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Eh, I think that a pretty huge portion of labor in the USA is spent on things that are not at all necessary for things people need or want for their quality of life. (Including the jobs of much of HN readership).

cf David Graeber Bullshit Jobs.

I don't think it's at all true that those people didn't understand the labor that is needed to create food (especialy this; they correctly predicted that agricultural labor has gone down drastically), housing, or even entertainment. I think they actually had it right, and that we don't work less is not about material necessity but just about the way our present economic structure works.

Graeber was no more careful or truth seeking with Bullshit Jobs than with the rest of his work. Other, better scientists have tested his bullshit and found b it lacking.

> Alienation is not ‘Bullshit’: An empirical critique of Graeber’s theory of BS jobs

> David Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs theory’ has generated a great deal of academic and public interest. This theory holds that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value. Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions. Marx’s concept of alienation and a ‘Work Relations’ approach provide inspiration for an alternative account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace environments in explaining why workers perceive paid work as useless.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/095001702110150...

> These projections always read like something that would come from a person who doesn't understand where their food comes from

From a smaller and smaller proportion of the population working in the agricultural field-- about 25-30% of the population in 1930 to about 10% now-- despite producing more calories per person and more meat, etc.

> From a smaller and smaller proportion of the population working in the agricultural field-- about 25-30% of the population in 1930 to about 10% now-- despite producing more calories per person and more meat, etc.

The graphs in the linked article show weekly working hours declining from 50H to 40H over that time frame.

Taking agricultural workplace participation from 10% to a hypothetical 1% isn't going to drop working hours from 40H to 10H.

> Taking agricultural workplace participation from 10% to a hypothetical 1% isn't going to drop working hours from 40H to 10H.

Yes-- the point is that your argument that it requires eating the cheapest synthetic food seems faulty; if 10% of our work hours are going to agriculture and related industries (including, as a sibling points out, restaurants and stores and manufacturing of junk food), then it's not a huge driver of our work week.

Similarly, it's not as huge a portion of our labor going to maintain and construct housing as you imply.

My understanding is that the 10% number included all food related jobs such as cook, waiter, food manufacturing etc. not just farming which is 1.3% of jobs.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

And if we need more calories we can just crank up the production. The food industry is highly automated.

If people today were satisfied with a 1930s level of luxury, we could absolutely get by on a 16 hour week. Probably a lot less, in fact. There would be no need for content marketing.

Most of the cost of living is fundamentally related to housing and transportation, which are determined by land use policies. In this respect, people of the 1930s may be better off than us depending on the metrics.

"Cost of living" must have meant something different back then. To me, it doesn't survive very well as a concept in the interwar period.

On an individual level it's not particularly hard to do for a little while when you're young.

The only problem is healthcare.

One thing that irks me is how keeping up with tech is almost mandatory. I see sms two factor being deprecated a lot now and am curious how people without smart phones work around that - just as one example of many

Switch to using TOTP based second factor and just use your computer to generate the TOTP secrets. Plenty of apps do it, no need for a phone of any sort.

It doesn’t cost that much to have a phone. Supermarkets sell smart phones for $50AUD and older phones can be had for free which still work fine.

No one _has_ to have the latest iPhone pro.

I don’t disagree but one still kind of needs to have a phone or phone number

Edit: was meaning to speak broadly about “keeping up” m

I was perusing YouTube last night and found a video of city life in 1945. It looked basically like today, except the cars looked nicer, there were more public transportation vehicles milling about, and people had great hats.

I'm being a little tongue in cheek but my thought was that daily life isn't that different now vs 80 years ago. Having a good cup of coffee provides the same level of stimulation. You go to work, chat with people, make something, and go home. These days you have access to more reading material during your commute, and can die from less diseases, so I mean the present isn't bad or anything, but people were probably enjoying existence as far back as 1945 ;)

I think that was also a time when people only owned one outfit and pair of shoes for several years, and would make due by mending them and washing them in the sink, and umbrella repairman was a profession.

Sounds like the good life to me; where do I sign up?

It may not be "that" different if you're comparing it to 500 years ago, but I'd be very surprised if the vast majority of people today and in 1945 wouldn't prefer the amenities we have now.

I assume you refer to the US, and it might be true in that case. In 1945, after WWII lots of places were completely destroyed.

> 1930s level of luxury

I can't help but s/1930s/Great Depression/ and wonder what this even means.

A very sparse standard of living, in other words.

So s/luxury/austerity/ which begs the question why the working class majority would want that.

More leisure time would be the benefit. Although the leisure would have to be less sophisticated.

>There's definitely more room to squeeze labor out of the market through more automation, but that doesn't result in higher wages for people.

This statement is kinda in odds with what proceeded it. You are suggesting that "in the real world" this is impossible. But then also conclude with the line of reasoning that you seem to be arguing against.

Or another thing that just came up on HN today...

"Excess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year"

https://hbr.org/2016/09/excess-management-is-costing-the-us-...

> Here’s the arithmetic. According to our analysis of occupational data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 23.8 million managers, first-line supervisors, and administrators in the American workforce in 2014. (This figure includes both the public and private sectors but does not include individuals in IT-related functions.) That works out to one manager and administrator for every 4.7 employees. Overall, managers and administrators made up 17.6% of the U.S. workforce and received nearly 30% of total compensation.

that's all fair, but how do you account for the dramatic increase in individual productivity vs the steady level of hours?

>Productivity in the United States averaged 63.33 points from 1950 until 2022, reaching an all time high of 115.97 points in the fourth quarter of 2021 and a record low of 26.24 points in the first quarter of 1950.

it seems wrong to ignore this. productivity 5x'd since 1950, but hours roughly 1x'd. you're not speaking to why this doesn't result in higher wages for people or a shorter work day. which is implicit support of whatever the benefiting factor is.

Wages were $3300 -- or about $40.8k inflation adjusted-- in 1950.

It's about $54k now.

So, it's not 5x, but hours went about .8x and wages went about 1.32x, so we're about 1.65x better off per hour. The overwhelming quantity of the benefit from productivity went to capital, though... which perhaps in unsurprising because a lot of the benefit to productivity has come from capital expenditure.