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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, did Keynes ever understood how capitalism works? Capitalism is competition. If your employees work less, your competitor's employees will work full time and overtime, getting their product to market faster and reaping all the rewards. It works with entire countries as competitive agents (see China). "Winner takes it all" operation mode of modern markets amplifies the magnitude of the problem.

Another issue is management overhead. Managing 10 people working full-time is easier (perhaps exponentially) than managing 40 people working 1/4 time. Easier means cheaper, which means that you are better positioned in the competition. This is why every rational company will hire 10 people full-time and leave the other 30 unemployed, instead of hiring all 40 for quarter of the time.

I see no solution to this problem in peacetime (Keynes' own solution famously didn't work). In wartime, of course, there are nearly no unemployed.

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Anyone who's worked 80+ hours/week can tell you that work is an efficiency function. At hour 75, one's capable of much less (cognitively and physically) and more prone to mistake than at hour 5 (as the article notes). The stakes are high when it's overworked 20-somethings working on an expensive lawsuit or transactional spreadsheets or trying to ship code on a deadline, to say nothing of engineers and others involved with public safety.

The notion of more work = better isn't as straightforward as you make it. The article itself points out Chernobyl and Challenger as the result of pushing people. Even from a purely competitive, capitalistic POV, pushing people to work more has very real risks; risks that make the expected return negative the harder one pushes.

It is entirely possible that capping the number of hours worked – such that workers are rotated and therefore are always fresh/at their most efficient – is more optimal than driving them harder and harder in the name of competition.

We see this with Olympic/professional athletes whose coaches enforce mandatory rest days and optimal sleep. Certainly these athletes, if they just "worked harder" in the name of competition, would be harming themselves after a point despite putting in more hours.

This recovery period, while mostly physical in nature, also extends into the cognitive realm as well. Knowledge workers need recovery too.

Which is why most professions are settled on 40-hour work week, as the ideal way to extract long-term productivity. If other time arrangements will give more productivity, employers will be eager to adopt it. But it is not the case for e.g. 15 hour work week.

Most occupations are settled on a 40-hour work week, sure, but that's because employers have done the math and determined paying overtime is worse than extending output. They don't cap it at 40 hours/week for optimal productivity; it's for the bottom line.

However, I can think of very few professions which involve a 40-hour work week, given that most professionals are salaried. In The U.S., 60 hours/week is more the norm (not to mention being subservient to email at all hours) and in certain competitive careers, taking vacations is eschewed.

This mentality is silly.

This looks strange to me (I am European). If working for 40h week is more productive than 60h week, why company owners even choose the latter?

It's not that less is more; rather it's that more work has diminishing productivity returns. And, after a certain point, the returns dip negative due to fatigue-related risks (this is a unique example, but it's always major news when the maximum hours allowed for medical residents gets reformed/reduced on account of patient mortality related to doctor fatigue).

And that's just when we limit the scope of "returns" to productivity. As the article points out, there are many, many non-productivity benefits associated with a shorter work week.

I don't think many Americans will be on their death bed lamenting "oh, if only I'd spent more late nights/weekends at the office working on spreadsheets."

Because the marginal cost, to the employer, of hours beyond 40 is zero – remember these employees are almost always paid a salary, i.e. a fixed amount regardless of hours worked (beyond 40). Thus, even if an employee's productivity plummets – but is still above zero – it's in the employer's interest to persuade (or prod) them to work more hours.

But of course even that's a gross simplification. There are lots of 'non-linear' considerations, e.g. burnout.

> I don't know, did Keynes ever understood how capitalism works?

I would say yes. That's a pretty wild question to ask. Do you know how capitalism works, because "competition" is not the definition.

Keynes is "widely considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th century."

"Following the outbreak of World War II, the leading Western economies adopted Keynes's policy recommendations, and in the two decades following Keynes's death in 1946, almost all capitalist governments had done so."

"When Time magazine included Keynes among its Most Important People of the Century in 1999, it said that 'his radical idea that governments should spend money they don't have may have saved capitalism.'"

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

> Keynes' own solution famously didn't work

Are you talking about the problem of hours in the work week here? What is the problem and failed solution you're referring to?

Stagflation.

I think you're forgetting to take into account the effect of longer hours on productivity (negative), and the fact that our working hours are a choice which (within a certain range) don't seem to have a strong effect on actual results in the "marketplace".

In the developed world, the 40-hour week is standard both because 60-hour weeks are less-productive, and because as a society we've chosen to prioritize health and happiness over the (mostly imagined) productivity of a longer workweek. But 40 isn't a magical number, it's possible 30 would work just as well or better.

As long as the productivity stays the same or increased, this option is viable. But if not, it isn't. Increased productivity from shorter hours is good, of course, but Keynes thought that even decreased productivity could be fine, as at some point it will be "enough".

Here's the catch: under competitive market economy, there is never "enough". And if you pass on market economy in your country, there are other countries who will outcompete you, both economically and militarily.

I wouldn't necessarily say we prioritize health and happiness though. We still spend the majority of our time awake working.

I'm not sure, in Europe the Greeks work the longest hours but have very low per-capita GDP, Germans work some of the shortest hours but are near the top for per-capita GDP.

You're taking a lot of heat but I can't see where you're wrong; in any competitive environment there will always be at least one player who, legally or otherwise, figures out how to exploit any conceivable advantage, creating a race to the bottom. It's nice to imagine a scenario wherein a company by protecting its employees' quality of life somehow secures a competitive advantage that creates a market success; but I [literally] don't see that happening.

My understanding of capitalism is that it is competition with rules (actually most people who talk about capitalism are talking about a market economy). We have rules against theft, trade secrets, patents and a lot of other stuff. As long as everybody follows the same set of rules the best still wins. You could mandate shorter work hours within capitalism.

It doesn't have to be "winner takes it all" necessarily.

It does. This is how e.g. digital economy works, and nothing could be done about that. In traditional economy, there can be e.g. a bakery shop in nearly every corner; people will just choose the closest one in most cases. In digital economy, all locality barriers are erased, if you need search, you go to Google, period. No need to evaluate other options as long as Google works OK. No legislation can change that (and if it could, it would bring much more problems than that).

>This is how e.g. digital economy works,

Even the slightest consideration will reveal that this is false. Uber and Lyft, Dropbox and Box, FBM and iMessage and Google Messenger and Whatsapp.

Ok, two winners split it all (because people dislike monopolies). But that's about it.

You are failing to consider the costs of switching from one service to another - people will put up with quite a lot to avoid inconvenience - as well as network effects: there's no point switching messaging platforms if all your contacts are on the old one.

TLDR: The "free market" is showering us with amazing riches, while making us miserable.

You mean, showering a very small subset of us with amazing riches while making the vast majority of us miserable?

Capitalism also means labor is a market. At any time there are thousands of companies looking to hire competent tech workers, and if you want to work part time, there is someone who needs employees enough to let you.

I'm also not sure what your alternative is; if we were using most any other semi-viable alternative to free capitalist labor, we'd all be working until the commissar tells us we can stop.

Correct and correct. I am a very pro-free market person; I just tried to explain why working less hours is uncommon, even considering the benefits.

The managing problem is easy. Work the same hours!

Say M-F 5 hour days. Or M-W 7 hour days. Lots of options. So so many office jobs don't need to cover all shifts.

The places that really need someone always there, say 24 stores or fast food.. they already are all part timers, and they manage.

I guess the only case to figure out is the fulltime employee + need coverage.. but I bet it can be solved with delegation...

How so? Coordinating the jobs between 40 employees is always way harder than between 10 employees.

Yet these retail stores are comprised of basically all part-time employees outside of management. My guess is that the money they save on benefits is worth it. Plus it doesn't seem like they need more people to manage the part time employees.

Well you are jumping from 10 to 40.

If you had 10 programmers, and gave them 3 day weeks (24 hours). How much less work to you get? Maybe none. Maybe 20%. So you hire 2 more. So you went from managing 10 programmers to 12.

I guess maybe a tiny bit harder? I suspect most managers would take the new workload for 4 day weekends.

what's full time, 10 h/week, 40? where did this magic number come from and why is it declining in the last decades, while unemployment rises? surely not because we became less able to work.

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