremely stupid plan that outs the person floating it as having been disconnected from reality on the ground for decades.

The modern economy solved material problems but it did not solve gatekeeping and rent-seeking problems and oh boy it has a lot of them. These problems are already gigantic compared to all of the material problems put together, so no amount of material deprivation will solve them.

[georgeecollins]

I think by making a comparison between today 1900 I wasn't expecting to get on the slot car track of all the bad economic policy of the last couple generations. I agree with you completely about the rent seeking, the protection of the wealth of old people at the expense of future generations, the gatekeeping of expensive accreditation. Amen to all that.

[smallmancontrov]

Maybe I was wrong to jump you for it, then. As long as your issue list prominently features those issues as well, we have no quarrel.

9 times out of 10, the way someone lands on materialism as an issue is by going down the issue list, crossing out anything that they might share culpability for (which is easy -- having a degree, a brokerage account, a 401k, a house) and then overstating the case for what remains. Materialism, culture, immigration, laziness, promiscuity of the youth (or lack thereof lol), and so on. I don't look forward to unwinding the things that elevate my place in society any more than the next guy, but some of them have gotten pretty torqued and I'd rather let off the tension than see if the next generation is the one that finally turns guillotine memes into reality.

[jameslk]

> Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat

Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive

[toasty228]

It's always the choice between flying cars and living in a hut made of cow dung, right? No in between is conceivable by the human brain, either boundless growth or the Neolithic

[inglor_cz]

I am not sure if the choice is so binary, but neither am I sure whether you can sustain a reasonable compromise without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.

A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.

I think almost no one would be willing to return, say, to the early 1900s when it comes to medical science and available treatment options.

Things like anti-retroviral therapy and CAR-T are just too nice to have when something otherwise fatal hits you. But that requires top-notch chemistry and biology, which requires top-notch lab equipment and computers, which requires top-notch material science and industry etc.

I am not sure if you can sustain all of this if all the the relevant PhDs work 16 hour workweeks. I am also not sure which parts of the modern economy can be left out to regress to a previous stage of development if you still want to retain the capability to treat cancer with advanced biologicals. The supply chains are just too complex.

Maybe in the age of AI and robots the options are different, but not before.

[toasty228]

> A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.

Smaller local economies/communities like my grandparents had in the 60s don't sound too bad, especially if we keep a few nice things from today. Do you need aliexpress? Fruits shipped form the other side of the planets? Etc. Once everyone has electricity, water, shelter, food and a tight local community were good to go, I'd even argue the "progress" we made since then actually broke some of the core things we require to thrive as humans (purpose, stability, communities,...)

I don't care about medicine that save 0.00001% of the population if the price of it is what we're witnessing today tbh, otherwise there is truly no limits and no arguments to growth at all cost

[inglor_cz]

Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.

You personally may not care about regressing to 19xx medicine, but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.

BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago. United Fruit Company and its banana republics have a long, long (and dirty) history.

[nkrisc]

> Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.

You have to dig a little deeper with your numbers, because everyone is going to die from something. Deaths from cancer would probably go down without modern medicine because most people wouldn’t be living long enough to die from cancer.

[toasty228]

And how many people suffer/die from obesity, diabetes and other lifestyle disease (lookup the main causes of deaths in the US, and their causes) ? All I'm saying is that there is a middle ground between "living in huts made of cow dung and dying at 35" and "75% of your population is obese and die from literal over consumption and lack of physical activity"

> but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.

Trump was elected twice, the voters are brain dead cattle anyways

> BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago

At what scale? People could go to the US in 1700 too, it doesn't mean that commercial airlines are sustainable at ANY rate

[pjerem]

> without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.

Well, the good news is that organizing societal and economic complexity and living into it is exactly what differentiate us from other species.

[inglor_cz]

OK, true, but the question is: what is the minimum workplace effort of living people that must go into that organizing process? Let us measure it in hours for the sake of simpliticy.

In the extremes, 1 hour weekly is probably too little and 100 hours weekly is excessive. But given how almost the entire world has converged to approx. 40 on average, I'd be surprised if it was very different from 40.

Yes, this may change with robots and AI.

[Ma8ee]

If you instead imagine the perspective of anyone from 16th century, you’d realise we are already living as kings. We have way more food and clothes than we can eat and use, we have self driving carriages, magic devices with entertainment in our pockets, not to mention that almost all our kids live to adulthood.

At what point do we say that we don’t need to waste more of earth’s resources and instead find time to enjoy our current enormous wealth?

[flextheruler]

The argument that commoners now live better than historical kings because we possess better technology is reductive if by living better you mean life satisfaction. Happiness is relative. Most people compare themselves to their peers. This is borne out by a multitude of studies one being that upper middle class people are unhappier living in upper class neighborhoods than in middle class neighborhoods despite the richer neighborhood having lower crime, better services, etc.

There will never be a point that society at large will decline to exploit resources when there is competition for those resources. It's easy to see why on average this behavior is common from an evolutionary perspective.

[Ma8ee]

No, I don't mean life satisfaction, I mean exactly what I wrote. Our material standards are unimaginable high compared to a few hundred years ago. I've never imagined kings to be particularly happy.

I am convinced there will be a point where humans will find other ways to compete than buying expensive goods. I thought the whole "humans are slaves to their genes" became quite out of fashion already 30 years or so.

[jameslk]

Well that's kinda my point. If we could all afford yachts tomorrow because AI robot factories made it a commodity like Swiss watches of yore[0], we'd all be buying yachts. And instead of bickering about not being able to afford yachts, people would be bickering about the rich asshole with the limited edition Aston Martin space yacht, while they could only afford the 3-speed helipad Temu yacht

0. https://www.paulgraham.com/brandage.html

[Ma8ee]

What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year?

While I agree that many people are status seekers, that can be different things. Where I live, a yacht is vulgar. Even a bigger car is looked down on if it isn't for some specific utility. Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.

[throw0101c]

> What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year?

If your job involves network connectivity and SSH, satellite Internet would allow you to do your job on your yacht where ever it happens to be, even in the middle of an ocean.

James Hamilton, Senior Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, [1] was doing this 15+ years ago as he motored around the world in a Nordhavn 52 [2] with his wife:

* https://mvdirona.com/2009/06/remote-data-communication-costs...

* https://mvdirona.com/2015/08/communications-at-sea/

* https://mvdirona.com/2018/03/kvh-v7-hts-twice-the-speed-more...

[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/02/james-hamilton-amazon/

[2] https://mvdirona.com/dirona/

[darkwater]

> Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.

Sounds like a poshy neighborhood colonized by expats. I mean, I do share the values but it's definitely a luxury and entitled position (with its own consequences on the rest of the locals sharing the same city)

[Ma8ee]

I wouldn't call it poshy, but it is mostly inhabited by academics. And it is not in the US.

I genuinely don't understand why you think it is entitled.

[supriyo-biswas]

> If we could all afford yachts tomorrow because AI robot factories

Handwaving away constraints on production on physical goods because of advances in code generation is a new one.

[rcxdude]

I think this is a deliberately somewhat fantastical hypothetical scenario (though not far off the sales pitch from humanoid robot companies).

[littlexsparkee]

The loudest gripes in this moment are housing, healthcare, childcare - essentials, not worries about keeping up with the Joneses.

[AngryData]

Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. Also antibiotics are not that expensive, especially if you buy them for "fish" and get them closer to production cost. You could sell some watermelons and afford antibiotics.

[defrost]

Upper middle class people in the UK live in traditional thatched cottages today - it's still a trade.

African traditional cattle herders are still a thing and they're still living in thatched huts with weave walls.

Elsewhere in Africa, Thatching is still an up market thing: https://www.africathatch.co.za/

Perhaps spend some time learning about the wider world before making such obviously incorrect sweeping generalisations?

[Maxatar]

>Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore.

UN data on housing somewhat disagrees with you. The somewhat is only because people living in such housing aren't starving/destitute, but they are still incredibly poor.

[nephihaha]

Many of them live in shacks made from wooden pallets and corrugated iron roofs instead. This is true across much of the Third World – Brazil, Haiti, South Africa and Indonesia all have them for example.

[jameslk]

I’m talking about how many people lived in the past

OP said they would be content with 40% less income for less work. That's fine, but I think it misses the point. On a large enough time scale, progress is so great that most wouldn't choose the past, nor would they choose our present if the future is substantially better. That's what I mean by "everyone wants more" ... it's what contributes to endless consumption rather than us working less hours when technology improves

[TheOtherHobbes]

From people I know who traveled, the people in thatched huts are sometimes reported to be far happier than we are.

And a lot of people in the US can't afford hospitals or antibiotics today.

[Windchaser]

It's one hospital, how much could it cost? $200 million?

[preg_match]

People work less = we live in mud huts? I’m not understanding the connection at all. You can’t just make that jump and then not explain it and pretend as though it makes sense.

No, it doesn’t make sense, only in your head. We’re not mind readers, please elaborate and at least try to use logic or reasoning. It’s frustrating to readers otherwise.

[CalRobert]

Thatched roofs are an expensive art installation compared to many other types

[Waterluvian]

Getting 3/5ths fired is my dream, too.

For a while I had a sweet gig where instead of raises I got to work less but that just bewilders management even though I’m very confident they got more for their money.

[oersted]

An employee is not a pure machine that converts money/time into results linearly.

It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear.

Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent.

This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.

[kakacik]

I work on 90% contract, meaning I get cca 10 weeks of paid vacations yearly, and its usual 5 days a week workload. Net income hit is somewhere around 6-7% of salary.

There is maybe tiny overhead, but there is also more efficiency during time I am actually in, especially in slow moving processes. Plus QoL improvement is massive for me, as an adventurer, mountain lover and first and foremost a parent of 2 young kids.

People are scared these days to look for new job, its same as it was in 2008 in many regards (I personally went in opposite direction during that time despite many people warning me against, and actively started consulting and soon after then relocated to Switzerland), but our lives are short.

Do you want to end up regretting working too much for some empty goals of others, which usually #1 regret of dying people? I sure as hell won't be in that category, company performances, insecure egos of control freaks in management and other bullshit be damned, they are not meaningful part of any life well lived.

[oersted]

Ah yes, of course, that's not what I meant. I would count you as fully dedicated, what you are describing is not too rare in EU in some professions. And I'd say that getting long vacations is quite a different dynamic than working part-time on a weekly basis.

I was referring to the commenters talking about working 2/3 days a week. In the Netherlands 4 days a week is also becoming the norm, which I'm not a big fan of but it's not all that bad either, actual productivity doesn't change that much in practice.

I just mean that at some point, if you are not actually focused on your job, you end up creating more work than you deliver, or at least not enough of a surplus to justify a salary. So it's not surprising that managers are averse to reducing hours and salary linearly, the impact is not linear.

[nmcfarl]

I really think this depends on the job. As soon as I read your initial comment, I thought about locums in medicine, people who float for as little as a weekend at a time, and as a little as once a quarter at any particular hospital. And the entire hospital industry has been built around them at least in the western United States. They’re clearly contributing something.

I think there are jobs where you need lots of context and there are jobs where other things are more important.

[oersted]

Never heard of that role, good to learn. I suppose the closest analogue I am aware of is substitute teachers.

[crazylogger]

This is equivalent to buying 3 extra days of free time with 60% of your income. You want more (holidays, in this case) and you buy them with work.

[jrflowers]

It’s 3 extra days per week OP. People live for a bunch of weeks. It’d only be 3 days total if they had the lifespan of a moth

[nkrisc]

Working 2 days a week is a 60% reduction in work, thus the 60% reduction in salary.

[voxic11]

I had a coworker who spent his career working for 2 years then taking 2 years off to live off the savings. Have you considered such a strategy? It seemed to be working out well enough for him.

[KptMarchewa]

It is possible to frontload the effort though and FIRE.

It makes sense too, if I worked two days of the week right now, I'd spend giant majority of that time just catching up and understanding the changing context. It would make more sense to work 4 months a year; 5 days a week.

Unfortunately, it's one of those things that only work in theory and isolation.

[bcjdjsndon]

> If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat

What about never working for 2billion% more?

[blks]

Can you survive and support your family on just 40% of your current income?

[toasty228]

50% of the people in my country earn less than 40% of my salary, so surely it's possible...

[chongli]

That's still wanting more: more free time.

You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.

[nextaccountic]

> That's still wanting more: more free time.

But this is working less to have more free time.

> You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.

Why not? That's exactly what the person said they want.

The incorrect point that was made is that everyone want to work because they want more stuff, not because they want more free time. People that get more free time typically achieve this by working less, or not working

[chongli]

Free time is a luxury just like anything else, but it's only valuable if you have enough of everything else. Nobody is jealous of all the free time homeless people have. They're jealous of the free time of people who don't need to work full time to pay all their bills.

[lan321]

Many dream of getting a van or a shack in bumfuck nowhere and doing what they want. Essentially living as an almost homeless person because the price premium to sleeping rough is worth it. Hell, I'm not a camping enjoyer, but a van with a starlink and space for my bike sounds enough. Sadly, I still need an address registration tho.

[alchemism]

You might lease a Regus (et. al.) business address for <$100/mo.

[peepee1982]

I'm definitely jealous of the free time homeless people have. I just don't want to make the choice for my children to be homeless with me.

[pixl97]

In theory in a robot economy you'll have 100% of the food and shelter you need to some standard, hopefully a decent one. The particular issue with how the world currently is is some people have 60% of their food and shelter while other people have 30000%

[littlexsparkee]

That's assuming all of your current pay is going to necessities - salaries here pay well in excess provided your 'wants' are few, you can cover the things that matter (housing, food, etc) and get your time back.