4-day workweek employees are happier. One lawmaker says it's 'here to stay.'
businessinsider.com
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Is their hourly rate anywhere close to 15$/hour ?
- Reduced commuting, etc.
- Improved health / quality of life.
- Reduced supply of labor (due to overtime kicking in) should push up equilibrium price.
> It feels strange to be offered the chance to work less than half as much as another human and receive substantially greater rewards for my efforts
This is the nature of any job where there's substantial leverage effects: if your work can make a hundred people fractionally more productive, you're going to reap outsized rewards.
LLMs are just going to amplify this, by devaluing a lot of work but allowing other people to be fantastically more productive thanks to their leverage.
We have a high enough standard of living to shoulder the downsides of 10% fewer working hours (which should lower productivity by less than 10%; perhaps much less) in exchange for the upsides.
Automation poses substantial risk of high unemployment; shortening the work week a little is a good hedge (and offers other benefits).
As long as the ones who are working 10% fewer hours are also taking home 10% less, I don't see the problem with it. But the current system of the welfare state that depends on redistributive taxation has a strong incentive against that change; if everyone working works 10% less, that's 10% less available to be transferred to those who aren't.
I interpret this in the opposite way you do. Labor force participation includes effects where people think it's not economically worth their time to work. Reducing supply of labor could be expected to increase labor force participation.
Not to mention this version of the statistic is a completely worthless one: it's not corrected for demographic (aging) effects.
> As long as the ones who are working 10% fewer hours are also taking home 10% less
This is unlikely: when you reduce the supply of something, the price tends to go up.
> if everyone working works 10% less, that's 10% less available
The marginal benefit of the factor (e.g. per-hour productivity) tends to go up, too. (Declining marginal factor product, blah blah blah). Indeed, this is why the price of the factor increases.
This is only possible with generous social benefits given to those who aren't working. In the top 8 most generous states, transfer payments given to those not working exceed the median income[0].
> it's not corrected for demographic (aging) effects
You're right. The prime working-age group (25-54) reversed the same downward trend after the 90-00 peak sometime in 2015, and recovered relatively quickly post-Covid[1]. But the picture isn't as rosy for young (20-24) entrants to the employment marketplace[2], which is worrisome.
> The marginal benefit of the factor (e.g. per-hour productivity) tends to go up, too
I understand, but aggregate production will go down, would it not?
[0]: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/the_work_...
No; for example, as discussed, retirees are in the set. If supply of labor falls, a greater proportion of people able to be retired will work due to economic incentives.
> I understand, but aggregate production will go down, would it not?
Yes, but it contradicts your "10% less".
Fighting the 10% less is:
- For each worker, their least productive hours will be cut rather than their most productive
- For some of hours lost, additional workers will be employed in higher value jobs.
- Some types of output will not be affected at all; others it will be worth paying overtime.
- For some of hours lost, automation will be employed.
- Lowering commute use of roads and transport will increase productivity.
All in all, I'd guess lowering the work week by 10%, and the nominal days-per-week to 4, might lower aggregate output by a couple percent. I would also expect wages to increase, arresting trends where wages have stagnated as productivity has increased.
Yes, its called age demographics. As a demographic bulge moves into retirement age, the LFPP (which is the labor force engaged share of the population above a lower age limit, but not restricted by an upper age limit) naturally goes down, ceteris paribus.
Want to hear a bigger disconnect? Most jobs we need to maintain our standard of living are blue collar jobs. Think waste disposal, plumbing, carpentry, textile, farming, transportation, etc... By contrast most white collar jobs are unnecessary fluff mostly dedicated to producing luxury goods, bean counting, or high-tech entertainment. About the only white collar jobs we need to live well are medical personnel.
> It feels strange to be offered the chance to work less than half as much as another human and receive substantially greater rewards for my efforts.
You are paid based on how difficult it is to hire your replacement. Blue collar workers are paid less because the availability of able-bodied people is high. It's supply and demand.
“Bean counting” (which I take as not just accounting, but management, analytics, auditing, investigation, and legal and dispute resolution) is what makes sure the combination of resources are where they need to be for other (including blue collar and medical, and everything in the supply chain of either) jobs to be able to happen at all, and which deals with the fact that the humans doing them aren’t robots and have coordination needs. If you want an economy much beyond individual subsistence farming, you need “bean counting”, and you need more of it the farther from that you want to be.
Coordination costs are real.
Obviously there's some optimum amount of coordination and allocation of resources. There's an upper bound on how much is useful, though.
I worry that we're creating more and more empty administrative and make-work middle management work, especially in many sectors.
Look at higher education, and what it costs these days (as a society and individually). But there's fewer senior actual "production" faculty and researcher jobs around per capita, and the compensation for them has significantly fallen in real value. An administrative and management class has captured a huge portion of the value to questionable benefit.
It's most clear there, but I worry that we're dedicating too many resources to middle management and excessively clever intermediaries.
You don't even need to think that hard. Remember 3 years ago, when only "essential workers" had to physically go in to work anymore? That's pretty much why.
It DOES cause another problem though: unemployment. Since blue collar workers are so expensive there is a lot of incentive to reduce it as much as possible in all areas of society. A few examples:
It is almost comical how many swedes do manual labor themselves instead of hiring help (especially home renovations). A software engineer coworker renovated all of his apartment (except bathrooms) himself, including changing floors. Construction materials and housing styles are optimised to reduce manual labor.
Almost all public parks have grass-cutting roombas, street cleaning is mostly done with machines, etc
IKEA is so popular because furniture is almost disposable, it is never worth repairing it (unless you do it yourself).
So this still creates another underclass of unemployed people which is also pretty bad for society and individuals. A lot of the gang violence you see about Sweden is a direct result of this. The social safety net helps (especially in ensuring that the children from this class has a chance to excel) but it is not enough and there are no clear answers.
I mean that’s trivial. Get a decent paint gun, laminate or vinyl flooring and just install them? It’s neither hard nor time consuming and it helps clear them mind.
As an added bonus, i made sure my network cables running through the walls are 10 Gbe. Just in case :-)
I absolutely recommend to anyone working in tech that they try it.
In Sweden, it's difficult to get rich through salaried work. Startups, inheritance, and housing are the only avenues. As an example, during the 'housing bubble' years, there were some buzz around people earning more from the appreciation on their house than they did from work.
With that said, Sweden has a high dollar-millionaires-per-capita. When you already have money, Sweden is almost a tax haven. But they pulled up the ladder behind them for most of the population.
You don’t think importing more than a million people from countries with vastly different cultures and placing them in segregated neighborhoods has more to do with it?
Native Swedes(and well integrated foreigners) have very little unemployment.
It's harder to do for a low wage workers who are paid more than they would otherwise be able to negotiate for, but High demand low Supply jobs would adjust pretty quickly
Obviously certain jobs like retail can’t just have people “not working”, but you can coordinate shifts. Or if there’s a scheduled period of time like with construction that’s different (though the construction guys and gals can help decide the schedule). And obviously even in tech jobs people need to communicate, present, have meetings, etc.
But other than that, actually talk to people to see what schedule, within the necessary constraints, works best for them. It’s their productivity which helps your company (of course if their schedule is 1 day a week then they’re not being productive; but if an employee does the same amount of work in <36 hours and is ok getting paid for only <36 hours, it’s a win-win).
First you'd have to define that. The "work to be done" increased with our productivity. We started with machines doing the work of 50 people, thread weaving for example, but it didn't mean thread weavers worked 50 times less, it just meant we produced 50 times more. You can apply that to pretty much every fields. When the end goal is "produce as much as you can" there is no "getting the job done", the only limits are set by laws regulating salaries and working hours.
Where did you get the impression that they were creating a strawman, or engaging in whataboutism?
Reductio ad absurdum would be more like "Assume X. [...]. Then false. Therefore, X can't be true."
It looks like an instance of the slippery slope fallacy - kind of. ("4 days? What next? 0?" - more like "of course people are happier working less, so what?" though)
We are not talking about a 1 or 0 day work week here though. Various studies and experiments show that productivity is not quite reduced from 5 to 4 day week workdays, while making people happier. Assuming it's true, it's worth it and we have little reason not to do it.