Reductio ad absurdum would be more like "Assume X. [...]. Then false. Therefore, X can't be true."
It looks like an instance of the slippery slope fallacy - kind of. ("4 days? What next? 0?" - more like "of course people are happier working less, so what?" though)
The root comment never implied that a zero or one day work-week was the inevitable consequence of the four-day work-week, so I don't think it was a slippery slope argument. Their argument seemed more like a reductio ad absurdum, because they took the basic subject of the article to an extreme, and asked why not.
Yes? Would you not want this for you? I would, this would allow me to work on whatever is meaningful for me, what I believe is worth doing, and engage in other enjoying activity. I'm working towards having the most meaningful "paid" work possible, but as long as I have to cater to customer or company needs, it has small chances to be fully aligned with what I want to do. I also believe a lot of useless crap gets produced, we don't need to work as much as we are doing and we would be better off on many aspects reducing this amount of useless work we impose ourselves as a species. So of course 0 days of work per week for everyone is not conceivable, but reducing the hours is largely imaginable.
We are not talking about a 1 or 0 day work week here though. Various studies and experiments show that productivity is not quite reduced from 5 to 4 day week workdays, while making people happier. Assuming it's true, it's worth it and we have little reason not to do it.
This is such a weird disconnect between middle class white collar workers and the rest of the country. I know a bunch of people working 60-80 hours a week, usually doing multiple jobs, just to make ends meet. It feels strange to be offered the chance to work less than half as much as another human and receive substantially greater rewards for my efforts. It would be interesting to see what this does to social cohesion.
Are rents too high? I mean unless living in rent controlled apartments I don't understand how people can afford working at normal jobs in most metropolitan areas.
If we adopt a 4 day / 36 hour workweek as normal, we can expect substantial social benefits:
- Reduced commuting, etc.
- Improved health / quality of life.
- Reduced supply of labor (due to overtime kicking in) should push up equilibrium price.
> It feels strange to be offered the chance to work less than half as much as another human and receive substantially greater rewards for my efforts
This is the nature of any job where there's substantial leverage effects: if your work can make a hundred people fractionally more productive, you're going to reap outsized rewards.
LLMs are just going to amplify this, by devaluing a lot of work but allowing other people to be fantastically more productive thanks to their leverage.
Alternatively, let's go back to sweatshop, all-day-long backbreaking labor. (It turns out this style of argument is not very useful).
We have a high enough standard of living to shoulder the downsides of 10% fewer working hours (which should lower productivity by less than 10%; perhaps much less) in exchange for the upsides.
Automation poses substantial risk of high unemployment; shortening the work week a little is a good hedge (and offers other benefits).
No need to make any policy changes; existing policy appears enough to make people work less. The labor force participation rate has been steadily decreasing from the 1990-2000 peak[0].
As long as the ones who are working 10% fewer hours are also taking home 10% less, I don't see the problem with it. But the current system of the welfare state that depends on redistributive taxation has a strong incentive against that change; if everyone working works 10% less, that's 10% less available to be transferred to those who aren't.
> No need to make any policy changes; existing policy appears enough to make people work less
I interpret this in the opposite way you do. Labor force participation includes effects where people think it's not economically worth their time to work. Reducing supply of labor could be expected to increase labor force participation.
Not to mention this version of the statistic is a completely worthless one: it's not corrected for demographic (aging) effects.
> As long as the ones who are working 10% fewer hours are also taking home 10% less
This is unlikely: when you reduce the supply of something, the price tends to go up.
> if everyone working works 10% less, that's 10% less available
The marginal benefit of the factor (e.g. per-hour productivity) tends to go up, too. (Declining marginal factor product, blah blah blah). Indeed, this is why the price of the factor increases.
> effects where people think it's not economically worth their time to work
This is only possible with generous social benefits given to those who aren't working. In the top 8 most generous states, transfer payments given to those not working exceed the median income[0].
> it's not corrected for demographic (aging) effects
You're right. The prime working-age group (25-54) reversed the same downward trend after the 90-00 peak sometime in 2015, and recovered relatively quickly post-Covid[1]. But the picture isn't as rosy for young (20-24) entrants to the employment marketplace[2], which is worrisome.
> The marginal benefit of the factor (e.g. per-hour productivity) tends to go up, too
I understand, but aggregate production will go down, would it not?
> This is only possible with generous social benefits given to those who aren't working.
No; for example, as discussed, retirees are in the set. If supply of labor falls, a greater proportion of people able to be retired will work due to economic incentives.
> I understand, but aggregate production will go down, would it not?
Yes, but it contradicts your "10% less".
Fighting the 10% less is:
- For each worker, their least productive hours will be cut rather than their most productive
- For some of hours lost, additional workers will be employed in higher value jobs.
- Some types of output will not be affected at all; others it will be worth paying overtime.
- For some of hours lost, automation will be employed.
- Lowering commute use of roads and transport will increase productivity.
All in all, I'd guess lowering the work week by 10%, and the nominal days-per-week to 4, might lower aggregate output by a couple percent. I would also expect wages to increase, arresting trends where wages have stagnated as productivity has increased.
> The labor force participation rate has been steadily decreasing from the 1990-2000 peak
Yes, its called age demographics. As a demographic bulge moves into retirement age, the LFPP (which is the labor force engaged share of the population above a lower age limit, but not restricted by an upper age limit) naturally goes down, ceteris paribus.
The good news is that if this law passes, those people will all make a lot more money. OT would kick in at 32 hours instead of 40 and double-time would apply on Fri/Sat/Sun instead of just Sat/Sun (assuming you have a union that has negotiated a weekend double-time).
> This is such a weird disconnect between middle class white collar workers and the rest of the country.
Want to hear a bigger disconnect? Most jobs we need to maintain our standard of living are blue collar jobs. Think waste disposal, plumbing, carpentry, textile, farming, transportation, etc... By contrast most white collar jobs are unnecessary fluff mostly dedicated to producing luxury goods, bean counting, or high-tech entertainment. About the only white collar jobs we need to live well are medical personnel.
> It feels strange to be offered the chance to work less than half as much as another human and receive substantially greater rewards for my efforts.
You are paid based on how difficult it is to hire your replacement. Blue collar workers are paid less because the availability of able-bodied people is high. It's supply and demand.
> By contrast most white collar jobs are unnecessary fluff mostly dedicated to producing luxury goods, bean counting, or entertainment. About the only white collar jobs we need to live well are medical personnel.
“Bean counting” (which I take as not just accounting, but management, analytics, auditing, investigation, and legal and dispute resolution) is what makes sure the combination of resources are where they need to be for other (including blue collar and medical, and everything in the supply chain of either) jobs to be able to happen at all, and which deals with the fact that the humans doing them aren’t robots and have coordination needs. If you want an economy much beyond individual subsistence farming, you need “bean counting”, and you need more of it the farther from that you want to be.
> and you need more of it the farther from that you want to be.
Obviously there's some optimum amount of coordination and allocation of resources. There's an upper bound on how much is useful, though.
I worry that we're creating more and more empty administrative and make-work middle management work, especially in many sectors.
Look at higher education, and what it costs these days (as a society and individually). But there's fewer senior actual "production" faculty and researcher jobs around per capita, and the compensation for them has significantly fallen in real value. An administrative and management class has captured a huge portion of the value to questionable benefit.
It's most clear there, but I worry that we're dedicating too many resources to middle management and excessively clever intermediaries.
> Want to hear a bigger disconnect? Most jobs we need to maintain our standard of living are blue collar jobs. Think waste disposal, plumbing, carpentry, textile, farming, transportation, etc... By contrast most white collar jobs are unnecessary fluff mostly dedicated to producing luxury goods, bean counting, or high-tech entertainment. About the only white collar jobs we need to live well are medical personnel.
You don't even need to think that hard. Remember 3 years ago, when only "essential workers" had to physically go in to work anymore? That's pretty much why.
Sweden pays (salary and benefits) blue collar workers relatively well, an average white collar worker very rarely makes more than double what a blue collar does (especially after taxes). On top of the social security net and taxes it creates a very egalitarian society.
It DOES cause another problem though: unemployment. Since blue collar workers are so expensive there is a lot of incentive to reduce it as much as possible in all areas of society. A few examples:
It is almost comical how many swedes do manual labor themselves instead of hiring help (especially home renovations). A software engineer coworker renovated all of his apartment (except bathrooms) himself, including changing floors. Construction materials and housing styles are optimised to reduce manual labor.
Almost all public parks have grass-cutting roombas, street cleaning is mostly done with machines, etc
IKEA is so popular because furniture is almost disposable, it is never worth repairing it (unless you do it yourself).
So this still creates another underclass of unemployed people which is also pretty bad for society and individuals. A lot of the gang violence you see about Sweden is a direct result of this. The social safety net helps (especially in ensuring that the children from this class has a chance to excel) but it is not enough and there are no clear answers.
> A software engineer coworker renovated all of his apartment (except bathrooms) himself, including changing floors.
I mean that’s trivial. Get a decent paint gun, laminate or vinyl flooring and just install them? It’s neither hard nor time consuming and it helps clear them mind.
Well i converted my garage into an office, sound and thermal proofed it, layed out drywood walls and the structure needed, painted, did the flooring and underlaying too. Took me a week and a half. A fun project. But i do admit i forced my self to step out of the tech bubble and learn other skills a few years ago, just for myself. It was a really cool project. It can take longer when you have zero experience but once you build it up just a little bit it can go fast.
As an added bonus, i made sure my network cables running through the walls are 10 Gbe. Just in case :-)
I absolutely recommend to anyone working in tech that they try it.
And making them work more than 40h a week would be illegal. And if you work that much because you have two jobs, you're going to make as much as engineers, even as a cleaner.
The marginal tax rate is going to be quite a deterrent when you're working two jobs. 55%, and then an additional 25% VAT, and you're at about 67% tax.
In Sweden, it's difficult to get rich through salaried work. Startups, inheritance, and housing are the only avenues. As an example, during the 'housing bubble' years, there were some buzz around people earning more from the appreciation on their house than they did from work.
With that said, Sweden has a high dollar-millionaires-per-capita. When you already have money, Sweden is almost a tax haven. But they pulled up the ladder behind them for most of the population.
yeah, to the point it feels like it is by design. From the gov point of view more companies == more growth for the economy as a whole. They don't want a high income working class, that is bad for business
That's extremely misleading. The tax in practice for the average person is 20-30%. The employer pays some more, but they do that in the US too for eg. health insurance.
The surge in gang violence is not because people are using Roombas.
You don’t think importing more than a million people from countries with vastly different cultures and placing them in segregated neighborhoods has more to do with it?
Native Swedes(and well integrated foreigners) have very little unemployment.
This.
I am in India and my cousins already make so much lesser than I do it's not even fair. They work harder physically, and their work life balance is shit. At some point they realized software pays a lot more and some of them tried to switch, but they didn't get the time in their jobs to study, and while I switched from a blue collar factory worker role to a content writer role and to a software developer, the times (2014) were largely different. Nowadays it's like the gate into this field is shut in everybody's face and it's sad seeing them regret not switch sooner. Not everyone enjoys the same advantages we get, and sometimes it's as simple as a reduced work week that let's you study, improve, or just pick up a new hobby to make life fulfilling.
Interesting. So instead we should make things worse for everyone else? Just like rto advocates want to make it worse just so a minority of folks can fill in voids in their private lives with coworkers. I think we should strive and improve things for those who works 60-80 hours instead if “feeling strange” when some get a good deal.
Let people work whatever schedule they want, as long as the work is getting done.
Obviously certain jobs like retail can’t just have people “not working”, but you can coordinate shifts. Or if there’s a scheduled period of time like with construction that’s different (though the construction guys and gals can help decide the schedule). And obviously even in tech jobs people need to communicate, present, have meetings, etc.
But other than that, actually talk to people to see what schedule, within the necessary constraints, works best for them. It’s their productivity which helps your company (of course if their schedule is 1 day a week then they’re not being productive; but if an employee does the same amount of work in <36 hours and is ok getting paid for only <36 hours, it’s a win-win).
First you'd have to define that. The "work to be done" increased with our productivity. We started with machines doing the work of 50 people, thread weaving for example, but it didn't mean thread weavers worked 50 times less, it just meant we produced 50 times more. You can apply that to pretty much every fields. When the end goal is "produce as much as you can" there is no "getting the job done", the only limits are set by laws regulating salaries and working hours.
The best thing that we could do to bring about more flexible work schedules is to decouple medical and retirement benefits from employment.
It's harder to do for a low wage workers who are paid more than they would otherwise be able to negotiate for, but High demand low Supply jobs would adjust pretty quickly
52 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadWhere did you get the impression that they were creating a strawman, or engaging in whataboutism?
Reductio ad absurdum would be more like "Assume X. [...]. Then false. Therefore, X can't be true."
It looks like an instance of the slippery slope fallacy - kind of. ("4 days? What next? 0?" - more like "of course people are happier working less, so what?" though)
We are not talking about a 1 or 0 day work week here though. Various studies and experiments show that productivity is not quite reduced from 5 to 4 day week workdays, while making people happier. Assuming it's true, it's worth it and we have little reason not to do it.
Is their hourly rate anywhere close to 15$/hour ?
- Reduced commuting, etc.
- Improved health / quality of life.
- Reduced supply of labor (due to overtime kicking in) should push up equilibrium price.
> It feels strange to be offered the chance to work less than half as much as another human and receive substantially greater rewards for my efforts
This is the nature of any job where there's substantial leverage effects: if your work can make a hundred people fractionally more productive, you're going to reap outsized rewards.
LLMs are just going to amplify this, by devaluing a lot of work but allowing other people to be fantastically more productive thanks to their leverage.
We have a high enough standard of living to shoulder the downsides of 10% fewer working hours (which should lower productivity by less than 10%; perhaps much less) in exchange for the upsides.
Automation poses substantial risk of high unemployment; shortening the work week a little is a good hedge (and offers other benefits).
As long as the ones who are working 10% fewer hours are also taking home 10% less, I don't see the problem with it. But the current system of the welfare state that depends on redistributive taxation has a strong incentive against that change; if everyone working works 10% less, that's 10% less available to be transferred to those who aren't.
[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
I interpret this in the opposite way you do. Labor force participation includes effects where people think it's not economically worth their time to work. Reducing supply of labor could be expected to increase labor force participation.
Not to mention this version of the statistic is a completely worthless one: it's not corrected for demographic (aging) effects.
> As long as the ones who are working 10% fewer hours are also taking home 10% less
This is unlikely: when you reduce the supply of something, the price tends to go up.
> if everyone working works 10% less, that's 10% less available
The marginal benefit of the factor (e.g. per-hour productivity) tends to go up, too. (Declining marginal factor product, blah blah blah). Indeed, this is why the price of the factor increases.
This is only possible with generous social benefits given to those who aren't working. In the top 8 most generous states, transfer payments given to those not working exceed the median income[0].
> it's not corrected for demographic (aging) effects
You're right. The prime working-age group (25-54) reversed the same downward trend after the 90-00 peak sometime in 2015, and recovered relatively quickly post-Covid[1]. But the picture isn't as rosy for young (20-24) entrants to the employment marketplace[2], which is worrisome.
> The marginal benefit of the factor (e.g. per-hour productivity) tends to go up, too
I understand, but aggregate production will go down, would it not?
[0]: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/the_work_...
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300036
No; for example, as discussed, retirees are in the set. If supply of labor falls, a greater proportion of people able to be retired will work due to economic incentives.
> I understand, but aggregate production will go down, would it not?
Yes, but it contradicts your "10% less".
Fighting the 10% less is:
- For each worker, their least productive hours will be cut rather than their most productive
- For some of hours lost, additional workers will be employed in higher value jobs.
- Some types of output will not be affected at all; others it will be worth paying overtime.
- For some of hours lost, automation will be employed.
- Lowering commute use of roads and transport will increase productivity.
All in all, I'd guess lowering the work week by 10%, and the nominal days-per-week to 4, might lower aggregate output by a couple percent. I would also expect wages to increase, arresting trends where wages have stagnated as productivity has increased.
Yes, its called age demographics. As a demographic bulge moves into retirement age, the LFPP (which is the labor force engaged share of the population above a lower age limit, but not restricted by an upper age limit) naturally goes down, ceteris paribus.
Want to hear a bigger disconnect? Most jobs we need to maintain our standard of living are blue collar jobs. Think waste disposal, plumbing, carpentry, textile, farming, transportation, etc... By contrast most white collar jobs are unnecessary fluff mostly dedicated to producing luxury goods, bean counting, or high-tech entertainment. About the only white collar jobs we need to live well are medical personnel.
> It feels strange to be offered the chance to work less than half as much as another human and receive substantially greater rewards for my efforts.
You are paid based on how difficult it is to hire your replacement. Blue collar workers are paid less because the availability of able-bodied people is high. It's supply and demand.
“Bean counting” (which I take as not just accounting, but management, analytics, auditing, investigation, and legal and dispute resolution) is what makes sure the combination of resources are where they need to be for other (including blue collar and medical, and everything in the supply chain of either) jobs to be able to happen at all, and which deals with the fact that the humans doing them aren’t robots and have coordination needs. If you want an economy much beyond individual subsistence farming, you need “bean counting”, and you need more of it the farther from that you want to be.
Coordination costs are real.
Obviously there's some optimum amount of coordination and allocation of resources. There's an upper bound on how much is useful, though.
I worry that we're creating more and more empty administrative and make-work middle management work, especially in many sectors.
Look at higher education, and what it costs these days (as a society and individually). But there's fewer senior actual "production" faculty and researcher jobs around per capita, and the compensation for them has significantly fallen in real value. An administrative and management class has captured a huge portion of the value to questionable benefit.
It's most clear there, but I worry that we're dedicating too many resources to middle management and excessively clever intermediaries.
You don't even need to think that hard. Remember 3 years ago, when only "essential workers" had to physically go in to work anymore? That's pretty much why.
It DOES cause another problem though: unemployment. Since blue collar workers are so expensive there is a lot of incentive to reduce it as much as possible in all areas of society. A few examples:
It is almost comical how many swedes do manual labor themselves instead of hiring help (especially home renovations). A software engineer coworker renovated all of his apartment (except bathrooms) himself, including changing floors. Construction materials and housing styles are optimised to reduce manual labor.
Almost all public parks have grass-cutting roombas, street cleaning is mostly done with machines, etc
IKEA is so popular because furniture is almost disposable, it is never worth repairing it (unless you do it yourself).
So this still creates another underclass of unemployed people which is also pretty bad for society and individuals. A lot of the gang violence you see about Sweden is a direct result of this. The social safety net helps (especially in ensuring that the children from this class has a chance to excel) but it is not enough and there are no clear answers.
I mean that’s trivial. Get a decent paint gun, laminate or vinyl flooring and just install them? It’s neither hard nor time consuming and it helps clear them mind.
As an added bonus, i made sure my network cables running through the walls are 10 Gbe. Just in case :-)
I absolutely recommend to anyone working in tech that they try it.
In Sweden, it's difficult to get rich through salaried work. Startups, inheritance, and housing are the only avenues. As an example, during the 'housing bubble' years, there were some buzz around people earning more from the appreciation on their house than they did from work.
With that said, Sweden has a high dollar-millionaires-per-capita. When you already have money, Sweden is almost a tax haven. But they pulled up the ladder behind them for most of the population.
You don’t think importing more than a million people from countries with vastly different cultures and placing them in segregated neighborhoods has more to do with it?
Native Swedes(and well integrated foreigners) have very little unemployment.
Obviously certain jobs like retail can’t just have people “not working”, but you can coordinate shifts. Or if there’s a scheduled period of time like with construction that’s different (though the construction guys and gals can help decide the schedule). And obviously even in tech jobs people need to communicate, present, have meetings, etc.
But other than that, actually talk to people to see what schedule, within the necessary constraints, works best for them. It’s their productivity which helps your company (of course if their schedule is 1 day a week then they’re not being productive; but if an employee does the same amount of work in <36 hours and is ok getting paid for only <36 hours, it’s a win-win).
First you'd have to define that. The "work to be done" increased with our productivity. We started with machines doing the work of 50 people, thread weaving for example, but it didn't mean thread weavers worked 50 times less, it just meant we produced 50 times more. You can apply that to pretty much every fields. When the end goal is "produce as much as you can" there is no "getting the job done", the only limits are set by laws regulating salaries and working hours.
It's harder to do for a low wage workers who are paid more than they would otherwise be able to negotiate for, but High demand low Supply jobs would adjust pretty quickly