Housing costs, which are proportional to average population income, force us to compete in a Red Queen's race - everyone's earnings have to catch up with others'.
There are other, more hedonic treadmills as well. Aluminium used to be expensive enough to make fancy tableware from, but now that it is dirt cheap, people want to buy iPhones instead.
I hope there are some among us who (cf Carnegie) might view building the equivalent of libraries as a positional good?
Cars are a significant one. Most people spend way more than they have to on cars for luxury features they don’t need for transport.
Personally I opted for no car even though I can easily afford it. It’s a huge amount saved and honestly the lifestyle of walking to places is nicer anyway.
That wasn't how it worked out for me. The average cost of a car in Australia a few years ago was $10,000/year factoring in everything with the car value depreciation. This is much worse now with the increase in fuel and car values.
Your increase in rent would have to be over $200AUD/week to be more expensive than owning a car. Not to mention the fact you benefit from living in a much more desirable area and everything else that comes with.
I live in an exurb of a major US metro on the East Coast. It's hard to compare costs directly as I own a house but anything remotely equivalent in the city on public transit lines would be much pricier. As for desirable? Well I have forest trails right out of my house. Don't care that much about walking to cafes and restaurants.
Monthly rents and mortgage payments are proportional to disposable incomes, pretty much by definition. People competitively bid up the prices in terms of what they can each afford.
I think it's more closely related to scarcity and how much someone's mortgage can be subsidized by monthly rents, and a lack of choice for renters to have other options. I don't think a lot of mortgage holders would be able to realistically pay their mortages if they weren't renting their basement out, and I know a lot of people who have houses now wouldn't be able to buy them because their salaries are wildly inadequate for servicing what they'd list for. But generally you're right if that dynamic weren't so insane.
A 1 bdr condo in my city would cost an overall ~$4000 for a really old condo in a shitty building, and there's <9% of people on record in the country who'd be able to afford that without a ton of pressure, and the only people I know that own anything more than that absolutely couldn't pay for it without renting our all of their rooms.
I guess it's still proportional in the sense that eventually renters will literally just have no money left
It depends on the definition of "housing costs". Monthly payments determine whether something is possible on a given income. Total cost is more a question of whether it's a good deal or not.
Then why are there rich and poor sides of a town? In many cases, people earning high incomes spend extra time to drive past lower priced housing to get to their higher priced housing.
No one forced them to pay more than the minimum for housing.
No one forced them to pay more than the minimum for housing.
Not all land in a given area are equal in their attribute and there's fundamental scarcity in desirable lands. The richest presumably purchases houses in locations that has the most amenities, while everybody scrambles for the rest.
Hence it is not housing costs “forcing” people to compete, it is people’s desire to have more than others.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing, it is very well possible the lower priced housing has unacceptable attributes, but that leads to different causal factors.
Where you live also determine access to jobs, educations, and other opportunities.
Cities are more valuable for this reason.
It is also determined by housing supply in a given location and transportation policies, how we decided that homes are investments which increases exclusionary NIMBY behaviors.
It is not merely 'desire to have more' than the other that determine the cost of living.
Its because of the schools. Since we in the US tied school funding to property taxes, getting your kid a good education if you arent truly wealthy enough to pay for private schools (now 30kish per kid per year) means living near other better off people , or sacrificing your kids future and perhaps their safey.
Housing costs are a basket of the cost of the housing unit itself and land costs. Regulation limiting how densely housing may be built atop land, when this limit is lower than the number of housing units demanded, is what causes the Red Queen's race dynamic.
Housing can be very cheap if you're willing to live in a small town. It feels expensive only when people want to cluster around the same, limited number of areas.
If you're not tied by an employer, then you can be way more flexible about how you spend your housing budget
I work remote and chose to buy an apartment in a highrise. There is so much more to life than just working. Being close to everything improves so much.
It’s hard to explain how good life is when you live within walking distance of friends and can spontaneously decide to go to the cafe for breakfast rather than having to schedule an event days in advance so people can transport in.
I've been thinking about this recently. I have friends who happily move out to pretty remote places, like the Pocono mountains or remote parts of Koh Phangan, etc, none of which is walkable and typically requires a 1+hr trip on a car or a scooter. Yet, they seem to have no problem socializing and having over tons of friends and partners. I guess it depends on charisma or something? If your friends or tinder dates think it's totally worth heading out to boondocks every time. I'm more with you, really want to be in the middle of things and everything walkable, but I have seen very sociable people thrive without that.
I'm 24, in Australia, and none of my friends own cars. When I was in the suburbs, no one would ever visit me unless I wanted to pick them up. We would have to arrange some other meeting place in the city which was expensive and not as comfortable as a dinner party.
Moved to the city and some of my friends live here while the others have very easy public transport to the city from their houses so now I meet up with friends several times a week. Often they don't have to travel at all and just walk from the office to my place after work.
It also depends on the types of friends you want and seek.
Some of the types of people we desire to be around aren’t going to be in those areas. If you’re into tech but live around a bunch of troglodytes - you’re not likely to make many friends around tech subjects. If that’s your passion and you want friends who share that passion - gotta move.
Some people have incredibly low standards (anyone will do) for friends and lovers. Some have high standards (very few will fit). If you live in niche small towns/villages with little in common - it’s gonna be rough to be someone with high standards.
There are two big factors that make housing in a given area expensive.
Yes, one is that a lot of people want to live there. That one's inevitable though. Some places are more desirable to live than others. I don't want to live in a small town with nothing to do.
The other factor is when a city refuses to build sufficient housing. This one is not inevitable. It usually comes about due to entrenched interest in the value of existing housing. For instance, north San Jose has built no new housing in a decade, despite a well known housing crisis.
It's not housing costs for most societies in developed countries, it's keeping up with joneses, which constantly change the meaning of "standard way of living". 1000 years ago most people would kill to live in standard of currently developed countries poverty level.
The author left out the most probable hypothesis of why it didn't happen though: ownership kept all that extra productivity and kept working labor just as hard for no more money.
The author left out that same option in the concluding statement: Some of them might have just been saying that productivity could be much higher, regardless of whether that turned into shorter working hours, higher wages, or a combination of both
... or neither, all of the money can be diverted to "shareholder value".
This is fact the way it's almost always been. Only in situations where labor has been highly organized has the outcome be any different, i.e. workers benefiting from productivity increases.
In my country, not only 100%, but also 80% and 60% jobs are commonly available, and people do take them — often in order to spend more time with their kids.
> How many parents would rather have a 5-day daycare or schools, so that they won't be exhausted for staying with their kids for so many hours?
Wow. I (and many people I know) have switched to jobs with fewer hours but lower pay just to be able to spend more time with my kids. This mindset that ones' own kids are to be avoided as much as possible is mind boggling to me.
I mean its not too surprising that some people don't like spending time with their children, it would certainly be very depressing if this was the norm.
Yeah. I was not advocating that people would rather work than spending time with kids. I asked the question simply because people in the tech circle, or at least my circles, half jokingly complain how weekends are more exhausting than weekdays for taking care of kids or how they wish they would have more time reading and writing programs for fun without being interrupted
If parents didn't have to work so many hours, I am extremely confident that many of them would choose to spend many of those freed hours with their kids.
Of course different people are different.
Either way, it's a huge problem that currently most of the people paid to take care of kids (very especially but not only pre-public-school age) are underpaid and overworked -- this does not lead to the kind of care for our collective kids that we would want.
Those paid to do childcare especially should be able to work no more hours than they can do while still being attentive and caring and fully invested, and be able to access continuing education and mentorship in how to raise kids, and still live a comfortable life.
That is currently not at all how it works in the USA.
The prediction is $400k/yr income and 4 hours a day.
We made it approx 1/6th of the way to the income goal and maybe 1/6th of the way to the time goal, when you account for improved vacation time, sick leave, mat/pat leave, remote work time, etc. all of which consume some of the productivity gain.
The big gap is that productivity growth rates didn't really sustain after 1970s leading to slower income growth and slower free time growth (see flattening of curve https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours).
Everyone is quick to say something like, "You're not living by the same standards that were the norm 90 years ago." The response is wanting. Notably, it's not the same as saying, "You could work that much if you wanted--so long as you're willing to endure the same living standards as 90 years ago." That doesn't seem to be true; the choice to opt for those standards doesn't seem to be there.
I think you may be right, at least in the developed Western nations. However, there are plenty of countries someone could settle in that have less developed infrastructure, and economies. You would be able to live in the same standards as several decades ago if you worked remotely for a small number of hours a day.
I don't mean this to denigrate these countries, but the living standards in some countries are very different. These countries are often "cheap" by Western standards. You could settle in the Balkans, for example, and work a few hours each day, four days a week, and cover expenses very easily with a freelance salary.
I know several Americans who moved to Croatia on DN visas specifically because they could only afford to live there on their freelance salaries.
A good example with cars : GM has been selling a 5K USD EV in China[0] for 5 years, yet in North America the Bolt EV (which I believe is the cheapest EV) starts at 27.5k USD. Sure, the 5K car is a death trap on wheels, but I doubt it's more dangerous than the cars we had 90 years ago.
You set the price as high as you can. The production is highly automated. There is some price elasticity meaning if you lower the prise you would sell more, but you are limited by how many buyers there are on the market.
I live, in many ways, by the standards of 90 years ago— apartment in a 1907 tenement house (a new law tenement, much better than the old law kind!), no laundry machine, clothing often bought used & which I often repair myself, most transportation on foot or on train/bike for longer distances. I have nicer electronics, of course, but that doesn't consume a big percentage of my income.
But there's no easy way to opt for a four-hour workday, which I would prefer— instead, I save most of my income.
But you can't just pick out the bits from the 1900's that you liked, and then abandon the bits you think you dont like, independently of each other.
For example, your nice electronics requires huge, globalized workforce, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of specialties to manufacture. Each of those specialties need the volume and scale to be profitable - so much so that it seems to not consume much of your income (as a rich person in a rich country).
Ditto with healthcare - you will have to abandon the fact that you would have access to it, or in any modern quality.
> you can't just pick out the bits from the 1900's that you liked, and then abandon the bits you think you dont like, independently of each other
Wait a second, sure you can. Why can't you? Your example isn't as good of an example as you think. The rest of the people in the world can hum along on their current trajectory if they want; what do I have to do with the production of those electronics in the hypothetical world? I don't have anything to do with it in the world we're actually in.
The collapse of the Soviet union in the late 80s gave rise to a unipolar capitalist world. That reduced the propensity of governments and corporations to share with workers the big computer-tech fueled productivity gains realized from the 90s onwards. In the previous decades it was easier to workers to negotiate better conditions, as their employees feared they would become communist-friendly if too mistreated. With fear from communism gone, corporations and governments feel free to squeeze their employees, sabotage unions, etc cetera. So productivity gains now go straight to billionaires pockets, instead of reducing the working hours for the rest of us.
While I doubt the lack of any major competitor to the capitalist West is the only factor, it certainly get very little attention compared to how plausible it seems.
That really needs several citations. You really think because the “great” Soviet Union collapsed that businesses decided “wow, we were worried about communism so now that’s not a thing. Now, we can treat workers however we what.” So, you think during the Cold War, Ford was really minding their P’s and Q’s because the threat of Marxist revolution, overthrowing U.S. Constitution, etc was a thing?
The PATCO strike[1] was '81, and Reagan's admin was RIFE with greed. The trends we see today didn't just spring up with the fall of the Berlin wall in '89; it has deep roots as a reaction[2] to the 70's and 80's.
People hate being bored. This means if you make people have too much leisure time, they seek alternatives.
In the past, this was mainly family and community events.
As the strength of both the family and civic social institutions declined, we became dependent on businesses to provide us things our families used to (child care, elder care, parties, dinners, storytelling, entertainment, music, etc). These cause demand for more commercial businesses.
As the article states, all the commentators were envisioning a work week dominated only by making sure you had enough to survive. If people actually wanted this, they would be able to achieve it. However, people really want iphones, vacations, nice clothes, etc as well. So there is demand for labor, and where there's demand and a buyer with excess cash, we will step up.
> The technocrats promised every family on the continent of North America $20,000 a year [about $400,000 today], and a sixteen-hour work week. This is perhaps the peak of promises based on an abundance economy. Charles P. Steinmetz saw a two-hour working day on the horizon
These projections always read like something that would come from a person who doesn't understand where their food comes from, how much work goes into building and maintaining their housing, or that most people's preferred entertainment options require a lot of work to produce.
I could see us arriving at some of these extreme estimates if everyone universally agreed to eat the cheapest synthetic food we could produce with the most automation, live in the most bare-bones housing, and exclusively choose free or cheap entertainment and hobbies. But in the real world, it takes a lot of work to get food to people, build and maintain housing, and the things people like to do and own are also labor-intensive to produce at various stages.
There's definitely more room to squeeze labor out of the market through more automation, but that doesn't result in higher wages for people.
>There's definitely more room to squeeze labor out of the market through more automation, but that doesn't result in higher wages for people.
This statement is kinda in odds with what proceeded it. You are suggesting that "in the real world" this is impossible. But then also conclude with the line of reasoning that you seem to be arguing against.
> These projections always read like something that would come from a person who doesn't understand where their food comes from
From a smaller and smaller proportion of the population working in the agricultural field-- about 25-30% of the population in 1930 to about 10% now-- despite producing more calories per person and more meat, etc.
> From a smaller and smaller proportion of the population working in the agricultural field-- about 25-30% of the population in 1930 to about 10% now-- despite producing more calories per person and more meat, etc.
The graphs in the linked article show weekly working hours declining from 50H to 40H over that time frame.
Taking agricultural workplace participation from 10% to a hypothetical 1% isn't going to drop working hours from 40H to 10H.
> Taking agricultural workplace participation from 10% to a hypothetical 1% isn't going to drop working hours from 40H to 10H.
Yes-- the point is that your argument that it requires eating the cheapest synthetic food seems faulty; if 10% of our work hours are going to agriculture and related industries (including, as a sibling points out, restaurants and stores and manufacturing of junk food), then it's not a huge driver of our work week.
Similarly, it's not as huge a portion of our labor going to maintain and construct housing as you imply.
My understanding is that the 10% number included all food related jobs such as cook, waiter, food manufacturing etc. not just farming which is 1.3% of jobs.
If people today were satisfied with a 1930s level of luxury, we could absolutely get by on a 16 hour week. Probably a lot less, in fact. There would be no need for content marketing.
Most of the cost of living is fundamentally related to housing and transportation, which are determined by land use policies. In this respect, people of the 1930s may be better off than us depending on the metrics.
One thing that irks me is how keeping up with tech is almost mandatory. I see sms two factor being deprecated a lot now and am curious how people without smart phones work around that - just as one example of many
Switch to using TOTP based second factor and just use your computer to generate the TOTP secrets. Plenty of apps do it, no need for a phone of any sort.
I was perusing YouTube last night and found a video of city life in 1945. It looked basically like today, except the cars looked nicer, there were more public transportation vehicles milling about, and people had great hats.
I'm being a little tongue in cheek but my thought was that daily life isn't that different now vs 80 years ago. Having a good cup of coffee provides the same level of stimulation. You go to work, chat with people, make something, and go home. These days you have access to more reading material during your commute, and can die from less diseases, so I mean the present isn't bad or anything, but people were probably enjoying existence as far back as 1945 ;)
I think that was also a time when people only owned one outfit and pair of shoes for several years, and would make due by mending them and washing them in the sink, and umbrella repairman was a profession.
It may not be "that" different if you're comparing it to 500 years ago, but I'd be very surprised if the vast majority of people today and in 1945 wouldn't prefer the amenities we have now.
Eh, I think that a pretty huge portion of labor in the USA is spent on things that are not at all necessary for things people need or want for their quality of life. (Including the jobs of much of HN readership).
cf David Graeber Bullshit Jobs.
I don't think it's at all true that those people didn't understand the labor that is needed to create food (especialy this; they correctly predicted that agricultural labor has gone down drastically), housing, or even entertainment. I think they actually had it right, and that we don't work less is not about material necessity but just about the way our present economic structure works.
Graeber was no more careful or truth seeking with Bullshit Jobs than with the rest of his work. Other, better scientists have tested his bullshit and found b it lacking.
> Alienation is not ‘Bullshit’: An empirical critique of Graeber’s theory of BS jobs
> David Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs theory’ has generated a great deal of academic and public interest. This theory holds that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value. Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions. Marx’s concept of alienation and a ‘Work Relations’ approach provide inspiration for an alternative account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace environments in explaining why workers perceive paid work as useless.
that's all fair, but how do you account for the dramatic increase in individual productivity vs the steady level of hours?
>Productivity in the United States averaged 63.33 points from 1950 until 2022, reaching an all time high of 115.97 points in the fourth quarter of 2021 and a record low of 26.24 points in the first quarter of 1950.
it seems wrong to ignore this. productivity 5x'd since 1950, but hours roughly 1x'd. you're not speaking to why this doesn't result in higher wages for people or a shorter work day. which is implicit support of whatever the benefiting factor is.
Wages were $3300 -- or about $40.8k inflation adjusted-- in 1950.
It's about $54k now.
So, it's not 5x, but hours went about .8x and wages went about 1.32x, so we're about 1.65x better off per hour. The overwhelming quantity of the benefit from productivity went to capital, though... which perhaps in unsurprising because a lot of the benefit to productivity has come from capital expenditure.
> Here’s the arithmetic. According to our analysis of occupational data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 23.8 million managers, first-line supervisors, and administrators in the American workforce in 2014. (This figure includes both the public and private sectors but does not include individuals in IT-related functions.) That works out to one manager and administrator for every 4.7 employees. Overall, managers and administrators made up 17.6% of the U.S. workforce and received nearly 30% of total compensation.
We are always talking about 4-day work week or stuff like in this article. However, I am much more interested in the question how much hours one could chip off of the usual 8 hour (office) work day and still be basically 100% productive. My guess is that around 6-7 hours should probably be AS productive as 8 hour-days. But, of course, this is dependend on a lot of factors (e.g. do you still have enough opportunities to communicate with colleagues etc.) which is why I would really like to see more studies about it.
Personally, I have just reduced my hours from 40 to about 35 and I love it. It's not just the extra hour that I have in the evening but also that I am way less tired after work (thus can enjoy the rest of the day more). Also, this last hour (to me) always felt like "I have to do it although it ain't productive at all". But that's me. Just one anecdata. I would like more.
One thing not mentioned is that productivity increases in one area free up some of those people to do entirely new jobs that did not previously exist, just because society couldn't afford to allocate people to those jobs.
Not many doctors and dentists and so forth 1000 years ago, because the agricultural base couldn't support it. It took 95% of people being farmers to produce enough food for themselves and the remaining 5% of the others. Now 5% of people can produce enough food for the other 95%, which allows them to be doctors and programmers and whatnot.
It defines them this way: "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."
It goes further and defines various types of thse jobs, with examples for each. Those are included in the Wikipedia article.
I hadn't heard of this book before, but I appreciate this from the wiki article:
"As a potential solution, Graeber suggests universal basic income, a livable benefit paid to all, without qualification, which would let people work at their leisure."
I think the 'without qualification' part is really important, so that there is no incentive NOT to work, and no stigma attached to receiving the money. Just give it to everybody and otherwise leave them alone.
That's not really a thing, despite what David Graeber [1] would have you think.
The reality is that business owners always want to make as much profit as possible, so they're never going to intentionally or knowingly pay labor for something that is useless, money that would otherwise go straight into their pocket. Sure there are some inefficiencies in the chain and a subset of managers trying to expand headcount unnecessarily because of office politics, but owners and board members are incentivized to eliminate that as much as possible because, you know, profit.
The only plausible spots for "bullshit jobs" are in government and in endowment-funded academia, where for various political reasons, effective oversight of costs is missing in certain scenarios. Usually that's a temporary phenomenon, as eventually a "nosy" journalist (or whistleblower) reveals a bunch of money is being wasted, and political pressure builds to reform that and stop wasting taxpayers' or donors' money.
The larger a company is the more out of touch the owners are, so they are not knowingly leaving money on the table.
And larger headcount usually mean higher valuation, so they don't mind.
And it might only take a few hours to do the thing the boss hired you for, so the time need to be filled out somehow. Good luck asking your boss if you could go down 50% in time, and keep 100% of the salary.
> Good luck asking your boss if you could go down 50% in time, and keep 100% of the salary.
That’s just the lizard brain mode of thinking. The person you paid $5k to redo your roof isn’t more deserving of the money because they spent two weeks on it instead of one. You’re both better off if they get it done faster.
My company went down to 80% time for 100% salary and every metric we use for productivity didn’t change one bit. I have no doubt we could drop another day down to 60% and still have hit all our targets. And anyone who actually works knows why, because the time off isn’t cutting into working time, it’s cutting into bullshit time.
To the contrary, the larger a company is, the more professionalized management becomes, and the more inefficiencies can be eliminated. Lots of economies of scale to be found.
And valuation has nothing to do with headcount, that's not how stock market analysts work. They look at revenue and costs and growth. The higher salaries are because of increased headcount, the higher costs are and therefore a lower valuation.
If it only takes you a few hours to do the thing the boss hired you for, you can bet they're going to find some more productive work for you real quick. In any business, there's virtually always more profitable work to be done that there are employees to do it, so it's not difficult.
> The only plausible spots for "bullshit jobs" are in government and in endowment-funded academia
You should read Graeber’s book sometime.
There are jobs that are useless but still benefit business owners financially. Graeber gives the example of a receptionist at a small firm. The firm had so few callers and visitors that the receptionist was totally unnecessary and sat idle most of the time.
Why did they hire her? If the members of the firm answered the phone themselves, they would not be taken seriously. Every serious firm has a receptionist to answer the phone, so they felt they had to hire one. She was essentially there as decoration.
> Every serious firm has a receptionist to answer the phone, so they felt they had to hire one. She was essentially there as decoration.
looks are sometimes not unimportant nor useless. It's only the hacker mindset that thinks otherwise. "Normal" people do put some importance on appearances. Therefore, it's not useless.
I think “useless” is the wrong aspect to focus on. Having someone sit at a desk doing nothing except answer a couple of phone calls sounds terrible. It’s good from the firm’s perspective because they get their receptionist, but the person in that role likely doesn’t get anything more than a pay check out of it.
Because people spend a large portion of their lives at work. I think it’s sad that so many people have to work these kinds of jobs because their talents aren’t monetisable. A person shouldn’t have to justify their need for shelter or food.
> A person shouldn’t have to justify their need for shelter or food.
while a good moral argument, the world has not reached a point where such outcomes can be had. At some point in the future, when there's post-scarcity for all basic resources, then it would be possible that people shouldn't have to justify their own shelter or food.
I honestly believe this could have been achieved already, at least in my country. But opportunities to push us in that direction are avoided more often than not. Maybe the same characteristics that advanced developed nations will also be their downfall?
Business owners usually don’t run companies. They hire “professionals” to do that. And those “professionals” usually care more about their personal gains and personal grandiose feelings than maximising profits long term.
It's interesting to look at developing countries like India for that answer. In these countries there are so many people doing jobs that in Western countries simply don't exist, because labour costs are too high. I wouldn't really call them "bullshit" jobs as another comment did, it's just a different way of allocating resources.
For example in the construction industry barely any heavy machinery is used - it's cheaper to have labourers do the work than it is to rent machines. In road reconstruction you will see men digging the road by hand, then women carrying the rubble away somewhere with small buckets.
Bezos has an interview where he’s talking about the future of labor and mentions pet therapy is a career individuals can have. He was using it as a way to say we don’t really know what the future will hold.
> "Surely," a triceratops says, "there was some point between gunpowder and... something called Amazon Prime... that you folks had to think, 'Are we supposed to be running a planet? Wouldn't we rather make Marvel movies?'"
The table shows the Netherlands with an average 38 days off from work, this looks... wrong? The minimum is 20 days, and ~30 is on the high end for most companies. There is no way that 38 is the average unless the study counted something else.
It's the sum of vacation days and holidays. I don't know how it works in the Netherlands, but in many places the day off for a national holiday is not charged against the vacation days granted by an employer.
yeah but when doing this statistic they probably did not cut out the national holidays that fall on weekends (and thus aren't worth anything). I say this as someone who just had to go through December 2022.. ;)
Although I've heard that there are a few countries/holidays where the holiday will be put on a workday if it falls on the weekend. However, my home country (Germany) is not such a country.
Because 4 hour work days aren't tenable. Here's a novel concept
Why do we have 7 day weeks?
Why don't we have a 6 day week with a 2 day weekend? That way we get the benefit of 4 working days, we can standardized the calendar to not have this 31, 28 day nonsense (30 days only), and more importantly working day lengths stay the same. We just get to the weekend faster.
I propose the day to be deleted be Saturday because Saturn's mythology is a righteous c*nt.
>Here's a novel concept Why do we have 7 day weeks?
Same reason we have 6 based arithmetic for time and circles. Standardizing on something is more important than what you standardize on in many cases.
I'm sure someone will stop by shortly to try and score a few cheap virtue points by claiming the French Republican Calendar was thriving before municipalities killed it at the behest of lobbyists for Big Nobility.
Yes that's the origin of it but why stick with 7? 7 is a shitty prime number and makes slicing and dicing into fractions of weeks hard. It doesn't work perfectly with the lunar calendar either.
The point is that there is inherent value in having an adopted standard.
Because humans are in a constant sexual arm race. People (and mostly men) are judged by economical status which is competitive, some men will use every extra minute to gain any advantage possible. And even if you decide not to participate in this game, then you will be working under someone who does and this person will want to max the output from you.
When looking specifically at the tech and startup sector, there's a couple things worth pointing out:
* Though the 40 week is still standard, more and more tech people are making their living as independent consultants/contractors, working part-time, advising, retiring early, etc. When you look at the amount of wealth created by tech and software, but also the flexibility and ability to do things like remote work, we actually have made a ton of progress here
* In the US at least, as long as health care is tied to full-time employment which is quantified by some arbitrary # of hours, it will be the predominant way to work
* Working hours are ultimately set by founders/owners, not by the employees (unless you're in a union like situation). Many software businesses have enough leverage that they can be run fully on fewer than 40 hours/wk, but generally investor interests, greed, desire to grow quickly, wanting to optimize profits, etc etc. Ultimately, culture and precedent is a really strong thing.
I'll hypothesize though that after the grind that was COVID, a refocusing on profits vs growth, we're going to see many more balanced businesses taking a far more progressive approach to working hours and reduced time roles. The 4-day work week is just one movement in this direction, and we're going to see a lot more tech companies that offer 20/hr week positions and more.
> more tech people are making their living as independent consultants/contractors
For me it looks like the opposite: today companies want full time employees (with a good LinkedIn profile). Unlike the 90'ies they no longer want independent consultants solving individual projects.
And all companies absolutely wants full time no matter the efficiency. Partial time gray beards not wanted.
> the peak of promises based on an abundance economy
What an odd thing to write in 1934, at the very bottom of a terrible depression. Is it an equivalent of a starving person fantasizing of a huge dinner some day?
In some ways, we did. 0 hour contracts have been on the rise for a while [0] and these can result in drastically varied shifts. One day you could be working for seven hours, another for only four. You could be set to work from 9-5 and get sent home at 3 because you weren't needed. It probably happens more than most expect...
That's not a very good explanation because the billionaires have always wanted to make more money, but the working conditions have improved (or not) in a more complicated pattern.
If we take 40 hours (and that's less, according to the original article), then this factor alone would make it 31% less for an average man! So 8 hours a day just turned into 5.52 hours, for men at least.
It's just that the rest of the time is not spent puffing cigars at the gentlemen's club as Keynes might have imagined, but stuffing your face with hot pockets playing Call of Duty on your aging parent's couch.
However, from the original rootsofprogress.org article, i didn't quite get this part:
men aged 20
Work hours Other hours
70,612 (20%) 276,522 (80%)
Ok, so retirement, sure. They mentioned child labor, holidays and education, but for most men aged 20 in the US that doesn't even apply (20 is not a child, number of holidays barely went up on their graph, education is irrelevant for 70% of men aged 20). They don't seem to consider the 31% men checking out of workforce. So what is this huge number of non-work hours that makes up 80% of your life? Guess I have to go read the reference.
i have no idea since i'm just a rando googling things, but there seems to be a ton more data available for men, and it's probably because in the 30's and before that, women were stereotyped much more than today and it's hard to do apples-to-apples. But feel free to pull up more data and contribute to the conversation!
In the U.S., labor force participate rate for women[1] increased from ~33% to ~58% over the same period, peaking at 60.3% circa Apr 2000. In contrast, participation rate for men[2] bottomed at 66.1% circa Apr 2020...for the time being.
Here's some data on aggregate U.S. labor force[3], and breakdowns of men[4] and women[5] constituent components. I'll leave it to the passersby to contemplate.
Maybe I'm unusual but I'd rather see more time off than a shorter every-week workweek. Though the latter is probably easier to achieve to some degree informally.
Labour is cheep. There is high unemployment, yet companies are crying for talents. You do not get rich by working, you get rich by having others work for you.
Just like the old merchants bying from one market and selling for 5x in another market.
Many good and service are produced with the help of automation and sold with high margins. Demand is artificially high, or prices are fixed.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadI hope there are some among us who (cf Carnegie) might view building the equivalent of libraries as a positional good?
Personally I opted for no car even though I can easily afford it. It’s a huge amount saved and honestly the lifestyle of walking to places is nicer anyway.
Your increase in rent would have to be over $200AUD/week to be more expensive than owning a car. Not to mention the fact you benefit from living in a much more desirable area and everything else that comes with.
I live in an exurb of a major US metro on the East Coast. It's hard to compare costs directly as I own a house but anything remotely equivalent in the city on public transit lines would be much pricier. As for desirable? Well I have forest trails right out of my house. Don't care that much about walking to cafes and restaurants.
A 1 bdr condo in my city would cost an overall ~$4000 for a really old condo in a shitty building, and there's <9% of people on record in the country who'd be able to afford that without a ton of pressure, and the only people I know that own anything more than that absolutely couldn't pay for it without renting our all of their rooms.
I guess it's still proportional in the sense that eventually renters will literally just have no money left
You are right that prices are raised by what people can afford but we need to be specific and say, which people?
No one forced them to pay more than the minimum for housing.
Not all land in a given area are equal in their attribute and there's fundamental scarcity in desirable lands. The richest presumably purchases houses in locations that has the most amenities, while everybody scrambles for the rest.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing, it is very well possible the lower priced housing has unacceptable attributes, but that leads to different causal factors.
It is also determined by housing supply in a given location and transportation policies, how we decided that homes are investments which increases exclusionary NIMBY behaviors.
It is not merely 'desire to have more' than the other that determine the cost of living.
If you're not tied by an employer, then you can be way more flexible about how you spend your housing budget
Yes, it is cheaper to live where fewer people want to live.
But, usually, there are reasons fewer people want to live there.
It’s hard to explain how good life is when you live within walking distance of friends and can spontaneously decide to go to the cafe for breakfast rather than having to schedule an event days in advance so people can transport in.
Moved to the city and some of my friends live here while the others have very easy public transport to the city from their houses so now I meet up with friends several times a week. Often they don't have to travel at all and just walk from the office to my place after work.
For me it's been life changing.
Some of the types of people we desire to be around aren’t going to be in those areas. If you’re into tech but live around a bunch of troglodytes - you’re not likely to make many friends around tech subjects. If that’s your passion and you want friends who share that passion - gotta move.
Some people have incredibly low standards (anyone will do) for friends and lovers. Some have high standards (very few will fit). If you live in niche small towns/villages with little in common - it’s gonna be rough to be someone with high standards.
Yes, one is that a lot of people want to live there. That one's inevitable though. Some places are more desirable to live than others. I don't want to live in a small town with nothing to do.
The other factor is when a city refuses to build sufficient housing. This one is not inevitable. It usually comes about due to entrenched interest in the value of existing housing. For instance, north San Jose has built no new housing in a decade, despite a well known housing crisis.
The author left out the most probable hypothesis of why it didn't happen though: ownership kept all that extra productivity and kept working labor just as hard for no more money.
The author left out that same option in the concluding statement: Some of them might have just been saying that productivity could be much higher, regardless of whether that turned into shorter working hours, higher wages, or a combination of both
... or neither, all of the money can be diverted to "shareholder value".
This is fact the way it's almost always been. Only in situations where labor has been highly organized has the outcome be any different, i.e. workers benefiting from productivity increases.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG
Wow. I (and many people I know) have switched to jobs with fewer hours but lower pay just to be able to spend more time with my kids. This mindset that ones' own kids are to be avoided as much as possible is mind boggling to me.
Of course different people are different.
Either way, it's a huge problem that currently most of the people paid to take care of kids (very especially but not only pre-public-school age) are underpaid and overworked -- this does not lead to the kind of care for our collective kids that we would want.
Those paid to do childcare especially should be able to work no more hours than they can do while still being attentive and caring and fully invested, and be able to access continuing education and mentorship in how to raise kids, and still live a comfortable life.
That is currently not at all how it works in the USA.
I kinda think TikTok, wow, candy crush, etc are are secretly funded by communists to bring down the capitalist west from within
We made it approx 1/6th of the way to the income goal and maybe 1/6th of the way to the time goal, when you account for improved vacation time, sick leave, mat/pat leave, remote work time, etc. all of which consume some of the productivity gain.
The big gap is that productivity growth rates didn't really sustain after 1970s leading to slower income growth and slower free time growth (see flattening of curve https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours).
I don't mean this to denigrate these countries, but the living standards in some countries are very different. These countries are often "cheap" by Western standards. You could settle in the Balkans, for example, and work a few hours each day, four days a week, and cover expenses very easily with a freelance salary.
I know several Americans who moved to Croatia on DN visas specifically because they could only afford to live there on their freelance salaries.
[0]:https://money.cnn.com/2017/08/07/autos/gm-china-electric-car...
But there's no easy way to opt for a four-hour workday, which I would prefer— instead, I save most of my income.
For example, your nice electronics requires huge, globalized workforce, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of specialties to manufacture. Each of those specialties need the volume and scale to be profitable - so much so that it seems to not consume much of your income (as a rich person in a rich country).
Ditto with healthcare - you will have to abandon the fact that you would have access to it, or in any modern quality.
Wait a second, sure you can. Why can't you? Your example isn't as good of an example as you think. The rest of the people in the world can hum along on their current trajectory if they want; what do I have to do with the production of those electronics in the hypothetical world? I don't have anything to do with it in the world we're actually in.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tppeGYoWDxg
In the past, this was mainly family and community events.
As the strength of both the family and civic social institutions declined, we became dependent on businesses to provide us things our families used to (child care, elder care, parties, dinners, storytelling, entertainment, music, etc). These cause demand for more commercial businesses.
As the article states, all the commentators were envisioning a work week dominated only by making sure you had enough to survive. If people actually wanted this, they would be able to achieve it. However, people really want iphones, vacations, nice clothes, etc as well. So there is demand for labor, and where there's demand and a buyer with excess cash, we will step up.
These projections always read like something that would come from a person who doesn't understand where their food comes from, how much work goes into building and maintaining their housing, or that most people's preferred entertainment options require a lot of work to produce.
I could see us arriving at some of these extreme estimates if everyone universally agreed to eat the cheapest synthetic food we could produce with the most automation, live in the most bare-bones housing, and exclusively choose free or cheap entertainment and hobbies. But in the real world, it takes a lot of work to get food to people, build and maintain housing, and the things people like to do and own are also labor-intensive to produce at various stages.
There's definitely more room to squeeze labor out of the market through more automation, but that doesn't result in higher wages for people.
This statement is kinda in odds with what proceeded it. You are suggesting that "in the real world" this is impossible. But then also conclude with the line of reasoning that you seem to be arguing against.
From a smaller and smaller proportion of the population working in the agricultural field-- about 25-30% of the population in 1930 to about 10% now-- despite producing more calories per person and more meat, etc.
The graphs in the linked article show weekly working hours declining from 50H to 40H over that time frame.
Taking agricultural workplace participation from 10% to a hypothetical 1% isn't going to drop working hours from 40H to 10H.
Yes-- the point is that your argument that it requires eating the cheapest synthetic food seems faulty; if 10% of our work hours are going to agriculture and related industries (including, as a sibling points out, restaurants and stores and manufacturing of junk food), then it's not a huge driver of our work week.
Similarly, it's not as huge a portion of our labor going to maintain and construct housing as you imply.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
The only problem is healthcare.
No one _has_ to have the latest iPhone pro.
Edit: was meaning to speak broadly about “keeping up” m
I'm being a little tongue in cheek but my thought was that daily life isn't that different now vs 80 years ago. Having a good cup of coffee provides the same level of stimulation. You go to work, chat with people, make something, and go home. These days you have access to more reading material during your commute, and can die from less diseases, so I mean the present isn't bad or anything, but people were probably enjoying existence as far back as 1945 ;)
I can't help but s/1930s/Great Depression/ and wonder what this even means.
cf David Graeber Bullshit Jobs.
I don't think it's at all true that those people didn't understand the labor that is needed to create food (especialy this; they correctly predicted that agricultural labor has gone down drastically), housing, or even entertainment. I think they actually had it right, and that we don't work less is not about material necessity but just about the way our present economic structure works.
> Alienation is not ‘Bullshit’: An empirical critique of Graeber’s theory of BS jobs
> David Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs theory’ has generated a great deal of academic and public interest. This theory holds that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value. Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions. Marx’s concept of alienation and a ‘Work Relations’ approach provide inspiration for an alternative account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace environments in explaining why workers perceive paid work as useless.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/095001702110150...
>Productivity in the United States averaged 63.33 points from 1950 until 2022, reaching an all time high of 115.97 points in the fourth quarter of 2021 and a record low of 26.24 points in the first quarter of 1950.
it seems wrong to ignore this. productivity 5x'd since 1950, but hours roughly 1x'd. you're not speaking to why this doesn't result in higher wages for people or a shorter work day. which is implicit support of whatever the benefiting factor is.
It's about $54k now.
So, it's not 5x, but hours went about .8x and wages went about 1.32x, so we're about 1.65x better off per hour. The overwhelming quantity of the benefit from productivity went to capital, though... which perhaps in unsurprising because a lot of the benefit to productivity has come from capital expenditure.
"Excess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year"
https://hbr.org/2016/09/excess-management-is-costing-the-us-...
> Here’s the arithmetic. According to our analysis of occupational data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 23.8 million managers, first-line supervisors, and administrators in the American workforce in 2014. (This figure includes both the public and private sectors but does not include individuals in IT-related functions.) That works out to one manager and administrator for every 4.7 employees. Overall, managers and administrators made up 17.6% of the U.S. workforce and received nearly 30% of total compensation.
Personally, I have just reduced my hours from 40 to about 35 and I love it. It's not just the extra hour that I have in the evening but also that I am way less tired after work (thus can enjoy the rest of the day more). Also, this last hour (to me) always felt like "I have to do it although it ain't productive at all". But that's me. Just one anecdata. I would like more.
Not many doctors and dentists and so forth 1000 years ago, because the agricultural base couldn't support it. It took 95% of people being farmers to produce enough food for themselves and the remaining 5% of the others. Now 5% of people can produce enough food for the other 95%, which allows them to be doctors and programmers and whatnot.
It defines them this way: "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."
It goes further and defines various types of thse jobs, with examples for each. Those are included in the Wikipedia article.
"As a potential solution, Graeber suggests universal basic income, a livable benefit paid to all, without qualification, which would let people work at their leisure."
I think the 'without qualification' part is really important, so that there is no incentive NOT to work, and no stigma attached to receiving the money. Just give it to everybody and otherwise leave them alone.
The reality is that business owners always want to make as much profit as possible, so they're never going to intentionally or knowingly pay labor for something that is useless, money that would otherwise go straight into their pocket. Sure there are some inefficiencies in the chain and a subset of managers trying to expand headcount unnecessarily because of office politics, but owners and board members are incentivized to eliminate that as much as possible because, you know, profit.
The only plausible spots for "bullshit jobs" are in government and in endowment-funded academia, where for various political reasons, effective oversight of costs is missing in certain scenarios. Usually that's a temporary phenomenon, as eventually a "nosy" journalist (or whistleblower) reveals a bunch of money is being wasted, and political pressure builds to reform that and stop wasting taxpayers' or donors' money.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_job
That’s just the lizard brain mode of thinking. The person you paid $5k to redo your roof isn’t more deserving of the money because they spent two weeks on it instead of one. You’re both better off if they get it done faster.
My company went down to 80% time for 100% salary and every metric we use for productivity didn’t change one bit. I have no doubt we could drop another day down to 60% and still have hit all our targets. And anyone who actually works knows why, because the time off isn’t cutting into working time, it’s cutting into bullshit time.
And valuation has nothing to do with headcount, that's not how stock market analysts work. They look at revenue and costs and growth. The higher salaries are because of increased headcount, the higher costs are and therefore a lower valuation.
If it only takes you a few hours to do the thing the boss hired you for, you can bet they're going to find some more productive work for you real quick. In any business, there's virtually always more profitable work to be done that there are employees to do it, so it's not difficult.
You should read Graeber’s book sometime.
There are jobs that are useless but still benefit business owners financially. Graeber gives the example of a receptionist at a small firm. The firm had so few callers and visitors that the receptionist was totally unnecessary and sat idle most of the time.
Why did they hire her? If the members of the firm answered the phone themselves, they would not be taken seriously. Every serious firm has a receptionist to answer the phone, so they felt they had to hire one. She was essentially there as decoration.
looks are sometimes not unimportant nor useless. It's only the hacker mindset that thinks otherwise. "Normal" people do put some importance on appearances. Therefore, it's not useless.
but why is there an expectation that they get anything more than a paycheque out of it? It's called a job for a reason.
while a good moral argument, the world has not reached a point where such outcomes can be had. At some point in the future, when there's post-scarcity for all basic resources, then it would be possible that people shouldn't have to justify their own shelter or food.
For example in the construction industry barely any heavy machinery is used - it's cheaper to have labourers do the work than it is to rent machines. In road reconstruction you will see men digging the road by hand, then women carrying the rubble away somewhere with small buckets.
https://www.looper.com/1047273/rick-and-morty-season-6-episo...
Although I've heard that there are a few countries/holidays where the holiday will be put on a workday if it falls on the weekend. However, my home country (Germany) is not such a country.
https://www.government.nl/topics/working-hours/question-and-... shows 11 holidays in NL if I'm counting right
Why don't we have a 6 day week with a 2 day weekend? That way we get the benefit of 4 working days, we can standardized the calendar to not have this 31, 28 day nonsense (30 days only), and more importantly working day lengths stay the same. We just get to the weekend faster.
I propose the day to be deleted be Saturday because Saturn's mythology is a righteous c*nt.
Here's a calendar of what a 6 day week would look like https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/calendars/images/9/93/Cale...
Same reason we have 6 based arithmetic for time and circles. Standardizing on something is more important than what you standardize on in many cases.
I'm sure someone will stop by shortly to try and score a few cheap virtue points by claiming the French Republican Calendar was thriving before municipalities killed it at the behest of lobbyists for Big Nobility.
The point is that there is inherent value in having an adopted standard.
Because humans are in a constant sexual arm race. People (and mostly men) are judged by economical status which is competitive, some men will use every extra minute to gain any advantage possible. And even if you decide not to participate in this game, then you will be working under someone who does and this person will want to max the output from you.
* Though the 40 week is still standard, more and more tech people are making their living as independent consultants/contractors, working part-time, advising, retiring early, etc. When you look at the amount of wealth created by tech and software, but also the flexibility and ability to do things like remote work, we actually have made a ton of progress here
* In the US at least, as long as health care is tied to full-time employment which is quantified by some arbitrary # of hours, it will be the predominant way to work
* Working hours are ultimately set by founders/owners, not by the employees (unless you're in a union like situation). Many software businesses have enough leverage that they can be run fully on fewer than 40 hours/wk, but generally investor interests, greed, desire to grow quickly, wanting to optimize profits, etc etc. Ultimately, culture and precedent is a really strong thing.
I'll hypothesize though that after the grind that was COVID, a refocusing on profits vs growth, we're going to see many more balanced businesses taking a far more progressive approach to working hours and reduced time roles. The 4-day work week is just one movement in this direction, and we're going to see a lot more tech companies that offer 20/hr week positions and more.
For me it looks like the opposite: today companies want full time employees (with a good LinkedIn profile). Unlike the 90'ies they no longer want independent consultants solving individual projects.
And all companies absolutely wants full time no matter the efficiency. Partial time gray beards not wanted.
What an odd thing to write in 1934, at the very bottom of a terrible depression. Is it an equivalent of a starving person fantasizing of a huge dinner some day?
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/414896/employees-with-ze...
"In 1950, 14 percent of men were out of the labor force. Today, that figure stands at 31 percent."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/business/men-unemployment...
If we take 40 hours (and that's less, according to the original article), then this factor alone would make it 31% less for an average man! So 8 hours a day just turned into 5.52 hours, for men at least. It's just that the rest of the time is not spent puffing cigars at the gentlemen's club as Keynes might have imagined, but stuffing your face with hot pockets playing Call of Duty on your aging parent's couch.
However, from the original rootsofprogress.org article, i didn't quite get this part: men aged 20 Work hours Other hours 70,612 (20%) 276,522 (80%)
Ok, so retirement, sure. They mentioned child labor, holidays and education, but for most men aged 20 in the US that doesn't even apply (20 is not a child, number of holidays barely went up on their graph, education is irrelevant for 70% of men aged 20). They don't seem to consider the 31% men checking out of workforce. So what is this huge number of non-work hours that makes up 80% of your life? Guess I have to go read the reference.
Here's some data on aggregate U.S. labor force[3], and breakdowns of men[4] and women[5] constituent components. I'll leave it to the passersby to contemplate.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV
[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11000001
[5] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11000002
At least in North America unemployment is very low right now.