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Comment by rdlecler1 | Hacker News Reader

The author blames the capatalists but the consumer and competition for goods and services are the culprit. If everyone could live where they wanted to, put their kids through good schools, did not have to pay student loans, save for retirement, and could afford vacations all with 30% less money than they make now then they you would see people seeking jobs that allow them to work less hours. When I take a Lyfy and a driver tells me that she has another job and is making extra money for any number of reasons she is not complaining that she is being overworked by Lyft, but that she doesn't make enough money (except for the occasional driver, like the one driving the landrover, that was driving for fun). Similarly, many engineers could pick up and move to Thailand and live like kinds doing some remote work (our designer does this), yet most would do anything to work at places like Google or Apple.

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You are assuming that working less hours means earning less money. An obvious enough assumption.

Well, that's false.

First, the actual mean work-week is not that high, once you take unemployment into account: some people are working their ass off, but many others either have precarious part-time jobs (fewer hours, but often no reliable schedule), or don't work at all. Reducing the official "full time" work-week would merely force the capitalists to re-allocate work a bit more equally. This will mean less unemployment, and less expensive unemployment insurance —which plays a big role in compensating for the loss of gross revenue.

Second, we could consider allocating less money to capitalists, and more to workers. The ratio used to be 60/40 in the 70s. Now it is more like 70/30, if not worse. Taking that ratio back can easily compensate for 20% cut in our working time.

Of course, such a change is impossible to initiate through individual action alone. You did capture the current conundrum of the isolated proletarian: work one's ass off, or don't earn enough. But there is a third alternative: rise up and change this rotten world.

Not easy. But as history has proven to us time and again, the world can change.

Yes, the world can change. The trouble is that it's impossible reliably to predict what change will result from a given action. The other trouble is that it's impossible reliably to predict what action will result from a given action. People are like that, be it ever so easy for a systems-oriented thinker -- like Marx, or yourself, or for that matter myself -- to forget. (Like any bad habit, this is susceptible to self-discipline.)

The other other trouble is that the soi-disant "social sciences" aren't and cannot be, because controlled experiments are impossible. Historiography and inference are fine and valuable things, but inflicting one's conclusions on others is a project best approached with a maximum of trepidation.

And the final trouble, the really insuperable one, lies in the fact that true collective action, the seat and soul of theoretical socialism, is in practice impossible save on the smallest and meanest scale, such as the rough music of medieval Europe, or the lynchings of the postbellum American South. In a larger arena, such as that of political action, true collectivism runs contrary to the unified intent and direction necessary to survival; begin as it may, a political movement must grow a leader or die. It may, as many, achieve both; it cannot possibly achieve neither, for the same reason its individual members cannot achieve orbit unaided, no matter how high they jump.

No doubt the world can change. The Bolsheviks changed it, quite effectively. Did they make of it what they intended? Did they make of it a better world than they found it? Will you?

What exactly do you mean by: > allocating less money to capitalists, and more to workers ?

Where are those ratios coming from, who's allocating this money, and how would you change the ratio?

Hi. I'm no Marxist, but I am old enough to remember the world before President Reagan & Friends.

Back then, the US had a tax structure that meant that the 1%ers paid much more in income taxes (FWIW, the poor also paid less in FICA); government was better funded, and could hire more people to clean up some of society's loose ends.

I'm not a fan of "basic income", although some "welfare" may have a place, but there is a lot of infrastructure that goes into supporting a business friendly environment, as well as making the country a nicer or safer place to live.

Of course, the powers that be in this country don't want us to turn into some kind of socialist hell-hole like Germany or Sweden :-)

People are always more than willing to redistribute "other people's money".

It always makes me laugh when I see this sort of talk in places like Hacker News. This is a very privileged subculture. If the proletariat rises up, the "intelligentsia" of Silicon Valley will likely be on the chopping block.

Not really. SV employees pay 40-50+% income in tax. The founders, maybe, are at threat.

The problem is that most jobs that require less work pay much less. You might work, say, 30% less, but you earn 60% less, especially when benefits (if you aren't full time you generally don't get them at all) are accounted for.

It doesn't matter if it is possible to make it work, it matters if it is feasible for most people, which it isn't. Don't get sidetracked focusing on outliers.

Source: I haven't had a full-time job in several years and I know I'm an outlier (I also know I may pay a steep price for it in a couple decades).

You can work full time, but get a 4 months vacation every year. If your employer don't offer unpaid vacation - do it when changing job.

So you change jobs every eight months? That's exactly the kind of generally infeasible solution I said to ignore. The vast, vast majority of people simply can't do that, so it isn't worth talking about as a general solution.

Make it a year long vacation every two year. What is infeasible about it except that it's not common now? You get a real 30% pay reduction for 30% more free time.

Tell that to someone who lives in an area where there aren't thousands of employers. Or who works in a specialty field where there aren't thousands of employers anywhere. Or someone who can't move across the country every couple years to find a new job because of children / family / whatever. Or someone in a profession (or just without extremely "valuable" skills) where changing jobs every two years is a black mark. Or someone in a situation where a year of "unemployment" would essentially make it impossible to get a new job (employers have a well-discussed bias toward the currently-employed). The list goes on.

It isn't common now a reason (several, actually). Once again, just because a solution works for some small portion of people doesn't mean that it can be generalized to the rest of the people.

It should work both for those with valuable skill and for those with low skill fungible job. BTW current median tenure for food preparation workers is around 2 years. It works not for all occupations, but it's not a small portion of people too.

I think the fact that they are not doing this shows, that they value money more, than free time.

Food preparation, and other low-skill workers can't afford to do it, 30% less income for most of them is below what they need to survive. It isn't that they "value money more", it's that they have no choice (well, really they do value money more, but it is because they value not suffering from malnourishment). Additionally, for most people who receive some kind of public assistance (which many low-skill workers do) being out of work means losing that assistance. So once again, it doesn't work for that group of people.

Median wage for food preparation is $19000. 30% less is still above poverty line. They can survive, but they prefer to earn $5700 more per year and have less free time. And situation is the same with programmers, only numbers are different.

People think they value free time, but they act as if they value money more.

I would gladly work less and be paid less; in fact, I have done exactly that. 6 hour days and just not come in whenever I want. But now that I'm corporate drone I don't have that option.

"If everyone could live where they wanted to, put their kids through good schools"

In the US, the competition for functioning schools and safe neighborhoods is incredibly high due to the Title IV and Fair Housing laws championed by DSA and their political allies. So you either work your fingers to the bone, or your family will be forced to live in the dangerous part of town.

> If everyone could live where they wanted to, put their kids through good schools, did not have to pay student loans, save for retirement, and could afford vacations

An ever growing share of household spending is driven by the positional goods you mention. People work harder and longer so they can outbid other people for particular houses and schools and vacation rentals. The net effect of cutting everybody's income is not anymore as important as is typically assumed. The bidding war for good neighborhoods and so forth simply de-escalates with lower incomes.

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