Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

Many of those people fullfil complex , Critical roles, successfully.

But most of it's "employees" are easily replaceable.

So why won't this work in the general economy ?

There's also the issue that the population is constantly growing and in flux in different areas. Nobody knows the exact right amount of stuff to make to serve everybody and underestimating can have dire consequences and get lots of people killed, so we can and should make more than might be necessary.

It's a huge oversimplification to say we just need 100 units of food so get the 5 people to make 20 units of food each and then we're good, no need for anyone else to work.

No, the majority of work is laborious and tedious and it's not a 'small number of people' doing it.

Do you realize how many retail service workers, customer service workers, restaurant servers, cooks, line pikers etc. there are?

This idea that somehow it's just a 'small number of folk working' is mythology.

And a lot of middle management is brutal - though it is often very inefficient, it's still essential.

Yes, a lot of jobs could dissapear overnight, but most could not.

I've been working 4 days a week or less for more then 5 years already. No problems.

Surpluses and shortages of skilled labor are very unevenly distributed. Differences in ease of automation will magnify this. If there is a demand for 100 neurosurgeons and then cut everyone's hours by 20%, you effectively created a shortage of 25 neurosurgeons. Decreasing hours doesn't increase supply and supply of highly skilled labor is not fungible i.e. you can't trivially retrain a PhD in electrical engineering or truck driver to become a neurosurgeon.

This leads to the following conundrum:

If we forcibly cut hours for everyone across the board then it will create severe supply shortages for the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate, some of which already have severe shortages because it is so difficult to create supply. If we cut hours such that labor supply is proportional to demand then the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate will be required to work by far the most hours, which isn't fair to highly skilled labor and creates a disincentive for required labor.

Systematically reducing working hours may benefit the majority but it creates perverse social and economic dynamics for the highly skilled minority whose labor society can't easily replace.

Citation needed?

This speaks personally to me as why tech workers (and multi-generation urbanites) are seen as widely disconnected: being persuaded a small number of people "create value" while forgetting about the people building your stuff, growing your food, extracting your oil (and killing the planet in the process), moving your stuff around, nursing people, building your house, installing your AC, shipping your amazon packages, and all the other ultra-necessary jobs (that are usually underpaid) that I don't even realise exist.

Without the drivers, Uber does not exist. Without Foxconn and its army of underpaid labor, Apple does not exist. It's not a small number of people creating value, it's a small number of people capturing all that value thanks to shitty wages and work conditions for everyone else.

We can all pretend "automation" will replace people, but it's obvious the complexities of those tasks will always mostly done by humans.

There's an obvious positive sum trade: the useless people get to slack off (e.g. living on UBI), and in exchange the useful are paid commensurate with the value the produce. The useful are happy because they're fabulously rich, and the useless are happy because they're not the ones working so hard. The only real losers are the social status masters, and social status is positional, so they'll always be a small minority.

Unfortunately that small minority controls the cultural narrative. They can reinforce the natural human tendency to zero-sum thinking, and they can hold out the false hope that the useless can become successful parasites too. Everybody is born equal, so if you're not rich it must be because you didn't work hard enough! It's easy to fall for it when your brain is hard-wired with the just-world fallacy.

This combination of cognitive biases and active manipulation means I don't expect to see any improvement before environmental collapse renders the whole thing moot. The 1% rule and everybody else is either overworked or underpaid. You'd have to think like an economist to even see the possibility of escape, and who wants to do that?

Your argument makes sense, but I'm suspicious that there is that wide of a gap between the 2 classes of people described.

That's a very arrogant and elitist attitude. I wish Galt's Gulch actually existed and we could exile elitists there. Let's see how they do without all the lower castes in society who pick their fruit, clean their toilets, cook and serve their food, take care of their children, pick up their garbage, and have to smile at them in order to have the honor of serving them.

Gold is more expensive than water because gold is rare. But no one would choose a world with plentiful gold and no water. Gold is not worth more, it is just priced higher by market dynamics.

Putting a value on one's work by the price the market gives it, and then justifying the market as the arbiter of value by the total price of work it incents people to do is amazingly circular.

You could say that our society works that way now, but there are innumerable pressures at work (many of them created by our public policy) that compel the less driven and the less capable to work ridiculous hours in "bullshit jobs" just to survive. It isn't necessary to compel less-skilled or less-interested people to work full-time just so that neurosurgeons will go to work. The people at the top of the skill pyramid get there because (a) they want to be seen as "the best" and (b) they want access to the money, power, and/or social prestige that comes with their chosen profession.

So many jobs are either not necessary or could be done in 1/4 the time. Our allocation of labor is massively inefficient, and it can't be just because we are afraid of making hard workers unhappy.

Reward for the extra day worked? If top performers are rewarded more than everyone else and working the extra day or two is optional,everyone else can opt to not work the rewardless extra day while top performers opt to work a full week for the reward.

It's much like competitive shift jobs for waiters, the good performers get the hard well tipping shifts.

Does this simply not work at scale?

C'mon man, that's not even remotely true. Even taking the outlier; google, $360,000 revenue generated per employee. Big deal; I'm pretty sure a decent accounting firm creates more value per employee.

This is an HN conceit that’s not actually true. Take something like health care. It takes a large number of individuals to produce health care services, and technology hasn’t really reduced that amount. The other day, I needed to schedule an appointment for my son, to follow up about his ear infection. I called the nice lady at reception who set everything up. I could’ve used an app, but that’s like saying you don’t need chefs because you could just eat grass. You can, but you don’t want to. Likewise, dealing with a computer to do something like this is an exercise in self abuse. And computers haven’t gotten any better at interacting with a human at the human’s level in decades. (On that front, I think self check out machines are similar. There is a reason Whole Foods mostly has regular cashiers. It’s because computers haven’t automated away the cashiers job, they just make it possible for customers to save a few cents by doing the job themselves.)

Likewise with pretty much everything else. In the legal field, secretaries have universally been downsized to cut costs. The result is just reduces efficiency, where $700/hour lawyers waste their time doing something a secretary should be doing. (Computers have done precious little to actually eliminate any of that work.)

That is to say: citation needed. For all of it.

This is interesting. You're saying you would be giving away something valueable for free, and yet there would be no takers? Maybe it's not so valueable after all then? Stuff that is genuinely solving some yet unsolved pain or problem should, given time, take on its own, without influencers.

But how?

I think the author is wrong about our work culture impaacting peoples need for work. I think people actually want to feel like they are contributing to society, like they are useful. The question to me isnt how do we create less work, its how do we make work more meaningful for people

It’s atrocious what some of these people are asked to do and the wages they’re expected to perform at.

But beyond that, even wages aren’t even the entire picture. I live in Chicago. I managed a fleet of workers who not only had to content with a company that paid laughable wages, workers were on their own for parking, vehicle maintenance, equipment and materials, ancillary costs of maintaining their tools.

End of the day the $25 we paid to our licensed and insured electrician translated to $12/hr coming home.

I fought for a year to get those fellas better pay. Our managing company was hearing none of it. The guy who ran the entire operation took home six figures. I know this because I saw the books.

Compared to costs

We know mainly why costs are too high in the Bay Area, and it's mostly housing. Which is a solvable problem, if only the market was able to expand housing supply.

Do you think it's the "terror" that makes that situation prefferable from a "capital stand point"? In times of historically low unemployment, I hardly think the general populace is holding such terror. And even so, why would splitting the work reduce this terror?

It’s preferable to have more production, which could be one person working 60 hours or two working 30 hours. Sometimes due to lower switching and communication costs and returns to specialisation/learning by doing 60 hours will be more productive. Sometimes the costs are low and the returns to one person working more hours will be low and it won’t be. If there are fixed costs to employing a single worker this will militate against splitting up the work.

> So reducing workload to increase employment rates is completely unacceptable to those who own society.

Then the German system of Kurzarbeit[1] during economic downturns should be unworkable. It isn’t, it’s just difficult to coordinate.

> Wage presure from near full employment is also undesireable to them but must be considered the lesser of two evils and is fairly fudge-able by changing the definition of employed.

Changing definitions do not affect whether there are too many or too few workers for the production demanded. If there’s an increase in demand for labour some people will work more and some people will come out of unemployment as wages are bid up by the greater demand.

[1]https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/08/01/anthropology-of-financi...

> In the 2008-9 recession, in response to falling orders, German firms reduced labour utilisation by cutting back work hours rather than by laying off workers. In fact, a whopping 90% of the drop in total labour inputs in the German economy in the Great Recession is to be explained by reduction of hours per worker ! This kind of “labour hoarding” does not normally happen during recessions in other countries, but did happen in Germany this time. This mini-miracle now has people on the centre-left all over the world seeking ways to replicate it in other countries, and has spawned a substantial literature.

> In Germany, firms face restrictions on sacking workers in the first place, but in case of economic difficulties, they can apply to the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit) for “short time” or Kurzarbeit. (Not the same as the 35-hour work week made famous by France, which is a statutory definition of full-time work.) The application entails a protocol for reducing work hours per worker, with the request triggering a process of consultations between the BA, management and works councils inside firms. After an agreement, workers can receive unemployment compensation in proportion to the loss in working hours.

We’re long overdue to move past “maximizing employment” at an economic policy level (looking at you US Federal Reserve).

I suspect that has a lot to do with the structure of our society, and our relationship with work.

From TFA:

> In fact, quantitative studies revealed that the average adult hunter-gatherer spent about 20 hours a week at hunting and gathering, and a few hours more at other subsistence-related tasks such as making tools and preparing meals (for references, see Gray, 2009). Some of the rest of their waking time was spent resting, but most of it was spent at playful, enjoyable activities, such as making music, creating art, dancing, playing games, telling stories, chatting and joking with friends, and visiting friends and relatives in neighboring bands. Even hunting and gathering were not regarded as work; they were done enthusiastically, not begrudgingly. Because these activities were fun and were carried out with groups of friends, there were always plenty of people who wanted to hunt and gather, and because food was shared among the whole band, anyone who didn’t feel like hunting or gathering on any given day (or week or more) was not pressured to do so.

It's quite possible to like work. But that isn't really true in a lot of jobs. People who are overworked and underpaid; low-level bureaucrats; middle managers... there's a lot of thankless, unrewarding jobs out there, where people can't see a benefit to their work, where people see a negative impact of their work on society.

That's very interesting. Got any cites for that? Would like to explore. Thx.