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.
So either your premise is horribly flawed or we're fucked no matter what we do.