Four day work weeks are popular in the same way it is both popular that taxes should be lower and public spending are both popular. Degrowth/anti-capitalism are popular to many but even among this subset of people they are very upset (as we have seen) when prices of things go up slightly.
I understand the arguments for the four day work week as it relates to reforms (such as the hours threshold for receiving healthcare could be lower) but that does not seem to be what this author is talking about here.
(Prices will rise and neutral inflation rate higher than historically regardless due to structural demographics globally; importantly, labor has power to enact change as the working population cohort shrinks)
In certain industries, consumers will pay a bit more and shareholders will see lower returns. People work to live, not live to work.
There are already shortages of bus drivers because the pay is insufficient for the work. This is good, because when there is surplus labor, stakeholders will say “thems the breaks.” Better to be perpetually starved of labor and force systems to adapt.
Bus drivers and line workers are also among the lower fruit for automation. Increasing their price could be what’s needed to push us into a higher-productivity state.
Let's look at this the other way, everyone gets a 20 % wage cut and we maintain current prices. On the one hand we would have additional demand for labor to do the 20 % of work, on the other hand we would have a 20 % drop in demand, so there might not even be a demand for additional labor pulling wages up. I would expect a relativ shift towards essential goods but I do not see how this could incentivize more automation.
Same prices and same wage does not work, because your wage now only produces 80 % of the products compared to before. If someone is syphoning off 20 % of your labor for nothing, then I am all with you and this should be brought to an end, but I fail to see how working a day less each week could be an effective tool to achieve this.
> Everyone gets the same pay, and prices stay the same. Shareholders see lower returns, but them's the breaks
This gets attempted once a generation somewhere in the world. The problem is when you devalue capital, it isn’t maintained. The only way your equation balances is with a massive jolt to TFP. There isn’t a free lunch in reducing labour; we must be realistic about the tradeoffs involved.
Working 20 % less will cost you 20 % of your living standard, there is no way around that. There may be some jobs where people already effectively only work 4 days and sit around doing nothing for one more day, in those cases you could maintain productivity if the people would squeeze all the work into the 4 days. And that the capitalists would voluntarily eat a 20 % loss seems pretty questionable to me.
Humans constantly living on a discount (labor, climate, energy, etc) and upset when the true cost sets in. Is what it is. Living standards must go down if automation and other non human labor mechanisms can't keep productivity going up as total fertility rate [1] and populations [2] decline.
I believe we agree organizing and unionizing is mostly the path to success here, due to unreasonable consumers and capital investors. Some jurisdictions might update labor law perhaps, lots of emotional and behavioral inertia to overcome though (along with plain ol' extractionist justification and belief systems).
I completely agree with you that we are living well beyond our means. And working less would be a way to lower our footprint, but that is probably not what most people have in mind when they consider a 4 day week. I also think it would not be the best choice, I think it would be better to not reduce the amount of work we do but instead of using the 5th day to produce more stuff we use it to produce better stuff with a smaller footprint.
How can we say "consumers will pay a bit more and shareholders will see lower returns"? We just went through an episode of tight labor and it resulted in high inflation in the US and companies recorded blockbuster profits by pursuing a price over volume strategy.
Of course, it also coincided with a supply chain shock but we ought to be honest that we cannot guarantee a tight labor market will result in Americans being materially better off.
Where else would business squeeze the P&L in the face of increased cost of labor? Prices go up, profits go down, or some combination if the business is to continue as a going concern.
With global markets what will end happening is that 4-day work jobs will not be able to compete with 5-day work jobs. The consumers will buy the things that are cheaper.
And besides, why do you need a government to mandate that and force people to do it? They aren't any laws forbidding working less and both parties can decide that a particular contract covers a 4-day work week.
It's a bad idea to regulate something that don't need regulation.
We watched everything become 20% more expensive in 2021 and we didn't get an extra day off. I'm happy to try it again if I can get a day off every week. This time I'm prepared, I have a nice mortgage that can be made 20% less expensive in terms of real dollars.
Or would it? Perhaps running easier shifts and staffing better to handle things like employees on sick leave, would lead to less attrition, fewer sick employees, and better job satisfaction.
If you can convince the employees that you're on the same team, they might also be more open to communicating inefficiencies like "this process is crap, if you change these steps you'll have fewer defects and the line will run faster". Saving EVEN MORE money and time.
That is certainly a possibility but I have doubts. If you could gain 20+ % percent of productivity be making your employees work 20 % less, it would be stupid for any company to not do this. What seems more likely to me is that you can gain a few percent which would make the overall impact less than the full 20 %. Making processes better and so on seems mostly unrelated to me, that you could also do with a full work week.
I think nursing is one sector I could see directly translating shorter work weeks to higher costs. Something like bus drivers you could remove part of services. With factories labour should not be significant part of cost compared to raw materials.
In many areas you could just provide less hours of services, thus lower costs. But in some this is just not possible and those will cost more.
Some things may get more expensive, and maybe that's fine. Inflation is a thing, and things become more expensive all the time; hell, over the past couple years, things became a lot more expensive, and we didn't get anything good in return for it, like a shortening the work week.
Production lines don't need to run 24/7. Advances in automation, and productivity in general, could also close the gap.
I'm so tired of this idea that the point of life is to produce more and more and more. That degenerates into the point of life being to work and work and work. It's dumb. Human lives could be so much more.
As far as I can tell all those links you posted were case studies involving public administration jobs and bureaucracy. Parkinson's Law is explicitly about this.
It is not at all clear if (or how) productivity would go up in most other jobs, including construction, factory work, barbers, nurses, garbage men, chefs, etc. While technology may make it possible that people are productive per hour, there is no study or even pathway for how a chef (for instance) could produce more meals in 32 hours than 40.
> Degrowth/anti-capitalism are popular to many but even among this subset of people they are very upset (as we have seen) when prices of things go up slightly.
Citation: trust me dude
I don't really recall getting upset at prices of things going up unless I perceive that the price change has no correlation to the value delivered. I get angry when my cable internet bill would go up $20 every quarter because they were selling me the same (terrible) service still, for a higher price. Just helping themselves to a larger portion of my monthly income while delivering the exact same product.
Or you have the even worse version of that, streaming services that raise their prices, as they're removing content from their libraries.
Conversely, I've personally known tons of people who buy higher priced products for the perceived value they gain. That's an utterly normal thing.
I'm sorry for throwing more anecdotes into the barrel, but our local Facebook groups absolutely lose their shit when things go up in price (or are perceived to go up in price.) Things like fast food places upping the price of a burger, or grocery stores charging a dollar more for eggs than last year, are certainly noticed.
(And honestly, for people on a fixed/limited income, food prices going up are probably a fairly reasonable thing to be upset about!)
I mean companies gouging on the prices of every day goods under bullshit "inflation" excuses is a hot topic right now, and deservedly so I feel. It's hard to take their cries of "we can't help it!" as seemingly every major corporation is reporting record profits constantly.
Irrespective of the larger economic forces at play there, if you're simultaneously whining about how you need to raise your prices because everything is expensive, or worse still, doing it because your laborers are demanding better wages, while not paying said wages and charging more and then posting record profits? I think people have every right to call your price rises bullshit.
So I claim arrogantly that such proposals and experiments are ultimately AGAINST the declaimed "green goals" IF such goals are green in the sense of spring grass, not in the sense of the dollars dominant color. Private jets since they are a little minority does not count except for PR/emotions (no, I do not have one).
BTW I observe always in "spring grass" green sense that living in dense cities is the most polluting way to live we have. Oh, yes, formally a new high rise building need less energy to heat/cool than an equivalent number of single family homes and being "near" demand less energy for personal daily trips BUT that's not the big picture. Single family homes can be rebuilt "frequently", for instance at a generational change (inheritance, and so on, let's say after 50 years) and the ability to to far shorter personal trips means the need of a much big infra to supply dense zones in food and water. The "TCO" is far higher for high density than for moderate-low density. A classic (well, not ideal but...) study http://www.newgeography.com/content/006840-high-density-and-... as a sample. Oh, and of course a single family home can have p.v. (it it's meaningful where it exists), charge a BEV at home and so on, I do have them now, I couldn't have them in a dense city.
I personally expect anyone asking for sacrifices, to make even bigger sacrifices themselves. And those that actually impact their quality of live. Like if you want to ban meat, you should be ready to get rid of things like coffee or large selections of fruits and vegetables.
A vulgar popular phrase from where I'm from (Italy) is "we are for equity, fairness, so we put it, you the people have than to get is, fifty-fifty". That's the kind of sacrifice ALL ruling classes in the known history have asked and "taken themselves".
This is unpopular here but... The green new deal have not much about ecology, at least is marginal, and have much about economy. The substantial targets announced in many occasions are impoverishing the 99% to make them workers operating services they do not own, consuming services to live, balancing their income and expenses to own nothing, no matter how much they earn.
Did you read for instance the "forecasts" of US DNI from the 2004 https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Global%20Trends_Mapping%... with notes about a stop in the development of Democracies to use in the west the China model to counter China or reports like https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... take this: did you see that the main focus is "making people accepting" and whole "urban mobility" is written everywhere try to imaging how such kind of mobility could be possible in dense cities, while it match perfectly sparse areas where some wealthy move and sometimes also reach a city via an small "inter modal node-building"? Did you really think we can produce enough EVs to substitute old cars (old EVs included, a generation after another)? Where did you imaging a p.v. centered electricity production in cities? Where the place to install heat pumps for heating and cooling and sanitary water in high rise apartments buildings?
The entire "material part" of the Green New Deal is about single family homes in a sparse area with some small buildings for commerce, industry, schools and so on. It's NOT about an entire society. We can converge to electricity as we almost have done with IP for signal appliances, but NOT in the way depicted by the green deal for a whole society. It's clear that such scenario is a new old classic, well depicted by this advertisement https://appliedevtolconcepts.com/ witch is not different from the '20s/30s advertisement of a gentleman on a car traveling from a nice home looking at workers in the countryside.
Be aware that not, I'm not from US far right, I'm a EU leftist citizen, having choose to built a new home, an EV, a domestic p.v. and having done the best I can to integrate my home appliance to maximize self-consumption. I know such model could work, but I also know is directed in ways to achieve BEFORE the new deal material part, the new deal "in 2030 you'll own nothing" part. Beside that you can read everywhere from famous economists, certainly not from the far right, like Varoufakis about https://unherd.com/2023/09/capitalism-is-dead-long-live-tech... or generic articles like https://jacobinmag.com/2022/02/billionaires-pandemic-wealth-... and so on.
Also I wonder what some will do with so much free time. I know many men for whom work is a way to escape home with the nagging wife and the kids who don't respect them. I guess they'll spend one more day a week drinking at the pub.
Before someone flags this for being against progressivism, it's just a thought that crosses my mind whenever this comes up. I'm not arguing against it.
Assuming the trope you mention is common these days (I don't think it is, but sure, let's run with it), perhaps part of the reason for it is the wedge that the working day pushes between the breadwinner and the rest of the family. And perhaps that breadwinner would have a better relationship with spouse and kids if there was a little less work and a little more family time.
Either way, if you don't work and get bored, that's on you. There are so many exciting things to do in our world (many of them low-cost or free, even), that there's no excuse for being bored, except, perhaps, for laziness or a lack of imagination.
I love my family (no nagging wife or disrespectful kid) but long weekends leave me exhausted. We have to figure out how to keep the kid engaged for a day without school or after school care for an assist. And this is at the same time trying to keep screen time down by providing interesting alternatives.
Coding is much easier than childcare, at least from my perspective. However, I know I’ll look back on my kid’s needy phase with fond memories.
I don't think we need to ban private jets. It should just be more expensive to use them.
Take Taylor Swift as an example. Is she meant to fly commercial? How would that work exactly? She'd get mobbed at the airport, at security, at the gate, on the plane. Just look at what happened when Taylor Swift went to a friend's rehearsal diner in New Jersey recently [1].
It would be a legitimate security issue too. The last one is why many executives of large companies (eg Tim Cook) are banned by their boards from flying commercial.
So, stop making private jets any form of legitimate tax deduction. Give them absolutely no tax advantageous treatment whatsoever. Increase the fuel excises, landing fees, parking fees, you name it. When the amortized flying cost of that jet jumps from $10k/hour to $30k/hour, we'll see who still needs to fly private.
Oh and as for working 4 days a week. Yes. Most jobs are bullshit. Most work is bullshit. Work less, get paid more.
>So, stop making private jets any form of legitimate tax deduction. Give them absolutely no tax advantageous treatment whatsoever.
AFAIK there's no such "advantageous treatment" for private jets. They're are tax-deductible in the same way that plane tickets (or any other business expense, really) are tax deductible.
That could change, though. The tax code could have a carve-out that says use of a private plane can't be counted as an ordinary business expense (or cap it at some amount, or some percentage of the cost).
> The tax code could have a carve-out that says use of a private plane can't be counted as an ordinary business expense
Seems like a weird way of doing it, considering that such a change wouldn't affect paying for such flights individually. After all, it's not like a company funded jet emits more co2 than a personally funded jet. If your concern is co2 emissions, you should just tax co2 directly, not through weird carveouts.
What do people expect to happen when they mob a celebrity like that? Like what's the point? They're not going to perform a show for you while waiting in an airport lounge. I can understand the reverent fan who attends every concert and goes out of their way to do so, and I can understand (in a way) the psychopath who wants to take home their body parts, but I cannot understand the fan that wants to ... fill in blank here ... by mobbing and getting in the face of their idol.
> That’s the radical vision proposed by philosophy professor and Marxist scholar Kohei Saito
I find it ironic that his book is still available for purchase on a half dozen "capitalist" websites. Why not it give it away for free once his labor has been "fairly" compensated for?
Why apply degrowth/slowdown in his own life and show us?
> He's not exploiting anyone by selling his book online and there's a pdf available if you don't want/can't pay for it.
I will make this dirt simple:
1. He is exploiting the workers who built and maintained the online systems.
2. If he is getting paid more than his labor, he is de facto exploiting those workers according to Marxism. (Doesn't matter if there is a free PDF hidden somewhere!)
> Maybe learn a little bit about Marxism and the community before criticizing it.
Maybe you should first learn a little bit about Marxism before blithely dissing valid critiques about this pseudoscientific theory (now also a defacto religion).
Why don't you politely tell me where I went wrong? What are the axioms of Marxism that I violated in my inference?
1. He is not. The companies that employs those workers are the ones that are exploiting.
2. I'm not sure that it is the case here, but a person can be paid more than her labor by several reasons, including luck in the market. Of course, in a large volume of exchanges, good luck and bad luck cancel each other out, therefore to explain a stable surplus value accumulation, you need another explanation. Marx explains this as a non-paid value taken from the workers. If he do not employ anyone, he is not exploiting anyone according with Marx.
Anyway, even though he was exploiting, any Marxist would condemn your moralistic view of the situation. Marx's critique is not a moral one. Friedrich Engels, who helped Marx to develop his theories was a capitalist who owned factories.
You have all right to do not like Marx or his theories. However, I think that any criticism should be valid (99% of what you find in the Internet is propaganda, not serious criticism), otherwise it is the critic who would be the pseudocientific/religious ideologue.
Whether or not degrowth can be made to work, what this guy is talking about is fantasy. For example:
...That creates some pressure on planetary boundaries. So that means that the Global North needs to consciously degrow because it is over-developing, and has excessive production and consumption.
This will not help. Emissions from the US and Europe now account of about 20% of global emissions and are going down. Emissions from the rest of the world are rising steeply.
> I think it’s [degrowth] in some sense utopian. But believing that capitalism will prosper in the decades to come is utopian too, because we will have more natural disasters, inflation, wars — and these will all accelerate with the climate crisis. So it’s naive to think that our way of life will somehow continue.
He admits several times that this isn't a concrete solution and that the global south will continue to grow but the point remains that we can't really continue what we're doing.
Not sure about this, as the 2 World Wars in 20th century and colonialism were a great source of deaths and disasters. But anyway, even if this is true, the point is that climate crisis probably will change this score, provoking lot more disasters and wars in the future.
Maybe a dumb question, but what does "banning private jets" actually mean?
Do we ban the actual planes themselves, as in, crack down on plane manufacturers to somehow restrict them from building small passenger capacity jet planes? And if so, what minimal capacity should be the threshold?
Or do we ban private companies and individuals from flying jet planes under said hypothetical capacity?
Another possibility might be to ban non-scheduled flights using jet planes.
In any case, who would have the authority to enforce this internationally, ICAO I guess? It does not appear like something they would even consider, their efforts being targeted towards implementing CORSIA (Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation) instead.
Now to go even further, let's hypothesize that private jets are banned. What about non jet planes, as in props or turbo-props engines? Perfomance in terms of speed can be close to jet planes. Take for example the Piaggio Avanti EVO, which can reach around 740 km/h. While its fuel consumption is notably lower than similar jet planes, it's still higher per passenger than commercial flights.
We can imagine a strong market demand for them will appear, to replace the banned model range.
So should non jet private planes be banned as well? Even models like Cessna 172 and such?
67 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadI understand the arguments for the four day work week as it relates to reforms (such as the hours threshold for receiving healthcare could be lower) but that does not seem to be what this author is talking about here.
https://www.4dayweek.com/casestudies
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=4+day+week+success
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law
(Prices will rise and neutral inflation rate higher than historically regardless due to structural demographics globally; importantly, labor has power to enact change as the working population cohort shrinks)
There are already shortages of bus drivers because the pay is insufficient for the work. This is good, because when there is surplus labor, stakeholders will say “thems the breaks.” Better to be perpetually starved of labor and force systems to adapt.
https://www.epi.org/blog/the-school-bus-driver-shortage-rema...
This idea that we should prioritize dividends and capital appreciation over the happiness and mental health of the masses... it's disgusting.
This gets attempted once a generation somewhere in the world. The problem is when you devalue capital, it isn’t maintained. The only way your equation balances is with a massive jolt to TFP. There isn’t a free lunch in reducing labour; we must be realistic about the tradeoffs involved.
I believe we agree organizing and unionizing is mostly the path to success here, due to unreasonable consumers and capital investors. Some jurisdictions might update labor law perhaps, lots of emotional and behavioral inertia to overcome though (along with plain ol' extractionist justification and belief systems).
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rates/
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/age-structure
This fails to explain a lot of people, such as most artists.
Of course, it also coincided with a supply chain shock but we ought to be honest that we cannot guarantee a tight labor market will result in Americans being materially better off.
And besides, why do you need a government to mandate that and force people to do it? They aren't any laws forbidding working less and both parties can decide that a particular contract covers a 4-day work week.
It's a bad idea to regulate something that don't need regulation.
If you can convince the employees that you're on the same team, they might also be more open to communicating inefficiencies like "this process is crap, if you change these steps you'll have fewer defects and the line will run faster". Saving EVEN MORE money and time.
In many areas you could just provide less hours of services, thus lower costs. But in some this is just not possible and those will cost more.
Production lines don't need to run 24/7. Advances in automation, and productivity in general, could also close the gap.
I'm so tired of this idea that the point of life is to produce more and more and more. That degenerates into the point of life being to work and work and work. It's dumb. Human lives could be so much more.
It is not at all clear if (or how) productivity would go up in most other jobs, including construction, factory work, barbers, nurses, garbage men, chefs, etc. While technology may make it possible that people are productive per hour, there is no study or even pathway for how a chef (for instance) could produce more meals in 32 hours than 40.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lambor...
https://www.equipmentworld.com/business/article/15280393/haw... (4/10 admittedly)
Highlighted results:
* Faster call response times across the 6 month trial
* Faster responses on Priority 1 calls (e.g., crimes in progress, life threatening emergencies) for 4 of 6 months
* 3x increase in code enforcement (e.g., parking tickets)
* 79% decrease in overtime spending
* -304 hours/month of overtime
* 50% drop in resignations and retirements (!!)
Citation: trust me dude
I don't really recall getting upset at prices of things going up unless I perceive that the price change has no correlation to the value delivered. I get angry when my cable internet bill would go up $20 every quarter because they were selling me the same (terrible) service still, for a higher price. Just helping themselves to a larger portion of my monthly income while delivering the exact same product.
Or you have the even worse version of that, streaming services that raise their prices, as they're removing content from their libraries.
Conversely, I've personally known tons of people who buy higher priced products for the perceived value they gain. That's an utterly normal thing.
(And honestly, for people on a fixed/limited income, food prices going up are probably a fairly reasonable thing to be upset about!)
Irrespective of the larger economic forces at play there, if you're simultaneously whining about how you need to raise your prices because everything is expensive, or worse still, doing it because your laborers are demanding better wages, while not paying said wages and charging more and then posting record profits? I think people have every right to call your price rises bullshit.
I think you are merging too much of it here. I was born in communist regime and as far as I can remember degrowth was never popular.
So I claim arrogantly that such proposals and experiments are ultimately AGAINST the declaimed "green goals" IF such goals are green in the sense of spring grass, not in the sense of the dollars dominant color. Private jets since they are a little minority does not count except for PR/emotions (no, I do not have one).
BTW I observe always in "spring grass" green sense that living in dense cities is the most polluting way to live we have. Oh, yes, formally a new high rise building need less energy to heat/cool than an equivalent number of single family homes and being "near" demand less energy for personal daily trips BUT that's not the big picture. Single family homes can be rebuilt "frequently", for instance at a generational change (inheritance, and so on, let's say after 50 years) and the ability to to far shorter personal trips means the need of a much big infra to supply dense zones in food and water. The "TCO" is far higher for high density than for moderate-low density. A classic (well, not ideal but...) study http://www.newgeography.com/content/006840-high-density-and-... as a sample. Oh, and of course a single family home can have p.v. (it it's meaningful where it exists), charge a BEV at home and so on, I do have them now, I couldn't have them in a dense city.
They do count. It's incredibly important that elites/leaders have skin in the game, and live by the same rules as those they govern.
Did you read for instance the "forecasts" of US DNI from the 2004 https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Global%20Trends_Mapping%... with notes about a stop in the development of Democracies to use in the west the China model to counter China or reports like https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... take this: did you see that the main focus is "making people accepting" and whole "urban mobility" is written everywhere try to imaging how such kind of mobility could be possible in dense cities, while it match perfectly sparse areas where some wealthy move and sometimes also reach a city via an small "inter modal node-building"? Did you really think we can produce enough EVs to substitute old cars (old EVs included, a generation after another)? Where did you imaging a p.v. centered electricity production in cities? Where the place to install heat pumps for heating and cooling and sanitary water in high rise apartments buildings?
The entire "material part" of the Green New Deal is about single family homes in a sparse area with some small buildings for commerce, industry, schools and so on. It's NOT about an entire society. We can converge to electricity as we almost have done with IP for signal appliances, but NOT in the way depicted by the green deal for a whole society. It's clear that such scenario is a new old classic, well depicted by this advertisement https://appliedevtolconcepts.com/ witch is not different from the '20s/30s advertisement of a gentleman on a car traveling from a nice home looking at workers in the countryside.
Be aware that not, I'm not from US far right, I'm a EU leftist citizen, having choose to built a new home, an EV, a domestic p.v. and having done the best I can to integrate my home appliance to maximize self-consumption. I know such model could work, but I also know is directed in ways to achieve BEFORE the new deal material part, the new deal "in 2030 you'll own nothing" part. Beside that you can read everywhere from famous economists, certainly not from the far right, like Varoufakis about https://unherd.com/2023/09/capitalism-is-dead-long-live-tech... or generic articles like https://jacobinmag.com/2022/02/billionaires-pandemic-wealth-... and so on.
If you really go deeper you'll find this story https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/17/nazis-based-th... and this management school http://www.intellinews.com/ukraine-could-be-a-beacon-a...
Before someone flags this for being against progressivism, it's just a thought that crosses my mind whenever this comes up. I'm not arguing against it.
Imagine sharing chores, the horror.
Either way, if you don't work and get bored, that's on you. There are so many exciting things to do in our world (many of them low-cost or free, even), that there's no excuse for being bored, except, perhaps, for laziness or a lack of imagination.
Coding is much easier than childcare, at least from my perspective. However, I know I’ll look back on my kid’s needy phase with fond memories.
Take Taylor Swift as an example. Is she meant to fly commercial? How would that work exactly? She'd get mobbed at the airport, at security, at the gate, on the plane. Just look at what happened when Taylor Swift went to a friend's rehearsal diner in New Jersey recently [1].
It would be a legitimate security issue too. The last one is why many executives of large companies (eg Tim Cook) are banned by their boards from flying commercial.
So, stop making private jets any form of legitimate tax deduction. Give them absolutely no tax advantageous treatment whatsoever. Increase the fuel excises, landing fees, parking fees, you name it. When the amortized flying cost of that jet jumps from $10k/hour to $30k/hour, we'll see who still needs to fly private.
Oh and as for working 4 days a week. Yes. Most jobs are bullshit. Most work is bullshit. Work less, get paid more.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUjXdKEVoBg
AFAIK there's no such "advantageous treatment" for private jets. They're are tax-deductible in the same way that plane tickets (or any other business expense, really) are tax deductible.
Seems like a weird way of doing it, considering that such a change wouldn't affect paying for such flights individually. After all, it's not like a company funded jet emits more co2 than a personally funded jet. If your concern is co2 emissions, you should just tax co2 directly, not through weird carveouts.
I wonder if that would make the PR problem worse by more starkly highlighting extreme inequality.
A 3-day work week AND banning private jets!
> That’s the radical vision proposed by philosophy professor and Marxist scholar Kohei Saito
I find it ironic that his book is still available for purchase on a half dozen "capitalist" websites. Why not it give it away for free once his labor has been "fairly" compensated for?
Why apply degrowth/slowdown in his own life and show us?
Maybe learn a little bit about Marxism and the community before criticizing it.
I will make this dirt simple:
1. He is exploiting the workers who built and maintained the online systems.
2. If he is getting paid more than his labor, he is de facto exploiting those workers according to Marxism. (Doesn't matter if there is a free PDF hidden somewhere!)
> Maybe learn a little bit about Marxism and the community before criticizing it.
Maybe you should first learn a little bit about Marxism before blithely dissing valid critiques about this pseudoscientific theory (now also a defacto religion).
Why don't you politely tell me where I went wrong? What are the axioms of Marxism that I violated in my inference?
1. He is not. The companies that employs those workers are the ones that are exploiting.
2. I'm not sure that it is the case here, but a person can be paid more than her labor by several reasons, including luck in the market. Of course, in a large volume of exchanges, good luck and bad luck cancel each other out, therefore to explain a stable surplus value accumulation, you need another explanation. Marx explains this as a non-paid value taken from the workers. If he do not employ anyone, he is not exploiting anyone according with Marx.
Anyway, even though he was exploiting, any Marxist would condemn your moralistic view of the situation. Marx's critique is not a moral one. Friedrich Engels, who helped Marx to develop his theories was a capitalist who owned factories.
You have all right to do not like Marx or his theories. However, I think that any criticism should be valid (99% of what you find in the Internet is propaganda, not serious criticism), otherwise it is the critic who would be the pseudocientific/religious ideologue.
...That creates some pressure on planetary boundaries. So that means that the Global North needs to consciously degrow because it is over-developing, and has excessive production and consumption.
This will not help. Emissions from the US and Europe now account of about 20% of global emissions and are going down. Emissions from the rest of the world are rising steeply.
He admits several times that this isn't a concrete solution and that the global south will continue to grow but the point remains that we can't really continue what we're doing.
*Edited to mark the quote
Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39219344
In any case, who would have the authority to enforce this internationally, ICAO I guess? It does not appear like something they would even consider, their efforts being targeted towards implementing CORSIA (Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation) instead.
Now to go even further, let's hypothesize that private jets are banned. What about non jet planes, as in props or turbo-props engines? Perfomance in terms of speed can be close to jet planes. Take for example the Piaggio Avanti EVO, which can reach around 740 km/h. While its fuel consumption is notably lower than similar jet planes, it's still higher per passenger than commercial flights. We can imagine a strong market demand for them will appear, to replace the banned model range. So should non jet private planes be banned as well? Even models like Cessna 172 and such?
Coincidentally I went down a Piaggio Avanti rabbit hole recently; it sounds quite cool.