We’re all paying for someone else’s 4-hour work week, not ours
aninjusticemag.com
aninjusticemag.com
This ranges from everything like online shopping (I bought a pair of trainers yesterday on a Sunday afternoon, and they were shipped from the warehouse 2 hours later), to the people who are used in low-wage countries to make those trainers at a price I feel is 'affordable'.
I'm reminded of a newspaper interview with a bank director here in Sweden a few years ago. She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's. On the contrary, they would obviously be sitting in the back of the cab, on their way to their well-paid career in banking, just like their mother.
But it stands to reasons that those who service our needs are doing so because it’s better for them than the alternative. If there is a systemic problem which results in lack of viable alternatives then attack those systemic causes, but it’s not obvious to me how those of us who who benefit from these services are the main cause of this issue. This seems tantamount to blaming Oscar Schindler for underpaying his Jewish factory workers rather than seeing the bigger picture in why those workers were happy to take low paying factory work.
You almost make it sound like the people who service our needs are forced to do so. It’s not like they’re giving up life of comfort and leisure because they’re forced to do our laundry.
There has been a lot of improvement in some parts of the world, especially some of the (formerly) worst, but a lot of workers are experiencing the opposite even while profits and productivity skyrocket.
Those old pictures of banks, where there were huge rooms full of 100's of clerks, all busy doing double-entry book-keeping. Now that's all done by computers and the clerks are doing something else, almost certainly something more interesting.
The problem, of course, is that the benefits of automation are accruing to the owners. If Amazon manages to replace all their warehouse staff with robots, then the benefits go to the Amazon shareholders. Which is OK, because the shareholders funded the creation of the robots. But as a society, we need to spread this more. We need UBI.
If it increases yield by magnitudes while also improving quality by magnitudes.
Example from the Pickle factory:
You have 4 people putting and screwing lids on pickle jars. 4 people. 2000 Lids a day. With around 40 faulty lids. Lets say you pay those 4 20k a year: total 80k.
An automation solution would cost you at least 400-500k. So unless this automation can do 20 000 lids a day and with only 10 faulty lids per day. Then Maybe it will be worth it. But most of the time it would not be automated.
The rate at which these investments occur is complex.
Here is a short example from the agricultural industry.
https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/44561/Man...
First, employees are way more expensive than their takehome pay. You have benefits, liability, managerial overhead, training, turnover, and facilities costs for every employee. Someone making 20k/yr might easily cost a company 50k/yr to employ.
Second, automation is rarely done to simply replace people. You automate tasks, not jobs. Most customers are looking for improved consistency, not increased yield or quality. That improved consistency means they can better predict their supply chains which leads to savings which dwarf the costs of labor. The other major reason for automation is reducing skill requirement - this frees up skilled employees for more valuable tasks, and removes a major impediment to scaling production.
Finally, most companies have no problem investing in automation. Interest rates are low so its easy to get cheap financing, and robots are in vogue so many companies will invest in automation even where it makes no sense to portray themselves as efficient. Indeed, most companies are more concerned with their valuation than their profits, and the more automated a company is, the more valuable it is in a sale. It's actually really hard to convince customers that they'ed be better served by a cheaper, simpler solution.
I was just trying to make a very simplified example that automation is never done to save human labour.
Hopefully. But what are the values that we hold that will allow that to come true? It's not just a matter of technology. Engineers, designers, and inventors will be the ones building that world. Do they believe their support staff (direct and indirect) deserve to benefit? How about the financiers, who often feel like they are the ones who deserve to benefit primarily, and give both the support staff and engineers short shrift? Deciding that those who work less important jobs than us do not deserve the benefit of our hard work is a race to the bottom.
Whatever the case may be, we can start putting those values into action now. Especially as we see work weeks increasing for people even in an age of abundance.
The very generous unemployment benefits that were part of the US Covid relief bill has led to companies having to rapidly raise wages in order to attract employees. I think this is the fastest growing wages we've seen since the 90s boom.
UBI could have a similar effect, but permanently. Push up wages across the board as not working is a viable option.
It raises the negotiating power of labor and negates some of the advantages of capital, potentially reducing wealth inequality.
Where does this money come from? Increasing prices?
[...] as not working is a viable option.
What kind of life would that be? It can not be too comfortable or everyone might decide not to work which will bring down the entire scheme.
Reducing profits for shareholders, increasing prices on the higher end items favoured by high-earning clientele. Keep the soup & salad the same, raise the steak.
The poorer people will skip the guac when it goes from $1 to $2 but richer people will just grumble and pony up. Maybe they just get Frapps for Fridays, but their manager will just grumble. This way the burden can be gently and consensually shifted up bracket.
Yeah, this is why I am against a UBI that is based on living costs. If you are going to divide society along those who work and those who don't you can't mix and match them in the same region. They'll have to live in cheaper places with less opportunity to make it easier for those who do decide to work. The idea that people live in SF on UBI without working while they push workers out is absurd. It would be a dysfunctional system that collapses on itself.
Sure, if you want to live on a UBI exclusively go to Florida and find a nice and quiet community in a cheap location.
Shareholder reserves. Or do you think they have trouble paying for their groceries? Some wealth inequality can be fixed rather painlessly. I think we can all hold our collective tears that they won't get $10M yearly bonus and "only" $9M.
> What kind of life would that be?
That's not for you or me to decide to don't impose your life philosophy on others. For the record I too can never sit idle but I am not judging others that can and do that all the time.
This is based on a Protestant Work Ethic kind of viewpoint that I think we need to get over.
Work is fulfilling. Sitting at home on benefits sounds great but isn't. I know, I've done my share. It's fine for a few months, but then I always got to the point where I'd take any job just to get out of the house and do something. And even "sitting at home doing nothing" meant working on creative projects.
In the UBI trials they've had so far, people didn't stop working. They do stop working two jobs to make ends meet, which is good.
> It raises the negotiating power of labor, which negates some of the advantages of capital that lead to growing wealth inequality.
Your misconception is quite widespread, though. I fear that this experience with guaranteed minimum income will politically kill UBI, anyway.
I pretty much agree, but Amazon do a lot of piggybacking on the work of others - so even those hypothetical robot - how much of them did the Amazon shareholders actually fund? And should they bare some of the societal costs of it?
The people ultimately set the rules that capitalism works within - even if it does feel like the power is incredibly unbalanced
The clerks are now writing CRUD banking apps. Better than monotonous bookkeeping, I guess, albeit less accessible.
But there simply aren't enough interesting, paying jobs being created, and increasingly we have too many people for boring jobs.
Which is astonishing because we've also added women to the workforce since then.
It looks like if there are too many people, more jobs get created. Presumably this is why average salaries have stagnated since 1970 - there are more jobs because employees are cheaper.
Someone chooses to provide a service.
> people who are used in low-wage countries
Where wages would be lower without manufacturing like shoe making.
> well-paid career in banking
Here's hoping software eats that part of the world earlier.
Also I get to keep more cash if I just don't pay licensing fees.
I just found out that I don't have to pay taxes since I am making so much money not paying for all the other stuff, I just call it non profit.
I mean it is not hard. Made my first million before I was 20 with only 80k initial funding from my dads emerald mine."
That might be surprising when you expect shipping to only work business days, but is it really weird considering that most stores/restaurants are open sundays?
That's true, and I've thought about it a lot. But it's odd that the author writes about this and yet can't see how they (and most people in developed countries) are part of the privileged consumer class as well. The author includes themselves as a member of the normal working masses that provide for 4 hour week workers:
> Their authors are so far removed from the reality of normal people, they don’t even see us anymore.
But the author isn't harvesting bananas or sewing clothes in a factory, they are a writer and editor. This isn't to say they don't suffer. Or, for that matter, that people who work 4 hours a week don't suffer. But if we're simply looking at who consumes more than they produce, then the net would be much wider than what they're casting and include many of the people they're advocating for (such as people in the west who work in restaurants or coffee shops).
I checked out her profile and one of her posts implies that she is a teacher: https://jessicalexicus.medium.com/nobody-will-ever-give-a-fl... I couldn't find much other information about her and Jessica Wildfire is obviously a pen name. I think you are quite incorrect in claiming that she is in the same class as people earning $70,000/month.
This just sounds so staggeringly inefficient. A person doing one full-time job well is gonna easily beat out many people doing that job part-time (and thus poorly). Plus, think of all the extra unnecessary commuting that comes with doing lots of little jobs spread throughout the day vs just the one job. I don't know how anyone can seriously advocate that this state of the world would be an improvement for anyone, except possibly the employers.
If your single source of income is a good choice, the experience of doing it for years makes you much better at it than a jack-of-all-trades who can do anything but none of them well.
You need to make the right choice for your situation. Don't knock someone else for making a different choice.
In this world, there are first-order effects, second-order effects, and a further deep hierarchy. Estimating which is which is a useful skill.
The same for every other job - you are either hiring someone who already has the experience to do the job right, or you are hiring someone for long enough that the time spent teaching them to do the job is paid off by all the work they do after they learn how to do it.
Instead of paying more or providing a better workplace, these companies just figure another sucker will come along.
It's a very common mistake to reach for automation because it makes things locally more efficient but forget all the things it makes less flexible and thus less efficient.
Plus, it has tax and regulatory consequences. /s
So, you do your client meetings, work on your highly-technical project, and after lunch, head to your retail sales job, or food service, or customer support, which you work for ~4 hours. This engenders humility and community engagement, while also flooding those spaces with workers so that no one employee has to put in a 12-hour shift (increasing the quality of their work and decreasing the risk of injury). And everyone gets paid enough to live on.
I understand that this dashes the paradigm of expertise or other specialized quality (like social connections...) deciding one's level of income, but it has always confused me that we pay LESS money to do the things people DON'T want to do. Most professionals and academics don't enter their fields for the high pay; aside from the necessity of meeting material needs (including student loan payments), it seems that the primary drivers of entrance into and achievement in such careers are intellectual interest and social prestige. Perhaps our attitude to compensation should reflect these truths. It means giving up the privileges and structures we've heretofore considered indelible, certainly, but it solves a lot of the problems mentioned above.
Those careers still have to pay enough to compensate for the effort involved in acquiring the relevant skills.
This is the main limiting factor to labor supply in these fields, and also a reason why putting one's "nose to the grindstone" once working in the field may actually be efficient. Even accounting for the fact that some or even most of this effort may not be as "good, intensive or professional" as the first few hours in the workday, it might nonetheless be more socially beneficial than merely working some generic, unskilled job.
(In fact, since one of the factors behind wages is the inconvenience of the marginal unit of work, we also shouldn't be surprised that pay can be high even though on average one might be willing to work for less!)
Do they? The effort in acquiring those skills goes to the desire to be proficient and do a job well, which is independent of compensation when needs have been previously fulfilled. You might speak about the material costs of training, but that's more of an institutional issue; the instructors, who likewise already have their needs met, aren't an added cost.
Anecdotally, I can speak to the willingness I would have to train for a tehnical profession, without compensation, assuming that my basic needs were met. Like everyone else, I'd be spending 4ish hours fulfilling some social or business need, so it's not a free ride. After training, if the institution hasn't covered the cost of materials/facilities/etc, then that becomes an issue for which extra compensation might be required, but the ballooning administrative and personnel costs that drive the rising price of post-secondary education in this country are rendered moot.
I want to push back a bit, also: the limiting factor to supply in many professional fields are often artificially narrow pipelines that wash out a number of candidates who would be competent. The ones who get through face the issue of there being a shortage of credentialed practitioners, which drives up compensation but also workplace stress, abuse, and error. These aren't open markets to begin with.
Therefore a 4 hour week is impossible even in an utopia.
What I think this discussion often overlooks is the large class of people - a third of society and rising, in the West - who aren't working and instead have their needs and wants serviced by other people because they are retired.
Now, obviously retirement isn't a hard cutoff, and retirement in general is getting later, but more and more work will be done in future for the retired rather than by themselves directly. A lot of this is currently done unpaid by their family members.
The other distortion here is that retired people are more likely to be property owners.
You make a very good point here. All this positive spin on "the gig economy" seems to completely gloss over on who on Earth are supposed to be "the gig customers" in this new paradigm, and where they will source their income. Is it gigs all the way down?
While I am not particularly fond of capitalism as an ownership model (but I am generally in favour of free markets, I'm not anti-capitalist, just capitalism-sceptic), if there is one good thing about a clear dividing line between entrepreneurship and hired labour is a division of risks and rewards. Entrepreneurship is for betting on a big reward, while accepting big risks and taking responsibility for them. Labour on the other hand is for prioritising stability and taking less responsibility, while sacrificing the chance of a big reward. Somehow the gig economy is selling the worst of both worlds: take all the risk and responsibility, but with no chance to make it big.
I sometimes question whether finance people (particularly those in intermediary institutions like banks) in general have the knowledge to understand how organizations actually operate. They seem to derive most beliefs about organizations from accounting statements, but don't seem to know much about "human resources," operations, organizational structure, management. Even areas like organizational strategy and legal compliance seem a bit out of reach. All of this is to say, from an accounting statement and naïve extrapolation point of view, maybe her prediction makes sense; when considering all of the other myriad factors that must be reckoned with across all organizations, I'm more skeptical.
This has nothing to do with the 4HWW though. The average software engineer working full time and spending most of their paycheck has just as much dependence on the labor of others to satisfy their needs.
I feel like normal people working normal jobs tend to not get called out for the simple fact that they are normal. It's a median bias.
I'm really tired of seeing online 'equality' warriors think entrepreneurship is easy and should be used to pay for all of society's financial hardships; entrepreneurship is a significant toll that can cause financial ruin and mental instability just to have a chance at arriving at any sort of time liberation.
When you create something you place your own time, finances, energy at risk - in many cases you get a low ROI in return. But like all educations, one can get better and improve over time.
One must vision the system, design the system, find ways to finance the system, execute the system, manage the system, and optimize the processes. Then possibly, you might be able to receive benefits from that system - but it is in no way guaranteed.
So don't pity the founder, but don't denigrate them either; actions taken on own volition mean founders must enjoy or live with the outcomes.
Most people have zero shots, or at best one, in them until they have to get back to paying their bills - and get stuck in the rat race forever. No access to credit, no chance of getting in front of a VC firm to pitch, etc.
The majority of people don't really care if the Harvard or Stanford kid had to put in 80+ hour weeks to build his or hers business. However hard that is to pull off, people won't respect it because it's just privilege asserting itself most of the time.
There are problems with this. Chances aren't always given out on merit, a fact that is a detriment to society. The other issue is what this article talks about: People selling a pipe dream.
>> No access to credit, no chance of getting in front of a VC firm to pitch, etc.
You're looking at this from a startup perspective I presume. You're ignoring the many plumbers, electricians, corner shop owners and other small business owners. Very few of these people were rich before starting their businesses. In the online world you can do similar things through e-commerce, small SaaS businesses etc. You can work on these in your spare time until they start to generate income + they have little to no startup costs.
One of the main take aways from Feriss' book was that he achieved the 4-hour work week by continuing to delegate more and more responsibility to the people working for his business.
Even electricians and the like have a very difficult time getting beyond self-employed with an assistant and maybe a partner who helps part-time with billing and scheduling. That leap to getting a second employee who can work independently in the field is a big one. Why is that person working for you rather than themselves? A good portion of the time, the answer to that question is that they are related to the owner in some way.
Founders I know (including myself): - One worked years on the side to grow it enough just to get seed. With newborn kids, then quit his CompSci job to live off his teachers wife salary for years. - One was on foodstamps for 6 years, and kids on medicaid to pull his shop through - One saved for years, and spent most of his money to get through the rough spots and is coming out the other side just now. - One failed 4 times - each attempt taking a few years, entered bankruptcy to try on a 5th attempt. - One lived at poverty means for years with a family while bootstrapping.
So.... there is a lot of "entrepreneurship is easy pr0n" as viewed from Silicon Valley. But if you're rich - it's easier to just sit back and be rich. So only a small group do. The rest of us are just trying to create something with little resources in the rest of the country/world.
I'm someone that's not from a privileged background, and I did not attend a prestigious university, but I sure do respect the time of anyone as much as I respect mine.
Sadly, it seems to me that it boils down to that quote from WarGames - the only winning move is not to play.
What people call 'equality warriors' I call bloodshed preventers.
Human needs are infinite. Every solved problem creates a new class of problems that you can solve.
And that’s ignoring the many bad solutions we already live with that are ripe for replacement.
Of course they aren't. Once the central bank hits the 2% inflation goal it is just a matter of time until there are enough opportunities for everyone.
Look at the most valuable companies today, and look 30 years ago.
There are numerous studies that show that income volatility at the top and at the bottom are very pronounced in US vs Europe and other developed countries.
More importantly, about 50% of people in the US will be in the top 10% of income, at least 1 year of their lives.
This goes against the tenet that the system is "rigged" or at least, it far less rigged here than in the rest of the world.
Alas, while you might want to believe the American Dream is alive and well, it's very much on life support. For example, the World Economic Forum ranked the US 27th in social mobility:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...
What I do know is income mobility since that's a hard number, and hard to manufacture.
And in that respect, citizens of the US are far better than the rest of the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/from-rags-...
You'll find in the article I provided that it offers the following definition:
Social mobility refers to the movement of individuals either up or down the socioeconomic ladder relative to their current standing, such as a low-income family moving up to become a part of the middle class.
Countries with high levels of social mobility exhibit lower levels of income inequality and provide more equally shared opportunities for its citizens across each of the five pillars.
This is, of course, precisely what we're discussing here.
For example, regarding Denmark, it notes:
Denmark holds the title for the most socially mobile country in the world, boasting an index score of 85.2. If a person is born into a low-income family in Denmark, the WEF estimates it would take two generations to reach a median income. In contrast, someone in Brazil or South Africa would take nine generations at the current pace of growth.
> And in that respect, citizens of the US are far better than the rest of the world.
The opinion piece you've cited makes absolutely no claims about how the US compares to other nations, and therefore does not support your claims.
It's of course a fascinating analysis. But it does not even broach the question of whether "citizens of the US are far better" off than those in other countries.
Europe has the very worst wealth (not income) inequality on the planet, but you won’t hear a peep about that.
Do you have information which contradicts the WEF analysis?
Seems prudent to support, even if you are born on level 50. The current system endures as long as most people feel like they still have more to gain playing by the rules.
If a critical mass of sufficiently capable people conclude that the game is rigged against them and they have exhausted their options to change it from within then attempting a hard reboot of all levels using pitchforks and guillotines starts to seem pretty rational.
Not sure how far we are from hitting that critical mass, but it would be nice not to find out.
Discrimination isn't by itself a problem, per se.
Discrimination combined with disempowerment/disenfranchisement/subservience, that is a problem.
I direct absolutely zero sympathy toward the Princeton grad who was born on third but thinks they hit a triple. Those are people who already hold much of the power in society, while simultaneously having no true understanding of what it's like to not be born into a life of privilege.
And those are the people this article is about: the privileged few who push the mostly false narrative that the rest of us can claw and scrape and eventually achieve the life they were simply given through birthright.
> Why should I belittle the hard work of a person that was fortunate enough to attend a prestigious university that gave them certain privileges? What is that majority trying to achieve? A world where that hypothetical person would stop trying?
A world in which everyone has approximately the same basic set of opportunities irrespective of the circumstances they were born in. A world in which hard work and individual achievement are, in fact, the primary determinant of success. In short: the very world these hucksters want us to believe exists today but doesn't.
Is that actually possible in the end? No. Inequality will always exist to some extent. But we can sure get a lot closer than the plutocratic disaster that we have today.
Heck, just raising the federal minimum wage in the US would go a long way. But when more than half of congress are millionaires (https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/04/majority-of-lawmake...) it's no great wonder that they have little sympathy, empathy, or just basic understanding of the rest of us and the lives we lead.
If we come to a point where the average person cannot afford a modest living (which we are pretty much on the brink of) then it doesn't matter what's logical or not. People are going to get upset and inevitably start breaking things.
the concept of a modest living is a forever changing goal-post, because people compare themselves with others.
What is modest today, is rich 100 yrs ago, and like a king 1000 years ago!
How is that even remotely similar to a modern modest living? Can we stop with this bullshit narrative?
But would you rather live as a king a few thousand years ago, or live as an average person of modest living today?
That you don't, is a sign of you being a 1%er like most people here. (And even here, I am sure many people would choose having thousands of people doing their bidding to the creature comforts of modern automation or medicine.)
Like unpaid internships. This practice can shut off entire industries from people who do not have parents who can support them in expensive cities well through their 20s.
Sometimes I like to think what a world would look like - geopolitically and economically if we didn't have newspapers, the internet, or any other means of communication. Would our world be a more balanced place? Would it balance itself out in the end?
This reflects my experience.
Co-founded a company, and we did OK for a while. At some point, we made a mistake that killed us.
I think I learned from that mistake, but have not had the opportunity to try again - the first lesson cost my savings to that point.
> The majority of people don't really care if the Harvard or Stanford kid had to put in 80+ hour weeks
They don't care about people busting ass for no reward and mostly downside, why should they care about someone doing it for much better odds?
Raising money gives them a shot at entrepreneurship by shifting the financial risk onto someone who can afford it.
When they’re successful, most startups tend to create a lot of good jobs. When they’re not, some rich folks lose some money.
This is all fine and good, and is one of the few parts of our economy that arguably works pretty well. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but pretty good.
I look at it like a baseball game. Most of us are stuck being spectators. We're perpetual employees, living paycheck to paycheck (the lucky ones saving a little) but we will never get to play in the major league. A few people are MLB players. They can afford to get one, maybe two at-bats during the game. If they miss, they're done. If they hit, they're heroes.
Then, you have the extremely lucky few who get infinite at-bats, due to being born into wealth. They swing, miss, fallback on their family, swing, miss, fall back, and so on until they finally swing, get a home run, then spend the rest of their life writing books about how to be talented at baseball.
So I'm pretty sure anyone can create a business - that also EMPLOYS the people who need to pay their bills yet do not want to take the huge risks in founding a business.
The laborer class doesn't risk time; they simply have it consumed. They also risk their own finances and energy, with the "ROI" being often to do things like decide between food and $5 in gas for the drive to work tomorrow.
The problem I have with entrepreneurship evangelists is that they elide important context from the discussion: the role a secure financial life growing up and into adulthood provides.
Nobody would say the act of building a business is not hard work, requiring sacrifice and long hours. That isn't at all what "equality warriors" object to. The objection is to the notion that that kind of hard work is even possible for everybody.
Almost everyone will not have the opportunity to commit to the hard work of an entrepreneur.
The struggling start-ups are left out of the experiment. I do understand the risks of new entrepreneurs. I'm perfectly fine with giving them a lot of leeway.
We could use profit off 1040's to determine which companies need to improve working conditions?
I think most of us are looking at the monopolistic big boys.
And sure, there will be companies crying poor mouth forever, but most won't be savvy enough to fool the IRS. Amazon will always be the exception.
I don't know...but for him to NOW turn it into a cult of personality and sell a fake story about "working hard" is at a minimum disingenuous
He is not praising indiscriminate effort. He is praising getting the most reward for the least amount of work.
Which demonstrates his privilege. But I don't think he's really trying to hide that or claim some kind of virtue.
The denigration happens when this labor doesn't just generate more money than other laborers, but way more money through a means that is entirely decoupled from labor. Gates has seen his wealth increase through Microsoft ownership more after he left the company than during his time actually working there.
Tim's book isn't without flaws (and is now significantly dated in many of the details), but one of the core messages is to recognize we all have a choice to do something other than work 50 years at a job we hate and then retire/die. Tons of people go through life without considering any alternatives to the path they are on, or developing the self-knowledge about what they actually want, which is a big reason so many people end up so unhappy.
He also emphasizes creating repeatable systems that you can then automate with software or hand off to other people. This helps you scale your business and income, but more importantly it preserves your time for other things you value more. The blog author thinks this is somehow a bad thing, but if nobody ever realized the efficiencies of exchanging money for services then most of us would be naked and starving; a huge chain of such exchanges is needed to produce the modern miracles of cheap clothing and food that are the foundation of modern living.
Tim didn't actually retire to the beach for a hedonic 4-hour lifestyle with servants refilling the wine glass and fanning him with palm fronds; the guy works harder than most people with a new huge book every couple of years, lots of active investing, and running a major podcast almost every week. The difference between him and other people is that he's not wasting time on stuff that other people could do for him.
I'm not a "bro", but I guess I'll stand here and defend Tim's book because it gave me a lot to think about.
So the choice is do you want to work toward a goal like that or instead just soothe your dissatisfaction by complaining about how rich people have more than you and life's not fair. That's basically what the author is doing.
Stop oversimplifying everyones lives and complex societal issues down to "personal responsibility" and hand-waving away valid criticisms. Inequality exists, it's not easy to get out of poverty, and unsustainable lifestyles have consequences.
Assumptions are funny things. It might surprise you, but I actually HAVE been in more or less this situation. For me, it was in the years of the Great Recession. I graduated in 2010 and nobody would hire me, not even for service jobs like Starbucks/Walmart/etc. My parents had no ability to help me, and moving back in with them in the podunk town where I grew up would've been an economic dead end. At my lowest all I had was a $300 netbook computer to my name with maxed credit cards and an empty bank account; net worth -$60k due to student loans and credit card debt I acquired trying to make ends meet during my extended unemployment.
During this period I would've been on the streets except I was able to rotate among friends who generously let me sleep on the sofa for free. I stole about 80% of my food from a nearby university by pretending to be a student on the dining plan and spent my days applying for jobs from the library while starting to learn how to code Python. What little income I had during this period came from ghost-writing papers for rich college kids--$10 per page!--and one-off tutoring gigs I arranged through Craigslist. I tried making logos for people on 99designs using a pirated version of Adobe Illustrator but never won any design contests and gave up after a couple weeks of trying to focus on the writing and coding which seemed more promising.
When I managed to get my first paid tech job in 2014, I spent my first $20k on dental work I'd deferred to the point I needed a bunch of root canals and crowns. Only after my teeth were fixed did I understand how much of my mental bandwidth had been occupied by thinking: How are my teeth feeling today?
It was difficult being poor and I considered killing myself at times because I felt like such a failure. But I'm glad I saw these as problems for myself to solve because if I was waiting for a government program or social revolution to make things fair, I'd still be waiting. Or homeless. Or dead.
> Do you think anyone in this position can simply get out by choice? How many people do you think live in conditions like this?
No, I don't think ANYONE can. And I don't think it's simple. But I think many people can. I wouldn't advise waiting on somebody else to fix your problems if you're able to attempt self-rescue. I'm tired of people who have never been poor infantilizing those who are by pretending they have no agency in life.
1. https://www.statista.com/chart/20323/americans-lack-savings/....
2. https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/more-than-a-third...
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/heres-how-many-americans-are...
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/03/report...
I just don't see how someone could possibly make the argument that everyone has the means to stop working and pursue something else. It points to being out of touch with the reality of not only Americans and Canadians but globally.
This feels like an expression of the "just world" fallacy[1]. It's entirely possible that many of the people stuck in 50hr/week jobs did all of the things you list but didn't get the lucky breaks Tim did and so are still working 50hrs a week.
Consider an alternative reality where everybody read 4HWW, took that advice to heart and proceeded to apply it to their life. Would everyone be working 4hrs/week or would you still need some people to work those 40hr/wk jobs that keep the world running?
Saying I'm expressing the just-world fantasy implies I'm casting judgement on people or somehow saying they deserve to suffer in miserable jobs because they made bad choices. I don't think that's what I said at all. Recognizing the reality that everyone has a role (that they may not be aware of) in deciding what to do next is not a moral judgement.
Entrepreneurship and becoming wealthy are not requirements to be intentional about work and having a fulfilling life. As an example, my sister is a single mom with an autistic child who worked in fast food for years and of course hated it. She realized she would be much happier if she could work in a healthcare field because she wanted work that made more of a difference to peoples lives. So she busted her ass and took student loans for night classes, and today she's successful as a nurse working every day in an operating room. For her, self-awareness of her desires led to goals and actions led to a much better outcome.
> Consider an alternative reality where everybody read 4HWW, took that advice to heart and proceeded to apply it to their life. Would everyone be working 4hrs/week or would you still need some people to work those 40hr/wk jobs that keep the world running?
I don't think it's necessary for everyone to achieve the same outcome for something to be a good idea.
If you read the book you would know it's not really about working 4hrs/wk but rather about freeing yourself up to pursue work you find fulfilling. I think many more people could do that if they knew it was an option, but I don't think everyone would achieve that. Entrepreneurship is risky and difficult, and many people prefer a more predictable path.
Our world, our economy, our technology, our agriculture, our transportation is FILLED with jobs that very few people would ever find "fulfilling".
I prefer a vision of a future/world in which everyone is able to lead fulfilling lives regardless of the work they do. A world in which the value of all work is acknowledged, and in which we recognize that it's not sensible for us to push people towards the idea that their fulfillment will come from the work they do.
Eusebi Güell built a small company "village" outside of Barcelona dedicated to the idea that even the cleaning staff should be able to go home after work and listen to opera, admire great art, read great books, enjoy good food amidst a vibrant and engaging social life. It wasn't perfect (and he went bankrupt), but it (like the English Garden Movement that inspired him) were steps in a better direction than "everyone should do what they love".
Let's stop pretending that everyone (or even most people, perhaps) can do "fulfilling" work, and focus on how to make it possible for people have fulfilling lives.
But, that doesnt make sense. Banking on my smartphone is more efficient than waiting in line for a teller, but it also means I need sufficient income to pay for the device and the network access (neither of which existed in 1950).
Her appeals to woke tropes make no sense, especially considering she goes by the title of "influencer"* - there's no colonialism in creating jobs, much less so in places with next to no digital economy. It's based on an abstract disregard to the fact that merely removing job opportunities will hardly leave anyone better off. There's also no colonialism in spending dollars where they get you further. It's just zero-sum guilt and envy porn.
*edit: it's "unfluencer" - disregard that bit
If you look at the who the poor are - it's virtually all part-time minimum wage workers. It's disproportionately women of color with children. A lot of these kids were born when these women were very young, if not girls. Most of these people were born into poverty AND live in areas with terrible public education AND the sixteen states where minimum wage is the lowest federal minimum...
Further, the majority of small businesses are not hiring 1 or 2 Ivy League educated MBAs they pay $250k per year. They're disproportionately hiring disenfranchised workers from the above ground.
Granted, these small businesses generally aren't the 4-hour work week Tim was talking about.
It advocates techniques like only answering e-mail once per day or less. He provides scripts for asking your boss to work from home so you can secretly travel the world while collecting paychecks and doing as little work as possible. He suggests it’s simple to start a lifestyle business to sustain your lifestyle while only working a couple hours per week, using virtual assistants to do most of the work for you while you travel the world.
I’m sure there are some people who have used his techniques successfully, but I’ve mostly watched people become terrible coworkers after trying to implement his advice.
Like the author of this article says, much of his advice is about shifting your work to other people so you have more free time for yourself. That’s fine if you’re doing this as honest business transactions by hiring people, but most office workers implementing this advice just end up shifting their work to their teammates by hiding from communication and working less than everyone else. If you get a “4-Hour Work Week” believer on your team, you’re going to end up picking up a lot of their slack. At least until your manager catches on and lets them go.
That said, I can’t agree with the author’s argument that we need to put a legal upper limit of 35 hour work weeks on everyone. That wouldn’t actually solve the problem of certain people abusing systems to work less than others. It would just require even more people to pick up the slack.
There are broader arguments about those who can afford to live off of investments, but they aren’t really addressed in the article.
It’s worth mentioning that Tim Ferriss didn’t actually get wealthy by following his own advice. He claims to have built and sold a supplement company, but even when his book was released it was hard to find anything about it. By his own accounts he actually worked quite hard at many endeavors and he also writes about burnout from overwork. Much of his wealth actually comes from good timing on being an early investor in companies like Uber.
It's just not as glamorous nor as profitable writing a humble book on getting rich by being at the right place at the right time through knowing the right people.
Yea, I can see how "work less, get rich" makes for a better selling book.
Yup, I had the same feeling when I got myself a 2nd hand copy years ago.
It's mostly a bragging book, where the author suggests trying and replicating his lifestyle.
If anything, one might pull out some quotes about work-life balances, but then again, if that's the game, there are better books about that stuff.
I hear people saying "tax the rich" and all other bs... it doesn't work, taxation doesn't actually solve the problem and the lower classes always endup paying all those taxes on way or another, either by having smaller wages or paying more for the products.
We need to find real solutions for these problems since nowadays I feel like people are working harder than in the XX century and having less wages.
I think that's the key. If more people are required to pick up the slack, the supply of labor is reduced. That means that the pay for labor is increased. It also flows upwards. If a manager must only work 35 hours a week, it requires three managers to do the work of two, creating upward pressure. (Now, in practice, nobody is going to be able to stop the startup CEO from working more hours. It stops somewhere.)
- It was published in 2007. I think if you picked up the book around that time it was extremely prescient in many ways. If you hopped on the "sell anything online" and "outsource most online labor" bandwagon in 2007/2008 I think you had a very good shot of coming out with a good business. At least, this is what I have seen with acquaintances who bought the hype back then.
- It was written by an ambitious 20-something with a lot of dreams, idealism, and smarts but not much "real world" experience. Many of us were ambitious 20-somethings who thought we had the answers to the new world at one point in our lives. Reading it from this perspective paints the ideas in the book with that wonderful energy-of-youth instead of cringe internet-guru vibes.
It is a young-persons book written for a very specific point in time. I do not expect it to age well but I also don't criticize it nearly as much as some people who tend to really hate on it.
A generous assessment, I would describe the mindset as exploitative with the self-knowledge that he didn't have any of his own talent worth exploiting. TL;DR: hire other people to do the work for you and mark it up a lot. I binned it quickly. To this day I avoid the author's name without exception everywhere it appears, he's guest to a lot of podcasts. Unfair maybe, but that mindset at 20 is probably that mindset at 30, 40, but with a sophistication to sell it better.
This is missing the point of the book though. Wealth isn't the goal. Earning enough money per month to satisfy your needs + wants in addition to freeing up as much time as possible is.[1]
I would give the book another read as it’s not a book about hoarding wealth, but instead about accumulating life experiences. Rather than waiting until you’re 65 to retire and travel the world/learn to sail/etc., you can do so in your 20s while remaining financially afloat.
We work to live, not live to work.
Much of his wealth actually comes from good timing on being an early investor in companies like Uber.
Also Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and many others. Not sure why you have an axe to grind with Tim. Of all the public influencers he’s the most forthcoming about his background and has done a lot of good (through psychedelic research, sustainability, etc.)
In practice folks still work around 40h, but they have more vacations to compensate.
I don't see much downside, beside... people working less overall. The end goal of this law was to share work.
I work in the US since 6 years. I miss a actual work life balance. I've quit 2 jobs because I was not able to obtain proper level of vacation and that 'pay without leave' was not an option.
I did show them twice that, leaving and not being pay is always an option with a at-will contract.
They did not like it, I told them all I was asking was some down time and that I was more than willing to compromise for it, but that they were not.
I would not have those issues for similar level of responsibilities in France.
But yeah, i wonder how people survive without at least 5 week/year. So much stuff to do and so little time :(
Being relatively senior, I asked to receive less money, and more vacation.
It was a very, very hard negotiation to go to 4 week of PTO while reducing my yearly salary by the equivalent of 40H*MyRate.
What's bug me the more in this context is how insane people think I am to ask for more free time. I don't count my hours outside of vacation. I do what I'm supposed to do and I enjoy it.
But once in while. Once or twice a year, I want to be away from any type of technology and fuck off in the woods.
It should not be that hard.
Plus, preventing me to do that will just hast my departure from the company that apparently can't suffer a employee being gone 1 more week? Nobody is irreplaceable, and if someone is, that person is not doing it's job and should be replaced.
Edit : to your question about having less than 5 week / year. I think my quality of life has vastly decrease, that my mental health as well, and that I missed a lot of bonding with my wife and children. As a result, I will gladly go back to a french level of financial compensation to get those benefit back.
The best way to get more time off is contracting instead of being salaried. You don't need to ask for less money, so it's a simpler transaction to negotiate.
Simple, because the value you're providing is much higher than your salary, so reducing your output costs more than the savings in salary paid.
Now if your output is actually linear with hours work, that's another story.
Global productivity would probably sky rocket if everyone took up this practice.
Frequent email checking and responding kills far more productivity than it generates.
Hard to take the author’s point seriously with phrases like this. It comes off as a tantrum born of envy, written in today’s lefty lingo.
There are better arguments against the 4hww here in the comments than hers.
Who do they think they are reaching with this rhetoric?
They pretty much told him that ignoring it was impossible, and they couldn't even entertain the idea.
So there is your answer. That kind of rhetoric has a lot of power right now.
The thrust behind this was that companies need to go back to being apolitical, and it's workers need to leave their politics and ideologies at the door.
Doesn't fully undermine your point, but I remember his proposal being stronger than that. I think he was more proposing to basically blacklist twitter SJW warriors from industry. Whereas now they feel like they can make a fuss and if they get fired they can just get hired by a competitor, he wanted leaders to have a public stance that they wont hire people like that.
1. identifies a particular type of person
2. characterizes them in a specific way that, like other group characterizations, is simultaneously an exaggeration, a truth, and a point of view
3. encourages us to think about that the assumptions we carry around about what a "default" model for life should look like
I know people who are very well described by this sort of language, even though (like any group characterization) it necessarily does not capture their whole selves. The description reminds me to not just accept that these people (or anyone else) have some natural born right to whatever position they end up in life, and that we can question whether we do in fact value what they do and say. It leads to questions like "Why are almost all the people who do <insert type of work> like this?", in ways that we frequently do for other sorts of work but tend not to ask about "success".
> "more fragile white males with degrees from Princeton"
That specific language recasts (in my mind) people I might have seen as extremely confident extroverts. At this point in life, I think that the "recast" take is more accurate than the way I used to see them, but it's not something I'd have come to spontaneously. Encountering language like this helps to raise questions about what is really driving people, whether or not my own answers to that question are correct.
> The 4-Hour Work Week enshrines entitlement, providing an instruction manual for wannabe digital nomads: If earning a million dollars is too hard, you can just jet around impoverished countries where the dollar is strong (a legacy of colonialism)
How on earth do you get angry at someone for suggesting living in a low COL location? Developing countries around the world are extremely eager to attract tourists/nomads who can inject money into their economy. And yet, the author would prefer that we shun developing countries entirely. Because colonialism.
> See, a global economy can’t support millions upon millions of people jetting around the world and running businesses online. There will always be a sub-class of people working constantly behind the scenes, in sweatshops and kitchens, in order to sustain this dream lifestyle for a tiny few. The inequality is baked in. That’s where the private, selfish audience of one becomes so dangerous. We read books like The 4-Hour Work Week as if they were made just for us, because that’s how they’re written. Their authors are so far removed from the reality of normal people, they don’t even see us anymore. We’re rendered invisible. That’s what should anger us. It’s not that Tim Ferris found a new way to live and then wrote about it. It’s that now millions of “enlightened” bros all worship him and aspire to be like him, as if this is what our planet needs — more fragile white males with degrees from Princeton, and podcasts selling high speed internet.
Offering people advise on how they can better their lives, is now an evil thing to do? Not everyone in the world can work in a white-collar job, and therefore, it is evil to help people pursue it?
The author of this article genuinely scares me. There is no discussion of content here, no discussion about the consequences of certain actions, no consistent logical argument put forward. It is simply endless ad-hominem attacks, based almost entirely on Tim's demographics and career success. The fact that this is trending on multiple social media, instead of dying in a tabloid rag, makes me far more worried about the future of our society.
This is kinda what I'm working on:
I recently launched https://4dayweek.io/ - Software Jobs with a better work / life balance.
I feel like the hard part will be policing this going forward, no? "You said only 35 hours" "Yeah, but we have a deadline and it just moved closer"
I'm convinced that the marginal hours between 35 and 40 are much less productive than the marginal hours between 25 and 30, and the marginal hours between 50 and 55 may actually be negative.
It has in fact been proven to be negative:
https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-wo...
https://lifehacker.com/working-over-40-hours-a-week-makes-yo...
Also, having personally struggled with overwork and burnout, I can say 60 and 80 weeks can be productive.. Until they aren't.
As an aside, this is why there’s such a culture of overwork in fields where many workers are extremely passionate about their work, like scientific research, art, and yes, software engineering. When a sizable fraction of researchers are in the lab 80 hours a week because they actually love their science that much, it precludes anyone else from treating the job like a standard 9-5, since the work level expectation is set by those who legitimately enjoy spending long hours on their passion project, and thus don’t consider those 80 hours as “work” at all.
It’s a common illusion that people are putting in those kinds of hours for decades, but the reality is people end up goofing off or burning out.
I’m emphatically not saying that expectations will implicitly rise to 80 hour workweeks across the board. For many businesses, there would not be any implicit pressure at all to go beyond the hypothetical legally mandated 35 hours. But for some companies in certain lines of work, there will most certainly be implicit pressure to go above and beyond 35 hours, simply because there are sufficient people passionate enough about their jobs that they will put in more than 35 hours and remain productive.
Breaks are obvious on an assembly line, less so in other jobs. Zoning out while physically in a meeting isn’t getting stuff done.
I'm not particularly concerned about enforcing this for entrepreneurs and the people who thrive on work. There are definitely people who are wired this way and who make the world a better place being who they are. The bigger issue is enforcing it so that one can't make others work more than 35 hours.
I would think a 35 hour work week in the West would allow and encourage an increase in entrepreneurial projects.
Therein lies the difficulty. Sure, you could make it illegal to explicitly say “yeah I’m gonna need you to come in on Saturday, and if you could come in on Sunday too that’d be great.”
But if there’s a culture at a software company of being a hacker on the weekends (whether on side projects or on company projects), even if you’re never explicitly asked to work on something after-hours, the “perpetual hacker” culture will implicitly cause people who aren’t gung ho hackers to fall behind. The worker who, for fun, learned a new algorithm/framework over a weekend that happens to greatly improve some aspect of the company codebase will advance over the worker who didn’t.
And sure, there might be companies that explicitly try to avoid hiring the perpetual hackers and only hire people who are not particularly passionate about technology in their spare time. Those companies will be eaten by the ones that only hire hackers.
Making labor scarce so that workers are paid a larger share of the profits they are involved in creating, like they have in the recent past, is the point.
Sometimes, one’s personal projects align with projects relevant to one’s work. Many projects at my work have been so interesting that I continue to think about and work on them in my spare time. Furthermore, the closer one’s personal projects are to their work projects, the more successful they will be at their job. This is what creates an implicit culture of overwork: if Hacker Helen’s personal projects align with her work, causing her to get promoted faster than Hacker Harry, he may also start devoting more of his personal project time to work-related things, in order to maintain job parity with Helen. This will percolate across employees, to the point that Non-hacker Nick, who never touches a computer outside of work, will be seen as underperforming.
Or: your employer does not value your time enough to grant on the job training time (aka what Google's 20% used to be).
This is exactly why a hard, legally mandated and enforced working hours cap is needed - to prevent people from self-exploiting themselves and their employer reaping the gains while those with a social life or a family get left behind.
> When a sizable fraction of researchers are in the lab 80 hours a week because they actually love their science that much
Or they are in the lab for such long times because they are understaffed as hell, underfinanced, and under constant pressure to pump out "research" of any quality to chase tiny grants? And most of them only put up with this bullshit because they are afraid of their 1-year (or shorter!) contracts not being extended, leaving them unemployed?
No one except a very few select top researchers actually wants that life style that is incompatible with any form of social life.
And for what it's worth: people died by the thousands literally fighting to their death a hundred years ago to force employers and the government to introduce worker protections. The way how tech and academia treats that sacrifice is frankly disgusting.
"Working hours" is a surprisingly nebulous concept. Let's say I'm a mechanic, and cars are my favorite thing in the world. The first thing I do after getting home from the shop is opening the hood of my personal project car, and tinkering with the engine for a few hours.
While my project car work doesn't strictly fall under "working hours," the skills I acquire in my home garage directly improve the quality of my work back at the shop. As a result, I will be a better mechanic than my colleagues who never touch a wrench outside of the shop, and I will thus get promoted faster than they do. Management notices this, and biases their hiring towards people who live, eat, and breathe cars because they make much better employees. Now, all mechanics at the shop are working 50+ hours a week on cars, even if by your hypothetical law they can only spend 35 of those hours at the shop.
Now let's make the definition of "working hours" even more nebulous. Suppose that a customer's car at the shop has a particularly interesting problem I couldn't solve during working hours. The problem is so interesting that I can't stop thinking about it when I get home. By law, I can't continue to work on the customer's car after hours, so instead I decide to reproduce the issue on my personal car, figure it out, and the next morning fix the customer's car as a result of my tinkering at home.
Replace "mechanic" with "software engineer," "customer's car" with "company codebase," and "personal car" with "personal computer," and you can further blur the line between working hours and personal hours.
The only law that could possibly prevent any of the above is making it illegal for people to work on anything even tangentially related to their day job during their spare time. This would not only be unenforceable, but patently unfair and ridiculous.
>>When a sizable fraction of researchers are in the lab 80 hours a week because they actually love their science that much
>Or they are in the lab for such long times because they are understaffed as hell, underfinanced, and under constant pressure to pump out "research" of any quality to chase tiny grants?
>No one except a very few select top researchers actually wants that life style that is incompatible with any form of social life.
That's exactly my point. As soon as you have even a few people in a workplace whose sole passion is the work, you're going to get a culture of overwork. Even if a scientist is legally mandated to only spend 35 hours a week in the lab, nothing’s stopping them from spending another 20 hours at home each week reading publications or working on other research-related tasks that can be done outside the lab (and for some scientists [e.g. computational scientists], that’s 100% of their tasks). I don't see any solution to this, other than strongly discouraging people who just want a 9-5 from working in fields that tend to attract people passionate about work. Just as not everyone is cut out for the grueling training schedule of a professional athlete (who submit themselves to such a regime because their sport is their passion), perhaps not everyone is cut out for the grueling work schedule of other professions.
You can't force people not to work, so you'll have some people who will choose to and some who won't, hence the people who do will have an obvious advantage.
That being said, progressing isn't everyone's life goal and I hope projects like this help create a market that 4-day weeks are the norm. The CTO at my last role was seriously considering this.
https://data.oecd.org/chart/6oFS
a zoom into percentiles, by country/region, is also revealing intercultural differences:
https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_1_Usual_working_hours_b...
Are you saying that would be bad?
The pie isn't a fixed size. It grows with increased economic activity. What happens in countries that are closed off to all the global "exploitation"? I'll let you work that out for yourself.
I’m a fan of Tim Ferris, bought books, listened to him for years, his material has really helped me.
But 4HWW seemed somehow off for me as it seems to fake it enough that customers stick around and even love the product, but if everyone did it, we would just have superficial stuff and not real.
So I don’t judge people but it’s not for me. And I’m sort of envious of people who can do it without worrying about it all the time like I feel I would.
I’ve never encountered a 4HWW product, other than Ferriss himself, that I liked. It just annoyed me with their anti patterns that work for some customers but not me.
Atheletic Greens is a good example in my mind, although not sure if they actually use 4HWW. I like the idea of a “healthy supplement” but it costs 3x the random green powder at Whole Foods, but it well marketed and forces subscriptions and auto renews. So it takes a hippy idea and weaponizes it for slackers like me. So I’d rather just guy the green stuff from the co-op, but now I’m always hearing athletic greens marketing and wondering if I chose wrong. The hippy stuff doesn’t talk about how awesome they are.
So it’s not a bad thing, people really like it. But it seems like the automation has so much potential to help customers more but instead scoops it up for the owner.
Yeah, there's a lot of irony to marketing, especially in this space. 'Authentic' products don't need marketing, leaders in a space will seek them out and stock them of their own accord. The purpose of dark patterns is to essentially circumvent this positive feedback loop authentic use produces, forcing passive consumption of a subpar product.
I feel like there’s a mental arms race between real signals and marketers who early identify and then misuse them. 4HWW seemed to accelerate that.
Paying people overseas for what would be a low salary in one’s home country isn’t exploitation. Say you’re paying someone abroad $3 an hour while minimum wage in your country is about $8. Median wage in this abroad country is $1.50 an hour. Your employee could expect to make that if she weren’t working for you. Are you exploiting her? I suppose, based on the non-loaded dictionary definition of exploit as “ make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource).”
But so what? You’re making her better off than she would otherwise be. She’s free to leave or argue for a higher wage. If you left - or were banned from hiring overseas workers - you’d be making her worse off.
Friction: If I'm getting paid $80k a year as a junior dev, I'm probably not going to switch to a similar job for $85k - yeah, I'm better off, but it can be a minor pain to switch jobs.
Imperfect markets: in mythical EconLand, if company A is paying a worker $1.50 an hour to make widgets and company B offers $1.500001 an hour, the worker will instantly switch to company B unless A matches the wage. In reality, there's a cost to switching and the worker doesn't know if her manager at B will be a pain-in-the-butt who negates the $0.000001 increase in hourly wage. Friction and asymmetric information like this is one reason we don't see hyper-precise pricing outside highly commoditized goods (EUR/USD spreads, pork bellies, etc.).
The luck/unequality is in that what's not much money for you, is a lot of money for some-one else.
* there were actual tariffs imposed when you imported the results of her labor, reflecting the very different costs of living in two nations
* the nation where she works had the same environmental and labor regulations as where you live.
* there were barriers to you directly or indirectly investing capital in the nation where she lives, and/or significant taxes on the profit you make from doing so.
* the nation where she lives had a strong union/pro-labor culture that gave workers the power to collectively negotiate with employers.
* the nation where she lives had a legal system that would reliably hold employers and investors responsible for their decisions.
Now, you might still choose to pay for overseas labor even if all these things were true, but you likely wouldn't be paying $3/hr anymore. As it stands, "cheap overseas labor" is about much more than that.
But you have to ask whether those ideas (barriers to investing capital, tariffs, etc) are good ideas.
We'd all like people to earn more and live better lives. It seems like the most popular argument on HN is that, to do that, countries should adopt more regulations. Another perspective is that, if we want to achieve our shared goal, the best way to do that is through less regulation, tax, and capital controls.
Same goal, different method.
People (generally) earn less and have worse lives under these conditions.
Someone below mentioned self-promotion, and I can see why it seems like it is. Otherwise, what's the motivation of the writer?
To point out the snake oil thats being sold here. Its easy to have a four hour work week if you're rich. The motivation of the speaker is to point out that what Tim is espousing is essentially unachievable unless you have a whole bunch of startup capital. It also points out that achieve the four hour week, you need to exploit people, either directly or indirectly.
So I'd say the motivation here is moral.
> Eventually, yes, we can get to the point where most people work fewer hours.
well given that "share of the national profit" movements have been about for almost a hundred years: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_Party_of_Great_B...) I'd say that the whole limited working week thing is a pipe dream. Well, not as the OP points out without creating a gopher underclass.
The bit about requiring an underclass?, or that not everyone can have a 4 hour week? or the requirement to have large financial worth before you can do a four hour week?
This is patently false, so many example case studies online and in the revised addition showing how someone was able to implement a 4WW lifestyle. Again it’s not about hitting 4 hours a week specifically, it’s simply a mindset (create systems to support your lifestyle, instead of having your business take over your life).
It also points out that achieve the four hour week, you need to exploit people, either directly or indirectly.
If I hire a virtual assistant to assist me in my tasks, am I “exploiting” them, or creating job opportunities? Sure I capture the value surplus that they create, but they get a steady salary and take on less risk than the business owner.
First things first, I am not attacking you, or your lifestyle.
I've read the case studies on his website, and it basically boils down to: get very successful selling stuff. Once you've done that you don't need to spend time or effort innovating. Now, I've done a fair bit of sales, and to get more sales you either need to capture a niche by the balls, or continually innovate. https://www.tropicalmba.com/10-more-four-hour-work-week-case... has a great overview of the strategies. None of those are going to give you a 4 hour work week for a long time, if at all.
Its just another extension of the "always be hustling" mindset that is so toxic to great number of people.
Look, I am very much for people not working long hours. I want workers rights, I want a working hours cap. I want workers to be mobile. However what Ferriss is advocating is mostly just a fantasy. Launching a company is stressful, innovating is stressful, unless its in an area you love. I have some friends who flew to bali to live that lifestyle, they along with many of their cohort failed.
> If I hire a virtual assistant to assist me in my tasks,
Are you paying them a fair wage, or an Uber wage? Hint: if you're paying them ~$10-100 a month, then its not really a fair wage.
These articles never think about what real resources people need.It's never "such and such square meters of living space, yea much food, so-and-so hours of attention by someone with 12 years training as a doctor".
The answer is always some variant of "more money! more taxes!". This is class warfare - and probably not the sort that will benefit the poor. A serious attempt at improving normal people's lives starts by articulating in precise terms what the minimum standard of life should look like.
"4 hours of work a week" is, I suppose, a good start. Better than average. But it is, as is traditional, totally overlooking any sort of accounting of what resources are needed and how they will be provided. Taxmen don't cause potatoes to grow.
If we could radically lower the costs of health care and education in the US, for example, that would do far more for rising the standard of living than taxing and redistributing wealth.
So my rationale to tax the rich has nothing to do with redistribution, and more to do with power decentralization.
It destroyed any hope of divorcing money from excessive political power.
That seems quite a fragile thing to do
I don't love Tim Ferris and the criticism of the book is pretty spot on, but come on, you are not "exploiting" people if you pay them to handle your support calls, be your virtual secretary or whatever.
You could say that the entire global capitalist system is exploitative in nature, or something like that, but an individual entrepreneur posting on Upwork is not "exploiting" anyone.
The four hour work week is bullshit but it's just the snake oil we all consume distilled to greater purity. I'm sipping wine while Ferriss is selling 150 proof fire water.
You enter the global upper middle class already primed for a shot at being part of the global rich by simply being born in the developed world.
https://money.cnn.com/interactive/news/economy/davos/global-...
(There are several global wage calculators online. I use them whenever I start pitying myself.)
If all these curious and hardworking researchers followed Tim's lifestyle, innovation would collapse and diseases and problems would gain the upper hand. I doubt Tim would want his doctor, lawyer, veterinarian, or dentist to stop making new advances, and just do 4 hours of work a week.
or the piles of humans feeding the internet, tech and social media 24x7
Unless we completely change our economic systems some people are going to have easier lives than others. A medium article bitching about that isn't going to change it. There are people with much easier lives than the author - but the author also has a much more privileged life than most.
Reducing the worlds inequalities and problems to "millions of “enlightened” bros" and "fragile white males with degrees from Princeton, and podcasts selling high speed internet" is ridiculous.
- The four-hour work week is a fantasy
- Comfortable lifestyles are generally only possible when other people are doing the hard work on your behalf, particularly service industry workers
Dubious points:
- The US dollar is strong in impoverished countries due to colonialism (there may be some truth to this, but there are many other factors)
- "Tax breaks" (no definition provided) never create jobs
- Universal basic income is achievable if we "make everyone pay their fair share" (depends on how big the cheques are. $100/month, or $2,500/month?)
Nothing to do with colonialism.
Despite the detractors, anarchists, and anti-US sentiment. The US was the glue that held together the world from 1945-now -- promoting a generally rules based order and peaceful trade that propelled us to a new level of world wealth.
A lot of the argument seems to be that you are using other employees working 40-80 hour weeks for the things you enjoy in your daily life. But I think the main point of Tim's book is that most processes can be automated or at least optimised. Consider the examples of "Someone’s gotta run" in the article: it's certainly possible for coffee shops, trash collection, food production and Amazon delivery to be mostly automated. Amazon has already automated most parts of their operation except for the flights and drivers delivering the parcels, but even that could be automated one day.
The point is that you don't need to get to the top of the pyramid to get what you want. If you list all the things you want (including things like sports cards, travel etc.) the monthly income you need to do this things (e.g. lease the sports car) is less than you think. That monthly income target (+maximising free time to do what you like) should be your goal, not "being a millionaire/being a CEO etc.".
Ferriss got to the point of working 4 hours a week by agressively delegating almost everything about his business. He never would have been able to achieve financial independence just by cranking out more hours.
Yes, critique Ferris, but please avoid his same pitfalls .
Also, digital nomads are very very good for local economies. Many countries are starting to realize this and are trying to attract them.
Additionally, the "4 hour work weak" is not literally 4 hours. It's a viral headline he talks about. It just "feels" like 4 hours because of lifestyle design.
This a trash article.
I just don't think that social mobility outcomes and health outcomes in social democracies have been as idyllic as people want to believe. Certainly in some ways and some countries much better than the US, but it's not a final solution.
I think that we need to reengineer society to properly integrate high technology. With more fairness, but with less idealism and more practicality. Without Social Darwinism but also with an understanding of things like primate mating instincts and group hierarchies.
Exactly, and if those digital nomads weren't there, these people would be out of a job.
If you don't like the inequality in the world, try and fix it. I don't bear any responsibility as an individual to fix these wrongs that happened before I was even born. But if I wanted to do it, going there to spend my money is an excellent way to help.
In one of the interviews Tim Ferris described that the "4 hour" title was chosen just via A/B test to be a clickbait. It's a spin on the classic "# ways to do something" clickbait extensively used by Buzzfeed and other low-quality media.
If you want to see negatives outlined in the post, just go on TikTok. Every other video is about making thousands of dollars via affiliate marketing. It is one get rich quick scheme after another.
This article could have been more interesting if the author started with a bit of the 4 Hour Work Week, then left it and Ferriss behind for more fruitful content.
I'm not sure pulling in Tim's book especially adds to their point, particularly when you consider it is easy for the rest of he to dismiss the inequality and 'layer cake' of society if we ourselves are not enjoying a 4hr work week.
N.B. This is not any sort of endorsement for your pet political theory.
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."
What happens if everyone wants a 4-hour work week, from a beach in Thailand?
And this is difficult to avoid because of the inherent benefits of specialization.
Write a book about "quick and easy shortcuts to get rich."
If you really want to get rich via the right mindset gleaned from an actual billionaire, I would suggest the book written by the late Felix Dennis with the ironic title How to Get Rich.
For some reason, I think Mike Myers' documentary Supermensch has a good deal to offer about what a successful mindset looks like.
In that sense there’s not much open air separating Tim Ferris and Timothy Leary. Both were encouraging their followers to drop out of society in order to turn inward in search of their private, individual nirvana, separated from the real world around them, full of people doing the hard, boring work of keeping things going. Both are pied pipers though in that the vast majority of their followers will not achieve the self-liberation they crave.
And the thing is- it worked, for a really long time. You can deny collective interests and make everything personal, if you can hand out free land like it’s candy. And then we had the period in the mid 20th century when all Europe was destroyed, and profits were so high that conflicts could be again papered over by crazy fast economic growth. It’s only now that cracks are finally starting to show, now that the economy has globalized and the free stuff is running out. If I’m right about this, then we will see the re-emergence of collective struggle in the next few decades and the decline of the self as the center of all effort and struggle.
I think this is accurate but only in that sense. Leary and his friends, like Robert Anton Wilson, had a strong sense of social justice and saw a world in which everyone benefited, and were very much concerned with scaling their ideas so that everyone worked less and enjoyed the benefits of a wealthier world.
They would be disappointed in a world where people are working longer hours for less pay while productivity and profits increase dramatically.
Instead, I have been working my way through Carol Sanford’s Regenerative Life and learning what that was about. It had taken me a year to realize what “regenerative” was even about: a world view and paradigm of living systems.
It is when people are allowed to be alive, participating in living system, that they can tap into regeneration. It then is no longer about how to equitably distribute resources, but rather, each person and each living system can tap into the regenerative powers of life. You still have to work, but you are no longer treated like a cog in a machine getting the life extracted out from you.
How I am going to exactly implement that in my own life, I don’t know yet. I have a lucrative career writing software for someone else, but with agism, it won’t endure.
Is this net-positive for society? Nope.
The example I remember from the book is Ferriss would make sales calls in the morning and the late afternoon, because those were the times when people would actually be willing to make deals, and the calls the rest of the day were a waste. And (according to him) he made more sales than most of the sales team.
Too many jobs are managed as "ass time in seat" vs any real measure of productivity.
But yeah, if your job is shit and you're just doing it for whatever money you are getting, then you may indeed be prone to find loopholes that enable you to do the minimum amount of work required.
This is just fundamentally wrong and reeks of blind socialist griping at the whichever current societal structure exists
A smaller, lesser influential person would try to call out an established name to try and curry "underdog points" in the hope to stoke a conflict. It gets you cheap but large promotion if you can pull it off. If it didn't work, at least you can say you fought the good fight.
No real risk. No actual loss.
OP is a pains to point out that there isn't much wrong with tim, its just what he's peddling is bullshit.
They they go on to make a fairly obvious point that we can't all work four hour weeks, not with the world as it is.
2. The main reason the OP is being downvoted is because assuming a writers intentions (based on nothing) and using that assumption to discredit everything said is unproductive and bad faith
Regarding point 2 everyone assumes intent from what they read, it's human nature. People simply disagree with what they assume. You are assuming why people you have never met are downvoting OP. We all do it.
That isn't a counter-argument to the criticism of the 4-Hour Work Week book. It feels like a cop-out on the part of Ferris.
In the 4-Hour Work Week, Ferris offers the advice that outsourcing tedious or menial tasks to economically poor countries allows you to reach your 4-hour work goal (the presumption being that you reside in a economically rich country that allows you to outsource to a cheaper country).
Disclaimer: I'm in the camp of readers who dislike the 4-Hour Work Week. Not just for the central premise of the book (outsource cheaply), but also for the excessively wordy style of writing that pads out the book.
The plebs should work 60 hours to support the lifestyle of the wealthy elites.
In all seriousness though it's clear his book is aimed at people that have a chance of creating enough wealth to escape wage slavery. For many people in the world this is simply not an option - I think that is the point the author is trying to make?
Yep, this is how capitalism works. It's just a gigantic pyramid scheme, and the object of the game is to climb to the top, even if that means stepping all over other people.
edit "I would say it would need income and corporation tax as well" (makes it a bit clearer that its a personal assertion rather than researched.)
Who is "you?" Even if large multinationals cooperate with your business plan preferences, doesn't that just lead to inefficient locale arbitrage and cops choking out people for P2P loosie diaper transactions?
You don't apply the same VAT rate to every product/service, e.g. staples that say poor people (rather that we all depend on) could gave lower tax rate; likewise if adding a certain VAT on everything while also giving everyone $12,000 per year means that you have to spend $200,000 on non-staple items before you're paying more into the UBI system than you're getting from it - and if you're sitting spending $200k per year on things you're not hurting.
And if you're making assumptions about Yang, could it not be you're making wrong assumptions elsewhere as your foundation for your conclusions? You clearly just hear some small shallow snippets from clearly untrustworthy sources that lack integrity/truth. Maybe instead research Yang and his policies thoroughly.
Say what you want about Tim Ferris and his devotees, but at least 4 is greater than 0, which is the number of hours you work if you've got an intergenerational fund of wealth slowly but surely extracting rents from the rest of the world through mortgages and dividends.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
We own more cars than before. We own more house than before. We eat out more than before. We take more trips than before.