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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

> They will have rebelled against long hours; the chances are that in 2022 few people will work more than seven hours a day, if as much

Bertrand Russell also famously predicted this. I believe I’ve read that in the 1800’s people were predicting industrialization would do away with labor. People are still predicting this today, with the advent of Machine Learning that’s good enough to automate things like driving.

Will this prediction ever come true, or is there some kind of human nature that is going to keep us grinding away no matter what we invent?

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> is there some kind of human nature that is going to keep us grinding away no matter what we invent?

I once read a commenter here on HN claim that any increase in productivity is inevitably 'eaten up' by an increase in debt/credit and that this is why we don't see a corresponding decrease in time spent working. I think that is very insightful.

I’ve got to think about that one, it definitely seems worthy of consideration, thanks for adding. I have noticed in my life that my expenditure does grow to meet my income, and earning more money (getting a new job or a big raise or a bonus) never feels like that much more because it’s so easy to use up the extra. My life seems to expand and contract to match whatever money I’ve got. In that sense, the comment you read feels true.

On the other hand, it’s typically employers that generally control hours and pay, and employers that both seek and use most of the profits from productivity; employees often only get the scraps. If employers are the major force for asking people to work hard, and offering jobs and pay, how does that fit into the idea of debt eating the productivity gains? Are we talking about corporate debt here?

I think a reasonably simple example would be the relationship between private debt and the property market.

Increased productivity -> increased income -> increased discretionary income -> increased ability to service debt -> larger mortgages -> higher property prices -> less discretionary income (which could otherwise have been used to 'buy' free time).

It's true that some of this borrowing will lead to new wealth in the form of new houses and associated infrastructure, but I suspect that a large amount - if not most - of the borrowed money is spent on driving up the prices of existing assets, in which case the winners are the lenders who have successfully captured the increase in productivity.

"Will this prediction ever come true, or is there some kind of human nature that is going to keep us grinding away no matter what we invent?"

Seems abundantly clear to me that there indeed is something in our nature that keeps us grinding. I do hope that we at least continue to increase the freedom to choose what and when we grind

It's not in our nature, it's in the rewards we desire.

We desire the best mate possible. No industrial or computer advance has (yet) provided any of us with better mates. Mates are as scarce as they were hundreds and thousands of years ago.

Mates choose each other according to relative status. By definition, there is no way we can increase everyone's relative status.

So the reason people grind as hard as they used to is that they're facing the same incentives and barriers: For the mate you want, you have to grind your way up the status hierarchy (or at least enough to avoid falling). Competition is just as stiff as it was in 1950 or 1850, or 1000 BC.

Things will only truly change in this respect when we invent artificial ways to satisfy peoples' desire for mates. However, this won't happen soon. Sexbots are only a small part of it; a mate is much more.

I guess the immediate question I’d have in response to that hypothesis is: if seeking a mate is what’s leading people to grind, why doesn’t that behavior taper off after marriage?

Because divorce is still a possibility

Wouldn’t you think that’s not enough? (Also note the other two plausible theories in this sub-thread.) Divorce rates aren’t 100%, and marriages typically last many years before a divorce. This means marriage should statistically be a significant drag on the hypothesis that seeing a make is what drives working long hours. (Not to mention the inherent conflict between working long hours and dating / spending time with someone.) Do you find it probable or plausible that mate-seeking is the primary and/or only reason people work hard? Is that why you do it, do you think? Of course I can’t tell why I’ve worked hard over the years, but it doesn’t really feel linked or even related to mate seeking at all. I only started working long hours after starting a long term relationship that eventually turned into a happy stable marriage. It’s highly unlikely divorce is in my future, but I feel many years of hard work left in me.

I'd argue that it's not human nature but rather our socio-economic system that keeps us grinding away. It's become obvious that for the most part automation does a disservice to workers rather than liberating them since they don't have the legal ownership of the automating forces. A typical factory or whatever if it is able to automate 20% of the current work being done will simply lay off 20% of its workforce rather than reduce everyone's workload by 20% while maintaining their wage.

Now this creates a bit of a crisis since the automated production produces things that need to be bought by the workers they displace, who now no longer have any money. The outcome as I see it is an extension of credit systems and the propagation of tedious nonsense jobs (ala Graeber's Bullshit Jobs).

In order to bring about the ideal of automation creating more free time for all without diminishing their income you'd have to transfer ownership of the automating forces to the workers they're replacing. But then I'm just a Marxist looney so what do I know.

This seems plausible that it has something to do with our economy and maybe capitalism specifically, and I’m kinda familiar with Marx, but I wonder if there isn’t more to it. The reason I say this is because I think I’ve worked the hardest in my life when I started a business. I’m not 100% certain, because I’ve put in a lot of long hours on my various jobs. But, it felt like it was much easier to work long hours on my startup than it did for BigCo or even for someone else’s startup. The desire to make my startup successful, and the fact that I was the owner and was responsible for anything bad that happened, that all made me work even harder, I think. Poking around on HN, it sure seems like lots of other startup founders do the same and might be working harder than the average worker bee.

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