[nrao123]

Because of Robots- the whole world may move to a 3 day work week. Here is Larry Page on that.

“If you really think about the things that you need to make yourself happy—housing, security, opportunities for your kids—anthropologists have been identifying these things. It’s not that hard for us to provide those things,” he said. “The amount of resources we need to do that, the amount of work that actually needs to go into that is pretty small. I’m guessing less than 1% at the moment. So the idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people’s needs is just not true.”

“You just reduce work time,” Page said. “Most people, if I ask them, ‘Would you like an extra week of vacation?’ They raise their hands, 100% of the people. ‘Two weeks vacation, or a four-day work week?’ Everyone will raise their hand. Most people like working, but they’d also like to have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests. So that would be one way to deal with the problem, is if you had a coordinated way to just reduce the workweek. And then, if you add slightly less employment, you can adjust and people will still have jobs.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/07/07/googles-l...

[jiggy2011]

The problem with that is that the best jobs (such as google) are competitive. Even if two people competing for the same job only want to work 30 hours per week, they both know that they can make themselves more attractive to the employer by offering to work more hours than the other person. This is especially true for immigrant groups competing with domestic labour.

The state could regulate the working week to 30 hours, but this will impact GDP and thus the state's ability to provide public services via taxation and also the ability of poor people to get out of poverty by outworking the more wealthy.

[gpvos]

The solution to that would be to make the per-person overhead costs (taxes, administration, health plan, etc.) for a job as close to zero as possible. A basic income would help with that.

Then there are still practical disadvantages (more communication needed, etc.), but these may be outweighed by the advantages (more different people on the same job may mean more creativity, etc.)

[jo_]

I'm not sure I follow. The same reasoning kinda' applies now: I can work more than 40 hours per week to look like a better applicant, but this becomes both counterproductive and untenable at a certain point. (There are a finite number of hours in a week.) Sure, there are times when you have to put in overtime, like when a big release is about to come out or there's a critical bug, but largely you should be able to finish your work in the allocated time. If this is consistently not the case, then you (the 'royal you') are either understaffed, ill managed, or incompetent. (Again, I don't mean to call you personally incompetent, I mean 'you' as a member of the workforce.)

I think with the insistence that 30 hours is full time we'll see fewer worthless meetings and less overhead, since time is now a scarce commodity. Think about it: that ten hours is a two-hour meeting every day. If I say, "I will work 60 hours a week every week," to my new employer, they'll look at each other with great incredulity. There isn't necessarily 60 hours of productive mental time each week. Given, I'm neither the smartest nor the most focused person in the world, but I think I could only do 20 hours of hard, focused mental work each week at my last job. The remaining 20 hours was mindless email, bug reports, writing documentation, or drawing XML diagrams which spelled profane words when zoomed out enough.

There will always be people who want or need to work more than the standard. That's okay. What reducing the work week means to me, though, is fewer people filling in their days with useless padding. If you're done after 30 hours, that's okay -- go home!

[icelancer]

Law firms don't see it this way.

> I can work more than 40 hours per week to look like a better applicant, but this becomes both counterproductive and untenable at a certain point.

[jo_]

They might not, but that doesn't mean we should make concessions to them. I agree that it's important to consider the practical aspects of a law's use, but we shouldn't avoid making laws because some groups will ignore them. In fact, in this case I think it adds even more incentive to drive down the work week time because then all the people working 40-hour weeks will be contributing over the minimum.

[dalke]

What does it mean to "outwork" someone? If I have two jobs, one at a fast food restaurant and the other harvesting vegetables, can I outwork someone living off of $50 million in inherited wealth?

Can I outwork someone working half-time as a business consultant and making $150K/year?

Also, GDP is a proxy, and not an end point. As Paul Samuelson pointed out, if a man marries his maid, then, all else being equal, GDP would fall. By this reasoning, getting married would have the same negative social consequences you pointed out.

[jiggy2011]

By outwork I mean work for more hours or be willing to. If a rich person with a degree from an elite university has a higher expected per hour productivity than a poor person with no degree then the poor person can sometimes compete for the same job as the rich person by being willing to work for more hours. Or the poor person might be able to get a different job that the rich person would not consider because the hours are too long.

I don't think getting married would have the same effect unless one party gives up work or reduces the number of hours that they worked after being married, this doesn't tend to happen anymore.

[rahimnathwani]

> I don't think getting married would have the same effect unless one party gives up work or reduces the number of hours that they worked after being married, this doesn't tend to happen anymore.

Dalke's point is that GDP is an imperfect measure. In his example, the maid's work counts towards GDP (because she is being paid a salary) but the homemaker's work does not count (even though it may be identical in nature and extent.)

[jiggy2011]

The taxable income of the couple would go down only if the maid continues the same work that she did before the marriage but for free rather than getting a different job, but this is quite a specific case that is outside of the norm.

[dalke]

You wrote "this will impact GDP and thus the state's ability to ...", as if that were a bad thing, or at least something to be avoided.

If so, then your logic says that this "outside of the norm" case is also a bad thing for the country, or at least something to be avoided.

Most would disagree with you. For that matter, my own g'grandmother worked as a maid for a man, who she later married. I don't see why you get to call my family history "outside of the norm" simply because it disagrees with your view of economics.

[dalke]

I notice that you have switched from "poor people" to "poor person with no degree", and from "richer [than poor]" to "rich".

My example was of someone who did not work at all, and has $50 million in inherited money. By definition, anyone who works will be able to outwork someone who never works. How does a poor person "outwork" that multimillionaire?

Classically speaking, I structured this as a worker against an owner of capital. You have responded, it seems, by arguing that capital is irrelevant, and then reclassified "work" to "access to better paying jobs".

I believe you also imply that going to an elite university is an independent factor from poverty. It may be that someone poor cannot take the 4 years off for such studies, and must instead help support the family and take care of an ailing parent. Therefore, these are correlated, with the implication that being rich helps make your children rich.

Your original premise was that working hard is the primary factor, and ignore other systemic biases.

[jiggy2011]

I will try to address both this comment and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8680361 in one reply.

I think you have misunderstood my overall argument, my claim is not that a poor person is likely to earn a higher income than a rich person by working more hours, but that all people regardless of wealth are limited to 24 hour days which they must divide into "work" and "not work".

A poor person can increase their value to an employer by being willing to forgo more "not work" hours than their competition. If the standard is a 40 hour week then they can offer to work a 50 hour week for example. The only people who they cannot compete with are those already working at full capacity (say a 100 hour work week).

They can realise this extra work either as extra wages or by being willing to work more hours for the same wage. This can be used offset other disadvantages that they may have such as a lack of a degree, lack of experience or lack of connections. If a law was passed that restricted the number of hours that people are allowed to work to a maximum then you remove a negotiation lever that some poorer people might want to use.

As far as the maid example goes, it is an outlier because the overwhelming majority of women (at least in the west) who are in salaried employment before they are married continue in salaried employment after marriage. Historically (as was the case perhaps in your great grandmother's time) this was not necessarily the case.

[dalke]

Embedded in that is the premise that increasing the number of working hours is a good thing. If the law insists upon a maximum of 30 hours per week, then the number of hours that one is willing to work is no longer a way to distinguish between employees.

This thread started with the observation, quoting bato, "as work gets "easier" the way forward would be to reduce hours worked, not increase them".

If you build into your analysis the assumption that working more is better, then of course you'll end up with that conclusion that working more is better.

You believe there is a negotiation lever by not having a cap in the law. To start with, I would rather have strong unions able to negotiate the cap as appropriate for the given trade. Failing that though, the US has laws limiting the number of hours to work, such as the Libby Zion Law in New York, which limits the amount of resident physicians' work, and hours-of-service rules for truck drivers.

Regarding the maid example, I believe you are suggesting that it's rare enough that it can be ignored for purposes of economic analysis. My suggestion is quite different - your justification says that we should not do things that reduce the GDP. I question the primacy of that argument. We make policy decisions to have our country more in the way we want it to be. GDP is easy to measure. That doesn't mean it's the right metric, or even a good rough gauge.

If we wanted a country where people had more time for personal enrichment, then we would have a lower GDP. So what? Studying French poetry of the 1800s or building sand castles on the beach or watching football games are cheap.

And if you're worried about the poor needing to catch up to the rich, then increase taxes.

[toomuchtodo]

Whomever develops and owns that automation is going to have to give it away (similar to what Elon did with the Tesla patents) if Page wants to move towards that model.

We've already seen wages stagnate for 30+ years because of productivity's decoupling from human capital (with productivity now captured through technology, which would encompass software, robotics, and other various automations): http://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/producti...

[seanflyon]

Wages where? Certainly not in China. Perhaps American wages are stagnating because they are getting closer to the average while at the same time the average wage is skyrocketing.

[rumcajz]

I've done a little write-up on the sociology/economics of the work done beyond what's actually useful: http://250bpm.com/blog:44

[logfromblammo]

I call that the "Mitochondria Theory of Economics".

There is a very, very tiny proportion of the population, certainly less than 10%, and possibly as small as 1%, that does essentially all the work required to support the entire species. They are systematically encysted into vesicles and surrounded by giant masses of inert cytoplasm and various organelles that depend on them completely.

The people that drive these economic mitochondria are often completely unaware that the entire burden of Earth's civilization rests upon their shoulders. They only see the needs of their own cell, and the other mitochondria in it, if any.

The entire remainder of the economy exists to distribute the output of the productive workers out to the nonproductive people. Much of that transport network consists of creating an artificial need with advertising and then fulfilling it with retail goods and services.

Reducing weekly hours would simply slow the distribution network, and possibly decrease the overall output of the mitochondria.

The problem is that the entire system is completely built upon the concept that people need to look like they are important to the function of the cell in order to acquire the resources and energy produced by the mitochondria. So everyone has to pretend that they are useful and important, as hard as they possibly can. And the worst possible thing in the world would be to let the mitochondria catch on that they could be independent organisms, and that they don't actually need the cells to survive.

Unlike biological cell mitochondria, economic mitochondria have actually been becoming stronger, faster, and more efficient during our recorded history. This bothers the mitochondria not at all. But it stresses the hell out of the cell's resource distribution systems, as the median useless organelle becomes further away from its vital resources.

Reducing working hours is not a viable solution, because it does nothing to address the fundamental problem with our resource distribution system. It is still completely built upon pretending to be important, with the best actors and those closest to the real economic producers getting the most resources.

Would it be so hard to admit that the majority of humanity is just useless cytoplasm, and put some of the massive and increasing output of the mitochondria into a vascular system to distribute resources evenly throughout the cell, rather than relying upon diffusion and fakery? And it turns out that yes, it actually is rather difficult. Pretending to be important has been so critical to survival for so long that admitting one's uselessness is tantamount to suicide.

[keypusher]

Keynes and many others thought the same thing, almost 100 years ago. Guess what? We work more hours now than they did then.

http://money.howstuffworks.com/five-day-weekend2.htm