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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30985 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Why we don't have a 10 hour work week.

I am not an economist, but it feels like there is an easy and obvious solution to why we don't have a 10 hour work week despite increased economic productivity.

Let's say I work 40 hours a week. I get paid 100k per year. Now, let's say I negotiate with my employer a deal to work only 20 hours a week. How much should I get paid?

The answer, of course, is much less than 50k. Although I will be doing half as much work, the overhead of my employment (health care, HR, managing me) has not decreased by 50%. Perhaps, depending on that overhead, the value of my half-time employment is now only 25k a year, or maybe even 0!

Let's take this a step further. Let's say I'm a surgeon that trains for 10 years and then works for 30 years after training. Let's assign a cost of 1 to the training years and a benefit of 1 to the working years. The surgeon has a net value of 20. If now, he only works half as much, his net value doesn't go to 10, it goes to 5. We now need to train 4 times as many surgeons.

People naivëly assume that, as a society, we have a choice to work half as much and be half as rich. I don't think this is the case. By working half as much, we might see a 75% or more reduction in material prosperity.

This is obvious when we look at who works. Contrary to what most people think, rich people work more. People who earn more per hour tend to work more hours. They get highly compensated for additional labor, and are therefore more incentived to perform it. This is as it should be. A society where the highly skilled work fewer hours is one that seems a massive decline in standard of living (as per the surgeon example above) Expensive assets need to be utilized more completely than cheap, replaceable assets. We can afford it if the poor work few hours. In fact, in the United States and other western countries this is already the case.

This obviously has huge implications for inequality. Too reduce inequality, we have to reduce the rewards that high-income people get for their labor. But this will cause a large reduction in the hours worked by high skilled people and will cause a much larger decrease in GDP than the reduction in hours. By tolerating inequality, we can have a much higher level of economic output, and thus more money to be spent on social welfare programs. The costs to reduce inequality are very high indeed.

The employment regulation with regards to benefits for full time employees also creates a stagnant market. You’d imagine without these sorts of regulatory requirements on hours worked per week, there could be much more flexibility and experimentation with different working hours in different business types.

In my view the amount of hours needed per week should vary drastically by industry, but unfortunately that’s not possible because we’ve decided all full time work is 40 hours, period. This has massive switching costs for the economy and labor market especially.

This is wrong. Tell your average employee to do the same work in 75% of the time, and he'll get rid of some slack, maybe kick off some small client who isn't worth the trouble, so that in the end in dollar terms he will have produced 95 percent of the economic output in 75 percent of time. First to go are the least productive tasks.

When france passed the 35 hour work week, productivity increased. In the developed world , less hours worked is correlated with higher GDP per hour worked. Historically, working time fell while productivity increased. You’d have to explain Japan's abysmal productivity despite long hours, and europe’s ‘all else equal’ superior productivity to the US.

You're wrong, and that's fine, I'm pissed at the others more, who obliquely refer to and imply what I just said, without directly attacking your point. Are we too agreeable? Have we gone soft?

Contrary to what most people think, rich people work more.

This is not true, both in anecdote and data.

Data says they work about 3 hours per weak on average, but other data says that as much as 70% of their total work is business travel, lunches, seminars, trade shows, "meetings", etc.

EG: Not actually work at all.

This lines up with my one wagie experience where I got to know exactly what a couple suits were doing with their day, and it was mostly facebook and porn, except for the days where it was mostly spending company money on entertainment

Data says

Source? That seems quite extreme.

It's iffy shit; there is no way to actually get rock hard data on this because of the obvious reasons.

We do have their self reported hours several places (such as: https://executivetimeuse.org/ ; the Harvard BS survey, etc. ), which generally claim 55-60ish hours but include lunches, dinners, exercise, personal enrichment, golf, and etc. as hours worked.

You can find the breakdowns if you google around; the more financial elite vs cultural elite friendly the given institution is the less they actually publish about what 'hours worked' means.

This isn't entirely theoretical, there are European countries with more generous paid leave and lower unemployment rates that have much lower hours worked per worker. You can look at GDP per Capita per Hour Worked per worker and see how that correlates with productivity. Matt Brunieg has an old blog post comparing U.S. and the Nordics that suggests the relationship is relatively linear and they at least are able to work less hours per work and maintain comparable GDP/hour, and obviously there are tons of confounding variables. They do this by giving people long summer vacations rather than shorter work weeks

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/05/31/work-levels-in-the-us-and-nordic-countries/

Given the demographics of the Nordics (and the oil wealth in Norway), shouldn't we expect the Nordics to have a GDP/hour worked far in excess of the U.S.? The fact that they don't is interesting.

What if we only looked at U.S. workers of at least 25% Nordic descent and reran the comparison? I think we'd see Nordic-descended U.S. workers far outstripping their peers in Nordic countries in terms of GDP/hour worked.

I think we should always be careful using Nordic countries as comparisons. "Let's take a look at these high-IQ, ethnically homogenous, high-trust societies. Now compare them to the United States!".

Norway does outstrip the U.S. in GDP/hours worked because of oil, at least in the 2016 data.

If Danish Americans have higher productivity than Danes it could be due to American institutions and increasing marginal returns on hours worked. It could also be that Danish Americans, as members of a much larger society with a wider range of IQ's can primarily occupy managerial and technical roles, where a larger share of Danes in Denmark end up mopping floors, waiting tables and taking care of kids because there isn't a population of low IQ people to do it for them.

I'll grant the Nordics aren't a perfect comparison class but what country that has achieved a major reduction in hours per worker is? Just going off Wikipedia's Labor Productivity & average hours worked list Germany has a GDP per hour of 68.85 vs. the US's 73 but 1300 hours per worker vs. America's 1,765. The UK has a much lower GDP per capita 54.35 but much closer hours worked, 1670. France has 68.63 GDP/hour and 1514 Hours worked.

OP is proposing a highly non linear relationship between hours workers and productivity. No one has reduced hours worked to the 20 hour work week (~1000/year) but within the range of hours per worker we see internationally the countries with the fewest hours worked have pretty high productivity. If you assume there is even a linear relationship than Europe is a bunch of sleeping giants economically that could increase their GDP by 20% overnight by skipping summer vacation.

The fewer hours worked, the larger proportion of your working time is overhead seems like a sensible observation. But it doesn't lend itself to any specific choice of what amount of overhead is acceptable. And there's also a trade-off of the more hours worked, the larger proportion of your working effectiveness is lost to fatigue. And both of those trade-offs likely vary widely job-to-job. And possibly in non-obvious ways, given that as a knowledge worker, my time "not working" regularly includes having some work problem in the back of my mind.

As far as I know high-intensity knowledge work like programming or data analysis gains huge boosts in productivity per hour if people work fewer hours and days. The other way to read that is that almost nobody can do this kind of work at full concentration for 8 hours straight but they will happily let you pay them for 8 hours.

Contrary to what most people think, rich people work more.

"Facts" not in evidence. I suspect the only jobs where marginal productivity doesn't decline sharply with time worked are highly monitored, low intensity, repetitive ones, like warehouse worker or truck driver. Hence your inequality statement is backwards -- the people who get hurt most by shorter hours are already low paid.

This obviously has huge implications for inequality. Too reduce inequality, we have to reduce the rewards that high-income people get for their labor. But this will cause a large reduction in the hours worked by high skilled people and will cause a much larger decrease in GDP than the reduction in hours. By tolerating inequality, we can have a much higher level of economic output, and thus more money to be spent on social welfare programs. The costs to reduce inequality are very high indeed.

Or bigger families, more kids, etc. The robber baron fortunes dissolved so fast, in a few generations, because it was diluted rapidly due to large families, lavish personal spending, and philanthropic projects. Rich people, elites having fewer kids and delaying family formation probably contributes to rising inequality. Jeff Bezos' divorce for example cut his net worth a lot.

True, but they donated and spent a lot too. Today's top tech billionaires hold on to their wealth much better it seems, but some billionaires have pledged to give away all fortune and leave none or little to kids. Also, the oil, rail, coal, industries faced major headwinds in the 20th century that I don't think big tech will suffer. The rise of highways hurt rail for example.

The robber baron fortunes dissolved so fast, in a few generations, because it was diluted rapidly due to large families, lavish personal spending, and philanthropic projects.

Did they? citation needed.

Carnegie' daughter and grandchildren all went on to occupy (and i suspect still do occupy) positions of wealth and power. The family of Henry Ford still own a controlling stake in Ford Motors. The upper ranks of the oil industry and east coast politics are both rife with Rockefellers, and JP Morgan is JP Morgan.

Thier wealth and influence is readily apperant today its just that they aren't the robber barons anymore the are the "old money". The folks sitting in the proverbial smoke filled rooms calling the shots for organizations with names like Ford, Cheveron, General Electric, and Chase Bank. Perhaps you may of heard of them.

the Vanderbilts completely blew their fortune. the Kennedy fortune has been diluted to almost nothing now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation

worth just $6 billion. tiny compared to Forbes 50 wealth. The Ford Foundation only worth $16 billion. Also tiny.

I was talking about personal fortune in regard to the OP talking about wealth inequality. Not lineage, which will obviously outlast wealth.

In terms of influence, I think that too is overstated. How often do you hear about any of these old families in the news anymore? Soros and Gates, who earned their wealth, get way more coverage and have more influence. Just running a company is not the same as moving pieces on the political chessboard.

In addition to what @2rafa and @The_Nybbler said you seem to be operating under the impression that the philanthropic organizations established by the respective families represents the sum total of thier net worth. This is simply not the case. The Ford family fortune is not just the Ford Foundation, it is the Ford Foundation plus a 40% stake in Ford Motors, an NFL franchise, and the various other privately held assets of its members.

Likewise the wealth of the Rockefellers is not just the Rockefeller Foundation its the foundation plus owning Standard Oil Chevron and shit-tonne of prime Manhattan realesate.

That individual members of these dynasties may rank lower than guys like Bezos, Gates, or Musk, has less to do with the robber barons "squandering thier wealth" than it does simple longevity.

I say lets see what shape Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla are in after 100 years of operation before we assume that our current generation of industrialists are any smarter than thier predecessors.

Kennedy wasn't a robber baron; he was a Prohibition-era bootlegger. And why would they want to be heard about in the news?

I’ve heard many of tech employees joke up 300k and 10 hrs a week during COVID.

Seems like Musks proved that was true.

Anecdotally, quite a few people that "work a lot" are actually just nominally present for a large number of hours, available in a fashion that's close to on-call, but not really doing what you'd think of as work. How many of us that post here do so while we're "working"? How many things are purchased on Amazon during standard office hours? The standard work week may not have formally changed, but quite a few white-collar employees have quietly elected to work 20 hours per week and most businesses don't seem to really care as long as the core work gets done.

If you look at produce in grocery stores, they tolerate some spoilage in order to make sure that they don't completely run out of any particular vegetable. It's difficult to predict exact sales of any particular fruit or vegetable and inconveniencing the consumer by running out loses more customers than passing on the cost savings of lower spoilage gains.

For some industries there could be a similar effect with labor, where having some slack in the system increases your ability to reliably meet tight deadlines and match peak demand. That reliability may be more valuable than the labor cost savings.

How many of us that post here do so while we're "working"? How many things are purchased on Amazon during standard office hours? The standard work week may not have formally changed, but quite a few white-collar employees have quietly elected to work 20 hours per week and most businesses don't seem to really care as long as the core work gets done.

Could be worth mentioning that load on porn servers correlates very nicely with US working hours...

US working hours are almost European downtime, mind you, so..

I know this because I was once in a position to be analyzing load on some mid-size porn servers; therefore I can also confirm that on these particular ones the Euro load was negligible. Also traffic was down in general on the weekends, which surprised me.

Also traffic was down in general on the weekends, which surprised me.

Not me. Stuff to do, time to go out, visit people etc.

Still, odd. I doubt that many people are looking at porn at work, it's probably more related to people out of the workforce..

but quite a few white-collar employees have quietly elected to work 20 hours per week and most businesses don't seem to really care as long as the core work gets done.

Another explanation is that businesses have no way of measuring core work and tolerate lots of useless mouths, i.e. Twitter prior to Elon.

But you're forgetting about all those new products like Nexus Q and Google Plus and Google Health and Google Pay and Hangouts and Loon and Google Fiber and Allo and...

(OK, Google Pay actually still exists. But the first few iterations burned, fell over, and/or sank into the swamp)

Google is a mature company which wants its shares to trade with the P/E of a startup (in the sense that senior and middle management have a very direct, personal, interest in a short-term run-up in the stock price, not in the long-term profitability of the core business). The easiest way to do that is to convince investors that management are entrepreneurial geniuses who are going to come up with another "big enchilada" that will be as profitable in 2040 as Google Search is now. Both management and the investors know that getting there involves a lot of failed investments. So investing in all those new "products" is somewhere between an honest-but-unsuccessful strategy of running an internal VC operation and an unusual way of spending the investor relations budget.

What you say about the overhead of work definitely makes sense, and I agree, but my question would be, why have we decided as a society that a 40 hour workweek is the general standard? How did we come to that particular number? Why is it that most employers don't require a 60 or 80 hour workweek instead, even if only implicit? Why are almost all work places willing to tolerate 40 hours as the optimal balance between overhead and productivity?

Why are almost all work places willing to tolerate 40 hours as the optimal balance between overhead and productivity?

Capital holders don't prefer such low hours, but they'll take what they can get when labor movements win. The 8-hour day has an interesting enough history and it surely doesn't look like the shareholders simply deciding that it's the optimal amount of time to get max returns.

I wonder if 8 hours of work a day for the 5 workdays managed to become a popular standard due to it cleanly cutting in half the 16 hours a day that most adults are expected to be awake. It's just easy to wrap your head around the idea of cutting up the day into thirds of 8 hours each. I don't know why 5 workdays became standard instead of 6 or 7. Perhaps 7 was out due to the influence of Christianity in most Western nations meaning there had to be 1 day of rest, and perhaps 1 more day on top of that just made sense for giving people more flexibility.

I wonder if 8 hours of work a day for the 5 workdays managed to become a popular standard due to it cleanly cutting in half the 16 hours a day that most adults are expected to be awake. It's just easy to wrap your head around the idea of cutting up the day into thirds of 8 hours each.

This was explicit in some of labor movement arguments for the 8 hour workday. For example, Wikipedia has this banner reading

8 hours labour

8 hours recreation

8 hours rest

I'm so glad I get to spend my 8 hours of recreation commuting, paying bills, dealing with house issues, cleaning, shopping, etc.

At the time the 8 hour day campaign was going on, your wife would have done most of those things. Commuting is an obvious exception, but according to my relatives on the working-class side of the family, typical working class commutes were much shorter then than they are now. (My grandfather was able to cycle home, eat, and cycle back to work within his lunch hour).

Well what's the alternative?

Well, I guess if they factored the fact that everyone has to manage their own life into the equation, and devoted some time to that, too. Or at least commuting time. 7 hours of work, 7 hours of recreation, 1 hour commuting, 1 hour dealing with other shit, and 8 hours sleep. Or something.

I work from home, what do I get?

You get to masturbate during staff meetings, what more do you need?

Dunno. I'm not claiming to have a perfect system or anything. I just think that if the "8 hours for ___" system is really why things are the way they are (and I have heard that referenced before as a reason), then it seems pretty shitty that so much of people's time is prespent on stuff that doesn't make them happy or better off in any way. It can certainly be difficult to manage one's life on so little time per day, and still feel happy and like life is worth living, that you're not just frittering away your life doing chores, with no recreation to speak of.

Of course, it's fucking criminal that commute time comes out of "recreation" time and not "labour" time.

If my coworker buys a condo that's a two hour series of public transportation transfers to our work, should he get to work half days every day?

And me paying much more for my house and car that affords me a 20 minute commute. Shall I work a full day to pick up his slack?

No, he should get paid for his time commuting though, or he probably shouldn't have that job.

Why should he give up an additional four hours of his time per day -- half his recreation time! -- for free?

He's getting $100k/yr for ~2000 hours at his desk. You are getting the same. The fact that it takes him 3000 hours of work (and you only 2100) to reach those 2000 desk-hours is immaterial. If he doesn't like getting paid $33.33/hr (vs your $47.62), he should find a different job.

EDIT: for the other half of your solution: Should he be banned from a mutually-acceptable job at $33.33/hr with 12-hour days, just because the wage must be $47.62 for that position?

The fact that it takes him 3000 hours of work (and you only 2100) to reach those 2000 desk-hours is immaterial.

No, it's not. It's the most material fact of all! Work should not be so able to cut into a person's free time! This should not be so accepted! Shed your slave morality and work to live, not live to work!

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It's a trade off no matter what. Currently he is trading that time for the luxury of his home arrangement at the budget he likes. Alternatively he can keep the time and pay more, or keep the time and money and live somewhere crappier.

So he's going to get paid the equivalent of half a senior engineer's salary to wait two hours each way each day because he bought a condo in the city and takes public transportation.

I will work as much as him but not get paid that extra 50% total pay amount because I chose to buy a place reasonably close to work.

Choose to live near work or choose to burn personal time traveling to work. If someone values their own time so very little that they get a place far from work, then no one owes them any money. We certainly don't need the perverse incentive of paying people to have extra long commutes.

So he's going to get paid the equivalent of half a senior engineer's salary to wait two hours each way each day because he bought a condo in the city and takes public transportation.

That time is not his own, so yes, he should be compensated for it.

I will work as much as him but not get paid that extra 50% total pay amount because I chose to buy a place reasonably close to work.

And you are being paid in four hours of time per day.

Choose to live near work or choose to burn personal time traveling to work. If someone values their own time so very little that they get a place far from work, then no one owes them any money. We certainly don't need the perverse incentive of paying people to have extra long commutes.

On the contrary, it's you who doesn't value your time, as you spend it on work, willingly, without asking for recompense. And we don't need to be wasting our lives on ever-longer commutes from cheaper outlying towns into designated economic activity areas, either. Maybe the employer can implement remote working if it bothers them so much?

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Because he could have chosen to live across the street from his place of work. Commutes are basically a self-imposed Georgist tax of sorts.

I don't know why 5 workdays became standard instead of 6 or 7. Perhaps 7 was out due to the influence of Christianity in most Western nations meaning there had to be 1 day of rest, and perhaps 1 more day on top of that just made sense for giving people more flexibility.

In the US, until relatively recently, there was a 6 day work week. From Wikipedia:

In 1908, the first five-day workweek in the United States was instituted by a New England cotton mill so that Jewish workers would not have to work on the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.[12] In 1926, Henry Ford began shutting down his automotive factories for all of Saturday and Sunday, due to pressures stemming from the October Revolution,[citation needed] which witnessed the ruling class persecuted for not giving the laborers dignifying conditions. In 1929, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was the first union to demand and receive a five-day workweek. The rest of the United States slowly followed, but it was not until 1940, when a provision of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act mandating a maximum 40-hour workweek went into effect, that the two-day weekend was adopted nationwide.[12]

It's probably just tradition. I'd point out that very high value employees (surgeons, CEOs, Tesla engineers) often do work 60 or 80 hours a week.

Tradesmen usually work more than 40 hours a week but are expected to kick their apprentices out of the van to avoid them getting overtime. So ‘government regulations’ are the obvious-seeming reason- blue collar workers would have to have their hours cut the rest of the week to work Saturdays, and once they’re shut down lots of white collar employment is just network effects.

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