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Comment by hirako2000 | Hacker News Reader

hirako2000

We haven't kept on lowering the weekly hours because despite the unstoppable productivity gains, people want more stuff.

Want to work 6h per week? Live on the strict minimum.

Want everyone to work less. Not happening.

Regaining time spent commuting is a pure gain of time without conceding on throughput.

An argument could be made that if all workers who can converted to remote but also went part time, all kids would truely have parents and environment deadlocks we face would be more half solved.

But here we are still debating which of hybrid, on-site or remote is best for some company cultures, whether the model benefits employers or employees most and how can we make populations and businesses swallow a carbon tax

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> Want everyone to work less. Not happening.

It could. How did we settle on 40 hours?

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052968060/how-the-40-hour-wo...

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The first demand of organized labor was 10 hours - the 10-hour movement. And they made a concerted effort and were successful, to a certain extent, to obtain the 10-hour day.

By the late 19th century, Hunnicutt says, the workweek begins to shrink to something closer to 60 hours a week for more and more people.

But it took the Great Depression to make 40 hours the norm. Government saw a shorter workweek as a way to fight the massive unemployment crisis by spreading the remaining labor out over more people. That led to a series of laws that eventually enshrined 40 hours as America's workweek in 1940. And it seemed like that trend would keep going. The most respected economist of the era, John Maynard Keynes, famously predicted that improving technology and increasing efficiency would deliver a 15-hour workweek by 2030.

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A California bill is out to redefine the work week as 32 hours.

Then companies will move out of California. Employment law here has become very adversarial to employers.

Gosh, I sure hope the door doesn’t hit their asses on the way out.

> A California bill is out to redefine the work week as 32 hours.

In France, the official workweek is 35 hours. It was brought in with the same argument: spread the work to more workers. Didn't exactly work out as expected.

Keynes was pretty good economist, not sure he took into account that industrialisation then got us into societies of consumption.

Once we solved the production problem it didn't take long to invent new ones.

If his prediction is right we would already be at the 20h week. Not sure why we would suddenly get into sprinting sprinting for the next 7 years to catch up with the productivity gains observed in the last 93y. Efficiencies have many folds increased.

All the California bill will do is guarantee access to lower paid jobs. Not necessarily bad since so many low paid jobs dare to get workers to do 40 + non paid extra time.

Ironically the workers who delivered the bill and those who will vote in its favour all work somewhere between 60 and 80h per week. And will continue to do so if the bill passes.

I’ve heard arguments that Keynes was right, if you average out your working life + retirement. Most people had little to no retirement in 1930.

Today, a lot of productive output goes towards supporting the elderly.

The point the parent comment was making is that some people want to work more. If you want everyone to work less, you would have to mandate it by law. That is, not just a mandate on what employers can require, but a mandate limiting what individuals can choose to do. That's a fine proposal if you're into that kind of social engineering, it's a reasonable point of view that I just don't share. But in the country I live in, it's a certainty that a mandate like that targeting how individuals can choose to use their time would never fly; you couldn't get it passed, but even if you did, the backlash would destroy it right away.

> We haven't kept on lowering the weekly hours because despite the unstoppable productivity gains, people want more stuff.

Which people?

It's the ones with all the money and power who actually control this. Don't try to blame this on regular working people.

>Which people?

People who are advertised to, and told that they aren't good enough unless they use <product>. Ads create negative utility by attempting to make people less satisfied with what they were already happy with.

Obviously "not all ads", some ads do useful work of informing the public about a useful product when word-of-mouth isn't working "fast enough". I'm adding this line specifically to pre-empt nitpicker replies.

I'm not seeking to blame the average earner over the super rich.

Most people are very much attached to consumption, it's been a bigger factor that kept the common 40h week than the employers very possible desire to keep workers hustling so much.

Which people? In term of numbers and total impact that would be regular people, more so than those possibly having more leverage on defining what a working week should look like.

In any case the control is over the regular people. If the latter change the other bunch will de facto have to revisit how much they consume, by rough as much.

You forget that rent goes up with income in an area. So does the price of many necessary goods.

I rather forgot to mention that and how it turns into a cycle, pushing out people with ordinary income out of those cities.

It's pretty much everyone who wants more stuff, when they can afford it. But the kind of stuff different people want varies a ton cultural and individually. But no, it's not that "regular working people" eschew possessions while the rich consume. "Minimalism" and "FIRE" and "#vanlife" type things are all distinctly wealthy phenomena. It's people who can bail out of that lifestyle into a life of bounty if they decide to. Working class people may have fewer possessions (though this isn't even necessarily true IME), but that doesn't mean they don't want more stuff. Every "regular working person" I know is trying to save up money for stuff they really want but can't yet afford. The only people I know who talk about consumerism and people having too much stuff are those who can already afford anything they want.

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