Report suggests 21 hours is the ideal work week
news.bbc.co.uk
news.bbc.co.uk
The gist of it is that you can take the dividends of increasing productivity in a lot of ways. As computers get faster, you can keep paying $2k for a new computer every 3-4 years and get a better one, or you can take some of that technology-advancement dividend in cash, and buy a netbook that's still better than your old computer. He's basically arguing that you should take some of the modern era's productivity dividend in leisure time, instead of just in more income and material wealth.
From the author of the report:
"So many of us live to work, work to earn, and earn to consume, and our consumption habits are squandering the earth's natural resources.
"Spending less time in paid work could help us to break this pattern. We'd have more time to be better parents, better citizens, better carers and better neighbours.
"We could even become better employees - less stressed, more in control, happier in our jobs and more productive.
"It is time to break the power of the old industrial clock, take back our lives and work for a sustainable future."
Basically, it seems the argument is that the more hours we work, the externalities of work increase sharply (you don't have time to spend raising your kids, taking care of your health, and you do have more money to spend on things you don't need).
Basically, at 21 hours, the marginal return from working another hour at your job equals the marginal return from spending an hour doing your own stuff. Beyond 21 hours the marginal return from working (minus externalities), is less than the return from focusing on your own activities.
For this group of people, the average family is supported by only 800 hours of work/year (about 16 hours/week).
This group of people has all the food they need (in fact, they typically eat vastly more than they need), a house to live in (about half own the home), most own an AC, a car, a TV, all the basic comforts.
You can read about this group of people, their lifestyle and their choices here:
(FYI: For things regarding welfare, do not read heritage unless you're applying a skeptical eye. Everyone has an agenda, but their entire purpose of being is an agenda.)
Incidentally, this article is simply an aggregations of statistics available from various government sources (e.g., census, BLS). Regardless of their agenda, their facts seem well supported.
"Average poor american has bigger living arrangements than the average Paris resident" -- really? The average subsistence farmer has bigger living arrangements than the average Manhattan banker, as well.
The US is a very capitalistic country (in a good way) and we have very little in the way of social welfare (in a sometimes inefficient way) -- being poor here isn't easy, even if it's not an automatic death sentence.
What the article shows is that in terms of living conditions, the American poor do not suffer much. Most of them have enough space to live in (more than Manhattan bankers you probably consider rich), enough food to eat (also more than those Manhattan bankers, judging by waistlines), a car to drive and all sorts of household appliances. In short, the poor have all their material needs met, and they manage this with only 16 hours of work/week.
In fact, the article shows that the modern poor are richer than the middle class of the recent past. In short, you can take the modern era's productivity gains and spend it on leisure rather than material wealth. Millions of people already do so.
What I consider "ridiculous" about the statistics is that they aren't indicators of anything -- they're just ways of slicing things so that they appeal to the mindset I described above. In reality, many of these people keep trying harder and harder but good jobs are fewer and farther between -- not everybody is in technology or the service economy.
Additionally, out of 37.3 million poor people, only 7.5 million were either employed or seeking work for more than 27 weeks/year.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf
I'm also curious why you are bringing this up again: I already pointed out your mistaken beliefs about the working habits of the poor 9 days ago.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102216
As for the statistics given in my previous source, they are indicators of the fact that the modern poor are richer than the middle class of recent history. All of which proves my original point: "You can take the modern era's productivity dividend in leisure time."
I mean, I'm sure there are some, but you really think that, let's say, a majority of the people you're painting with this brush are saying to themselves "yeah man, why get a job, it's not like I'm gonna starve to death"? What % of the poor would you say they are, ballpark? Honest question, or if you'd prefer, how else am I missing your point?
But the fact that 80% of the poor are not even looking for a job suggests they are not that unhappy about lacking productive employment.
That aside, I think that the article does not address another important (probably too recent) reason/ambition for increased work load: improving ones social status. As already indicated this probably was a non-issue when the article was authored, but then again my comment would fall into the just-for-the-record category...
Spending less time at work makes it possible to do all these things and it is something that I would very much like to do.
Of course, since I am working 60-70 hour work weeks, perhaps doing other stuff is just seductive to me right now.
Now that's out of the way, I disagree with extending PG's "Pie Fallacy" like this. As PG mentions in his article repeatedly, wealth is not the same thing as money. The pie of products that people will trade money for is quite limited, and unless you have a farm and don't mind living in a shack, you will need money.
The probability that people made obsolete will then create something useful in order to barter their "wealth" for money, money for supplies, and finally supplies for a living, is exceedingly small. Think about how many of you here are making niche web-apps that would be the first things to drop off of a customer's expenses when the market declines.
It is true that overall wealth would increase if everyone just worked on something else (even if it is unlikely to be traded for currency), but that is exactly what the article is suggesting: generating wealth in the community.
In the end, all this illustrates is a power struggle. A business owner will seek to turn all productivity increases into profit. Employees will seek to maintain or increase salary per effort. These two goals are fundamentally opposed. The reason the article sounds so absurd is because it is arguing in the favor of employees at the expense of business owners.
http://neweconomics.org/press-releases/hospital-cleaners-wor...
Horse's mouth, incidentally: http://neweconomics.org/press-releases/shorter-working-week-...
With the rest of the time I do wildly different things. Last year I simply wasted it, learned Clojure, did social stuff, read a whole lot. The year before it was two startups at once. Which was predictably very fun and unsuccessful.
I work SEO for 3h59, and then I started a school in India teaching children how to use the computer....and I also have been traveling to a new country every 4 month2 for 2 years to study the language (i speak spanish italian and portuguese, lived in italy spain argentina brazil and India)
This has been brought home to me over the past few months, since I switched to contracting and mostly working from home. I had originally hoped to gain more independence and perhaps increase my income a bit, but not particularly aimed to reduce my working time. In practice, I worked a much lower number of hours for several months, due to some third party problems reducing the pace of the project below what my clients and I had wanted. Of course, this hit my income pretty hard on an hourly rate. However, it also gave me a lot of spare time to relax and offload the past few years of work stress, learn about new things, get back into some hobbies I'd been missing, spend more time with family and friends, and so on. Last year was probably the most enjoyable time I've had since I started full-time work, and many friends and family have commented on how much happier I seem these days.
I'm happy to be pushing he hours and income back up again now, so I can consider things like buying a nice house and supporting a family, because those things matter to me too. But we did just fine on a lower financial income but with more free time for a while, and I'd happily do it again from time to time rather than be the live-to-work guy for my whole life.
I calculated that I needed to work one 8 hour day per month to maintain that lifestyle indefinitely.
Naturally, a guy with a laptop and unlimited free time will find something to keep busy, so that was also the trip that launched my first couple entrepreneurial sites.
rent - wife pays $450, I pay $450
For this amount in Texas, you get a duplex with backyard in a nice neighborhood, a coffee shop and bus stop around the corner, 2 bedrooms, a garage, and 1200 square feet.
utilities - 150
student loan - 100
monthly unlimited bus pass - $25 (used to be $10 until recently)
shared office in downtown austin - $150 (optional, but has already paid for itself many times over due to bringing in extra work)
t-mobile prepaid phone - $100 per 1000 minutes, refill this every 4 months or so.
food costs - never calculated
insurance - on my wife's
$850/rent, $550/food,utilities, etc.
$1400/month total to live. (in San Francisco, no less)
Consult at $100/hr. Need to work ~ 4hrs/week.
However, I work more than that to raise money for our startup, and the time I'm not "working" I'm often spending reading, learning, practicing.
People want to work. Some people want to work hard. Most especially, people want to achieve. The question is where people put their effort; whether they 'level-up' in real life or some artificial one.
Like starving?
There is nothing natural or inevitable about what’s considered ‘normal’ today. Time, like work, has become commodified – a recent legacy of industrial capitalism. Yet the logic of industrial time is out of step with today’s conditions, where instant communications and mobile technologies bring new risks and pressures, as well as opportunities.
This is right in every respect, I think.
It is taken by many as an article of faith that there are 10x productivity differences in knowledge workers. If we actually mean that, then 2x differences in numbers of hours worked should be quite sustainable. As I've said before, why should my daily life be fit to the schedule designed to maximize the productivity of illiterate water loom operators.
Where this report gets really really wacky is assuming that everyone can do it, which probably requires massive amounts of wealth flowing around to support unproductive workers. That might even work, for a while at least, if you had some sort of unfair advantage which could conceal you from the market -- taxing authority, perhaps, or such a booming economy that you could afford extravagances like the demands of the United Auto Workers out of the petty cash drawer.
There are also hard limits on how much value can be wrung out of the labor of low-skilled people, and those hard limits work in pretty much direct proportion to hours labored. I think achieving income parity (and relatedly, working hour parity) between them and high-skilled workers is probably a lost cause. I can sell software while sleeping, a trader can act as a productivity multiplier on millions in capital at the click of a button, but this floor isn't getting swept until somebody actually pushes a broom over it for an hour. (Oh, more bad news: robots can already do that, and it will only be a few more years before the cleaning company we outsource to figures out how to exploit that differential profitably.)
This might interest you if you haven't heard of it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE
Results Only Work Environment - you agree on a set of tasks with your manager, you complete them, you get paid. Doesn't matter when you do it or how long it takes you. That lets people choose to work at a slower pace with more goofing off on Facebook or webcomics, or work in a blaze and hit the beach, or whatever. People who wish to produce manic levels of work can produce more and get paid for it as gauged by results, people who want to work less can complete less tasks can do so and still get paid a reasonable amount. I think there'll be some kinks to be ironed out, but it's more or less the future.
> (Oh, more bad news: robots can already do that, and it will only be a few more years before the cleaning company we outsource to figures out how to exploit that differential profitably.)
Cleaning floors is notoriously hard to outsource, but the technology-in-theory for automating/roboticizing much more of manual labor is already there. It's why I'd like to see the world get more wealthier - people have a false believe that if there's no more poor people, everything will get more expensive. Pretty false idea - if more people are doing R&D, pure science, engineering, art, programming instead of manual labor, we'll see huge gains in new innovation and can roboticize/automate much of the manual labor away. Hell, when I was in China I'd see like 30 guys with chisels tearing up asphalt which you'd have one guy with a jackhammer doing in the States. The labor was cheaper than the machinery, but as the Chinese get more educated and into high skilled work, that'll change and they'll switch over to jackhammers and whatever we invent next after jackhammers.
This is really a key point, I think. Automation is the means by which high-skill workers apply their productivity multipliers to what would otherwise be low-skill work.
The technology already exists to automate large swathes of low-skill work; the only reason it's not already done is that, for the most part, low-skill workers are still cheaper, mostly due to the implicit coercion of things like "needing money to buy food".
What happens when technology progresses to the point where robots are cheaper than paying someone minimum wage is a tricky question--and it's going to happen, probably in Japan first (thanks to both a high level of technological sophistication and an aversion to cheap immigrant labor).
http://blogs.ft.com/money-supply/2009/12/10/the-trans-atlant...
The end result basically said that 4-hr workdays are less than half as productive as 8-hr workdays, and that diminishing returns make long work weeks quickly useless. Interestingly, per hour productivity peaked fairly low--something like 30hrs/week, I think. So, all else equal, if you're paying people hourly, you get best value for money having more people, working fewer hours in fewer days.
On the other hand, if you're paying people a salary, you technically always get more value up to the point of burnout (i.e., negative marginal productivity), but for whatever work week length, you get best value for money having people work a few very long days. That is, 12hr days M-R would be more productive than 8hr days M-S.
Unfortunately, I've been unable to find the study in question again; so take the above with a grain of salt, as my memory is certainly fallible.
That's OK, it's late in the week.
In the book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," Stephen Covey explains a great theory called the P/PC ratio (production to production capacity). In other words, take care of your physical and mental self, and you will produce far better results in your work related endeavors.
People don't realize that not exercising and not eating healthy will severely limit your ability to work productive 40-100 hour work weeks.
I imagine 'optimal' productivity for one person varies considerably from person to person, and situation to situation, (and I imagine /on average/ optimal productivity means working more than 20 hours a week)
Which is why I was so disappointed by this article. I thought they were going to do some research on the optimal number of hours/week to work for maximum productivity. (I suppose I shouldn't be too disappointed; just measuring productivity is /hard/)
the first, most obvious benefit is redundancy. If one employee gets sick or gets another job, I've still got the other guy, and can often talk him or her into working more temporarily to cover until I get someone else.
The other benefits are that I think nerds often under bill. A person working for me 20 hours a week ideally (well, ideally for me, the employer) gives me as much 'inspiration' as someone working 40 hours.
I also think employees are vastly more productive when they feel like working. In my situation, if I pick the right people, I get to pay them when they feel like working, when they are most productive, and then not pay them when they are unmotivated, and thus less productive.
Now, if I hired everyone as employees, then we'd have interesting issues with health insurance; each employee would have a per-month cost not dependent on hours I got out of them (I'm assuming that I'd have a better retention rate if I offered health insurance) But it's possible that cost would be low enough to justify the scheme; maybe I would just pay them a lower wage than I otherwise would?
(man, health insurance is fucked up... as far as I can tell, if I want to get people tax deductible insurance, I have to get everyone insurance; If someone wants to opt-out, as far as I can tell, I can't give them the cash I'd otherwise be spending on them.)
If we extend the definition of "work" to include self-directed projects, education and enrichment, 40-55 is about right; 40 for most people and 55 for the more ambitious.
Beyond 60 hours per week, marginal productivity is minimal.