Comment by avidiax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avidiax | Hacker News Reader

You are worried about income inequality, which is hardly the same thing. Tech workers generally don't have discrete business or political goals that they use their money to influence to their advantage, even if they do have some low millions to low 10's of millions of nominal wealth.

What is more unsustainable, IMO, is the concentration of work. 3 out of 10 men and 4 out of 10 women over 20 year's age in the US are not working. Working far in excess of 40 hours per week is common. US vacation is still generally a paltry 2 weeks, non-mandatory.

And all this, despite continual improvements in productivity over the past century.

Couldn't we collectively reduce our working hours, have more vacation time, and employ more people? That would more fairly disperse the productivity gains of technology and improve many people's lives.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm

> Couldn't we collectively reduce our working hours, have more vacation time, and employ more people?

Step 1 for that to ever be realistic is to sever the connection between your employer and your health insurer.

An additional complication is that employing two part-time employees means you needed to train and hope the knowledge actually transferred twice, but that is trivial in comparison to paying the benefits for two employees (IIRC, benefits are more of a fixed per-employee cost rather than something that pretends to be related to hours worked, like salary).

I think a two pronged approach:

1. 4 day work week to address your concerns.

But a 4 day work week will mean some business will go to a 4 day shift and a 3 day shift. And of course, some people will do two jobs so they can out compete their neighbouring Jones... so a 4 day week with some kind of enforcement?!? Not sure how that'd work.

2. Employee equity in the business. If an investor gets a dividend, so do the employees. This helps balance everyone vs the 1%'ers. Of course, there's a lot of details in that too like everything in life.

I agree in an egalitarian sense.

The thing is mostly those people not working are not productive people generally.

Whether it's through lack of relevant skills, or lack of volition and opportunity, or drugs, or inter-generational welfare, or whatever.

The reality is some people take and take and don't create. It's cheaper to pay someone capable and motivated a programming salary than try to get those people to be productive, otherwise human resource markets would have used those people already.

Is the reason for high unemployment due to people who want jobs but can't get them?

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