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Comment by vesak | Hacker News Reader

As a species, we have been moving towards "less hours, more work done" for centuries. Just a few hundred years ago, most of humanity worked every waking hour creating food for themselves in order to not die of starvation.

The logical end point of this progress is 0 hours work per year and we still get everything we want. We're not quite there yet, but we're already much closer to that point than "work all the time to survive".

We should do something about resource distribution, though. I'm not saying that we would be there already if the 1% didn't steal everything, but we'd certainly be closer. Not communism or anything close to that, though, we already know that crap has no chance of working. But just something not quite so unbalanced.

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How about: we have achieved the right work-life balance now with ~40 hours a week as a species, a balance that allows us to be most creative. We don't work to survive anymore (with the universal basic income on the horizon), we work to show off our creativity. Take artists as an example, they don't reduce their work load just because they can. I'm not even sure who spends more time at work: a startup engineer or a [successful] musician.

So no, we'll always need room for creativity and show-off, whatever it takes, be it 40, 80, or 30 hours per week on average throughout a year. And no, it's not going to converge to 0 because it would mean pretty much the end of the evolutionary path for our species.

You're making it sound as though people are only allowed to be creative during work hours.

I'm working 70% (28 hours a week) by choice because it leaves me ample room to be creative outside of work hours, on my own projects, outside of the logic of profit maximization.

> Not communism or anything close to that, though, we already know that crap has no chance of working.

Communism was never tried. The experiments never got over the socialism phase. I bet that we going to end up with communism down the line somewhere when we overcome resource scarcity. See Star Trek for example. Currently socialism did not work at all tough.

>Communism was never tried.

I've heard people say that capitalism has never been tried, either.

AFAIK the closest we got to full blown capitalism was Chile under Pinochet. The "Chicago boys" implemented policy that came close to a totally free market. The results were that the upper class gained wealth at a higher rate than anywhere else. The poor people died of starvation.

Indeed. What would you call the closest full blown communist experiment? Soviet Union? Venezuela? North Korea? Vietnam?

Really hard to answer. I'd say the Soviet Union because they had the political infrastructure for localized government by the workers (Soviets). They never gave them any real power tough and kept it centralized.

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