Why not? Because capitalism. New technology will continue to automate away more and more jobs, from manufacturing to the service industry. This could be one of the greatest achievements in human history, leading to that so-called "leisure society" futurists talked about, but that would require a massive overhaul of most countries' economic systems.
All those gains in productivity mostly enrich the owner class while the rest of us have to fight even harder for the jobs that haven't (yet) been eliminated by technology.
In the U.S., it's hard to imagine getting a single conservative lawmaker to sit down at a table and have a frank discussion about wealth redistribution or a minimum income or public ownership schemes, possible solutions to this problem. That makes me worry that the inevitable transition away from our obsession with the free-market and pursuit of capital will be painful rather than celebratory. And that things will have to get worse before enough of us can consider implementing solutions that make things better.
I perceive this as one of a species of comments that is well-intentioned and valuable in isolation, but that when introduced to the thread has the effect of making it harder to discuss the article on its own terms.
It's easy to see the subtext of the article that indicts unrestrained economic competition. So it's hard to ding a comment for surfacing that subtext and engaging with it.
But at the same time, having been on HN for a long time, it's also easy to see how the result thread will simply litigate capitalism, and how unlikely it is that anyone will learn anything from the ensuing debate.
I agree. Comments like this are stronger when they stay with the specific content of the article. They're weaker when treating it merely as a platform for some generic position ("obsession with the free market").
It isn't that the rhetoric is false, it's that it's impossible for it to be substantive here. Grand claims need grand substance, which there isn't room for in a mere comment post. People compensate for this with ersatz things like getting louder or angrier.
Tangents don't have to be bad. Ira Glass-style "I had an uncle who wore that kind of hat" tangents can be great. But generic tangents go somewhere uninteresting. The gravitational pull of the large, familiar topics has to be resisted because once the discussion gets stuck on one of those planets it is never getting off.
I don't care to post this, but meta begets meta...
Your (and tptacek's) meta comments seem unhelpful and clearly favor HN's status quo.
I've successfully demanded a shorter workweek from capitalist bosses, and helped coworkers fight theirs. And that comment you both meta-criticize is pretty sensible, in my view. If you're going to hack a system, it's worth getting familiar with the subversive lit.
(Though their last paragraph may indicate a lack of familiarity with that subversive lit. Because politicians will naturally fight/coopt revolutionary changes to the system they administrate. Post-capitalism is a revolutionary change, and a capitalist state would attempt to respond violently. But whatever.)
The story about how you helped workers organize shorter work weeks would be interesting.
The framing of advocacy for post-capitalist society isn't, because of the nature of the site.
The only people who will pay attention to the latter conversation either (a) are doing so because they are intractably opposed to your idea and enjoy pushing back on it or (b) are already on your side.
That doesn't mean there's no group (c) of receptive, persuadable people, just that the venue you've chosen doesn't reach them effectively.
> but that when introduced to the thread has the effect of making it harder to discuss the article on its own terms
That isn't neccesarily a bad thing. I'm personally fine with a comment thread debating things unrelated to the article itself, as quite often articles aren't half as interesting and valuable as things that appear in the discussion thread.
> and how unlikely it is that anyone will learn anything from the ensuing debate
I'm not so sure. Yes, some debates are being rehashed, but I'm pretty sure that barring few HN-ers who like a particular topic and chime in every time, we see the same arguments being brought up by new people. I suspect that at each iteration some people learn what they were supposed to learn and leave the conversation.
That's a fair point, but I don't think asking the question "Why don't we have a leisure society yet?" is subtextual. I think the question follows immediately from the article and my commentary follows immediately from that.
I believe you're mostly true. I can only see one slim chance for things to turn out better than expected: most capitalists get rich by making not-so-useful crap that can only be bought by plebes enjoying some disposable income. Ford vitally needs most American to be able to afford an SUV.
If automation continues and demand stays the same, things like 3-day work weeks will come about naturally. A capitalist system would not prevent that from happening.
Would you care to share why you think capitalism would prevent an increase in leisure time (even though it has been increasing since the industrial revolution)?
> Would you care to share why you think capitalism would prevent an increase in leisure time
It's actually a quite simple mechanism - people who would want to work 3 days will get replaced by people willing to work 4 days, which will get replaced to work one day more, etc. As long as people actually need jobs to survive, the end result is they work as much as possible within bounds of law. We sometimes forget about it, because IT industry is in it's golden age, with more jobs than suitable candidates. But look at non-specialized jobs like retail, and you'll find everyone working Monday-Saturday in shitty conditions for low pay. They'd be working Monday-Sunday, were it not the long fight against capitalism for leisure time.
Capitalism optimizes for profit, not for human values. Those are becoming increasingly separated nowdays.
That's obviously false. If there were an infinite supply of desperate people "willing to work more for less", wages would be zero, or minimum wage at most.
There is a finite supply of labor, and we are not anywhere near a level of technology where we no longer have an unbounded demand for labor.
"Reduced labour" isnt produced by automation, increased profit is. To "give back" labour you have to reduce profits.
"Leisure time" was won by unions, collective bargaining and legislation. "The Weekend" only exists at all because of the collective actions of the workforce, not of capital owners.
Reduced labor (per output value) and increased profit are the same thing.
There is always a trade off between time spent working and wealth. Only through automation can we keep our current quality of life while working less, increase our quality of life without working any more, or do anything between those two possibilities.
No, automation just reduces the amount of repetitive labour. The remaining labour isn't distributed evenly across the workforce: some people take up more work to increase or maintain their level of wealth and some people become unemployed.
Envy and ambition create worst-case nash equilibria for all.
> If automation continues and demand stays the same, things like 3-day work weeks will come about naturally.
That's simply not true, otherwise we wouldn't be working the same hours at the same adjusted wages as we were 50 years ago despite massive gains in productivity.
A company's increased productivity doesn't benefit the workers, it benefits the owners/shareholders. What do you think the typical factory owner will do when a new assembly line component means he only needs 50 out of his 100 line workers? You're pretty naïve if you think he'll let those 100 employees work 20 hours/week now. No, he'll fire 50 of them and let the wages of the remaining employees stagnate at best since there's more competition for their jobs now. Why? because that's what reduces expenses and improves the immediate share price of his company. Economics 101.
We are working the same hours as 50 years ago because we want to be able to purchase cell phones and modern cars bad stuff. You could work a lot less and live with 50s level technology, but almost no one chooses to.
Also, if a shareholder makes more money, they buy more, creating new labor requirements elsewhere.
Your first point is true, but it's not the only explanation for why people still work 40 hours a week. My explanation is far more influential.
And your second point is blatantly false. That's the same, tired, rhetoric Republicans have been spewing since Reagan. Owners of companies doing well won't reinvest that into their companies unless there is demand on the consumer side and they don't spend all of that money on consumables like a worker would (since they have to).
We already have the leisure society - the bottom rung of the income distribution (in the US) lives in that society. People below the poverty line in the US work very little and have consumption and disposable income (after taxes/transfers) of about $20k/year.
I don't see a claim in those links that people at the bottom rung have $20k in disposable income. I can't imagine they even have $20k a year to begin with. Your claims are very different from my experience living close enough to that bottom rung to know people in it.
In the second link there is a graph entitled "Disposable Income for a Hypothetical Single Parent with One Child, by Earnings", which doesn't fall below $20k. Of course, it may not be correct to generalize it, and it is incorrect to present it as "per person" since it represents two people - parent and child.
Please explain how this supports your figure. I don't see it. Dividing the consumer unit "average annual expenditure" by the "average number of persons per consumer unit" per column there, only the top two exceed $20k, and only the top 3 approach $20k. It does all exceed $10k, but there's still 27 million households spending less than $15k/yr/person - where it would be more correct to say "about $10k" than "about $20k".
One of the biggest practical hurdles to that sort of wealth distribution is simply that there is a whole world of people outside the US ready and willing to accept investment and residence from the owner class.
That's not a problem. profits made within a country can be taxed within a country. Stopping the export of capital is a legal/legislative issue, not a logistical one.
The rich have already left. The mythical class we're "punishing" arent tied to nations/peoples any more. Their assets are however. Their companies operate within nations. They wealth is spent in deals/properties/etc. within countries.
If a Koch brother lands on US soil he can be arrested and all of his assets seized. If he does a deal with a US company, all of the transactions can be subject to US law.
I find the whole economic system to be quite bizarre. Nobody's salary seems to correlate with much except their skill at getting a high salary. For instance, my sister (elementary education) makes even less than I do as a grad student. The difference is that she wakes up at 5:00 AM and works all day teaching and taking care of little kids until 7:00 PM, whereas I wake up whenever I feel like it, head to a coffee shop and work on research (which is basically a computer game for me), and mix in bike rides and whatever else as I please. The difference in salary will be even more extreme once I get my PhD.
It really doesn't seem fair, and when I think about the vast majority of the world population in other countries, it seems even less fair. I used to have a more conservative stance that if you want to get more, you just have to work harder, but now I've reversed my stance completely: I think it's mostly luck -- where you were born, who you know, what your social skills are, and if you just happen to be in the right place at the right time.
Many jobs seem like they exist solely for the sake of creating more jobs. We have managers of managers of managers. A lot of people don't put a lot of effort into their work (they spend their day browsing the internet), and the ones that do put in an honest effort don't seem to be rewarded for it. The hardest-working employees are rarely promoted into administrative positions. And the best way to increase one's salary is to job hop instead of remaining loyal to one company (http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employees...).
I feel like many people have this ingrained notion that you're just "supposed to work" for so many hours a week, and no one is seriously pursuing the goal of creating leisure time (or at least work that's personally enjoyable). We have more than enough technological capability to provide basic survival needs to everyone on the planet, yet we're nowhere close to achieving that goal.
Again, I don't know why it's this way. But it is, and it just seems wrong to me.
I think there are two separate issues in your comment...
You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly.
Your second point is that there seems to be a lot of people with useless jobs and I couldn't agree more. We're RAPIDLY approaching the point where most people are employed to do basically nothing of value. How many people's jobs could be replaced by the mythical "script" written in a day by a good dev?
I'm glad to see us get to this point. People should learn and practice useful skills. So as not to cause a violent revolution, I think we do need some form of basic income though. That would also enable creatives to experiment and produce without economic pressure which I think is great. I also don't care if 99% of people mooch off this model as most people are just wasting time at work as it is anyway.
It's a horribly short-sighted viewpoint to not take into account the effect teachers (are supposed to) have on whole new generations of people! Teachers raise people who may get billion-dollar ideas in the future, and should be paid accordingly.
They should, but they aren't and this is the reality.
Capitalism sucks at valuing things that don't give immediate profit. Education is such a thing - it has extreme ROI... 20 years down the line. Which is too long a time and it gets valued less than small changes that will bring in a little bit of money next month.
How is capitalism the thing valuing teacher's salaries? If referring to the US and public education, aren't they a branch of the government?
And even ignoring that(for example, at private schools), the 'consumer' here is really the parent. The child isn't in a position to choose schools, so it's really about selling to the parent. I imagine it has to be hard to get a sense of any 20-year projected ROI if you can only indirectly measure teaching quality by what your child says and standardized test scores.
There's also a bit of a principal-agent problem. The people who make decisions about the educational system are state bureaucrats, teachers, and parents, in roughly that order. The one person who's most affected by it - the kid - has basically zero say in anything.
I suspect that education would be a much higher priority and teachers would be paid much more if children could vote.
You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly.
Except this argument doesn't seem to apply globally: I have a good friend over here in Europe who's got a PhD in computer science. He works as a researcher in a renouned university. His sister is not a kindergarden, but elementary school teacher.
She makes (slightly) more money than he does. Her work day starts at 8am and most of the time ends at 2pm. She's got around 10 weeks of vacation per year. She cannot legally get fired if she performs badly.
So in this country, my friends knowledge and high level skill levels certainly weren't a value multiplier when compared to his sister.
Granted, he might be able to get a higher paid job with his background, but that brings us back to the grandparent's original point: your education is not a good predictor for your salary.
"You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly."
And then the kids grow up, and you are fucked. Do you think the first ever important thing those kids learn, for society, is when they become 20+ and one day they start learning compsci-simulated-quantum-biomolecular-teleportation-of-artificial-intelligence-nanoparticle-drug-dynamofeedback 101? (Yes, if it's not obvious, I just pulled that out of my...)
She gets less, cause the system doesn't care about if the world in totally destroyed 30 years down the road. (Actually that would be great. Opportunity for "growth" and profit.) It only cares about billions yesterday.
Honestly, it's not fair. The whole idea of capitalism is to encourage people to work jobs / obtain certain skills that there is a demand for. If we didn't have enough people to available to be teachers, salaries would start to go up.
The example I see thrown around a lot is plumbing, or garbage collection. Presumably not very many people want to become plumbers, so they get paid accordingly.
I wouldn't say no one is pursuing it. I think it just has yet to become considered as a real possibility for many.
I believe there may be a certain point in the development of society where there has to be a shift from the economic/capitalist model into a model based on human betterment or an effort directly focused on increased capability to sustain and improve our quality of living.
Capitalism worked to get us where we are, but I don't believe it will get us to where we want to be. It improved quality of life and was necessary to develop our current resources. Now we may be able to use those resources to directly model our lives and improve upon their quality.
You seem to be implying that cash/capitalism is the only incentive. People are still becoming teachers, aid workers, and pursuing the arts even though the financial incentives are terrible. All of those fields aren't all fun and can be risky endeavors.
Let's say we have a basic income. There will probably be less maids so people will have to spend more of their own time cleaning. Your office might have less janitors, part of your job might be to empty trash outside. Maids and janitors will still be around. Their roles would be diminished and they'll just get paid more.
We don't have a purely capitalistic model right now. Whatever we move toward won't be a "pure" anything, either.
The personal incentive is that we could all live better lives. We have the means and the capability to directly improve quality of life, rather than gaining capital to trade it for quality of life.
I would love some kind of job board for "lifestyle jobs". Thats jobs with 2 or 3 day work weeks and a 9-5 schedule. I might go as low as $60k (+ benefits) if it was offered.
The closest thing to achieve that now is freelancing.
Yeah -- and it's way easier to pack out 4 or 6 solid months of work than it is to find work that trickles in regularly at anything like "2 days a week," at least for me.
The book only gets a one-sentence mention in the article, but much, much more could be said. Particularly, it presents overworking as a form of paranoia.
Working was framed as a duty to God and since we didn't know if God existed, we were to work hard, just in case. Now that we've (largely) shifted our beliefs from a Christian god to more diffused spirituality, we can stop justifying overwork in this way.
> Now that we've (largely) shifted our beliefs from a Christian god to more diffused spirituality
Where did you get that from? A quick google search says about 3/4 of Americans identify as Christian, and about 62% are members of a church congregation.
I'd guess about half of that identify as Christian because it's socially unacceptable to be agnostic. Church communities have more uses than simple religious worship. Ask any salesman.
>I'd guess about half of that identify as Christian because it's socially unacceptable to be agnostic.
That's much less an issue now than 50 years ago though, which is what's important when talking about a relative decline. It was much less socially acceptable to identify as agnostic in 1960 than it is today.
My dad was a music director and assistant pastor. He worked about 5 days a week, and also had another job on the side. Choir practice, church functions and services, preparing sermons, visiting sick church members, counseling members, and doing charity work add up to a good bit of time.
That's a valid point and some people below have valid points, too.
I was definitely speaking from my own social milieu (young to middle age tech workers).
In fact, the line from Christianity to work ethic is still so indistinct, many things would have to happen in order for us to make the jump to working less.
On the other hand, if the current younger generation is as unemployed as I understand it, then perhaps working fewer hours will simply be their default choice.
This is the biggest thing I miss from my consulting days. I would never work a 5-day week. It would either be a 3-day or 4-day week, leaving lots of time for travel, family and hobbies.
Sadly, I could never see our clients accepting any business day where we are not available during regular business hours.
Clients are surprisingly willing to deal with that. It may be less of a hard constraint than you think it is, particularly if you train your clients to expect that type of working relationship.
I had an interesting call with a doctor client recently. "I didn't notice a number on your website." "That's correct." "So how am I supposed to get in touch with you?" "I recommend email." "But you only respond to email a day later." "That's correct." "Shouldn't you make yourself more available to your customers?" "With respect, doctor, I'm exactly as available as I wish to be."
You would think she'd be mad after a conversation including that, but she actually left happy, because I was able to fix her problem.
Kind of ironic that a doctor would say that to you. Just try getting a doctor's direct line or cell. It's almost impossible, they have receptionists because they'd be overwhelmed with patients calling them with stupid questions all day if they didn't.
Of course, you could also just hire a remote assistant to field phone calls for you if you wanted.
Maybe I'm parsing your comment incorrectly, but do you mean that you used to have clients that allowed you to make your own schedule but you no longer do? Out of curiosity, what caused the change?
I firmly believe we'll see more people move to a consulting model where they work far fewer hours, are more productive and make as much or more money as before.
I have been fortunate enough to work a 4x10 shift for my employer for the past 6 or 7 years. At this point, the shift and hours are almost worth more to me than the actual job I am doing since having the three days off makes for a much more relaxed weekend. Being off for one or two weekdays when most everyone else is at work is also a definite plus since it makes getting errands done and just going out and being a "tourist" in my own city much easier.
It's exactly what I'm thinking about lately. A lot of colleagues of mine work 4 days a week, from Mon - Thu, and have 3 days off. It is a HUGE difference compared to the 5:2 ratio.
It's not that I don't enjoy my job, but it sound so much sane to me. I hope next year I'll have saved a little bit of money I currently need so I'll be able to do a 4 day working week.
If you ever have the opportunity to work 4 days a week, choose Tuesday to Friday, rather than Monday to Thursday. The reason is that everyone else will be in a good mood on Friday so it will be much less stressful working Fridays rather than Mondays. For the same reason, don't burn your floating holiday on a Friday.
Haven't tried it myself, but I like the idea of working a 9/80 with every other Friday off. One interesting effect is that those who are in the office on Friday end up feeling more productive or relaxed since there are fewer people around. I also wonder if every other Monday off might be better in some cases.
My sister did 9/80s. They were pretty nice when she first moved to the area, but the problem is that you have to take them off on a Friday and it's use-it-or-lose-it. Now that she's married, it's pretty rare that her husband gets time off when she does, and so the extra Friday was basically just a "sit at home in front of the TV day and veg", while the 9 hour days meant that it was an hour less time to spend with her husband in the evenings. I think she's switched back to a regular schedule now.
I have some former coworkers that effectively did 9/80s as well, since they maxed out their vacation and started taking every other Friday off so they wouldn't lose it. It usually worked better, ironically, for people without many hobbies, since they were okay with just sitting at home and vegging for Friday.
4-day weekends could be great if all of society moved to them, but they're tricky when it's just some employers because the people you love aren't around to hang out with. I actually tend to prefer taking Wednesday off; a veg-day to break the week in half seems much more relaxing than a 3-day weekend where you can't do anything fun for one of the days.
Economists of yore were wise to see that productivity would increase dramatically, but they were wrong in believing that surplus productivity would translate into leisure time.
I look at Google and Ycombinator as the model for the future economy, if economic systems are left unchecked by the threat of physical force.
How many people are working at Google everyday on a product that will never produce one red cent? Hundreds? Thousands? How many funded YCombinator startups will never provide a return on investment? 60%? 80%?
These days, the smart money is taking all their surplus productivity and putting it into long-shots to create even more surplus productivity. This explains why industries like software development, that have such an enormous productivity surplus, are paying such high wages right now. One could even argue that the shortage of skilled individuals in such an environment will lead to an increase in demand for those who can train such people - leading to something like a more organic education system.
High wages? Not compared to doctors or lawyers or mid-level business folks. My friend is a marketing manager (a glorified secretary/copy writer with an MBA, by her own admission) and she makes more or less as much as a senior developer.
Enough already with the "high wages" myth. It is the exact cause for the shortage of software engineers in the US - most young people in the US don't want to pursue it because the reward is not commensurate with the effort and risk.
yes. and the science is very exhaustively on my side: time and time again, it's been shown that workers (especially knowledge workers like programmers, designers, etc.) are more productive when working less hours.
Well, if you really believe it is as simple as being a pure numbers game then based on population counts we're going to have to find a way to work 24 to 28 days a week to keep up with the Chinese.
So either your premise is horribly flawed or we're fucked no matter what we do.
The whole point of advocating for fewer work days is that we are just as productive in fewer hours. That's why overtime doesn't work long-term; you wear out and do less per unit time.
I think that used to be the whole point, somewhere around one hundred years ago. I thought that now the point is, we're doing mostly bullshit jobs anyway, so how about we all agree to work a bit less and have some time to live our lives?
So the reason for working longer hours is to ensure that the Chinese people have to work longer hours (which ensures that Westerners have to work longer hours)?
Seems like a pretty bad prisoner's dilemma - and a pointless exercise if you already accept that China will ultimately win.
> China will continue to work 6 or 7 days [...] and the reserve currency will be the yuan.
You suppose that wealth production is proportional to the number of hours worked. This used to be an oversimplification, and now becomes simply false. Countries lead by people who keep counting on this falsehood will fail.
Imagine three companies doing equivalent work in the same sector.
Company A has 3-day work weeks; it's running Monday - Wednesday and then it's inactive for four days.
Company B is like A, but instead of not working 4 days a week, it doubles the staff and has people working 3-day work weeks in two groups.
Company C has employes working 6 days a week.
You can see that companies B and C will be strictly more productive than A and they will outcompete it quickly. As for B vs. C, it all depends on whether costs associated with additional employees (benefits, etc.) outweight the marginal productivity bonus company B has over C by virtue of employees being less tired and having a life. Apparently, the costs are greater, since most companies look more like C than B.
And hence, if you switch to 3-days workweek, you'll lose to the ones who work 6 days/week.
To paraphrase Bill Gates, measuring wealth production by hours of work is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
The "production per hour" metric gets more and more meaningless and deceitful for more and more jobs, mostly for the most productive ones. Obsessively measuring $/hours misleads us into thinking that spending more hours will get us more $, which is false for most jobs which actually creates significant amounts of wealth.
I've automated away dozens to hundreds of menial jobs (hard to count): what sense is there in comparing my one-shot engineering hours to those of the technicians I've definitely made redundant? Each of my hours will have saved thousands of technician hours over the years: does that make me and my time worth thousands of time more than them?
> we still have to work some hours
Some of us have to work some hours, but there are more and more poeple whose hours simply can't be converted into wealth. And that's good news, not a tragedy, because we don't _need_ those working hours. What we need is a way to distribute wealth complementary to, and less obsolete than, salary.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, I think this is a valid point.
One of the reasons companies are unwilling to reduce working hours is because of their competitive nature and that others haven't. No one wants to fall behind. But if others did it, then it's much easier to follow suit.
While taking multiple multiple-week holidays each year, where many employees never return, making the first few weeks after Chinese new year very slow.
All those gains in productivity mostly enrich the owner class while the rest of us have to fight even harder for the jobs that haven't (yet) been eliminated by technology.
In the U.S., it's hard to imagine getting a single conservative lawmaker to sit down at a table and have a frank discussion about wealth redistribution or a minimum income or public ownership schemes, possible solutions to this problem. That makes me worry that the inevitable transition away from our obsession with the free-market and pursuit of capital will be painful rather than celebratory. And that things will have to get worse before enough of us can consider implementing solutions that make things better.