Start with universal basic income and a 15-hour work week
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
> A recent poll among Brits revealed that as many as 37 per cent think they have a job that doesn’t even need to exist.
I'm not going to deliberate on the prevalence of bullshit jobs and their impact on quality of life (which seems to be where the article takes it's main pitch), but given that - I rather disagree that not working is the solution that obviously follows.
My experience tells me that, as a developer, an awful lot of what I do could definitely fit in that 15 hour window if there are 2 other people also doing "my" job. Splitting up my week's tasks with the 3 of us putting in 45 hours would result in much more productivity, in my opinion.
I'd then have much more time to do things I wanted to do, and experiment with new tech for shits and giggles. That often gets pushed back in favor of other life experiences these days.
Eh I think skills are stickier than that. FWIW, I spent about 6 months doing almost no programming, but I didn't feel particularly unproductive when I started again.
Besides which, there's no reason people can't be continuing developing their skills in the remaining hours anyway. The 15 hours is just how much time you have to spend doing what you're told. And you can likely learn much more efficiently if you work with that intent instead of acquiring skills incidentally as your job requires.
Having 2 days off a week, really is only enough time to do chores, not enough to spend on your own skills or do anything productive for yourself.
As a contractor, I tend to take 1-3 months off between contracts + it seems to help, not hinder. I'm much fresher when I go into the next contract.
Of course, that's their right, but whether you can make a sustainable economy out of subsidizing that is another question...a question that is much more pressing than "wouldn't that be better?" and one the article doesn't even attempt to answer, probably because it is largely impossible and anything like it is speculation akin to religion.
Also is "more Counter-Strike" at all correlated with a quality of life increase? 45 free minutes you wouldn't have had to get rid of some stress shooting things - probably yes? 5 hours a day - probably not?
Or worse, shooting heroin.
Pretty much none of that is happening in areas where unemployment is chronic, even in a nation as wealthy as the United States. It's quite a mystery as to why well-educated people persist in the mistaken belief that UBI will magically cause recipients to behave nobly.
> It's quite a mystery as to why well-educated people persist in the mistaken belief that UBI will magically cause recipients to behave nobly.
I find the reverse to be the mystery - why some people persist in the belief that people on UBI will mostly turn to spending their days abusing drugs and cheap entertainment? Like if humans were zombies who need an employer to give their life a direction?
I invite you to walk the streets of downtown Detroit or, as thehardsphere points out, parts of Appalachia if you still have doubts.
The only reason such areas in the US don't make international news is that third-world countries still have it relatively worse and, even then, governments of other nations issue formal cautions to their citizens against travelling to these areas.
I protest this unseemly slander; I'll have you know that I treat women with respect. /s
In answer to your question, A) you can pretty much find a study that says anything you want and B) a considerable number of my high school classmates from lower and lower middle class families did, in fact, fall prey to drug addiction and I know all too well that, had circumstances been just slightly different, I might have joined them. Am I weak? Perhaps, perhaps. But no more so than a great many others.
Seriously, go to Detroit or one of these other afflicted areas and walk around. Many of these people are already on public assistance programs. If you survive the experience, come back and see if you can manage to still say to me with a straight face that people will find their own productive purpose in life given UBI.
For other people, that extra time and the safety net may enable them to start a business or do charity work or run for their local school board. I'd argue it's worth it for society to subsidize 1,000 people playing Counter-Strike for every one person who could be empowered to start the next Google.
It's not a normative argument, it's a is this even possible? Isn't that a necessary question?
because EVERYONE is as productive as you are? give me a break.
There's a reason he cites a survey as one of his main pieces of evidence - he doesn't have any. It's pie in the sky feel good that doesn't have any evidence.
You don't start with universal basic income and a 15-hour work week when the current baseline is 40 hours and a lack of decent health insurance.
It's fairly clear that there isn't even support in the current US ruling class for universal healthcare. That makes anything even remotely like basic income largely irrelevant there.
I've been programming professionally, and developing my skills at a medium pace for a couple of decades. After a few years now of actually tracking my time to the minute, I often get less than 15 hours of programming in a 40 hour work week. Meetings, chat & email, lunches & breaks, and sooner or later some degree of management, these things add up to a majority of your time.
If you filled a 15 hour work week with meetings and included a lunch hour, then yeah, there's no coding getting done. But I would hope spending less time working means and implies to a greater degree shedding all the time we spend at work not working.
If a meeting ends with no action items (assigned to specific people) and no decisions made, it was a useless meeting, and you should stop having it. Status updates can be written down and emailed, or better, posted to a wiki.
If you do 15 hours of work over a 40 hour week, do you still do 15 hours of work over a 15 hour week, or do people end up doing 5 hours of work?
Is there any evidence either way? These discussions always bring out the anecdotes, but we need hard stats to show whether this is even doable.
So some people would actually dedicate that 15 hours to getting things done, and some people would still fill it up with bullshit and game the management metrics to maximize pay per unit of effort.
That doesn't mean I'm unoccupied an additional 20 hours a week, but being occupied with my choice of activities is way better.
The summary / thesis of life-after-work is that we must "find a muse" - which is to say, since you no longer must work your entire life away, you may now re-allocate those same hours doing something that you love. Even something that you are wildly, obsessively, passionate about.
A small portion of the current policy research around AI & Automation is how do we deal with the emotional fallout among people who feel they've lost their purpose. How do we convince people that it is OK to "take a handout"?
There are really deep cultural implications to that idea. There are people who believe "there's no such thing as a free lunch" - consider the Georgia representative who very specifically floated the idea of making poor children sweep floors in schools in exchange for meals "in order to teach them the important life lesson that there is no such thing as a free lunch" http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gop-rep-suggests-kids-... ... like that is someone who really believes in that as a principle as opposed to just a colloquialism.
What would it do to their self esteem if they were suddenly taking free money?
How many parents would be happy to spend an extra hour with their kids in the morning? A couple of extra hours at night? A few extra hours to learn guitar or beat that next level of super-mario?
Even with a couple extra hours at home a week it's hard to find exactly what I should be doing. I tried to put together a schedule of taking some online classes I've watched to for a while, writing, spending 30-1 hour playing games I've been meaning to play, and generally calling / talking to friends and family more. However I still find myself in a loop of checking reddit, youtube, facebook, and hackernews over and over around 7PM.
I understand its a problem born from extreme privilege but if the future is filled with more free time it's a problem that many will run into.
Coming home after 8 hours of work to 1-2 hours of chores isn't fun.
Piano, saxophone, geology, astronomy, japanese, game development on old consoles, hiking, weight training, personal site redesign, writing novels, writing stories, designing board and card games, mobile app development, virtual reality development, drawing, composing music, game production and publishing, cooking, etc.
It should be noted that for all of these things listed there was at least a small period of my life where I spent a good chunk of time doing them.
Instead right now I seem to only have the time, energy, and motivation for board game design (and recording it in a diary), keeping my puppy active and happy (walks, fetch), playing some games, fixing a bug or adding a small feature or two in a mobile app once a week, and writing one short story for an anthology once a year.
And I only work 40 hours a week. When I worked 60+ I didn't have energy to do anything but eat dinner and sleep.
Without taking everything to the extreme of comparing 100 vs. 15 hours a week, and of course out of my own experience, it seems that companies with 'lenient' schedules (say regular 4-6 hours work days) tend to deliver better products (as in quality, customer acceptance, even financially) but also portrait better working environments, suffering far less employee turnover, resulting in an overall win-win.
Arguably it might be rather a consequence than a cause of having good, empathetic management, final success etc., but the point stands: with all the caveats, longer working hours have early diminishing returns, my own experience as both employee and contractor dismisses the whole 'you lose skills working three days a week' idea, and the secondary outcomes of it (better products, happier customers, less turnover, etc.) are indeed worth the investment.
Edit: grammar
For example, my current company is very small and young (in experience). We're only now implementing meaningful workflows of builds, deploys, ci, etc... hell, even version control as previously an after thought.
With that said, trying to increase staff heavily to compensate for 15h work weeks would mean a lack of workflows would impact us greatly, imo. Ie, some people here don't document their in progress work, and barely commit. How is someone else supposed to pick that up mid way through? Ie, the project still needs to get done in say, 2 weeks, but the original 40h/week dev will not be able to finish it in 2 weeks, so other people have to join in and work on it together.
I'm not arguing against 15h weeks, just that it would mean single developers can't deliver the same product in the same timeframe most likely. So documentation, testing, and team communication would have to pick up the slack i imagine.
How on earth can you do that?
A few weeks ago, I was in the office for 9 hours. I went home, goofed off of a little bit, then picked it back up for another 6 hours. I had been crushing it that day, and I was motivated enough to continue. In the wee hours of the morning, I was practically useless.
I was hunting a bug that I had introduced with a small change. I reduced my statements to simple variables, created a truth table, then filled in the table to find equivalent statements. I was arguing with that damn truth table for half an hour. I lost of course. A truth table is a concept that can't be wrong. In fact, my conditional had been correct all along. It was a mapping that I had introduced elsewhere that was causing the conditional to evaluate differently.
I don't do this every week or month but sometimes you struggle with something for weeks or months and then suddenly everything clicks and it just flows.
What scares me is when it goes from that to "the government should mandate / provide this". I would see no reason that would not lead to a bad outcome similiar to other socialist countries.
And remember, when people say that we decrease our societies working hours by 1/2, 2/3, etc they are saying that we should halve the number of doctors, teachers, pilots, farmers, etc. This guy may think accountants, consultants, etc are fake make-work jobs, but I've never seen a company knowingly being someone on when they know that person won't add value to the company (and therefore the society as well).
No, they mean there should be twice as many of them working half as much (or less, if there are productivity improvements).
Obviously that would be hard to achieve in the short term, because these jobs require training, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.
I see that you did qualify your claim with "it seems" but if you could list the companies you had in mind that are beating competitors on quality + customer acceptance + financials by having employees only work 20 to 30 hours per week, that would be extremely helpful evidence in this thread.
The 80 hour a week salary (no overtime) culture is also prone to people just goofing off. So sure you are in the office 80 hours but only 30 of those are productive hours (at most).
If you know you're expected to work 80 hours you will be on the clock 80 hours but not all of it will be "work."
I found that with shorter work days people stay more focussed and make better use of their time because they know they need to.
I can see this working in protected environments but how is this going to work out for companies in industries where only the paranoid survive.
UBI is about society as a whole, not you specifically.
Uh, yes it was? The modern 40 hour working week is a direct result of legislation:
Well bully for you. If I want to keep my current job, I'm expected to be here from 8:30 to 5:30pm, except a lunch break. Of all the recruiters that contacted me in the past month (and there were 7 or 8 of them), every single one of those companies expected at least 8 hours of work, and probably more (games industry).
There was one probable exception, a consulting company, but I have no desire to live out of a hotel 4+ days a week.
I have done Freelance in the past, but hunting down work is something I'm not very good at, as I'm not really the type that can put myself out there and cold call people very easily, so I had difficulty finding enough work to keep me going.
But if I could get away with working 30 hour weeks and make about 20% less than I normally would, and with full benefits, I'd be much happier, and probably more productive. Very few companies would agree to such a deal, though.
What is the incentive for companies to throw a third of their labor costs out of the window? I surely agree that it at least seems to be the case that some people are doing work that seems to serve no purpose besides getting the worker a paycheck. But it can not be 37% bad, can it?
Companies should be eager to get rid of those jobs, lower prices, increase market share and capture some sweet additional profits. Why don't they? Is corruption within companies so prevalent and working so well? Or are bullshit jobs simply more of a myth, there are some but most only look useless but are actually not?
The existence of most of those jobs relies on the risk intolerance of executives. They don't know for certain which people in their organization are basically bullshitting and could be fired tomorrow, and they're not willing to take the risk of firing the wrong person and screwing the entire company/team/organization. So they let things go, as long as they're making money (or, really, as long as their neck isn't personally in a noose for not making money). Periodically, companies will try to determine which employees can really be cut when money is tight, but it's surprisingly hard to determine even from one or two management levels above a particular employee whether they are really adding value or just creating the appearance of it.
All you really need to do as an employee in a "bullshit job" is create just enough doubt as to whether or not you're somehow important, on some level or in some situation, so that nobody is willing to take the risk of firing you. That's it.
I'm glad I don't have one of those jobs right now, but if push came to shove and it was between collecting a paycheck for a bullshit job or getting my house foreclosed on, I'd do it again. As I suspect most people would, and probably will depending on how many of the "everything will get automated" predictions come true. In a workplace with a lot of opaque automation, it wouldn't be especially hard to create the appearance of adding value just by not screwing anything up, and/or occasionally screwing something up on purpose only to "fix" it and demonstrate value (or give an implied threat of what might happen if you were fired).
I think if you asked enough people about the things they aspire to, the things they dream about, the things that drive their ambitions, almost all of their responses would include something at least related to increased income.
So it seems to me that society-wide goals should include decreasing our collective risk aversion. If you can do that with 15hr/week jobs and basic income, then it's worth trying.
I think many people who already work menial jobs that are threatened by automation lack a certain drive for self-improvment that would need to be a required aspect of their lives if they otherwise have an extra 25-30 hours a week. Would these menial workers improve other aspects of their lives or simply watch more Netflix? I think anti-depressant use in a 15-hour\UBI world will increase.
When you are tired and scraping by it's hard to find the energy for things like self improvement. When your concentrating on getting food on the table + getting enough sleep.
The times I've had the most time for self improvement have been when there's been a combination of time off + money.
I've found, after a job finishes (e.g. company folds), or just between contracts, you need a while to decompress.
But then after a while you get a lot more energy for stuff.
WRT programming projects - it takes mental effort, I can't do a huge amount of it outside of hours when I'm working 5 days a week.
When I take a break for a month or two I have energy for any project I like.
Is there significant evidence that automation is stripping us of jobs at an unsustainable rate (i.e. we are losing jobs faster than new jobs are being created)? I am optimistic that there will be work enough to do for everyone, even with mass automation.
Pessimism isn't science either.
> and at the scale of the problem it is a mistake that gets to happen only once.
The problem doesn't even exist yet. It's a potential problem. We are speculating on potential solutions to a potential problem. There are an infinite number of potential problems. I think it's a waste to start solving them until it becomes abundantly clear there is a problem.
I don't see science happening at any level here.
I'm pretty down with all the complications we've layered over the paleolithic lifestyle.
It's also not true that labor is uninvolved with technology. If people are busy with the hum drum details of survival they have less time to try new ideas and the like.
Granted, yes, some things existed before this became the norm, like plagues and whatnot, but I think part of the reason we all need to be treated for medical problems is because of the nature of modern work being incompatible with human biology.
Indeed, if those paleolithic people worked 40+ hours a week, perhaps we would be really advanced by now :)
Should this be the case? Should we permit society to expand to a point in which it's impossible for people to opt-out?
I'm not comfortable with requiring all humans to be a part of society, but at the same time I'm not sure if there's a solution given the fact that resources are finite.
There were two summers which were really bad: some days it was unclear where the next hot meal would come from.
I wonder if I had pulled through if there would have been UBI.
But would I have been as motivated?
I am a proponent of UBI as I believe it's the only sane way to deal with the coming wave of unemployment in a number of categories.
But they do not do it because it requires that amount of time to immerse yourself in a problem, I work pretty close to half that at most and do completely fine.
Huh?
I've worked my share of 70-hour weeks, but none of them have been as a developer. In my experience productivity tends to go negative after a certain point.
I assume by default that anyone programming for 70 hours a week is producing good code for 25 hours of it, marginal code for 20, bad code for 15, and godawful WTF garbage for 10.
If the schedule is to work from 7 AM to noon, lunch for an hour, nap for an hour, and work from 2 PM to 7 PM, for each of the 7 days per week, that might actually get 50 hours of good code and 20 of decent code... until that person burns out hard after three months.
70 hour work weeks for knowledge workers is a very obvious sign of dangerously incompetent management. The only conceivable reason for it is to institute it as a temporary measure to meet a deadline when someone is actually going to die if you miss it. And then, you have to throttle the hours way back afterward to prevent resentment and burnout.