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Comment by ptah | Hacker News Reader

productivity increases were meant to help us earn more by working less. what went wrong

1. We compare ourselves to to others and compete with them. (Keeping up with the Jones's)

2. Humans aren't good at predicting what will make them happy.

3. Work comes in quanta (9-5 job, either you have one or not). For some reason there are few options to take half a job, if you want to.

You earn far more by working a lot more. You use it to pay for housing, education, and healthcare. You are in competition with your peers, who also have increased productivity, so it's a wash at best.

What a sad way of looking at the world. The only way to actually win is to step off the damn hedonic treadmill.

> You are in competition with your peers

I am?

I honestly don't care what they do, how much they make, etc; if they are doing better (financially), great for them.

Myself? I'm what I call "Dave Ramsey Debt-Free" - I have no unsecured debt, I have no car payments, I use my credit cards wisely and pay off the amount owed monthly if not weekly. The only debt I have is my mortgage, and honestly I could pay it off in full tomorrow if I wanted to.

Many of so-called peers who might be making more, aren't anywhere near as lucky. Some of them I know struggle and live paycheck-to-paycheck. I used to be there myself. I can empathize with the situation.

Buying a house changed all of that. My wife and I changed our financial situation completely. It took a few years of ramen and beans, but we did it. Anyone can do it - but the first step is to stop competing with your peers, and stop trying to "keep up with the Jones".

In the end, when you're dead, you're dead. Nobody is going to say "well, s/he had more than their neighbor/peer over there, at least" - and the fact is, even if they do, you'll be dead; you won't care.

Not parent commenter, but you are competing. You might not compete for the nicest car, but you are competing for housing, healthcare and education. Houses aren't expensive because they are built with gold, but because everyone needs one.

It's not like you can't work fewer hours and have all the things greater productivity offered. But it's also created even more things you can get by continuing to work more, and most people do not feel satisfied living without them

This is exactly it. We can get the same standard of living we had 50 years ago while working a hell of a lot less than we did 50 years ago. But of course nobody wants to live that way (myself included).

I wonder how this true this sentiment actually is. For instance, my house was built in the twenties. Other than internet and a television (which are hardly bank breaking expenses), living in this home is not meaningfully different than it would have been in the 50s. All of my major expenses are things that would have been accessible (if cheaper, eg college education) in the 1950s. Cutting all modern luxuries from my life would hardly move the needle on my ability to “work a hell of a lot less”.

No. This is a myth. Check costs of various expense segments against net salaries and you will see how much certain areas have changed.

Insane example: just the average cost of processing the legally required paperwork for partitioning and buying a plot and get all permits to build is higher for me today than it was for my grandfather in 1960 to buy the land and all materials to build a house. As measured in net income - hours of work after taxes. And I'm in a higher income bracket than he was.

I'd work 30% of what I do now if I could. The truth is that no one will ever employ you at 30%.

first of all this is an incredibly white-collar centric claim. shift work pays by the hour for however many hours you work (and possibly overtime), and most of these jobs don't expect you to work full-time. in fact, they might prefer that you don't. you're probably not gonna get an aeron chair and a mechanical switch keyboard though.

even in software, there are people working less than full-time. there was a thread about this just the other day.

> first of all this is an incredibly white-collar centric claim

Well yeah obviously I wouldn't be able to live working @30% doing food delivery or cleaning bathrooms...

> there are people working less than full-time.

There are some for sure but so far I haven't found a company accepting my requests. It's probably highly dependent on the country/industry.

I currently work a three day week. Finding somewhere that let me do this was not easy. There were rather few places willing to do it and I took a pretty big pay cut (on top of earning 40% less by working 40% less, I mean). I don't think I'll be able to sustain it indefinitely, financially speaking. Maybe I can find somewhere for 4 days for less of a pay cut (or increase my hours here).

So, I wouldn't say "no one will ever employ you at 30%", but its definitely not easy and it does come with a cost beyond what the fewer hours would suggest.

> The truth is that no one will ever employ you at 30%.

Yeah they will - you just haven't figured it out yet (but you can - if you're willing).

/Bob Dobbs can show you the way...

I'm not sure that's true any more at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. People I know are having a very difficult time covering just rent, electricity, food, and transportation for a family of 4 on a dual full-time income.

After cutting basically everything else except the cellphone bill because you basically can't get by in the modern world without a phone and an internet connection. (And that replaces the landline bill they would have had a few decades back.)

That only works if only a few people decide to work more, since in capitalism prices/wages are set by the marginal rate. So if everyone works more, wages just go down, till no one is actually any better off.

On average, we are earning more. It's just that one of "us" has earned over a hundred billion dollars in the past couple of decades, which drags the average up a bit.

I think you forgot the scare-quotes around "earned".

Another way to look at it is that a productivity increase increases the marginal value of time spent working...

Capitalism

edit: before the downvote storm, have a look at https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Raoul... and https://libcom.org/files/The%20Society%20of%20the%20Spectacl... it's doing a very good job at explaining the shift we went through after WWII, when everyone was promising 5 hours workdays and retirement at 45.

>> "edit: before the downvote storm, have a look at"

I'm as down on capitalism as anyone, but one of HN's very good guidelines is that you should be more thoughtful and substantive as the topic gets more divisive. Dropping the word "capitalism" in response to someone asking what's wrong on a forum full of capitalists is never going to go well.

Put a little effort in.

And yet, people defending capitalism are never expected to put in this extra effort.

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