Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)

evonomics.com

56 pointsdownbad_38 comments

Four-day week trials, for example, keep showing productivity holds or improves — Iceland ran the biggest pilot, the UK had 61 companies in their trial, Microsoft Japan saw a 40% boost. The data is there.

Yet I know a CEO who suggested implementing a four-day week if the least productive 10% of workers came in an extra day instead. Just bonkers.

The extreme cognitive dissonance in these types is so odd - on the one hand, they claim that CEOs are these money-hungry evil tycoons who want to get as much out of their employees as possible, yet on the other hand, they also claim 4 day work weeks are supposedly so amazing and effective and improve productivity.

So .. why wouldn't these horrible CEOs who want to leech everything possible out of their employees gladly/immediately choose to implement 4 day work weeks, when they would supposedly make their employees more productive for the same cost? Why would they refuse to take that?

I'm not sure which types you have in mind? The most strident critics of CEOs I know say they're not just money hungry; they're power and status hungry, and will happily trade off additional money for opportunities to show that they're high status or exert additional power over the little folks. If that's what you value, directing your employees' lives for an extra day every week may be worth leaving a lot of money on the table.

If their goal is power and status, 4 day work week, at lower wages, frees up capital to hire more humans to control.

Option A: 800 employees working 5 days per week.

Option B: 960 employees working 4 days per week (and producing more than the 800)

You're assuming they'd prefer to control more people, but what if they prefer having more control over less people?

I had a boss like this when I worked at a call center, he would swing a golf club around (he was short and I think he wanted to feel like he had a weapon, he never hit any balls in the place) and he would go out of his way to offer overtime to the poorest and most hard off people and wanted to see how much OT he could get one person to work.

It was his little game to manipulate people that couldn't help but say yes into a situation that left them no time to live a life.

The stats were much worse for such people, and those stats had a direct impact on his pay, but if there was a sadistic option he always took it.

Same guy had a "water drinking contest" so he could watch all his employees throw up for a day off.

This seems to work if everyone is peaceful with each other.

What happens when two neighboring countries have a conflict but one of them decides to work less and is comfortable with less economic growth. The other keeps pushing harder and ends up with excess money that they put into their military. Now they can invade their neighbor.

Economic power generally leads to military power. Maybe the world shouldn't be this way but it is.

Oh good. Climate change causing wars over changing limited resources means we'll still have jobs.

The broken window fallacy, now with crop failures and artillery.

There are numerous examples where two neighboring and unfriendly countries with a large economic imbalance hasn't resulted in war. North Korea and South Korea don't like each other, but South Korea's economic boom hasn't led to them invading North Korea. In fact, North Korea has become more belligerent over the years. Nor has China invaded Russia yet.

Both of those less successful nations have nukes.

Why aren't 6 and 7 workday countries taking over 5 workday countries? The existence of majority 5 workday countries is the counterexample.

Last I checked China was doing pretty well. Soon they will have double the nuclear power plants of everyone else and already have a monopoly on rare earth mineral processing.

There’s an odd goal with “productivity” by CEOs in recent years under some obsession to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I suspect in the US where it’s shown time and time again businesses don’t value human lives we will not see this which is sad. Humans could improve so much if we chose to.

Humans are great at solving problems we put our minds to. But one of the problems humans often want to resolve is "I would like to have more and better stuff". That's why there's a lot of discussion about "productivity", the term refers to a business's capacity to satisfy that demand.

You can, of course, argue that it's wrong for humans to want that. The author refers approvingly to some hunter-gatherer societies where people do 20-25 hours of what we would call labor tasks a week because they simply don't demand any products or services beyond mere subsistence. But there's a hidden judo move here, where he talks a lot about their subjective enjoyment and satisfaction, in order to avoid squarely confronting the fact that their lack of productivity means their material conditions are much, much worse than ours.

In general, if you keep an eye out in detailed anthropological literature, you'll find a lot of similar alarm bells. I just found this matter-of-fact paragraph from Daniel Everett I was vaguely remembering, which is written in a neutral to approving tone and yet clearly describes the men of the Pirahã hunter-gatherers pushing their wives into prostitution (https://web.archive.org/web/20190808091528/https://www.edge....):

> It depends on the river trader, but sex is also a very common trade item. So you see these foreign babies being raised among the Pirahã. It's mainly the husband who works out the deal. Single women can negotiate on their own; wives wouldn't make that offer unless their husband negotiated it. In their dealings with outsiders, men take the lead, and the women won't usually come around unless they're called by Pirahã men. But promiscuity is not a problem for the Pirahã. It doesn't violate any values that they have.

>material conditions are much, much worse than ours.

I wonder how much better (or worse) off they are with mental health. What I see in our culture is a bunch of people scrambling to sell a bunch of plastic bobbles in order to afford a bunch of other plastic bobbles. None of it seems to make us particularly happy while it completely destroys the planet we're living on. In fact a whole lot of our 'material conditions' seem to isolate us and make this time in history uniquely depressing.

"Less work" is productivity. Economists are absolutely obsessed with it.

Now, as far as reducing the hours we work, there's a problem. If we decide to take our productivity gains to work only 20 hours per week, someone else can "undercut" us by working 30. Or 40. And so on.

And part of the obsession with job creation is the fact we've taken on so many immigrants who need jobs lest they become a major drag on the economy.

Anyhow, if we want to work less, it's almost inevitable it has to come through government regulation. Put a cap on how many hours a job can require. Minimum vacation amounts. Etc... but then how do you deal with entrepreneurs? Or ensure that a single job can provide a decent standard of living even if it's a low productivity job. And so on...

Look to organized labor, not the government.

The New Deal legislation that standardized the 40 hour week came only after a century of pressure from American workers.

Decreasing working hours increases labor availability (=> so you'd expect people to get paid less as a result), but higher headcount for comparable output is also totally undesirable for an employer: The only potential benefit is some limited redundancy (bus factor), but this comes at the cost of communication overhead (meetings), decreased software design coherence, no "single source of truth" (person), all of which cost money/time to mitigate.

I don't like it, but I understand why we ended up here...

For software maybe, but that’s just one industry.

You have very similar mechanics elsewhere though. More people => invariably more communication/HR/information management overhead pretty much regardless of what they do, and you grow the labor supply also (=> more people willing to work shorter hours).

And the link between health insurance and work that we have in the US makes that math even uglier.

We need a new business structure that allows decentralized workers. Ironically these systems exist, and are called play, and are often used to get around child labor laws. The Queen Ants own the forever games (Roblox, LOL, Fortnite, Minecraft). A less playful example is Open Sores. These systems are mostly decentralized, but we need a design that only allows groups to form in specific blocking situations, like ants building a bridge.

Economic factors to consider:

0. Differentiation--> we are not all the same, and we do not have identical wants and needs

1. Massive investment of time, effort and capital in automation--> requires ROI for investors

2. Supply is governed by demand, not by a bureaucratic checklist

3. Necessary work is harder than unnecessary work --> who wants to work harder for same rewards and incentives?

4. Job "usefulness" and compensation is determined by supply and demand--> rare and difficult vs. common and easier

5. Hunter gatherer lifestyle is not equal to 21st century lifestyle--> the horses are out of the barn

6. Free time is not play time --> free time is a combination of play and personal advancement which creates more differentiation

The point of automation is that it reduces the bargaining power of human workers, but they still have to trade their time and effort for wages. When automation improves, the wage proportion of the created value shrinks.

To what extent is our extended increase in work time related to societal desire to increase standards of living?

Cost of living is terribly high. How much is because we’re comparing different standards? Not all of it, I think, but some for sure.

We don’t think it’s ok to not have running water, electricity, education, sanitation, etc. we think it’s worth societal costs to provide public benefits like fire control, roads, law enforcement, zoning, etc.

I think it’s interesting to consider what makes it harder to live in the modern world that it takes more money to do it.

Not a good take. It wasn't work that was invented recently, but ability to sustain yourself by performing some repetitive (and not always meaningful or productive) actions at pre-defined time periods (like 5 days a week x 8 hours a day). Which does go back to Industrial Revolution and even more recently to Ford Motors and similar enterprises and business models. If you were to ask a hunter-gatherer or a nomad or a slave or even a trade laborer (ie a shoemaker) in pre-industrial times, they'd tell you it's a pretty sweet deal.

No worrying where the next meal will come from, if there's going to be enough crops for the next few months, or if you'll be able to find an animal to kill large enough to feed you but but not large enough to kill you, if you can protect yourself against predators, or aggressive neighboring tribes, if you will be able to find/maintain a shelter good enough to protect you from the elements, esp in extreme cold or hot climates. If you'll be able to make enough shoes to earn enough to sustain yourself and the family, while competing with other shoemakers for a limited demand and limited materials, and million other things.

> In fact, quantitative studies revealed that the average adult hunter-gatherer spent about 20 hours a week at hunting and gathering, and a few hours more at other subsistence-related tasks such as making tools and preparing meals (for references, see Gray, 2009). Some of the rest of their waking time was spent resting, but most of it was spent at playful, enjoyable activities, such as making music, creating art, dancing, playing games, telling stories, chatting and joking with friends, and visiting friends and relatives in neighboring bands.

I'm surprised the author didn't add that they also didn't suffer from obesity or dental cavities or cancer (which is mostly because living past 30 wasn't invented until like 14th century).

See Australia.

so there's this place called Europe

Sure, politicians are going to be happy with less economic power, and as a result less political and military power. Seems exactly like something politicians would go for. /s

They have name for “Less work for same pay” : inflation.

Seems like today's more-work-less-pay model also leads to inflation, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.

The thing being hinted at is there is an already an English term to describe the notion of the value of a unit of something decreasing over time, which is “inflation”. Not causation, just definition.

This is confused. Less work for same pay means each unit of work is more valuable, in other words deflation.

That's less productivity for same pay. We can have less work without impacting productivity much.

Quite a few fallacies in the article the largest relating to evolution. Sure we aren't evolutionary predisposed to work, but Europeans, North Africans, Asians are genetically and we have plenty of ancestors and examples of life that spend their whole lives working

It's hard to know how long evolution takes to work in some of these things. Are we still better adapted to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, even if we have hundreds of generations with agriculture now? This is essentially the same question that adherents of "primal" or "paleo" diets and lifestyles ask.

On the one hand, humans are pretty adaptable. We had colonized a large part of the world even before the invention of agriculture. Some adaptations, like loss of skin pigmentation in Europeans, happened relatively quickly, we think.

On the other hand, other adaptations, like the ability to digest lactose into adulthood relied on specific mutations that still haven't spread through the whole population.

I suspect that we would be happier with less work, and more time socializing, singing and dancing, and more time in nature, but how would you ever prove it?

Stick electrodes into everyone's brains so they can get a measure of how happy people are, and then they can run experiments on us.

> Sure we aren't evolutionary predisposed to work, but Europeans, North Africans, Asians are genetically

What?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com