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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

Something similar seems a good idea to me, too. Example. Germany has 42 million employees and 3 million unemployeds. Reduce working hours from 40 to 37 hours per week - with reduction in salary, but probably not the full 7.5 % - and hire one new employee for every 13 employees. And there you go - no more unemployment and more leisure time for everybody. Saved unemployment benefits can be used to counter salary reduction for maybe a few years. Problems: salary reduction, small companies, differences in job demand and availability.

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While it's been pointed out that this is a reasonably well-understood problem (Lump of Labour fallacy), I think it's unfair to downvote this comment. I'm reserving my downvotes for abuse and bad conduct, not people I simply disagree with.

So these 3 million unemployed people can be evenly spread out over the economy, sharing in 3/40ths of the jobs of doctors, nurses, machinists, programmers, cleaners, gardeners, engineers, chefs, management consultants, inbiss cook and street sweepers?

And this can happen with less than a few percent friction cost?

Explaining why this will fail, let alone describing how it did indeed fail where it was tried is econ 101 material. As someone else pointed out, look up Lump of Labour fallacy.

There are tons of problems with these types of schemes, the primary one being that there is management overhead and people aren't substitutable. The more people doing the same task, the more work will need to be coordinated and thus overall output would probably decrease.

This is called the lump of labor fallacy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

I call the fallacy a fallacy - it seems way to simplistic to me. There is obviously a fluctuation in work demand, for example all the seasonal work, but this fluctuation is not arbitrarily large. Take it to the extreme, 20 instead of 40 working hours per week - how would this not require twice as many employees, maybe even a few more because of reduced efficiency, to yield the same output? In essence this is nothing more than more equal distribution of available work.

A few thoughts:

1. Not all jobs are created equal, and not all unemployed persons are qualified or capable of performing all jobs. There would still be a mismatch in positions available and workers to fill those positions; without "perfect" alignment a community productivity deficit would continue, moving the costs around instead of eliminating them.

2. It'd become politically desirable to disproportionately point these efforts at industries where it'd be easier to integrate the unemployed ranks (lower skill set barriers to entry). This would have an effect of reducing profit margins in those sectors given the increased overhead of a larger workforce for an unpredictable amount of productivity change. One expects if the total labor hours are the same, economic output of an individual entity in that economy would be equal while personnel costs would increase.

3. There will always be a small portion of the working populace out of work for legitimate reasons.

And, please do a little Googling on seasonal work. In the US, for example, millions of jobs fluctuate between seasons depending on buying and production trends. That's not small peas, so to speak.

It's hard to put this very politely, but you're making a fool out of yourself now. Lump of Labour fallacy isn't crazy voodoo economics, it's incredibly well established. Read the Wikipedia article, then look through some of the references. Your concerns are amply addressed.

No he isn't. I suspect he's starting to correctly identify that Economics has about as much scientific validity as Astrology: they both have the trappings of science, but frankly, they're both full of unverifiable and unfalsifiable nonsense.

I suspect the only reason most people accept it is that they learned it at school so it must be true.

My friend, if you do not consult the mystical Tomes of Economycs on Wikipedia, then the ghostly Vapours will consume you with the aspyct of Mercury.

People have been trying to demonstrate effects of Denmark's 1992 change from 40-hour workweeks to 37-hour workweeks, but afaict nobody's come up with much that's solid, whether showing a negative impact on output, a positive impact on employment, or much of anything else except the mere fact that hours worked per week went down. There are a lot of before-the-fact theoretical papers, from the late '80s and early '90s, but post-1992 nobody seems to have succeeded in validating them. That doesn't mean there was no economic effect, but at the very least it doesn't seem to have been a particularly large one.

There will also be one new manager for every 13 managers. I see that it would be very difficult to make a law to achieve this with a big bang, but I don't see any good reasons why a country could not make a law requiring to reduce working hours by 3 or 4 over a period of maybe 5 years.

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