Overwork contributes to 745k premature deaths per year
npr.org
npr.org
Overwork *CONTRIBUTES* to the death of more than 745k per year. It did not solely and directly cause those deaths. How would you even know if it did? But the claim of the title is that overwork killed them as if overwork popped out behind them with a gun and shot them. It's just obviously a nonsense claim. And once you put it this way, tons of things CONTRIBUTE to excessive deaths. Poor diet, exposure to many everyday chemicals, living in a city(air pollution).
In fact, what are the odds that overwork doesn't correlate with living in a higher air pollution environment? Anyway, the claim in the title is nonsense.
> "It's just obviously a nonsense claim"
Yes, obviously, and even more obviously after reading the article and the linked WHO press release which says "The study concludes that working 55 or more hours per week is associated with an estimated 35% higher risk of a stroke".
Attacking straw people based on a title of a newpaper headline isn't pro-science.
The headline is "Overwork Killed x" and that implies in no uncertain terms that overwork directly and solely killed people which is again, obviously nonsense.
> A few months ago a person of the ones you mention in your first paragraph posted on FB, as a blow against religion, that religion was so unreasonable that parents had to train their kids since youth in order to believe. And I remember thinking at the time about all the years of training needed to get any non-superficial commanding of science.
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/29763
Edit: I should add that I believe the title is justified in this case. The study[1] identifies overwork as a cause for developing deadly diseases. Without overwork, the given number of people wouldn't have died of these diseases. Unhealthy diet and other factors are counted as a consequence of overwork. It could be phrased as '3.6% of stroke deaths and y% of ischemic heart disease deaths could have been avoided by working less'.
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
Oh you mean like everyone on Social Media who think they understand Science but never actually practiced it once in their lives?
Some other really weird ones: engineering, design, art, math
And my favorite: programming
I generally find conflating any two of these different things to be problematic enough that "science" is a useless word.
But more how would you go about testing an hypothesis (design of experiments) how do you know if the result are statistically significant? if it’s statistically significant is it enough to say it’s true (light can behave like a particule and like a wave so is it both or neither ...)
But they rarely teach the scientific method.
+1 if you can get your hands on some ammonium dichromate for an even more impressive, but more dangerous demonstration.
These types of "experiments" are less about teaching science, and more about impassioning a love and interest for science.
My goal is not for my kid to learn a subset of chemistry theory from the explanation in a book or some fun experiment.
Instead my goal is for them to understand why the human race now have this knowledge. How did the first chemist came up with the theory, how did they verify the theory was correct ... why do we now believe this is how atoms work.
When I went to my teacher with the experiment, she laughed at me and told me it was absurd, because batteries wouldn't drain that quickly; she was really quite rude and aggressive about it. I'm still not sure what she was thinking; I had to contradict her multiple times and say that my Dad was an electrical engineer several times; she was still skeptical.
I learned while young that people in positions of authority, even when nominally "credentialed" in science, are often completely incompetent, not curious, not open-minded, and are instead arrogant and patronizing. She thought she knew what the answer was and she hadn't seen it before, so she just ridiculed me. This was in one of the best school systems in the country, in one of the best schools in that district.
This would only be surprising if your teacher was a Physics teacher. If you want to be extra charitable a Science teacher. Most people don’t care about it understand the scientific method and it’s a profoundly unnatural way of thinking, much like doing formal logic.
I'm not sure. Physics teachers often have to deal with absolute laws of physics, e.g. "you can't make a perpetual motion machine".
You can't ever demonstrate that something doesn't exist (philosophy of the black swan/inviting disproof by counter-example), so it's challenging for teachers to communicate this as a fact to curious students: the result is sometimes teachers appearing scornful.
One slightly-misunderstood law of conservation and you're suddenly a physics teacher who is scorning the truth.
[1]: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/01/11/are-experts-real...
That's genuinely a baffling lesson to take from that incident. I mean, your father was the credentialed one, with an engineering degree, and the teacher was the unqualified one who was just a science teacher. Surely the lesson should be the exact opposite?
Try telling HN to remember this when talking about covid death figures.
I understood the headline figure to be suggesting that 750k people per year around the world are dying early, i.e. 10 years earlier than they would otherwise.
(Unlike you, I find it unsurprising and likely true to the point of not being headline-worthy: this is not very many people against the working age population)
The original article doesn't quite refer to that definition, but does say that 23.3 million Disability Adjusted Life-Years are lost per year, so it does seem to be working on an approximately equivalent basis.
Saying that everything around us "contributes" to death is pointless hyper-factualism. It's useful to have a scientific attempt to quantify how much each factor contributes.
This then further emboldens the misinformed people on the other side of the debate to be categorically anti science because they have easy go to evidence of "scientific claims" that are easily debunkable.
Whereas this absolutely is not even what they are claiming and it would never be in the realm of science under any circumstances to make this claim the way you are stating it.
> Fig. 1. Conceptual model of the possible causal relationship between exposure to long working hours and ischemic heart disease and stroke.
All they are doing is tying a statistical extrapolation of some data regarding the correlation of prevalence of ischemic heart disease and stroke with length of work week and then extrapolating, proposing a POSSIBLE CAUSAL MODEL for this and then tying this first layer of data to
> ESTIMATES of population exposed to long working hours
They absolutely did not systematically prove causality of anything and certainly not by a long shot did they prove the causality of overwork in specific numbers of deaths.
Also check out their own ratings of the confidence in the data they used:
> Ischemic heart disease (Li et al., 2020a) c 41–48 hours/week 20 studies (312,209 participants) 0.99 (0.88–1.12) Low quality Inadequate evidence of harmfulness No
49–54 hours/week 18 studies (308,405 participants) 1.01 (0.82–1.25) Low quality Inadequate evidence of harmfulness No
≥55 hours/week 22 studies (339,680 participants) 1.17 (1.05–1.31) Moderate quality Sufficient evidence of harmfulness Yes
Stroke (Descatha et al., 2020) d 41–48 hours/week 12 studies (265,937 participants) 1.04 (0.94–1.14) Low quality Inadequate evidence of harmfulness No
49–54 hours/week 17 studies (275,181 participants) 1.13 (1.00–1.28)e Moderate quality Limited evidence of harmfulness No
≥55 hours/week 7 studies (162,644 participants) 1.35 (1.13–1.61) Moderate quality Sufficient evidence of harmfulness Yes
Most of their data is by their own admission judged to be of low quality for proving this point and in two cases over a high threshhold they established that moderate quality data was sufficient to establish "evidence of harmfulness"
Basically it is difficult to communicate how many different levels you are incorrect on.
Slightly off-topic, but the truth is the same can be said of Covid 19. That is, presence of or correlation is not necessarily causation. The best example is, people who were morbidly obese; with high blood pressure, Type 2 Diabetes, other complications, etc. Yet Covid gets sole credit for the deaths?
All that aside, a lack of time (e.g., from working a lot) leads to "compromises." Fast food, not exercise, no mental downtime, etc.
Take cocaine overdose, causing a heart attack. Might have had a heart murmur, asthma, obesity, and it's always possible that without those conditions the patient would have survived. Cause of death was still a cocaine overdose.
There's a separate question, which shouldn't be conflated, whether hospitals were over-reporting COVID deaths because of financial incentives. It's possible there was some of that, but while you can move numbers around a bit, you can't hide death itself, and the US had substantially more deaths last year than would have been expected had the pandemic not come along.
Worth noting that by that standard, overwork doesn't cause death in any case. People die of strokes, heart attack, disease, but they don't die of overwork: or smoking, for that matter.
The study of what contributes to mortality has little to do with the study of what causes it, is what I'm saying. COVID is assuredly a case of the latter.
This was to avoid the time consuming process of dealing with insurance claims and the uninsured. It unintentionally created a perverse incentive for hospitals to claim as many deaths as possible as covid deaths. That doesn't mean that all or even most hospitals are doing this, at least not intentionally but everyone working in the hospital is aware that it needs financial stability. Even if they're not intentionally sticking their thumbs on the scale to attribute deaths to covid that shouldn't be, there's going to be a bias for it.
As for the amounts, you can probably find those with a web search but be aware that there's lots of bad information out there so be careful about the source you check.
- Why was the fact that Covid disproportionately affected those 65 & over brushed aside?
"Adults 65 and older account for 16% of the US population but 80% of COVID-19 deaths in the US, somewhat higher than their share of deaths from all causes (75%) over the same period."
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/what-sh...
Note: Covid rates and deaths are falling off because people 65 & over have gotten the jab. Not necessarily because other less vulnerable groups have; including children.
- Why was the fact that comorbidies - a medical science standard - suddenly abandoned?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/cdc-94percent-of-co...
- Why was Covid's disproportionate affect on communities of color brushed aside?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-about-health...
- Why was the response to Covid and its contribution to an increase in poverty brushed aside?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/8-million-americans-sli...
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2020/10/21...
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Hiding behind aggregation and hyperbol in order to scare Karen is a dangerous tactic; a spin far too many people accepted with out question. The problem with fear is its limits the field of vision - literally, as well as to facts beyond the narrative.
Yes. Covid exists. That said, in terms of the response and data transparency there has been a significant amount of unreasonable manipulation.
Please don't confuse how "popular" a fact is with its legitimacy. Just the same, the popularity of propaganda doesn't increase its legitimacy.
Thank you for pointing that out. It's an easy mistake to make given how very often one can see that terrible disease, "Overworkitis," on death certificates... /s
Also something like GDP is very macro, and not all GDP activity is socially beneficial, so GDP contribution would be a flawed way to make such an assessment. For example, someone scamming seniors out of their retirement money through shady business tactics wouldn't be a net positive to society, but could contribute millions to GDP.
My $0.02 based on nothing more than personal experience is that it seems to be a net negative in practice. I'm sure that some degree of overwork in certain industries has raised GDP, but there are also notorious examples of systemic overwork reducing productivity, like medical providers (mistakes) and Japan (Parkinson's Law), which seem to resonate more with my experience.
Who knows, though? It could easily be the opposite, for all I know. It would be interesting if someone was able to do this analysis.
Like, with smoking, it is the actual thing you consume which kills you. But with overwork, it’s not that you’re working $x hours too many, but that you’re super stressed out. (Even achieving low stress levels with normal work hours can be hard!) I think phrasing it as stress makes the tie more obvious to me because high stress levels are more obviously damaging.
While most people understand that stress probably isn't good for you, we haven't had decades of ad campaigns and public health initiatives dedicated towards it. So the general public just needs time to catch up before we put stress in the same bucket as smoking, lead paint, and asbestos.
1. people usually do not instantly die after smoking. There is a long process from smoking to death.
2. people who smoke are different from people who do not smoke. There could be other contributing factors associated with people who smokes.
"smoking kills X people a year" was never a scientifically accurate claim. The accurate claim should be smoking increase * chance of ##, or on average people who smoke live ## years shorter.
However, there are cases where you can say smoking kills someone. For example, a woman who frequently smokes during the pregnancy gives birth to a baby born with severe life-threatening defects and the baby dies immediately after birth. In this case it could be OK to say the mother's smoking killed the baby, because:
1. There is a relatively short period of time involved.
2. There may be no other significant contributing factor to the birth defects, if we can rule out genetic factors.
Otherwise, in most cases, it is not scientifically accurate to claim smoking kills X people a year. In some cases, smoking actually could save people, who would otherwise use more detrimental means to release stress or anxiety.
I do agree people need to be more critical of science reporting. And often science needs to do a much better job at both sciencing and explaining the results to people who aren't experienced in interpreting them.
1. is the length of the period of those people from getting infected to death relatively short?
2. are there any other significant factors contribute to those people's death in that period?
Even if deaths were patients older than the median life expectancy with significant existing health problems prior to the infection, they can still pass those two tests, so most of them were still killed by the virus.
>are there any other significant factors contribute to those people's death in that period?
Multiple things can contribute. Our body is an extremely complex organism. Putting a death down to 100% this or that when in reality it's a lot more complicated isn't just imprecise, it's often flat out wrong.
And just because events coincide doesn't mean there's causality. If 1000 people died on a day with severe thunderstorms around the country that doesn't mean the thunderstorms killed them all. When old people with a virus infection die it's reasonable to assume there could be a connection, but you can't just say everyone who tested positive in a given time died of the virus.
I agree "events coincide doesn't mean there's causality", but I think the causation here is still pretty strong, even for 90 year olds.
What about HIV/AIDS? Does it kill anyone?
The usual interpretation, long work hours are the major factor in the mortality of 745k people, is a valid interpretation of the research results.
To say it only contributes to mortality along with many other factors, without pointing out the portion of correlation, is to say nothing at all, which isn't what the report tries to communicate.
You're referring to a headline from an online magazine health section, not "science," nor even the study you are criticizing (which you clearly haven't even glanced at).
> *CONTRIBUTES*
What's the insight here? Do you really think that people can possibly die from "overwork," full stop, or are you being deliberately obtuse for the sake of wedging your politics into the discussion?
> In fact, what are the odds that overwork doesn't correlate with living in a higher air pollution environment?
Somehow this still works on HN.
The study itself uses the word "causes", so I I guess some people misread it to say it causes heart disease and death, rather than contributes to.
I’m focussing on men because they die 11-18x more than women in all Western countries, but most of those deaths were in worker jobs, and if we focus on the office workers (and WFH candidates), I’m sure the difference is tighter. But still a multiple. So let’s start somewhere:
We love to overwork ourselves to death, sometimes by sexist prejudice (“men are workers!”), sometime by honour (“He died in a battle”), sometimes by ideals (“This startup is the work of my life”), sometimes for money (“Ok we risk high with this robbery, but we might have money in the end”) and often because we have no friends and no other way to be recognized in society.
It’s not a fatality, but I’m a bit lost at where to start.
This isn't quite what you are referring to, but, back in the days when I had delusions of becoming a college professor, I had always thought I would die in front of a blackboard, with a piece of chalk in my hand.
> I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.
From Bertrand Russell. The full text is a bit longer, but I really like the sentiment behind these words.
But I'd actually disagree about gender being the primary drive of this - I'd instead state that the "young" (vaguely defined) tend to be more willing to invest everything singlemindedly compared to the "mature". With an understanding that gender also seems to contribute this but also contributes to maturity with women tending to mature to the idea of having a family at a younger age then men.
One of my many disagreements with feminism is that it has somehow persuaded itself that this is somehow a privilege for men, and not an intolerable and sometimes literally fatal burden.
There are other brands of feminism, of course.
It definitely is a privilege, as a whole. People bring up workplace fatalities, and compare the experience of poor or working-class men vs women in general. The experience of a working class woman in this country is absolutely worse than that of a working class man, but both are very bad, because our country is not built for our working class or poor, regardless of gender.
If you compare women vs men in the same class, men undeniable have privilege.
On overwork specifically, fathers are the most likely to work overtime and swap shifts - more so than men without children (and women in general). When it's a choice even other men don't make, it should be obvious even to the most frothy ideologue that there's a unique pressure on fathers in this regard. They're giving something up that literally everyone else finds valuable.
I don't know why the possibility of "Yes, men encounter unique problems" is met with derision. I'm not dismissing or trying to minimize problems women encounter, and life at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap sucks in general. But men absolutely don't enjoy some sort of privilege there; it's a grind and it will literally consume you unless you can come up with an out regardless of sex or creed. That suckage is gong to be different depending on circumstances, but I will say nobody really cares, good luck, and can you please keep it to yourself in polite company, because it's gross and makes people uncomfortable.
> I’m focussing on men because they die 11-18x more than women is all Western countries, but most of those deaths were in worker jobs, and if we include service industry, I’m sure the difference is tighter. But still a multiple.
I think you need to qualify those deaths a bit. On a long enough timeline men and women all day at the same rate. If it's while at work that absolutely makes sense given that women didn't "work" like men did until recently.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
I don't know if it's actually fair to try and ascribe expected lifetimes to lifestyle when there are some pretty clear biological differences - this strikes me as a sort of Occam's Razor situation.
There was a woman who did immense progress for the miners and factory workers, organizing demonstrations and strikes. But she had never had success trying to attract attention of the number of limbs lost or lives lost. No-one cared than men were severing their bodies at work and living disabled. Then she stated wording it this way:
“When a man dies at work, it’s a WIFE and little CHILDREN who can’t eat.”
Then men started improving safety.
> I’m focussing on men because they die 11-18x more than women in all Western countries, but most of those deaths were in worker jobs, and if we focus on the office workers (and WFH candidates), I’m sure the difference is tighter. But still a multiple.
I asked that they qualify the deaths - men don't die 11-18x more than women - they die the exact same - 100%. Age range it, provide bounds to that statistic. Because even "while working" doesn't make sense if less women work than men.
Example: In France, there are about 500 deaths at work, 40 are women. It’s getting lower in general but actually increasing for women until before the Covid, as equality makes progress in worker positions.
Certainly under any and all finite time periods, the rates would differ.
I think this is already true if they want to be recognized as a career woman right? Otherwise they’re working, but basically expected to quit at any time to bear children.
I’m pretty sure, currently everyone dies exactly the same amount.
100%
Firstly, your numbers are meaningless without context (we all die eh!?)
More importantly, work might be a small factor but other factors are believed to be more important.
From https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151001-why-women-live-l... are two points:
Firstly, testosterone has been implicated as the cause: “A few [institutionalised men] were forcibly castrated as part of their ‘treatment’. Like the Korean eunuchs, they too lived for longer than the average inmate – but only if they had been sterilised before the age of 15.”
Secondly: “female chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons also consistently outlive the males of the group”.
Additionally, I have read that women having XX chromosomes and either one or the other X chromosome is active in each cell (a kind of chimerism) which has been though to provide more resiliency.
Edited: made writing clearer.
I'm not sure that's true. It's just the system is often set up with the rule of "overwork or be left behind".
Common work schedule in China these days is "996" or 9am-9pm, six days a week. It's standard across internet companies. ByteDance and Pinduoduo I believe are "11116", i.e. 11am-11pm six days a week.
I don't think anyone actually wants that schedule, honestly.
Yes, it destroys families, it wrecks people's lives, it contributes to screwing up everyone's cardiac and mental health, it drives people to depression and worse. But it's not like you can negotiate with them to work 9am-5pm five days a week for slightly less pay. They don't offer that option.
This isn't really China-specific either. iBankers in NYC do the same or more hours and they also aren't offered a 9-5 option, it's either work all your waking hours or you're fired.
No idea about China though.
It's not entirely unheard of for men to do things for their family. It's not uncommon for women to do this either. If stereotypes have any accuracy, men tend to be willing to do an awful lot to impress women (e.g. "happy wife, happy life").
And plenty of kids and women worked in cotton mills with horrendous accident rates when compared to today.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is another example here.
Some of us have started to have issues with the "get ahead" mentality. Otherwise you are totally correct, wanting to get ahead implicitly means getting ahead of others i.e. out-competing them, but, like I said, some of us have started to see/understand that this battle is mostly futile.
What if succeeding personally while watching many others suffer unfairly, in a rich country where it needn't be that way, isn't enough to enjoy life? Do we have a duty to expand our sympathies beyond the self and the family? Most ancient wisdom says yes, and yet the modern status quo has failed to conserve this crucial pillar of humanity. Instead we have prosperity gospel, and its more secular version, the mythical meritocracy. Failed ideas that the human race has fought off more than once, only to find itself in the same boat again.
I think there are a lot of assumptions in that statement that highlight the problem.
What does it mean to "get ahead as an individual"? The phrasing implies that you mean earning as much money as possible, but should that really be our primary goal?
It also implies that for one person to "get ahead", somebody else needs to stay behind, but why should that be? Why should I work 60 hours a week, and another person zero, when we could both work 30?
The problem with making that our culture is that most work is not very enjoyable or fulfilling, and so we're basically peer pressuring people into miserable lives, and that causes other problems like drug addiction and mental health issues.
I sometimes think it’s useful to think of myself as a mental athlete. My job is to perform intellectual feats of strength in controlled efforts. The rest of my time I spend preparing for those efforts by relaxing.
Sadly companies make it seem like that's the case, like there's a war going on, forcing people to work until they drop or lose their income. That applies to offices and factories alike. Just to squeeze that last 10-20% out of people.
For what? A shitty app, 2 more assembled devices, 3 more ready meals, all of which will be forgotten or in a landfill without even being properly used.
South Korea and China competition is "working harder". In the US it's all about "working smarter"
Also with all due respect for South Korea and China...very risk averse.
The big jumps happen when you take a risk and beat the odds, not the endless grinding which goes on in Asian societies.
Asian societies lack the arrogance of the creator/founder, which abounds in the West, especially American Jews.
Imagining something new and having the arrogance to think that it will be a great success and you'll be the one bringing it into the world. This is the trademark American Jew mindset.
Zuck turned down 1 Billion for Facebook...Larry and Sergey 1 million for Google. It takes guts and arrogance to think you'll beat the odds and say "no thanks" to 1 billion (and to 1 million too! considering it was back in the 90s and it was a very good deal for the effort they put into it)
( skip to 1:06 ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ4aDgZSjDo
There's a parable about this, about a fisherman and a businessman.
https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/09/04/the-fisherman-and-the...
If overwork is mandated by your culture, you will not find the time to heal, thereby starting a downward spiral. And with so much competition, there will be only few winners and lots of losers. If you lose, the sacrifice of your health will have no benefits and there is no way to get it back.
Life is not about work. Life is about living. And health is essential for living.
I imagine a similar phenomenon exists for other mineral resources.
On the other hand, the answer to GP's question is that this study isn't predominantly about officework. It's a global study[2], and miners are likely accounted for. Americans account for less than 5% of the statistic.
[1] https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/minin...
[2] https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S01604120210022...
If there's a good source on cobalt mine deaths that shines a light on the issue why not consider submitting it to HN?
Now that I am currently working from home where I can pet my cat, tend my garden, watch Netflix, and still work as much as I want I am happy as a clam.
Have to think its our attitude toward work that is part of the problem? Now, I don't endorse 12-hour days. But it seems that 60-hour weeks aren't the whole story, if 72-hour weeks used to be the norm.
Are you sure? I seem to remember otherwise.
When you think about it, most of the work most people do is utterly inconsequential and doesn’t matter much if at all. And even when it does, it’s really not so critical that the world will end if it’s a week or two late, making most overwork useless.
There are very few mission critical, literally life saving exceptions. 99% of it all is not: if the TPS reports are done a week or two late, no one dies and nothing explodes.
Most of this overwork is for bullshit, mundane reasons that aren't even worth a rat's life.
A job overworked or not gives a purpose, a lot of people get depressed if they loose a job because they lack the purpose. Also overwork makes sure there is not much time to think about anything else.
I don't encourage overwork, however it can have both positive and negative impact on lives.
Obviously, society should incentivise that those professions that are overworked and useful to society hire/train more, so they are not that overworked.
If they wouldn't have been capable of accomplishing so much over as short a calendar period, I would estimate higher fatalities, especially during the pandemic but also over all the other decades.
I expect there is an equation for this tragic number.
It doesn't matter how many more life-savers you deploy, simply because there will never be enough of them, things will always be better if one or more of them put in a little extra time.
Should also be equations for the positive-outcome/number-of-hours.
Lower income folks work more hours and are more likely to self-medicate. It isn't the additional hours that kill them, necessarily.
Almost always overwork does not kill "directly", if your premise is alcohol and tobacco is not controlled, my question is then how much of alcohol or tobacco consumption is driven by overwork.
Guess it's time to remove that one.
Working 9AM-8PM regularly has real health side effects and, honestly, it can get a lot worse than 11 hour days in the gaming industry.
Surely this is the stress these people feel rather than the number of hours? If you work 80 hours per week with 0 stress or pressure, does it still apply? If so, what mechanism causes it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27180545 (362 points/174 comments)
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/02/early-e...
Also, has anyone else felt the narrative pushing articles lately?