We waiting for that moment now for what? 20 years?
Productivity-wise I think they make some mistakes we westernes do not make, like for example, in communication, because of many cultural things, they tend to not speak out. That is in our advantage to some extent.
On the other hand, they are not going to look at the clock and say "hey my contract is 40 hours I am gonna call the union!". Like it or not, this part is destroying us.
It is a matter of time. China is already overtaking US in some key areas technology-wise, like electric car (they own also 80% of lithium mines) and other stuff. So if you want to fool yourself...
My opinion is that we have been getting steadily worse in values from the fact that we became very comfortable. By this I mean also myself: my parents were better in attitude and my grandparents also.
That is how I see it. God forgive me for being politically incorrect and wanting to enslave humanity (probably I would be accused of things like this nowadays in Europe) or something for saying that, but productivity comes from labour.
I do not talk from outside. I have been in Asia for 11 years living.
If we do not give a push to our mindsets, we will become irrelevant and that includes leaning on effort and self-reliance and self-improvement, which is what took us here. I see (Europe, dnt know US but from the media looks like kind of the same) a huge amount of rights and whining.
I know I will get more negatives for this. I just describe what I see :)
Did you come straight outta 1850?
This is not destroying is at all. We used to work this much in the US. We fought against this back when and gained labor rights and had growth and productivity since then along with quality of life.
When you bring a country up to a middle class life this happens. Middle class jobs don't get more productive when you do them 80 hours a week rather than 40.
Your outcome comes from two things: from productivity vs payment. That is the same today and in 1850. No law is going to stop that.
So, if they are not there yet but they will be and they work more, you can see the outcome? We are quite better at communication IMHO in the westerner world in working environments. And still more productive. But the distance is narrowing.
In a scenario where they do not have all those laws and they still keep the "1850 mindset" they will eventually have better products at lower prices.
> Middle class jobs don't get more productive when you do them 80 hours a week rather than 40.
Data taken from? Of course this depends on the activity, but no matter what you do, there will still be first, secondary and tertiary sectors. Mostly tertiary for developed countries, but you still support from the others...
I am not proposing to work 80 hours per week, in fact. I am just giving you awareness of what is coming right now. As long as we have something else to offer it will be ok (I do not think we have much more to offer anymore, that can be sustained in the next 20-30 years unless we do a shift in mindset). The distance is narrowing a lot and that means that at some point... did you see how many strategic sectors around all Europe chinese bought? From harbours to business, etc.?
I don't think you're aware that this has been known for over a century. For one example:
"Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons" - https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-wo... .
] More than a century of studies show that long-term useful worker output is maximized near a five-day, 40-hour workweek. Productivity drops immediately upon starting overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.
] In the short term, working over 21 hours continuously is equivalent to being legally drunk. Longer periods of continuous work drastically reduce cognitive function and increase the chance of catastrophic error. In both the short- and long-term, reducing sleep hours as little as one hour nightly can result in a severe decrease in cognitive ability, sometimes without workers perceiving the decrease.
Or, see the chapter in McConnell's "Rapid Development", at https://archive.org/details/rapiddevelopment00mcco/page/600/... . Page 601 under "don't require overtime; it will produce less total output" describes why, with pointers.
These are specifically speaking to software developers because those are the resources I know best.
Programmers aren't special - these factors are generally true for middle-class jobs and manufacturing jobs (as Ford's research showed in the 1920s.)
If you believe otherwise, where's your data?
BTW, going to work when one isn't able to work at full capacity is called "presenteeism". Some of the ways that overtime can cause presenteeism are: working while tired due to lack of sleep, migraines from stress, feeling pressured to go to work while sick, lower general health and well-being from lack of exercise/fun, and paying bills and doing other personal tasks while at work.
A gross but meaningful estimate could be per-capita evolution (though there are other factors, such as not leading the economy which gives you advantage to catch up).
If the hole keeps narrowing... :)
> going to work when one isn't able to work at full capacity is called "presenteeism"
I do not fundamentally disagree with this. I do know performance is not exclusively tied to the number of hours worked. And also burnout can do bad things to you. But if you have a whole country doing more in a sustained way, probably the cost/benefit is not proportional to the extra hours but it will show a trend overall.
Simply put as more work becomes thinking/creative long hours are going to harm productivity.
Past about 40 hours / week, across a wide range of jobs, it's more cost effective to hire new employees than to take the marginal reduction in performance.
> per-capita evolution
Like the early days of the Soviet Union, when the country went from being one of the most backward countries of Europe to having space travel? Is that your metric?
Regardless, you haven't presented data, only conjectured that such data exists.
> if you have a whole country doing more in a sustained way
Your "if" carries a lot of weight.
You need to show that such a country exists. Present data please.
Here's are more examples of how 80 hours/week is not realistic for an entire country's workforce.
"The Productivity of Working Hours", John Pencavel, The Economic Journal, Volume 125, Issue 589, 1 December 2015, Pages 2052–2076, https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12166 and https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
] The estimates above on the output-hours relationship suggest that, for most [observed British munitions workers during WWI], weekly output rises with weekly hours of work although, after a point, the increase in output declines as more hours are worked. This point where the marginal product starts to decline varies with the workers and with the work done. For hours of 48 or less, weekly output tends to be proportional to weekly hours worked and the decline in the marginal product of hours occurs after 48 weekly hours.
See the Marginal Product of Hours in Table 5? After about 48 hours, it's better for the company to hire someone else. After about 65 hours per week, the marginal value is negative. See also Table 4 "Implied Output-Hours Relations Corresponding to Two Fitted Spline Functions".
Or from "The effects of working time on productivity and firm performance: a research synthesis paper", Lonnie Golden (2011) at http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---pro...
] Shepard and Clifton (2000) established that manufacturing productivity does not necessarily improve when hours are lengthened. Their empirical study of aggregate panel data for 18 manufacturing industries within the US economy suggests that the use of overtime hours actually lowers average productivity, measured as output per worker hour, for almost all of the industries in the sample, even when the data are controlled or corrected. More precisely, a 10-per cent increase in overtime resulted, on average, in a 2.4-per cent decrease in productivity measured by hourly output.
] Indeed, it appears that in many, if not most, industries in the United States, shorter hours are actually associated with higher rates of output per hour (Holman et al., 2008, see Figure 1). ...
] A recent analysis of 18, mostly European, Member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development explores the degree to which longer annual hours have been associated with per-hour productivity at the national level, since 1950. It finds that the responsiveness of per-hour productivity for a given increase in working time is always negative. Not only are there decreasing returns on added working time, the returns in the form of added production diminish more rapidly for longer working times. When annual working time climbs above a threshold of 1,925 hours, a 1-per cent increase in working time would lead to a decrease in productivity of roughly 0.9 per cent at the threshold and a fully proportional decrease of 1 per cent past the threshold of 2,025 hours (Cette et al., 2011).
Or for South Korea, "When Less is More: The Impact of the Regulation on Standard Workweek on Labor Productivity in South Korea", WooRam Park, Yoonsoo Park (2019) https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22136
] Taking advantage of the stepwise introduction of the standard 40-hour workweek in Korea, we apply a difference-in-differences framework to individual-level cross-sectional and plant-level longitudinal data to examine the impact of the policy on working hours and output, respectively. We find that the policy reduced per-worker hours but increased per-worker output, which is robust to various specifications and sample restrictions.
Or for Japan, "Why Do the Japanese Work Long Hours? Sociological Perspectives on Long Working Hours in Japan", Hiroshi Ono (2018) at https://www.jil.go.jp/english/jli/documents/2018/005-03.pdf :
] From the perspective of human resources, long workdays are a problem because: 1. Long workdays produce waste and inefficient allocation of human capital. Both at the firm and macro-economic levels, Japan is less productive than the OECD average. Return on equity (ROE), one indicator of corporate performance and profitability, is far lower than their counterparts’ in Europe and in the U.S. meaning that they are using capital less efficiently than their Western counterparts do.
] Figure 1 shows the relationship between working hours and productivity (expressed as GDP/ working hours) in OECD countries. The correlation between the two is -0.78, and is statistically significant (p<0.001).
South Korea's productivity (GDP per working hour) is about like Poland, and the only country listed with longer working hours per annum than South Korea is Mexico.