I think we should also start with 6 hours work days or 4 days 8 hours. It will free up time to try new ideas and spend more time with family and loved ones. 6-7 weeks of vacation would also be something to try. Ie optimizing for life quality.
When reading the comments, I expected people to dismiss the idea as unrealistic or naive but to agree with the spirit and to share the general goal of reducing worktime.
I was not expecting panic and outrage.
It was a minority (and certainly skewed by the groups of people who post online in the first place), but a notable number of commenters were violently opposed the idea, not out of economical concerns, but because they believed the end goal of having more free time itself was highly problematic - that it would encourage an unhealthy lifestyle, erode morals, would pose a danger to social order, etc etc.
It was a sobering read and a reminder that status-quo bias is still very much a thing.
In a free society, work hours is an agreement between consenting adults. If you want to work part time, that option is widely available. But why force your preferences on the rest of us?
If I stop working, eventually somebody will turn up at my door and throw me out onto the street.
Of course. But the fact that we have biological needs is not coercion.
Libertarian thinking in a nutshell.
I started my first company in 2001 by getting 6 months off from Ericsson. I wanted to during that time, Ericsson would have to allow me to come back and continue as an employee. Quit permamently after three months. Now I'm happily running my fifth startup.
Also did you have any unvested compensation (stock awards, bonuses, etc) and what happened to them when you paused your employment?
No bonus, stocks etc.
The "freedom" you are talking about is the freedom to take or leave work schedules we consider abusive today. If you want to go back to a world where employment means 12/7 or starve, you are free to campaign for the repeal all you like, though. Your senators' aides are standing by, call now. Meanwhile, I will be lobbying them to constrain your freedom a little more.
I get so many people telling me “but people would be miserable, they need work to be happy and have purpose.” UGH YES I agree, but I never said I would ban employment! I just want people to be able to take a year off now and then, or work half time, or volunteer or do non-capitalist work and be fine. People seem to think that if we weren’t desperate for employment we’d just sit around bored all the time. That’s not what wealthy people do! Human beings are far too creative to just sit around and do nothing. Eliminating compulsory work is about increasing freedom. We’re smart enough to find something good to do with that freedom.
You can also see that effect already in schools. Currently there is school vacation and you see lots of groups of bored teenagers hanging around.
There is something very wrong with a "free society", when most of its people don't know what to do with their free time except to kill it. (The very concept of timekilling is disturbing as well)
But yes. I am 100% behind the idea of robotic basic income!
People can learn again, that there is more to live than mindless huzzling and consuming.
It might take a generation for people to adjust, like Clay Shirky describes at the start of his talk “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” from 2008:
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing—there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders—a lot of things we like—didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
If we are supporting people that legitimately can’t work, sure. But supporting people that can work, but don’t — that’s where I have a problem because my willingness to work, even in jobs I might not like gets punished through taxes. Why do I have a personal responsibility to support others that are unwilling to support themselves. We are talking about grown adults, if they have nothing to contribute to society, why would we subsidize that? Some layabout watching Judge Judy all day gets a free pass while the guy working on a hot roof all day is supposed to pay for that? Who is going to be a janitor if they don’t have to? Producing something of value to society is part of being a part of a society. People have a responsibility to take care of themselves. They might need some temporary help now and then, but making dependency a permanent state is a great way to ensure that government has ultimate control of your life.
People will take jobs for the similar reasons we take jobs now- we want money, and take higher paying jobs to afford nicer things. In a world where bases are covered, luxuries will definitely be a better carrot than the stick of homelessness.
And since you brought it up, I find your attitude disturbing. “Why should I have to help other people” is kind of a gross question. You don’t want to help other people? Doesn’t that make you selfish? Again I’m not saying I will force you to help, but why are you against the idea of helping others anyway?
I see that you mention government. I didn’t mention government. I said society could provide for everyone. We can do that without the government.
You can also organize among your minority group and protest that your rights are being violated, or hire lawyers to sue.
I’m not concerned with people who don’t want to participate. They don’t have to and we don’t need their support. Such a system can be supported entirely by those who want to support it.
I’m sorry if I come off confrontational but your question seemed to be a “gotcha” that is honestly very simplistic. As an anarchist or “libertarian socialist” I’m quite aware of problems of the state. I will say that in many cases I think local governments may find it beneficial to support these systems, but I like the idea of this being done on a local level so individual cities can decide for themselves. In the same way that some governments operate trains, it is not the case that trains depend on government to be useful.
If the cost of supporting peoples need is driven towards zero, then the cost of supporting your own needs will likewise gets driven towards zero. At that point, the amount of work you will need to put in to meet your needs will go towards zero, and the number of people that can be supported by a minimal amount of additional works will rapidly increase.
The point being that at some point the incremental amount of work needed to support a large number of people choosing not to work will be so low that it's not worth worrying about it relative to the potential benefits of creating a surplus large enough that it effectively becomes a choice for everyone.
While I'm sure a lot of people will choose leisure, a lot of us won't. We might work less. More likely we'll work on different things. If I had full freedom to choose my projects, I'd still work on something because I work on software because I enjoy it.
Liberating a huge number of people to pursue projects that the financial payoff for is extremely uncertain has the potential to be massively transformative.
There are plenty of ways we could reward those choosing to continue to do the minimal necessary work in a future like that, to ensure sufficient people want to.
> They might need some temporary help now and then, but making dependency a permanent state is a great way to ensure that government has ultimate control of your life.
I happen to agree with this part. The Expanse illustrates this potential case well: People on "basic" have their needs met, but are also locked out of work, and getting into the upper echelons where you can get a job and do better is treated as a privilege allotted via random allocations - unless you have friends in high places... People on basic don't dare rise up, because their life depends on not getting in the crosshairs of government.
This is why a lot of the left are concerned about universal basic income, for example - because it is a potential "bread and circus" for capitalism struggling to deal with future fallout of automation.
But that is different from opposing the idea of a system where automation is advanced enough and democratized enough that basic needs are available to be met everywhere, and nobody has the power to stop you from using the time that gives you however you want, including creating your own position to do better.
So, his opinion is that we should be more productive in 4 days than we are in 5. I do enjoy the 3 day weekends, but I have to admit that I don't like the immense pressure of the shortened week.
You learn to make meetings more effective, group menial tasks in to blocks and make time for interesting things, and become better at prioritising.
And damn do I feel productive when working on hard technical problems. Some things just require a fresh mind.
That or they were very good at faking it.
People will find ways to get the time and rest they need, hiding and faking is less effective.
On top of that you get loyalty in return for being treated as human beings rather than slaves.
Of course companies that do that are usually startups, and if your startup tries to fuck you, leave. They probably need you more than you need them.
The culture aspect needs to come down from the top. A senior engineering manager at a well-known SV company with "unlimited" vacation claims it works pretty well because, from his perspective, an expectation that you'll take time off and disconnect comes from the top. On the other hand, I've heard others at the same company give a less rosy report, so YMMV depending on teams, etc.
And we're getting more than half of each 24-hour day off too! I guess what more could we want?
I hope you are not alluding that Sweden has 6 hour work days? That is not true. It has 8 hours, like most other countries.
I work with teams across Europe and they seems to put in hours that aren’t that different from the US.
I assume that voluntary?