How three-day weekends can help save the world
greenbiz.com
greenbiz.com
This is part of the problem I think. I've worked 4-day weeks in the past and one of the best things about it is you have a free day during the week to do all the things you normally can't get to. Go to the doctor, visit other business or government offices that are normally only open while you're at work.
Of course if everyone does a 4-day week, then you lose that benefit. Then you have to cram all those errands into the 4 days, during which you now also have more work to do.
Instead of "everybody take Friday off". It might make more sense to stagger days off so everyone has a chance to have a day off while things they need are open.
When we travel in Europe, we find it incomprehensible that businesses are so customer unfriendly - everyone shuts shop by 5pm and very few are open over the weekend.
I find three day weekends to be much more relaxing than the standard weekend. It means I can spend time with my friends on one day, do chores on another day, and spend the remaining day relaxing. As long as I still have a day I can spend with my friends, I'd be okay with a different schedule than M-F or M-R.
There is a barrier to a shorter workweek I don't see touched on often, and maybe it's just me. I'm hesitant to work less because I'm afraid that people would find out that I'm just not that necessary around the office, and that the work I do isn't important as I think it is. Realistically, I think such a realization would be more damaging to my personal pride than anything else. I think I base too much of my self-worth on how replaceable I am to my organization. It's a bit ridiculous to seek validation from an organization, but it is one reason why I'd be hesitant to have a day off while other people are working.
Ten years from now, let say you can find a job where you can work 32 hours a week (or 40, but 8 from home -- slacking a little on that), but let's say you don't earn enough to afford that new iPhone. You can only afford the previous years model. You can't quite have the new curved behemoth TVs that everybody has, nor can you take a vacation any time soon, but you can to take a mini one every weekend.
Is this going to be okay for you? I would argue, many people might be able to do this now. I think that desire to consume is pretty strong. I definitely have it.
These decisions all come with tradeoffs. If your neighbor decides to work 48 hours, taking the 8 your decided to forego, and he can afford these nice little things, are you then going to be calling it unfair that he he's paid more than you? Are you going to be calling for an weekly hour cap to prevent it?
One answer might just be norms. If only 10% of people work 56hrs, then you don't earn so little that you can't afford "that expensive thing that everybody has". What everybody has is based on norms and averages.
A question is then how we went from working 7 days a week, to 6 days a week and Sundays in church, to 5 days a week. How did people start to work less and live with the reality of earning less in comparison to those staying with the old working hours.
Unions.
With blood. The socialist revolutions were in big part based on fighting for the workers abused in the freshly industrialized world.
It's ironic if you see how fast people today want to get rid of all the safeguards that got us the quality of life we enjoy today, all in the name of cheaper products and "I will be an entrepreneur too!" mindset.
You can witness the same transition happening in India completely peacefully. Many middle class jobs are transitioning to 5 day weeks as part of capitalist competition to gain/retain workers. Nerdy software engineers - more or less the opposite of violent socialist revolutionaries - are some of the first to gain these benefits.
I remember hearing recently the philosophy of an older (read: 70+) black civil rights activist criticizing Black Lives Matter. He said that back in the day, they had a 4 step process. 1) Have an ideology, i.e. figure out exactly what you want. 2) Ask for it nicely, and reduce levels of niceness in the requests gradually. 3) Peacefully protest. 4) Revolution.
It seems like the socialist revolutions might have jumped to step (4) unnecessarily.
[1] Just read some of Jack London's socialist fiction. One of his short stories is about socialist revolutionaries murdering innocent people and dropping their bodies on the doorsteps of peaceful capitalists.
Oh come on now, that's just silly.
The past is a foreign country.
First, i think you mean unions, not socialism. Non-socialist countries also have had 5 day weeks. Also even though unions have increased worker rights in history, pure capitalism has also been doing that as well. Look at silicon valley, where empoyee perks, extra PTO and such have not been fought for but are provided.
When supply begins to overshadow demand, whether due to immigration, more people getting CS degrees or whatever, you'll see a lot of those perks stripped away, and wages will stagnate or fall (relatively speaking).
This can be a self-reinforcing cycle, and it's how the economic pie can grow even as everyone on the whole takes more.
Because those things have long been fought for and accepted. Silicon Valley, being in California, is far from "pure capitalism.
Or, it might be the perceived norms - 70% workdays, 30% personal days.
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
You (sort of) left out a factor: Slowing / arrested population growth.
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-datasets/-/tipspd2...
Because Germany ran massive trade surpluses, while other Euro states took on debt to buy German goods. I don't see a cultural shift, either.
If only it worked that way. In practice, for the last 3+ decades most productivity gains have merely increased profit margins and the wealth of those in the top quintile, they haven't had a significant positive impact on most of those who have actually been more productive.
Yes - if only because I believe most people can't operate well for more than ~28 hours/week. I don't want to be diagnosed by a doctor who has to work more than that. I wouldn't want my case argued by a lawyer who has to work more than that. I wouldn't want my food prepared by a cook who has to work more than that. Etc.
Laws and caps are how we got to 40 hours/week (35 in France). Let's keep them going.
So it would need to be a very strong societal norm otherwise people will naturally gravitate towards the option that makes them more.
I think it should be government leading the way. Expand AmeriCorps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmeriCorps) and equivalents around the world, but with more than cost-of-living allowance - both setting the agenda for society but also helping cover for jobs lost to automation. Modest pay for 3-4 days/week of work. The sort of jobs that can give people meaning to life, don't require 4+ years of tertiary-level education, etc.
My hope is that wages stay the same even though you work less, because your value input into the company is the same or better. That would be the dream at least.
I am not accounting for moonlighting or side gigs at all though.
Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
He calls those jobs bullshit jobs because he has a (historically informed) vision of an economy that works better without them. He rags on people who write marketing copy, for example, because their job is basically to sell something you otherwise wouldn't buy. It could be argued that, in a more efficient economy, people wouldn't be selling things people don't want to buy. Similarly, he sees managers as a way to compel people to do work they wouldn't otherwise do, and thus sees those jobs as bullshit.
It's true that he thinks very differently from you, but that doesn't make him a quack.
See a quack. Most of us in the real world know that managers, no matter how much we despise them or even if we are of the many that thing most manager suck, we know their job is to organize those underneath then. A number of these manager-less companies in the last year have had to introduce managers because they actually do server a purpose: managing!
He was a prof of Antropology at Yale before leaving. He is most famous for being a Wobblie, anarchist activist, and one of the heads of the Occupy Wallstreet group (I still have memories of walking by them every day and had no problem having a slice while watching the entertainment).
The irony of that statement is that Mr Graeber probably did many managerial types of jobs in his life (like being a manager over grad students, and managing part of OWS), without it strictly being called a manager.
if it sounds like a duck...
Here's a relevant part of the essay in question:
> In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.
It's not a scientific study, but he's talking about people who themselves believe their own job to be basically pointless.
I've had such jobs myself, so I sympathize with the idea.
Indeed. I am a programmer and I can sympathize too! So far all my jobs but one were of the utterly bullshit kind. That's the reason I decided to steer clear of the web world in the future - it seems to me that this part of our industry is made almost entirely out of bullshit, and is mostly about ad delivery, ad infrastructure and SaaS pseudo-products that operate on shitty business models.
Meanwhile on the other side I've worked for companies as small as three people where we were basically a team of equal contractors with no management required (non-IT outsourced labor, more or less, long story)
I would wager that only a very small number of people in between in size provide any value that couldn't be replaced by say, a mailing list and a small shell script or two. I've worked for some good managers. Of course half were below the median by definition and they mostly produced BS work.
The grad student analogy is inaccurate, that's more of a mentorship or apprenticeship model.
What's ironic about it? Where does he argue the merits of managing grad students?
>He was a prof of Antropology at Yale before leaving. He is most famous for being a Wobblie, anarchist activist, and one of the heads of the Occupy Wallstreet group
What are you "most famous for" so we can determine if we can dismiss your opinions on the basis of those achievements.
>had no problem having a slice while watching the entertainment
You sound like a real empathetic gem.
He sounds like a left-wing Donald Trump in that Striker Mag article. He's frighteningly quick to make sweeping generalizations based on anecdotes - e.g. all corporate lawyers think corporate law is pointless, let's get rid of them.
He seems to have a very limited, simplistic understanding of the world - capital owners have brainwashed an army of paper-pushing white collar drones (the ones who work in "bullshit jobs") in order to systematically devalue the noble people who do "real" work, like teachers and car mechanics.
There is no consideration of the interpersonal and organizational dynamics at a small scale that actually drive the creation of low-value-add jobs and worker discontent. There is no consideration of the fact that corporate law firms are actually successful worker-owned collectives. There is no understanding of the labor market dynamics behind how teaching, nursing and administrative labor is bought and sold.
To be fair, that article is the only thing of his that I've read. Maybe his other stuff is better - more insightful, more action-oriented?
In that Striker piece though he seems more interested in ranting against the demon of capitalism than doing anything to improve people's lives. Ironically, he seems more like a hustler pumping out marketing copy to convince people to buy his books (isn't writing ad copy one of those "bullshit jobs"?) than he does a thoughtful academic.
It's too bad, because there are probably a lot of social and political changes that he and I would both like to see happen - for one, I'm a huge fan of a reduced work week.
Yet we have an inherited notion that it is deeply sinful to survive without working hard for it, and equally sinful for many to prosper while few labor. As a result we must endlessly invent placeholder positions for people to fill (all of those second assistant deputy administrative oversight whatever jobs that let people show up and pretend to be useful), lest they have no "work" to do anymore and thus no claim to a share of the production capacity.
We could just as easily switch to some sort of rota for performing the necessary work, and have everyone provided for with a minimum of required labor, but this is seen as an affront to the religiously-held beliefs of people who haven't adjusted to what we're actually capable of nowadays.
I agree that the US has a widespread cultural belief in the virtue of work and the sinfulness of laziness.
That said, I don't think it's quite as simple, or as centrally planned, as you're making it out to be.
When a company hires a lot of people into vague roles that don't really add much value it more often than not seems to be driven by ego and power struggles among existing employees. For example, a VP who is anxious about seeming important and also eager for a promotion might hire a big team of lower level managers whose work adds dubious value because overseeing a team of 100, including several layers of management, is often seen as more impressive (and a better qualification for senior leadership) than overseeing a team of 10 - even if that small team is super efficient and gets just as much work done. And while the efficient 10-person team leader is probably a better manager and better-suited for executive leadership overall, there is some logic behind promoting the person who built out an unnecessarily large team. Leading a larger group of people with lots of layers is a distinct skill, and one that is pretty hard to practice. The person with the big team at least has done it before. Hiring a lot of useless roles is kind of like dressing for the job you want, on the company's dime.
In any case, I think these kinds of personal and organizational dynamics are a much bigger driver of fluffy, low-value-add jobs than any kind of feeling of cultural obligation to provide employment to middle managers.
But you sure can make snide remarks!
Marketing did the choice for us. And instead of using all the available communication tools, like FB Messanger, WhatsApp for our benefit, we post cats and meals.
Well, it's very different, because I like to take a lot of long breaks, and have a lot of free time for side projects. For me it's less about TVs and vacations, and more about being able to retire early. Hopefully from an exit, or passive income.
What a strawman--you make up jealousy and legal bans when no one has suggested any of those. Using that logic, are you going to call those who work less than you (because they value their quality time more than the shiny new toys) slackers? Are you going to prevent them from getting promoted because they don't work as much as you? This type of argumentation just does not lead to a constructive debate, imo.
Also, I have seen this line of argumentation. In a thread less than a week ago, somebody said how he found it unfair that I or others might work 60+ hours and he only work 40 and that pay scales should and job promotion abilities should be equal so he didn't have to give up his life to compete against those of use that had a different set of priorities (my terminology -- his was a little less forgiving). People choosing 32 hours a week would be upset to get passed up by those choosing 48+ hours. It's natural.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#In_econom...
Regarding wages, it's normal that you make more (ceteris paribus) if you work more. As for promotions, I guess it depends on the kind of role involved; many managerial roles are known for requiring pretty long hours, so this might not be compatible with 32-hour week for a start. But you should be able to move up from, say, junior to senior dev if you got the skills, whatever your working hours. Everything is not possible obviously, but when it is, mere working hours is a pretty lacking metric for merits and promotion--as the article points out.
Rather than: "Let's use our extra wealth to give people some more leisure time."
We could say: "Let's use our extra wealth to take more leisure time for ourselves."
My life goal is to help end the necessity of human work for our survival, and I think it's critically important that we understand that this will only happen if we take the time. John Maynard Keynes famously predicted in 1930 that as productivity rose, working hours would drop and at some point we would all be working 15 hour work weeks. That didn't happen though, and it seems in a huge part related to the fact that, as productivity rose business owners turned that in to profit for themselves rather than sharing the profits with workers.
So suggesting business owners "give" us that time seems unlikely, and I think we need to take it for ourselves. We can do that by becoming business owners ourselves, either by joining a cooperative[1] or by starting our own business, or we can do that by earning a high enough salary that working 4/5 as much would still pay the bills, and then negotiating hard with prospective employers until you find one that needs you enough to accept a 32 hour a week schedule.
Anyway, I'm completely agreeing with you, I've just spent a lot of time thinking (and writing) about this and I think the language of suggesting we "give" this to workers critically misses out on the workers' agency and ability to take what they want for themselves.
Certainly, achieving this will not be easy and there are many problems, but I think it's a goal so worth achieving that we ought to work hard to figure that out.
[1] For more information on the benefits of a cooperative-business based economy, see the excellent book "Democracy at Work" By Richard Wolff: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13591849-democracy-at-wor...
You hit the nail. This is exactly the reason why the 15 hour workweek did't arrive. And unless systemic changes happen it is also the reason why a market requires regulation.
I suppose if you say everyone who wants a bit bit more leisure time should leave cities for cheaper places it works out monetarily, but then people have to move.
The median income is low because a small fraction of people take a large fraction of the wealth. But workers could leave wage jobs and become co-owners in a cooperative business, where wealth gains would be shared by all.
Does that make sense?
5 days of work. Get up, get self ready, get kids ready, get kids to school, work, get home, feed kids, get kids to bed. Too mentally tired to do anything now, and if it's not summer then the Sun's either down or going down. Hope you didn't need to mow the damn lawn again, or your evening's really shot.
Day 6, spend actually quality time with kids (finally!), begin to recover from the work week.
Day 7, starting to feel like a real human again, maybe do just a little stuff for one's self, get the house in order after 6 days of chaos, do other necessary stuff that was deferred during the work week.
Day 8: five days of work starts over.
Can't say I agree.
On the contrary, 2 days off and I would have nowhere near the time I would like to do all the things I want to do.
Policy is how we get to the point there is choice. A short workweek, vacation time, and policies that allow for family or self-care means one can choose overtime: Choose a second job: Choose to work a seasonal job during their vacation. Choose to take time off of their job to take care of family obligations, choose to stay home from work when sick.
Sure, theoretically you can choose some of these things, but you might not be able to afford housing or food or ensure you still have a job if your 2 children get sick a few times in a year. Some folks won't hire someone that isn't willing to put in the time, etc.
The whole point is that you have to have an environment where you have that sort of choice. And I can't see us getting there without legislation.
I agree wholeheartedly, though unfortunately increased productivity is just being used to increase profit margins.
I didn't want to sit around and "wait for it to happen" so I just started doing this myself - taking tons of unpaid leave every year, and even completely quitting so my average days worked in the last ~10 years is something below 50%. I'm much happier for it.
These questions arise from the fact that profits and productivity have soared, while employment and most people's incomes have stagnated or dropped.
Part time work has shot up as a percentage of all work. In Australia it has gone from 1/10 to 1/4 of work from 1966 to 2007. Most other countries are similar. AU numbers in the link.
http://www.pc.gov.au/research/supporting/part-time-employmen...
Before people point out that people would actually like to work more it's worth quoting the link that this goes both ways:
"Since the early 1990s, 20-25 per cent of female part time workers and 30-35 per cent of male part time workers have indicated a preference to work more hours. At the same time, there is evidence to suggest that two full time workers want to move to part time work for every part time worker who wants to move to full time work."
'..over the last thirty years there has been an increase in involuntary part time employment.'
'There has been no sustained or substantial decrease in the level of involuntary part time employment among women since it increased during the recession of the early 1990s.'
'involuntary part time employment increased strongly during the economic recessions in the early 1980s and 1990s, as well as the economic slowdown in 2001.'
Your paper was published in June 2008, before the '08 Crisis.
Choosing to work Part-Time is a privilege. Companies use Part Time work to avoid paying benefits, leave, etc. Keeping employees in a sort of limbo to save costs.
Also while benefits are not usually the same as for full time they are sometimes and even if not the same are not as different as they are in the US.
The idea of a three-day weekend looks nice, but it should be applied to people, not services! Services should be still open Monday to Friday, just with 80% of the people working in.
Other advantages are that 2 working parents who each had an opposing day 'off' would only need child care for 3 days instead of 5, resulting in lower costs and more family team. I know that would be great for me!
I vote for Friday. It's the Muslim worship day - and snuggles nicely against the Jewish and Christian worship days. It would give "Thank God It's Friday" an extra dimension of meaning. Most people are halfway home mentally anyway.
Monday also has some claims, but think of all of the songs that would have to be re-written to make Tuesday the new "most hated." I Don't Like Tuesdays (tell me why.) Rainy Days and Tuesdays Always Get Me Down. Blue Tuesday.
That's all I got to say about that.
In the end it comes down to people making a decision. They are willing to take their work home with them essentially, either literally or via phone, because they value that job enough to compete with the others who are willing to do the same.
There are plenty of slightly less demanding jobs or even fields that will give you that ability, but that drive for the little more financially comfortable life is quite powerful. Too many people act like they are powerless when in reality they have the power to start looking into jobs or careers.
This is best visible in tech where we are used to perks that we already consider basic, another discussion is whether those perks are actually a way to make us work more.
On a personal note I remember working in advertising and being on my Blackberry 24/7. Was it necessary? I don't think so, but neither my ad agency nor myself had an effective productivity system in place. Workplaces has changed so much in the last 5 years, that we may want to consider teaching people how to work less, remotely and avoid re-work at any cost. My proposal would be putting that as obligatory course in every college. Sort of like d.school Design Your Life, and instead Design Your Work.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-04/mexico-s-r...
Wait! Are these the same Keynesian economists that say doing pointless work, literally digging holes and filling the up again, can improve the economy?
What is such a statement supposed to mean? What was the total energy cost in those months? Did they shave a 1% or a 20%?
5/7 == 71.4% of days are work days
3/5 == 60% of days are work days
So we would lose 11% of working days, but you would get a weekend after every 3 work days.
I think the main objection would come from various religions which have hard-coded a 7 day week, but if they picked one holy day out of 5, that is even more visits to the designated building of that religion every year, so it seems like they could get on board with that.
That 'd be straight out illegal in Germany, for example (8h/d maximum on long-term average, 48h/week max on long-term average). If any accidents happen with this excessive overtimes, the employer is fully liable for any damages claims.
What the US desperately lacks is a federal workers' protection laws.
https://workfamily.sas.upenn.edu/glossary/n/nineeighty-work-...
Google is your friend.
Please take the time to look up what 9/80 means before dropping a bunch of political conjecture.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/...
Unions stagnated decades ago and have achieved little more than strangling many of the industries they are involved in.
Because that's how it was for labourers before unions?
Yes, life with unions sucks. But life without unions sucks even more.
It's amazing how workers, who got fired by the hundreds of thousands, voluntarily gave up pensions only to lose their jobs, dealt with numerous health issues and cancers working in horrible conditions, even in modern times, and still get blamed.
Rather, gains in productivity could be countered by increases in the standard of living. But, since the first world standard of living has been "good enough" since the 1950s, the increases in productivity have instead fed the ever-increasing wealth divide in first world nations.
Nice middle ground, I think. I think for businesses that require customers to be around... restaurants, taxis, coffee shops... losing a day would be pretty brutal.
Likely see less coffee shops, for example, as they would struggle to make rent. Probably more chain coffee shops, as a result. I see a lot of consequences like this to adding another weekend day.
The coffee shops everywhere I've lived are more crowded on the weekends than during the week.
A lot of stores, coffee shops, and the like are almost completely staffed with part time workers that only work 3-4 days a week anyway, though they might have to have slightly more hourly management. Taxi drivers are often independent contractors.
The bigger issue I would be things like nursing homes, hospitals, and other such things because suddenly you'd need more CNAs and nurses and doctors on staff. It would really need to be planned in a way that gets nursing programs (for example) expanded and folks enrolled in such programs. The businesses would benefit overall, however - Somewhere in sweden they experiemented with 6 hour nursing shifts not so long ago. They found less stress, better care, and less absenteeism among the nursing staff. Short term loss that some planning can help with for what seems like long-term gain.
The nationalist slur at the end of your comment was totally unnecessary though.
European here. Fully agree. What is largely overseen is that the meme of Europe being a largely regulated field where everything is so much different to the US, has (according to my perception) largely evaporated over the last 10-15 years. While the startup acumen is still more elaborated in the US due to more liberal working laws, people in Europe work a lot overtime unpaid, even more than in the US.
http://fortune.com/2015/11/11/chart-work-week-oecd/
What I would like to say is people feel exhausted in Europe too.
For another irrelevant comment about productivity: Try walking into any office in China right after lunch and find any worker not asleep at their desk. And their economy is pretty booming.
1) United States is ranked 13th on the World Happiness Report, behind 12 countries all more regulated than the US. [1]
2) Americans might work hard, but they work less than both Mexico, Russia, Greece, etc. [2]
Weird huh?
And if you really are interested, short afternoon sleeps are positively correlated with lower stress levels and increased personal wellbeing.
Life does not have to be a constant pursuit of ever-higher GDP, which is skewed towards those with large amounts of capital anyway.
Is highlighting the fact that the US is the largest economy considered a slur?
The commenter could have just said that the 25% extra hours worked each week compounded into a much larger economy and omitted 'siesta'.
Is that true? I honestly don't know, but my intuition is that it's true for a certain subset of projects and not others. Even if it is true, is the origin of that truth "working harder"? I sincerely doubt that. If I had to guess, the availability of capital is the leading cause. And that capital came from somewhere, but it wasn't all hard work.
Good point. I cannot offer you proof, although if you polled people who have lived in multiple countries, including the US, you would probably find a majority of them agree.
Also, at the very cutting edge of technology, I think even small things can kill ideas, and the US probably does the least damage to the idea while it is taken from germination to profit. Maybe it is that small subset which has a cascading effect on the rest (e.g. Google, whose extraordinary financial success in search certainly cascaded into many things which touch people's lives directly).
Interestingly, I have made this comment at what is sleeping hours in the US but is more closer to work hours in many other places around the world. And till now this is the only comment which has raised this question despite HN's global audience - not that I am not glad you asked the question, I am just saying that it is not meeting with a ton of resistance (yet). On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if my point is completely refuted with a mountain of evidence in the next few hours :-)
> Even if it is true, is the origin of that truth "working harder"? I sincerely doubt that.
My point is that everything is a sort of multiplicative factor when it comes to the size of the economy, and a nation where people are working nearly 25% more time than other nations (or at least the ones being compared here) can be a pretty significant boosting factor, especially when it is combined with the availability of resources and the productivity associated with what is called "human capital".
> If I had to guess, the availability of capital is the leading cause. And that capital came from somewhere, but it wasn't all hard work.
Not to say that the US has never made mistakes, I think they have at various times abused the power of their economic and military strength for mobilizing capital to their advantage (to put it really mildly). I don't know how to account for its effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
But then again, it would also lower the US quite a bit, so I guess the comparison is difficult. Besides, "the EU" does not exist when it comes to work/leisure regulation and attitude.
But if we're making happiness the measure, America doesn't even break into the top ten.
The article is about energy consumption and how to save the worlds natural resources. What has your comment to do with that?
It is having more money worth damaging our planet, risking famine for millions, risking natural habitats?
Maximizing relative economy value is not a goal in itself. The goal is the citizens happiness and health. They are talking about saving the world and you answer back talking about money.
Citation needed. From what I've seen the US underperforms on e.g. happiness surveys (certainly in an overall statistical sense - it's possible there are individual exceptions).
> While they were taking their siesta, the USA was busy being the largest economy in the world.
And what do you have to show for it? Has that large economy "trickled down" to the people in the street?
I don't know how many of these lists there are, but 108th would be a little hard to believe. The UN puts Palestine at 108.
Truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
http://happyplanetindex.org/countries/united-states-of-ameri...
Phillipines is 20th. "I kinda find it hard to believe a happy country would choose Duterte as its President."
Brazil is 23rd. "I kinda find it hard to believe a happy country would impeach its President".
Palestine is 22nd. I was gonna write a sentence of that form for each one but it seems a little unnecessary.
Pakistan is 36th. Haiti is 57th. Iraq is 67th. Egypt is 86th. America does at least barely squeak by Afghanistan and Syria at 110th and 113th.
There certainly is no objective way to measure happiness and the UN method does seem flawed, but come on.
For example Turkmenistan comes in near last, and it would be hell on earth for a coastal USA hipster who just wants to talk progressive politics in a coffee shop all day, but the natives kinda like it the way it is... happiness is not defined by most as a starbucks on every street corner, etc.