Because the people in charge of deciding which work should be done have decided that we should spend every waking hour making them more powerful. Next!
The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society are willing to work this hard. The hardest working participants of the labor market will set the tone of the competition for high-paying jobs.
A typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.
The mismanagement of inelastic labor supply into soggy labor demand in order to minimize wages is completely intentional.
We need to react to it with the same intentionality that we did a century ago when we won the 40 hour work week, which still hasn't been entirely eroded despite half a century of chipping away.
The simple answer is wrong obviously, because it fails to address the nuance.
The most powerful members of our society (not the hardest working ones) are the ones who set the tone for the rest of us. We only need to continue working this hard as long as we accept their dominion over our society.
That's a choice we make as a society every day, and it's probably a result of the simplistic form of thinking you offer in your comment.
Moreover, for creative professions, including programming and engineering, the number of "worked" hours is emphasized only by incompetent managers who do not really know how to measure the productivity of the employees.
When competent programmers or engineers have a difficult problem to solve, they will think about it all the time, regardless whether they are "working" long hours in the office or they are doing any other activities, at home or on the street.
It is quite frequent to have the best ideas when you are not in the office "working". For things like programming or designing, the time required to type on a keyboard the solution is never a bottleneck.
At least for myself, the majority of the technical solutions to the problems that I have worked have come to my mind at home, in the morning, immediately when waking up, and the "work" done in the office has always been mostly in typing whatever solution I already had in mind when arriving at the office.
Anyone who believes that a programmer or engineer who "works" e.g. a 50-hour week is more productive than one who "works" a 40-hour week is naive, to not use a more insulting word.
I’ve worked in companies that are not highly compensated or highly competitive and they were still like this. 40 hours was the “floor”, not the ceiling. If you worked 40 hours you were the bottom of the barrel, inevitably the first to be let go should things come to that.
Typical? I know a bunch of tech folks, and none of them are pushing huge hours.
Work for a ramen noodle startup? Sure. Work for a typical profitable company (Atlassian/Xero, whatever) - and I just don't see it.
Especially with the leverage of good LLMs operated well - if anything I find I have less time pressures than more, and I over deliver as compared to almost every one of my peers.
> The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society are willing to work this hard
Let me fix that for you.
The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society [hoard wealth beyond the wildest imagination of those in the bottom 99%.]
So much wealth they quite literally don't know what to do with it, and for a cherry on top they're not even happy. The richest man on the planet is a depressed Twitter troll.
Until the general public rightfully takes back the money they've worked generations to generate that _mostly_ flows into the pockets of these (t|b)illionaires, we will continue to see a more stressed and less happy society for all.
> A typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.
In specific bubbles like Silicon Valley startup culture or FAANG this is true.
Greater than 40 hour weeks has been the expectation at several non-FAANG, non-Silicon Valley, non-startup companies where I've worked.
But I don't think people in those jobs realize how uncommon it is. The jobs in the middle of the curve, even tech jobs, are not all that demanding. They also don't pay the high salaries that we correlate with demanding tech jobs, but that goes with the territory.
It's a weird feeling if you've only known hustle-and-grind companies and then you stumble into a more traditional company where nobody is in a rush to get anything done and few people even work for more than 2-4 hours that they're in the office. These jobs are everywhere, though.
It is very legal in the US to work more than 40 hours of salary work, and no you don’t need to be paid overtime or compensated in any extra way. That’s the nature of salary jobs; 40 hours is the minimum, most people don’t work the minimum because working the minimum doesn’t bode well for your career or job security.
If working the minimum gets you fired you ought to have legal recourse. I know many parts of USA maybe don't allow this. But it also means the job was shitty so probably ideal to move on.
> The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society are willing to work this hard. The hardest working participants of the labor market will set the tone of the competition for high-paying jobs.
Is this true? It does not matter if Bob works 100 hours a week if his output is not desireable. We are in this state because we WANT more, and there's apparently people out there that are willing to work to give us that.
Also, the West is quite literally living on the backbone of other industrial economy for the past 20 years. So you "luxury" is completely unsustainable with the amount of "work" that you put in because you outsourced all of the labors out.
Nobody wants to admit they are having a 15 hour work week with AI, but if in office attendence is any indication, I think many knowledge workers are starting to reduce work hours. It is much easier to do so remotely.
Some are filling hours with more work however it seems like many are not increasing work volume, just quietly reducing the amount of labor.
To me the opposite effect seems to occur: management sees one guy get a ton of a certain kind of work done with AI and then expects everyone to increase all work output by that much because they also have access to AI.
Of course "some folks say they work a lot more than they actually do" is also nothing new to AI anyways.
Would seem to come down to whether finding ways to do the work twice as fast is part of your responsibilities, rather than simply turning the crank on the job.
A sysadmin is expected to write scripts to image new machines faster, not continue to set up each one painstakingly by hand.
If working people in industrialized society weren't artificially kept indebted and poor (relative to the wealth they should have), then it would be impossible for the rulers to control the population, and they would loose their power.
A ruler will always prefer to rule over 100 wretches, than be an equal with 100 peers. And people all over the world have been bred to submit by relentless head stomping by family, school and media.
But the current order will end without violence and be forgotten as foolishness, just like the spell of the feared Soviet terror regime ended as if people woke up from a dream. Just like the strangle grip of popes, priests and monks ended and is now the source of ridicule. Our children's children will look with nothing at disgust at how the current population worship "governments", "authorities" and so on - all of these illusions made up of some of the least admirable people alive.
We live in a money-based economy. Money comes from other people, who don't give it away unless you satisfy them somehow. Those people that want work from you, will take all the work you can perform (up to the limit of labor laws). That's why.
Every economy is "money-based" in some way, money is just an abstract representation of value. You can try to get rid of it, but it will come back in another form because "value" is still useful to quantify and resources are finite.
money comes from other people... and the money printer -- if you have access to it.
money =\= purchasing power. if they print enough (and spend it themselves first into the economy), then the purchasing power is being siphoned away towards the source of the new money.
The robber barons at the turn of last century were able to build their empires under conditions of gold-backed currency. This is not a soft-money story, and hard-money will not fix it.
I'm no economist but it seems like competition for housing drives up prices as wages increase. Also, more generally, people's happiness seems to be more correlated with their economic rank in a society, rather than their wealth in absolute terms [1]. So, people want to do better than their neighbors, not just do well.
1. Boyce, Brown & Moore (2010), “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction”
On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation by David Ricardo.
This book is most famous for being misquoted by nitwits trying to argue that globalization is always good for everyone, but if you had asked David Ricardo he would have said his most important result was that of Rent (later specified as differential rent or Ricardian rent), the idea that economic productivity tends to get squeezed onto land prices. A modern update would argue that this applies to assets more generally. Assets go up by squeezing productivity out of the main economy. Whether you think this is brilliant or terrible depends largely on whether you own lots of assets.
The "golden billion" people almost all live in luxury, by the standards of an early industrial society like the early 19th century Europe which Marx described, and daily use a ton of amenities which even the mightiest king could not afford 1000 years ago. But we take it for granted.
I could have taken my savings and downshifted to a comfortable life in a third-world country. But instead I've put them in my wife's business, and keep working, while living in one of the most expensive cities in the Solar system. This is because I want a better education for my children, and success for the business. (The city is also enjoyable when I have the time.)
Then, some amenities are still expensive. Think about medical care, especially larger-scale like cardiac surgery. Well, think about the cost of a Claude subscription if you live otherwise happily for $25 / day in an inexpensive third-world countryside.
We work so much because there's still utility in it, in many cases. We have plenty, but not plenty enough.
I used to live in a big city and work as a software engineer.
I realized it wasn’t making me happy. Sitting inside everyday is not how I want to spend my life. Now I live in a mountain town of 10,000. There is no traffic. We ride everywhere in town. I work 10-20 hours a week on writing and books, depending on the season. I snowboard 100 days a season. We took our 6 month old on a trip for a year (wife got 18 months maternity leave) she works 3 days a week.
I cut our firewood so we have no heating bill, have no phone, no tv. We really enjoy the simple life. We have plenty of time to host dinner gatherings, hang out with our daughter, hike, camp etc.
We did a 10 day wilderness canoe trip with friends this summer, it was unreal.
We realized More money will not make us happier. We don’t want more money. More time doing the things we love with family and friends will.
The choice is there.
I live in a big city and work as a software engineer.
I love the city, the friend group, being into some communities that do not exist in small towns.
If you'd put the outdoorsy small town lifestyle on me, I'd kill myself.
I'm really happy for you it worked out, but what you suggest is not an overall solution. (And just imagine how your town would look like, if we all moved out of the cities ... we'd create new cities).
The fact that cities are big is cause by people wanting to live there, not elsewhere.
I mean, since 1900. If you could afford to stay rural during the Industrial Revolution*, you could expect 10 years more life expectancy. Dickensian cities were disease nightmares.
(*) but you started off as the kind of person who could afford that choice
> This is because I want a better education for my children
The research strongly suggests that the most important factor in giving a child a better education is the degree of parental involvement. Do you think working and focus on business success gives you more attention capacity to be involved with your child's education than the downshifted option would have?
Above some nonzero level of parental involvement, the peer group dominates. I want my kids to be around brighter, nicer kids; many of them gravitate to schools in expensive locations.
The research does show that peers do become significant in the teenage years, but suggests that parental involvement is still most important even then. Prior to that, the peer group seems to have little-to-no effect.
So, the good news is that even if you want to give your best in that area, you only have to endure for five years, give or take. Something tells me you won't be packing your bags after that, though. It may not be your intention, but the combination of words gives the impression you're actually more interested in the appearance of giving your child a good education than giving a good education.
I was one of the dumbest among the smart kids I hung out with, the bad influence, but we did have fun.
peers count for alot, parents count for alot. but what counts the most is the kid him/her self.
I say this because there came a moment, and I remember it well, when I knew that I knew how to learn. before that, I didn't not know that.
I knew WHAT I wanted to learn, just not how to learn it, how to nurture and guide myself. it was a big deal and it still is
This. The last time I looked at this, worldwide (per-country*) median salary to house price ratio has stayed stuck at about 5 years for the past few decades.
Hey, hopefully some of you techbros can 'disrupt' the status quo.
This is why Keynes' prediction "... that technological progress and rising productivity would lead to a 15-hour workweek (about 3 hours a day) by the year 2030." was so wrong. He couldn't imaging the increase in our demand for standard of living which has becomes a hamster wheel. He just saw that we'd no longer need to grow our own food or collect water or chop wood to stay warm or hand wash clothes or any of the other huge labor needs of the previous century.
I would work fewer hours/days if I could. Employers mostly don't like this. Also, working fewer hours could affect my ability to obtain health insurance in the U.S.
If anything, it’s many of the basics that have become more expensive. Housing and education are far more expensive today then 100 years ago (as a share of average salary). And some essentials like health care, while more effective today, definitely absorbs a much higher share of people’s wallets (and the nation’s GDP).
Totally. If business can ship more in less time. They won’t stop at 15-hour, they will keep shipping more because competition and hamster wheel. In fact, I feel like the amount of work is actually increasing too…
> people's happiness seems to be more correlated with their economic rank in a society
That may be broadly true, but it's descriptive, not prescriptive.
There are many relatively poor people (with physical needs met, but not always) who are far happier than most of the top 1%. The secret is character -- things like contentment, thankfulness, and showing faithful love to family and people in general.
more simply, my happiness is correlated with how few obligations i have, especially obligations im uninterested in, such as paying banks interest on loans
I was reading this and a question came up. It ultimately works under the premise that there is only one ticket — so the conclusion is that the ticket must be ownership.
But if machines produce more, couldn't the state provide free services rather than cash? In kind provision could be less dependent on wages than taxation is.
Then couldn't we divide the monetary system further — not as banknotes, but by subdividing it? Would the administrative system be too difficult after all?
In other words, if the problem is that only the "wage" earned for participating in production grants the right to consume, then shouldn't tickets to the means of production also be distributed?
Still, no matter how I think about it, in the end it comes down to the problem of distribution. The OP also gives capital ownership as an example, but...
If automation can enable substantial production without human labor, then what on earth is the reason we should keep demanding that humans do wage labor for survival? I find myself thinking about this a lot these days.
Someone who did not participate in production can consume the product because they own capital. Then what is the basis on which that right arises?
In fact, economic logic, when you think about it, seems to be mostly a kind of circular reasoning. It says "capital's share equals its marginal contribution," but that market itself is ultimately something created by power.
Sometimes I have thoughts like this. In fact, the core of capitalism is the ownership of the means of production, and such ownership will keep accumulating ever-widening disparities. If automation keeps advancing, humans will eventually become unnecessary — and then how will the market be maintained? We cannot give everyone a claim on automated production. In the end, a ruling class and a ruled class will inevitably exist, and the question becomes how the ruling class can rule entirely with the consent of the ruled. Lately, it seems this principle no longer works in capitalism.
There is hope for fully automated robotic companies that are owner-less, and undercut any profit-making entity since they have no profit sharing to do. See https://lorenzopieri.com/robotic_commons/
> In fact, the core of capitalism is the ownership of the means of production, and such ownership will keep accumulating ever-widening disparities. If automation keeps advancing, humans will eventually become unnecessary
Welcome to the Marxism 101, the basic idea when observing increasing automation while expanding the ideas of Adam Smith, and some of the more solid parts of the thought (there are both very good bangers and "let's not talk about this" in it)
"Investment" is just an abstraction that we've created to manage resource allocation. If people with wealth didn't "invest" in a way that's productive to society, society can choose a different method of resource allocation that doesn't involve those people having the ability to invest.
So you mean giving a little money and resources should grant you a perpetual license on being the vampire to suck the living soul out of the thing you "invested" in
Don’t forget that technology development is a spectrum. A lot of the basic research that laid the groundwork was funded through public investment. Then the VCs and BigCos come in when the technology is mature enough to be worth the risk of investing in tech transfer to take it all the way to a real product
Where do you think productivity from extending our lifetimes with advances in medicine and biology will go? Oh, you thought by extending our lives, we'll be enjoying it more? No. We'll be just working more.
You don't need investors for this. Example from a non-profit that does R&D, café and music events (and has no investors per its NPO status): no matter how much faster R&D work can be completed, the work hours will never be reduced as this would be unfair to all the other teams. If work gets completed faster it just means that more projects will come in to fill the free time.
Whitney’s cotton gin increased the speed separating cotton fibers from the sticky seeds by 50x. I wonder if labor will experience similar outcomes with the efficiency AI creates?
We work this hard because there's insufficient collective drive to provide for all before the wealthy are allowed to extract.
If 2 people both need something to survive, then collectively the group needs to produce 2 of those things. But if 1 of them demands 1000 of that thing, then collectively they need to produce 1001 of that thing to satisfy the demand.
The problem is that the demand for the extra 999 is given equal weight and competes for production resources vs the 2 that are actually needed instead of explicitly prioritizing the 2 and then letting the 999 come from a secondary pool of post-needs-fulfillment labor. Right now if you produce only the 2, then most of the time the person who only wants the 1 that they need won't get anything at all, and in many cases that means they starve and die.
When the consequence of collectively producing less than the total sum demanded by the wealthy is that some people will then starve and die, that hangs like an inverse sword of damocles over the heads of the poor and middle class, always threatening those who can't just buy their way out into laboring more than would be otherwise needed.
The very obvious to me solution is to structurally prioritize meeting everyone's common needs for food/water, shelter, and medical care first before then satisfying the desires of the rich who want more. That way rich people can still get all their private jets and fancy cars, but they'll need to pay more to convince people that the loss of their leisure time is worthwhile instead of everyone in the underclass living under constant threat for survival.
Upvote from me. I am proposing something on these lines, I call it "Basic Post-Scarcity", where basic needs production and maintainance get fully automated and work becomes optional: https://lorenzopieri.com/post_scarcity/.
It's something of a collective action problem even beyond power relations. My motivation to work less than 40h just isn't that high since everyone around me is working 40h too.
Also has to do with demand for savings. The US has a bunch of mostly accidental policies that juice that demand.
One aspect that interests me is the relative difficulty of "part time" employment. We define "full time" as 40 hours a week (number may vary depending on location and field, but that's the stereotypical value). The wage that brings in may be, for successful people in a reasonably lucrative field, substantially more than needed for a comfortable life.
But let's say I decide that I'd be happy with my life at 50% of my current pay, and I want to do 50% less work in exchange. 20 hours per week instead of 40. If you're in the kind of job that makes enough for this to work, you probably can't do it. 20 hours per week is for crappy jobs in retail and food service. It's very unlikely that you'll find a tech job willing to employ you part time at any pay level.
So even if I, personally, am sufficiently productive and sufficiently compensated that I could afford to work a lot less than people did 50 years ago, I can't do it. At least, I can't do it on a rolling basis. The closest I can come is to retire early. Or maybe take some years off in the middle of my career, but that's extremely risky. I definitely can't cut my hours and pay in half in a given week, or month, or even year.
Answer: People are reluctant to live in 2026 the way they did in 1973.
The additional compensation is a statistical artifact that accounts for air conditioning, iPhones, reliable cars that last 20 years, the Internet, etc.
but the unaffordability crisis stems from housing, food, fuel, etc. people aren't struggling because of an iphone they buy every few years, or the $20/month their AC adds to their monthly summer utility bill.
Seems like tragedy of the commons principle - if everyone was chilling and working 20 hour weeks, I'd do the same. But people hustle and grind to get rich so that's the culture I have to adapt to.
IMO: if my company slows down to a healthier 30 hours, we lose to competitors and lose our livelihoods. So we have to keep up the 40 hours or disappear. Seems like so much effort is wasted in competition.
To demonstrate that this is a nonsense, you all should work 50 hour weeks for a year, thus obviously destroying your competition, and then dial back down to 30 hours weeks for the rest of time.
The "we" in this is a missing a piece: the size of the labor force. It's shrinking. Has been for 20+ years, with a peak around 2000.
Some people are working hard. The growing demographic is the retired, the trust-funded and those NEET-ing around on various forms of subsistence income. Another few years we'll be back to post-war levels ~%58 of participation, where two-parent homes prevailed, and one stayed home.
because we don't have organized labor, all current working conditions in the US have been provided by through organized labor — child labor laws, weekends, 8 hour workdays, breaks, you name it... employers have never given any of this freely along with productivity gains
it's strange that all these articles about how much we're working don't even peek into the history of how our current structure was formed
the current productivity gains have mostly been captured by the richest, and everyone else is competing against each other for the scraps... if you choose to work less, you are out-competed and lose your status (guess what kind of groups can help avoid this!)
Yeah, it only takes half the time to make the same stuff, but we aren't making the same stuff now, are we? (Or do you all want to go back to the pre-AI, pre-Internet, effectively pre-computer 70s?)
This reminded me of a strange quote I heard a while ago:
"I think the problem we've had is, people decided they didn't want to work so much anymore. (...)
We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. (...)
So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude, and it's go to come through hurting the economy, and that's what the whole world, the governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality."
"The working class is the original and fundamental economic class. . . . The function of the investing
class is to serve the members of the working class by insuring them against loss and by providing
them with desired goods." - Levy
". . . the justification for the existence of the investing class is the service it renders the working
class, measured in terms of wages and desired goods. The contrary is not true. The working class
does not exist to serve the investing class. The working class has the right to insure itself through
organizations composed of its members or through government, thereby eliminating the investing
class." - Levy
Jerome Levy was a committed ideological capitalist.
From that perspective the idea that workers need to be reminded to suffer is like saying insurance companies need to stop paying so many claims to remind us of the risk of house fires....
180 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 96.5 ms ] threadA typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.
We need to react to it with the same intentionality that we did a century ago when we won the 40 hour work week, which still hasn't been entirely eroded despite half a century of chipping away.
The most powerful members of our society (not the hardest working ones) are the ones who set the tone for the rest of us. We only need to continue working this hard as long as we accept their dominion over our society.
That's a choice we make as a society every day, and it's probably a result of the simplistic form of thinking you offer in your comment.
Dig deeper.
When HN comments talk about tech jobs they often mean specific, high-compensation or highly competitive companies.
When competent programmers or engineers have a difficult problem to solve, they will think about it all the time, regardless whether they are "working" long hours in the office or they are doing any other activities, at home or on the street.
It is quite frequent to have the best ideas when you are not in the office "working". For things like programming or designing, the time required to type on a keyboard the solution is never a bottleneck.
At least for myself, the majority of the technical solutions to the problems that I have worked have come to my mind at home, in the morning, immediately when waking up, and the "work" done in the office has always been mostly in typing whatever solution I already had in mind when arriving at the office.
Anyone who believes that a programmer or engineer who "works" e.g. a 50-hour week is more productive than one who "works" a 40-hour week is naive, to not use a more insulting word.
Work for a ramen noodle startup? Sure. Work for a typical profitable company (Atlassian/Xero, whatever) - and I just don't see it.
Especially with the leverage of good LLMs operated well - if anything I find I have less time pressures than more, and I over deliver as compared to almost every one of my peers.
Let me fix that for you.
The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society [hoard wealth beyond the wildest imagination of those in the bottom 99%.]
So much wealth they quite literally don't know what to do with it, and for a cherry on top they're not even happy. The richest man on the planet is a depressed Twitter troll.
Until the general public rightfully takes back the money they've worked generations to generate that _mostly_ flows into the pockets of these (t|b)illionaires, we will continue to see a more stressed and less happy society for all.
In specific bubbles like Silicon Valley startup culture or FAANG this is true.
Greater than 40 hour weeks has been the expectation at several non-FAANG, non-Silicon Valley, non-startup companies where I've worked.
But I don't think people in those jobs realize how uncommon it is. The jobs in the middle of the curve, even tech jobs, are not all that demanding. They also don't pay the high salaries that we correlate with demanding tech jobs, but that goes with the territory.
It's a weird feeling if you've only known hustle-and-grind companies and then you stumble into a more traditional company where nobody is in a rush to get anything done and few people even work for more than 2-4 hours that they're in the office. These jobs are everywhere, though.
To keep perspective, that is illegal in many countries. Not everyone has it so bad. You can make it better.
You explained the symptom but not the root cause, which I did in my heavily downvoted comment.
Every student is conditioned from K to work hard like a robot. Those who refuse to work hard fail out of the school system.
Um. What? That can't be typical. It's not even legal.
I have never worked significantly over 40 hours.
Is this true? It does not matter if Bob works 100 hours a week if his output is not desireable. We are in this state because we WANT more, and there's apparently people out there that are willing to work to give us that.
Also, the West is quite literally living on the backbone of other industrial economy for the past 20 years. So you "luxury" is completely unsustainable with the amount of "work" that you put in because you outsourced all of the labors out.
Some are filling hours with more work however it seems like many are not increasing work volume, just quietly reducing the amount of labor.
Of course "some folks say they work a lot more than they actually do" is also nothing new to AI anyways.
But hey, it's not your employer's job to just hand out money. Demand it. Or, if you truly are a 10x dev, just go solo and work 4 hours a week.
A sysadmin is expected to write scripts to image new machines faster, not continue to set up each one painstakingly by hand.
A ruler will always prefer to rule over 100 wretches, than be an equal with 100 peers. And people all over the world have been bred to submit by relentless head stomping by family, school and media.
But the current order will end without violence and be forgotten as foolishness, just like the spell of the feared Soviet terror regime ended as if people woke up from a dream. Just like the strangle grip of popes, priests and monks ended and is now the source of ridicule. Our children's children will look with nothing at disgust at how the current population worship "governments", "authorities" and so on - all of these illusions made up of some of the least admirable people alive.
money =\= purchasing power. if they print enough (and spend it themselves first into the economy), then the purchasing power is being siphoned away towards the source of the new money.
see the cantillon effect.
1. Boyce, Brown & Moore (2010), “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction”
This is a significant claim. What do you base this on? Are there any studies or references?
This book is most famous for being misquoted by nitwits trying to argue that globalization is always good for everyone, but if you had asked David Ricardo he would have said his most important result was that of Rent (later specified as differential rent or Ricardian rent), the idea that economic productivity tends to get squeezed onto land prices. A modern update would argue that this applies to assets more generally. Assets go up by squeezing productivity out of the main economy. Whether you think this is brilliant or terrible depends largely on whether you own lots of assets.
The "golden billion" people almost all live in luxury, by the standards of an early industrial society like the early 19th century Europe which Marx described, and daily use a ton of amenities which even the mightiest king could not afford 1000 years ago. But we take it for granted.
I could have taken my savings and downshifted to a comfortable life in a third-world country. But instead I've put them in my wife's business, and keep working, while living in one of the most expensive cities in the Solar system. This is because I want a better education for my children, and success for the business. (The city is also enjoyable when I have the time.)
Then, some amenities are still expensive. Think about medical care, especially larger-scale like cardiac surgery. Well, think about the cost of a Claude subscription if you live otherwise happily for $25 / day in an inexpensive third-world countryside.
We work so much because there's still utility in it, in many cases. We have plenty, but not plenty enough.
I realized it wasn’t making me happy. Sitting inside everyday is not how I want to spend my life. Now I live in a mountain town of 10,000. There is no traffic. We ride everywhere in town. I work 10-20 hours a week on writing and books, depending on the season. I snowboard 100 days a season. We took our 6 month old on a trip for a year (wife got 18 months maternity leave) she works 3 days a week.
I cut our firewood so we have no heating bill, have no phone, no tv. We really enjoy the simple life. We have plenty of time to host dinner gatherings, hang out with our daughter, hike, camp etc.
We did a 10 day wilderness canoe trip with friends this summer, it was unreal.
We realized More money will not make us happier. We don’t want more money. More time doing the things we love with family and friends will. The choice is there.
I love the city, the friend group, being into some communities that do not exist in small towns.
If you'd put the outdoorsy small town lifestyle on me, I'd kill myself.
I'm really happy for you it worked out, but what you suggest is not an overall solution. (And just imagine how your town would look like, if we all moved out of the cities ... we'd create new cities).
The fact that cities are big is cause by people wanting to live there, not elsewhere.
Actually, people moved to cities to get a job, when it became harder to have one in the country side because of industrialisation.
(*) but you started off as the kind of person who could afford that choice
They are the reason I choose to work less - to spend time with them doing the things we love.
The research strongly suggests that the most important factor in giving a child a better education is the degree of parental involvement. Do you think working and focus on business success gives you more attention capacity to be involved with your child's education than the downshifted option would have?
So, the good news is that even if you want to give your best in that area, you only have to endure for five years, give or take. Something tells me you won't be packing your bags after that, though. It may not be your intention, but the combination of words gives the impression you're actually more interested in the appearance of giving your child a good education than giving a good education.
I knew WHAT I wanted to learn, just not how to learn it, how to nurture and guide myself. it was a big deal and it still is
That’s not ambition, that’s desire. Ambition is wanting to do more.
Hey, hopefully some of you techbros can 'disrupt' the status quo.
Post 2008 it has been about 6-8
(Well unless You say “near 5” is 3-9)
If anything, it’s many of the basics that have become more expensive. Housing and education are far more expensive today then 100 years ago (as a share of average salary). And some essentials like health care, while more effective today, definitely absorbs a much higher share of people’s wallets (and the nation’s GDP).
That may be broadly true, but it's descriptive, not prescriptive.
There are many relatively poor people (with physical needs met, but not always) who are far happier than most of the top 1%. The secret is character -- things like contentment, thankfulness, and showing faithful love to family and people in general.
But if machines produce more, couldn't the state provide free services rather than cash? In kind provision could be less dependent on wages than taxation is.
Then couldn't we divide the monetary system further — not as banknotes, but by subdividing it? Would the administrative system be too difficult after all?
In other words, if the problem is that only the "wage" earned for participating in production grants the right to consume, then shouldn't tickets to the means of production also be distributed?
Still, no matter how I think about it, in the end it comes down to the problem of distribution. The OP also gives capital ownership as an example, but...
If automation can enable substantial production without human labor, then what on earth is the reason we should keep demanding that humans do wage labor for survival? I find myself thinking about this a lot these days.
Someone who did not participate in production can consume the product because they own capital. Then what is the basis on which that right arises?
In fact, economic logic, when you think about it, seems to be mostly a kind of circular reasoning. It says "capital's share equals its marginal contribution," but that market itself is ultimately something created by power.
Sometimes I have thoughts like this. In fact, the core of capitalism is the ownership of the means of production, and such ownership will keep accumulating ever-widening disparities. If automation keeps advancing, humans will eventually become unnecessary — and then how will the market be maintained? We cannot give everyone a claim on automated production. In the end, a ruling class and a ruled class will inevitably exist, and the question becomes how the ruling class can rule entirely with the consent of the ruled. Lately, it seems this principle no longer works in capitalism.
Welcome to the Marxism 101, the basic idea when observing increasing automation while expanding the ideas of Adam Smith, and some of the more solid parts of the thought (there are both very good bangers and "let's not talk about this" in it)
History shows most innovations would have happened anyway without big dependence on individuals, which is overrated most of the time.
Humanity really doesn’t need billionaires
It's the ability to not work a day in one's life because of inherited investment.
For example, I don't consider Jim Simons to be in the investor class.
Nothing prevents any of us from similarly figuring out how to make a money via investment.
But Simon's descendants are in the investor class.
They are not the ones who invested to make those productivity gains possible.
In fact those descendants may not even understand what "productivity gains" mean.
Also I am going to be in the alleyway with a bag of glue if you’re keen. But I am not going to make any more money as I called in sick to work.
If 2 people both need something to survive, then collectively the group needs to produce 2 of those things. But if 1 of them demands 1000 of that thing, then collectively they need to produce 1001 of that thing to satisfy the demand.
The problem is that the demand for the extra 999 is given equal weight and competes for production resources vs the 2 that are actually needed instead of explicitly prioritizing the 2 and then letting the 999 come from a secondary pool of post-needs-fulfillment labor. Right now if you produce only the 2, then most of the time the person who only wants the 1 that they need won't get anything at all, and in many cases that means they starve and die.
When the consequence of collectively producing less than the total sum demanded by the wealthy is that some people will then starve and die, that hangs like an inverse sword of damocles over the heads of the poor and middle class, always threatening those who can't just buy their way out into laboring more than would be otherwise needed.
The very obvious to me solution is to structurally prioritize meeting everyone's common needs for food/water, shelter, and medical care first before then satisfying the desires of the rich who want more. That way rich people can still get all their private jets and fancy cars, but they'll need to pay more to convince people that the loss of their leisure time is worthwhile instead of everyone in the underclass living under constant threat for survival.
Also has to do with demand for savings. The US has a bunch of mostly accidental policies that juice that demand.
The fact that we can do in 16 hours what we used to in 40 doesn't suddenly mean that people are only willing to work 16 hours.
But let's say I decide that I'd be happy with my life at 50% of my current pay, and I want to do 50% less work in exchange. 20 hours per week instead of 40. If you're in the kind of job that makes enough for this to work, you probably can't do it. 20 hours per week is for crappy jobs in retail and food service. It's very unlikely that you'll find a tech job willing to employ you part time at any pay level.
So even if I, personally, am sufficiently productive and sufficiently compensated that I could afford to work a lot less than people did 50 years ago, I can't do it. At least, I can't do it on a rolling basis. The closest I can come is to retire early. Or maybe take some years off in the middle of my career, but that's extremely risky. I definitely can't cut my hours and pay in half in a given week, or month, or even year.
We aren't competing with workers from 1973, we're competing with other workers leveraging the same accelerated efficiency.
The additional compensation is a statistical artifact that accounts for air conditioning, iPhones, reliable cars that last 20 years, the Internet, etc.
Some people are working hard. The growing demographic is the retired, the trust-funded and those NEET-ing around on various forms of subsistence income. Another few years we'll be back to post-war levels ~%58 of participation, where two-parent homes prevailed, and one stayed home.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
Peaked in 2000 at 67.3%. It's now around 61.8%. That's over an 8% decrease. Hadn't realized it was that significant.
I recommend everybody spend some time poking around FRED occasionally. It's a good reality check.
it's strange that all these articles about how much we're working don't even peek into the history of how our current structure was formed
the current productivity gains have mostly been captured by the richest, and everyone else is competing against each other for the scraps... if you choose to work less, you are out-competed and lose your status (guess what kind of groups can help avoid this!)
"I think the problem we've had is, people decided they didn't want to work so much anymore. (...)
We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. (...)
So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude, and it's go to come through hurting the economy, and that's what the whole world, the governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality."
-Tim Gurney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJHP0VfeOrU&t=12s
". . . the justification for the existence of the investing class is the service it renders the working class, measured in terms of wages and desired goods. The contrary is not true. The working class does not exist to serve the investing class. The working class has the right to insure itself through organizations composed of its members or through government, thereby eliminating the investing class." - Levy
Jerome Levy was a committed ideological capitalist.
From that perspective the idea that workers need to be reminded to suffer is like saying insurance companies need to stop paying so many claims to remind us of the risk of house fires....