Just to touch on one important problem for which one must account:
Productivity over time is how much stuff you get out vs what you put in, from one time period to the next. Inflation is what the stuff costs over time.
But what do you do with stuff you used to make that you don't make now?
And the opposite: what do you do with stuff you make now that you didn't used to make?
If you look only at the the things that are almost exactly the same from one period to another, usually you find that the intuitions hold: food used to take 10% of our hours, now it takes .6%, etc. etc.
If you dig into the details of CPI and PPI, you'll quickly say, "waiiiiiit a second, can you really just do that?"
For example: they'll say that your tv or car now is "more stuff" because of "features." But if you had to make the old car now, you might be able to make way more of them for the same inputs.
Productivity gains have mostly gone to the investor class, they’re not only not working but making more for not working than they ever have. Elon could go sniff glue for a day and he’ll make more money than most of us would working 10 jobs for the rest of our lives.
I think investors deserve a return on their investment but the system is also heavily rigged in their favor. They get bailed out for bad investments, they pay lower tax rates, they have many mechanisms to avoid taxes altogether, and systematic inflation favors investors over laborers.
And what historically happens when a small advantaged class presses their advantage so far that the lower class is unable to sustain a reasonable standard of living?
The problem is that the payout is unbounded. Yes, their initial investment was important. But most of the productivity gains after that investment was not directly their work, yet they claim all of that as well.
Where do you think productivity from extending our lifetimes with advances in medicine and biology will go? Oh, you thought by extending our lives, we'll be enjoying it more? No. We'll be just working more.
I'm no economist but it seems like competition for housing drives up prices as wages increase. Also, more generally, people's happiness seems to be more correlated with their economic rank in a society, rather than their wealth in absolute terms [1]. So, people want to do better than their neighbors, not just do well.
1. Boyce, Brown & Moore (2010), “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction”
This is why Keynes' prediction "... that technological progress and rising productivity would lead to a 15-hour workweek (about 3 hours a day) by the year 2030." was so wrong. He couldn't imaging the increase in our demand for standard of living which has becomes a hamster wheel. He just saw that we'd no longer need to grow our own food or collect water or chop wood to stay warm or hand wash clothes or any of the other huge labor needs of the previous century.
The "golden billion" people almost all live in luxury, by the standards of an early industrial society like the early 19th century Europe which Marx described, and daily use a ton of amenities which even the mightiest king could not afford 1000 years ago. But we take it for granted.
I could have taken my savings and downshifted to a comfortable life in a third-world country. But instead I've put them in my wife's business, and keep working, while living in one of the most expensive cities in the Solar system. This is because I want a better education for my children, and success for the business. (The city is also enjoyable when I have the time.)
Then, some amenities are still expensive. Think about medical care, especially larger-scale like cardiac surgery. Well, think about the cost of a Claude subscription if you live otherwise happily for $25 / day in an inexpensive third-world countryside.
We work so much because there's still utility in it, in many cases. We have plenty, but not plenty enough.
I used to live in a big city and work as a software engineer.
I realized it wasn’t making me happy. Sitting inside everyday is not how I want to spend my life. Now I live in a mountain town of 10,000. I work 10-20 hours a week on writing and books. I snowboard 100 days a season. We took our 6 month old on a trip for a year (wielded got 18 months maternity leave) she works 3 days a week.
I cut our firewood so we have no heating bill, have no phone, no tv. We really enjoy the simple life. We have plenty of time to host dinner gatherings, hang out with our daughter, etc.
"Research shows that average U.S. income growth is strongly related to rising house prices but is essentially unrelated to changes in the supply of housing units across metropolitan areas."
> So, people want to do better than their neighbors, not just do well.
That's not what your data shows. It just shows that people don't want to be near the bottom of the pile, because it indicates they're being mistreated (which they are).
People don't want to "do better then their neighbors," they just don't want to be left behind by society.
Framing it the way you do makes it seem like everyone desires brutal social darwinism. It's not true. People just want to be treated fairly and live in a relatively egalitarian world.
I'm not dismissing what you are saying, but do you have evidence for what "people want"? In my experience, when somebody claims to know what people want then it tends to be a mix of "I want", "the people I know want", "I hope people want", "people should want", and a few others, rarely with any evidence.
The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society are willing to work this hard. The hardest working participants of the labor market will set the tone of the competition for high-paying jobs.
A typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.
The mismanagement of inelastic labor supply into soggy labor demand in order to minimize wages is completely intentional.
We need to react to it with the same intentionality that we did a century ago when we won the 40 hour work week, which still hasn't been entirely eroded despite half a century of chipping away.
What do you mean won? The 40 hour work week was instituted during the Great Depression (hence why you see 1938 in the link) to try and get more people back into the labour force. The idea was that, like, if those working 60 hour weeks were forced into working 40 hours then 20 hours would open up for someone else, giving them some spending money to open up the economy again.
The 40 hour work week was originally conceived of by labor, which may be what you're thinking of, but it wasn't put in place for them. That was for businesses so that they could have more customers.
The industrialists tried to coup FDR. They filled the air waves and newspapers with paid opinions about how his pro-labor policy would sink the economy. And then it didn't. Not only did it not sink the economy, it led to arguably the greatest period of middle class prosperity ever seen.
I think there was another small event that occurred around the same time that confounds things a bit. An event which VERY heavily involved industrialists.
Your calculator must be broken? As your own link tells, the Haymarket Affair ushered in the 8 hour workday, not 40 hours per week. 8 * 6 (sometimes 7) = 48 (sometimes 56).
The 40 hour work week came in 1938. This is even echoed in the original link, as mentioned earlier.
Not sure why you insist on continuing to use that broken calculator. Four 10 hour days, for example, also allows a 40 hour work week. A 40 hour work week is in no way dependent on an 8 hour workday.
But it remains that 6 days per week was the norm prior to 1938, so 48 hours would be typical. We're talking about 40 hour weeks being typical. Stay on topic, my man. The 40 hour work week was not won, unless you think the Great Depression was caused by a labor uprising?
Typical? I know a bunch of tech folks, and none of them are pushing huge hours.
Work for a ramen noodle startup? Sure. Work for a typical profitable company (Atlassian/Xero, whatever) - and I just don't see it.
Especially with the leverage of good LLMs operated well - if anything I find I have less time pressures than more, and I over deliver as compared to almost every one of my peers.
The simple answer is wrong obviously, because it fails to address the nuance.
The most powerful members of our society (not the hardest working ones) are the ones who set the tone for the rest of us. We only need to continue working this hard as long as we accept their dominion over our society.
That's a choice we make as a society every day, and it's probably a result of the simplistic form of thinking you offer in your comment.
> The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society are willing to work this hard
Let me fix that for you.
The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society [hoard wealth beyond the wildest imagination of those in the bottom 99%.]
So much wealth they quite literally don't know what to do with it, and for a cherry on top they're not even happy. The richest man on the planet is a depressed Twitter troll.
Until the general public rightfully takes back the money they've worked generations to generate that _mostly_ flows into the pockets of these (t|b)illionaires, we will continue to see a more stressed and less happy society for all.
Even if we assume that they didn't before (which is not really true to start with, for the overwhelming majority of the population), I don't see anything wrong with the fact that women now have to justify their value to society like everyone else.
The problem is the fact that any couple, of any combination of sex or gender, now cannot afford a decent life without 2 full time salaries (or more, in many cases. That's a bad result of natural market forces that should definitely be addressed.
I think we don't talk enough about this. I'm neutral on the previous distribution of work, but I think it's very unfair what the society is doing to women now. Workers have never been paid so low in a lot of countries in purchasing power of something essential which is housing, while women have never worked that much in a lot of countries. And it's a choice societies made, because work could pay more, and everything else could pay less. Rich countries don't lack of wealth, they just distribute it differently, and when women started to work, they decided they wouldn't distribute as much wealth to workers anymore.
This reminded me of a strange quote I heard a while ago:
"I think the problem we've had is, people decided they didn't want to work so much anymore. (...)
We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. (...)
So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude, and it's go to come through hurting the economy, and that's what the whole world, the governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality."
"The working class is the original and fundamental economic class. . . . The function of the investing
class is to serve the members of the working class by insuring them against loss and by providing
them with desired goods." - Levy
". . . the justification for the existence of the investing class is the service it renders the working
class, measured in terms of wages and desired goods. The contrary is not true. The working class
does not exist to serve the investing class. The working class has the right to insure itself through
organizations composed of its members or through government, thereby eliminating the investing
class." - Levy
Jerome Levy was a committed ideological capitalist.
From that perspective the idea that workers need to be reminded to suffer is like saying insurance companies need to stop paying so many claims to remind us of the risk of house fires....
Nobody wants to admit they are having a 15 hour work week with AI, but if in office attendence is any indication, I think many knowledge workers are starting to reduce work hours. It is much easier to do so remotely.
Some are filling hours with more work however it seems like many are not increasing work volume, just quietly reducing the amount of labor.
To me the opposite effect seems to occur: management sees one guy get a ton of a certain kind of work done with AI and then expects everyone to increase all work output by that much because they also have access to AI.
Of course "some folks say they work a lot more than they actually do" is also nothing new to AI anyways.
A lot of people aren't working hard. They might sit at their desk from 9-5 but total effort put in is probably only around 15hrs a week of solid work.
It's hard to see this if you're a typical HN reader because we're all a pretty motivated lot who tend to enjoy what we do, and what we do is fairly concrete. But survey the typical office and you will be blown away by how little effort people are putting in. And of the "work" that is getting done a lot of it is never used, or the sort of thing whose quality can't be easily evaluated so it trends towards the min viable product.
I used to work at a company where a significant fraction of the workforce just spent all day producing "decks" (PowerPoints). They hardly sent emails or wrote documents - even things you'd expect to be a Word file were decks - and on the few occasions I gently enquired about how long they'd been working on their current "project" (a deck) I'd always regret it, because the answer would be something like several weeks. Total output from those weeks: a dozen badly made slides that said very little, and which could have been an email.
And that was in fintech! Go look at the public sector, academia or NGOs and be amazed at the endless armies of people who can spend an entire year on making a single PDF that your average hyped-up Valley engineer would produce in a week.
These people are all technically working a 40 hour week but in reality a lot of their time is spent on YouTube, napping, walking the dog, taking care of kids, listening to podcasts, researching their next vacation etc. Their managers don't hold their feet to the fire because they're doing the same things, and the company produces enough profits that nobody is really motivated to do layoffs.
There are a few misconceptions that come up in this discussion, which are important to understand:
a) people don't just work to make X dollars per year. They work to have a similar or higher standard of living than their peers (the famous "keeping up with the Joneses"). Sure there are dirt cheap housing in the middle of the country, but everyone wants to live in NYC. This is not about getting to a fixed point, it's a competition. So no matter how much more productive we get, we'll work as much as we reasonably can, which for most people is 40-60 hours/week
b) the issue with doing redistribution with taxes, is that the government doesn't just give the money back to the people. They waste it by proclaiming they can put it to good use, via custom benefits, non profits, etc. This is (usually) a huge waste of resources. So taking in an additional 30% of GDP as taxes won't make everyone 30% richest; it'll go in the pockets of the well connected or those willing to commit fraud and grift. And the politicians in governmetn have strong incentive to continue doing it this way because they get support and votes in return (e.g. through media corruption or special interest groups that vote as a bloc)
c) we have taken some of the productivity back - we have life saving drugs, clean water, cheap energy, all the entertainment in the world in our fingertips - things that 100 years back were reserved for royals and kings. But because of point (a) of course, nobody's happy having "just" that
d) even if the macines become super productive, it doesn't mean the price of everything is going to zero. There's still only so many apartments to rent or own in manhattan, and the price of human service will skyrocket (as it has done over the past few decades - compare the price of a TV to the minimum hourly wage for example). So it's a misconception that the value of money will go to zero, as Elon recently said
Seems like tragedy of the commons principle - if everyone was chilling and working 20 hour weeks, I'd do the same. But people hustle and grind to get rich so that's the culture I have to adapt to.
Tech (business in general) is a Red Queen's Race. If everyone else runs faster, you have to run faster just to stay in place.
We're very good at absorbing productivity improvements. Hell that's the whole goal of software – make things faster then eat the edge by making them faster for everyone.
We live in a money-based economy. Money comes from other people, who don't give it away unless you satisfy them somehow. Those people that want work from you, will take all the work you can perform (up to the limit of labor laws). That's why.
Every economy is "money-based" in some way, money is just an abstract representation of value. You can try to get rid of it, but it will come back in another form because "value" is still useful to quantify and resources are finite.
money comes from other people... and the money printer -- if you have access to it.
money =\= purchasing power. if they print enough (and spend it themselves first into the economy), then the purchasing power is being siphoned away towards the source of the new money.
We work this hard because there's insufficient collective drive to provide for all before the wealthy are allowed to extract.
If 2 people both need something to survive, then collectively the group needs to produce 2 of those things. But if 1 of them demands 1000 of that thing, then collectively they need to produce 1001 of that thing to satisfy the demand.
The _problem_ is that the demand for the extra 999 is given equal weight and competes for production resources vs the 2 that are actually needed instead of explicitly prioritizing the 2 and then letting the 999 come from a secondary market of post-needs-fulfillment labor. Right now if the group produces only the needed 2, then most of the time the person who only wants the 1 that they need won't get anything at all, and in many cases that means they starve and die.
When the consequence of collectively producing less than the total sum demanded by the wealthy is that some people will then starve and die, that hangs like an inverse sword of damocles over the heads of the poor and middle class, always threatening those who can't just buy their way out into laboring more than would be otherwise needed.
The very obvious to me solution is to structurally prioritize meeting everyone's common needs for food/water, shelter, and medical care first before then satisfying the desires of the rich who want more. That way rich people can still get all their private jets and fancy cars, but they'll need to pay more to convince people that the loss of their leisure time is worthwhile instead of everyone in the underclass living under constant threat for survival.
Personally I think the constant political drumbeat to have more jobs instead of literally anyone trying to maximize collective leisure time is the greatest tragedy of modern capitalism. It's always jobs jobs jobs instead of needs and rest.
Upvote from me. I am proposing something on these lines, I call it "Basic Post-Scarcity", where basic needs production and maintainance get fully automated and work becomes optional: https://lorenzopieri.com/post_scarcity/.
IMO: if my company slows down to a healthier 30 hours, we lose to competitors and lose our livelihoods. So we have to keep up the 40 hours or disappear. Seems like so much effort is wasted in competition.
To demonstrate that this is a nonsense, you all should work 50 hour weeks for a year, thus obviously destroying your competition, and then dial back down to 30 hours weeks for the rest of time.
It's something of a collective action problem even beyond power relations. My motivation to work less than 40h just isn't that high since everyone around me is working 40h too.
Also has to do with demand for savings. The US has a bunch of mostly accidental policies that juice that demand.
Quite surprising that the article does not mention, not even in passing, Russell's In Praise of Idleness [0]. Back in the 1930s Russell observed that a small fraction of the population had managed to sustain the British wartime economy in WWI, while the great majority of the workforce was in the trenches. Of course in peacetime you may want more prosperity, but the idea that this would require _everybody_ (well, at least every able-bodied male, this being the 1930s) to work _full time_ was already absurd back then.
EDIT: Being downvoted, cannot reply for 10 more hours.
We still work hard and will continue to do so because we are conditioned for the first 21 years of our lives to work hard at school.
21 years is a third of your productive life, a time when you body still works reliably, can repair itself rapidly, you have very little responsibilities and thus can take more risk and explore the frontiers of possibility.
The math teacher tells you to write out twenty tables of addition, so you do it.
The chemistry teacher tells you to balance out fifty chemical equations, so you do it.
The English teacher tells you to write out 500 word essays to explain why Sherlock was not a villain but just misunderstood, so you do it.
If you question why, you fail.
If you question is there's a better way to demonstrate the understanding, you fail.
If you refuse to do these assignments and start a lemonade stand, you fail.
Thankfully working hard is getting disrupted. An LLM doesn't sleep, take breaks, fall asleep after three 6 hour shifts or take sick leave. Nothing works as hard as an LLM and even basic LLMs that can run on commodity GPUs with 6GB of VRAM can write out twenty tables of addition, balance out fifty chemical equations and argue both for and against why Sherlock was a villain.
People will argue that balancing out fifty chemical equations and writing out twenty tables of addition is necessary to gain the foundation necessary to do more abstract tasks.
That to be an effective writer, you need to read two works of Shakespeare and critique in a manner that appeals to your teacher or the AI that grades your writing assignments. People who never got to do this are idiots and their writing is just garbage, unfit for human consumption.
That to be an effective Front End developer you need to code in x86 assembly. I would like to save those debates for another day.
But people actually don't give a s*it if you work hard or not!
They only care if you're giving them value for either their time or money.
Those who don't realize this will keep working hard for those who will put them to work. Those teachers will keep joining unions and complaining they don't get paid enough while they will reject the truth, the reality.
The problem is that people who refuse to work hard most often have life trajectories that most other people dislike. Someone may enjoy the life of leisure, drinking, and strolling around that bums choose. But the downsides are real, and most people abhor those.
Yeah, it only takes half the time to make the same stuff, but we aren't making the same stuff now, are we? (Or do you all want to go back to the pre-AI, pre-Internet, effectively pre-computer 70s?)
Because it deliberately fudges things around to imply that getting off crisis-prone gold standard was the actual reason things changed, instead of other policy decisions
Whitney’s cotton gin increased the speed separating cotton fibers from the sticky seeds by 50x. I wonder if labor will experience similar outcomes with the efficiency AI creates?
Answer: People are reluctant to live in 2026 the way they did in 1973.
The additional compensation is a statistical artifact that accounts for air conditioning, iPhones, reliable cars that last 20 years, the Internet, etc.
One aspect that interests me is the relative difficulty of "part time" employment. We define "full time" as 40 hours a week (number may vary depending on location and field, but that's the stereotypical value). The wage that brings in may be, for successful people in a reasonably lucrative field, substantially more than needed for a comfortable life.
But let's say I decide that I'd be happy with my life at 50% of my current pay, and I want to do 50% less work in exchange. 20 hours per week instead of 40. If you're in the kind of job that makes enough for this to work, you probably can't do it. 20 hours per week is for crappy jobs in retail and food service. It's very unlikely that you'll find a tech job willing to employ you part time at any pay level.
So even if I, personally, am sufficiently productive and sufficiently compensated that I could afford to work a lot less than people did 50 years ago, I can't do it. At least, I can't do it on a rolling basis. The closest I can come is to retire early. Or maybe take some years off in the middle of my career, but that's extremely risky. I definitely can't cut my hours and pay in half over a week, or month, or even year.
The "we" in this is a missing a piece: the size of the labor force. It's shrinking. Has been for 20+ years, with a peak around 2000.
Some people are working hard. The growing demographic is the retired, the trust-funded and those NEET-ing around on various forms of subsistence income. Another few years we'll be back to post-war levels ~%58 of participation, where two-parent homes prevailed, and one stayed home.
because we don't have organized labor, all current working conditions in the US have been provided by through organized labor — child labor laws, weekends, 8 hour workdays, breaks, you name it... employers have never given any of this freely along with productivity gains
it's strange that all these articles about how much we're working don't even peek into the history of how our current structure was formed
the current productivity gains have mostly been captured by the richest, and everyone else is competing against each other for the scraps... if you choose to work less, you are out-competed and lose your status (guess what kind of groups can help avoid this!)
Because the people in charge of deciding which work should be done have decided that we should spend every waking hour making them more powerful. Next!
In theory we could just come together, start focusing on building a working society which defines what we need and what we want and just build it efficently.
We could just get rid of any inefficency.
Capitalism is driving our current economy, it doesn't has to.
There is no real reason why we couldn't decide tomorrow that every car is electric and depending on some factor you can just request a car.
Planet earth has resources x, the only question is for what we use it and how we distribute it.
But no if i want to be self sufficient (100%) i can't do this.
If i want to exit capitalism and build up a country not defined by it, i can't either.
If i kill bad leaders, i will be thrown in prison.
Short of a windfall or fanciful ideas of starting my own business (and then having to work even harder), I'm still a wage slave who needs to keep doing what the man asks of me so he will give me my monthly stipend
That may be true for the individual, but the man can be kicked to the curb at any time with ease if the workers collectively decide to. The man is only a belief.
We're still working this hard because we, as a group, want to. It is as simple as that.
The man just sets policy that maximizes prices and minimizes wages, so that the median person still works full time and lives hand-to-mouth even while the economy has achieved a level of productivity that would have been compatible with Keynes' 15 hour workweeks were the surplus not devoted exclusively to pumping assets.
If working people in industrialized society weren't artificially kept indebted and poor (relative to the wealth they should have), then it would be impossible for the rulers to control the population, and they would loose their power.
A ruler will always prefer to rule over 100 wretches, than be an equal with 100 peers. And people all over the world have been bred to submit by relentless head stomping by family, school and media.
But the current order will end without violence and be forgotten as foolishness, just like the spell of the feared Soviet terror regime ended as if people woke up from a dream. Just like the strangle grip of popes, priests and monks ended and is now the source of ridicule. Our children's children will look with nothing but disgust at how the current population worship "governments", "authorities" and so on - all of these illusions made up of some of the least admirable people alive.
I was reading this and a question came up. It ultimately works under the premise that there is only one ticket — so the conclusion is that the ticket must be ownership.
But if machines produce more, couldn't the state provide free services rather than cash? In kind provision could be less dependent on wages than taxation is.
Then couldn't we divide the monetary system further — not as banknotes, but by subdividing it? Would the administrative system be too difficult after all?
In other words, if the problem is that only the "wage" earned for participating in production grants the right to consume, then shouldn't tickets to the means of production also be distributed?
Still, no matter how I think about it, in the end it comes down to the problem of distribution. The OP also gives capital ownership as an example, but...
If automation can enable substantial production without human labor, then what on earth is the reason we should keep demanding that humans do wage labor for survival? I find myself thinking about this a lot these days.
Someone who did not participate in production can consume the product because they own capital. Then what is the basis on which that right arises?
In fact, economic logic, when you think about it, seems to be mostly a kind of circular reasoning. It says "capital's share equals its marginal contribution," but that market itself is ultimately something created by power.
Sometimes I have thoughts like this. In fact, the core of capitalism is the ownership of the means of production, and such ownership will keep accumulating ever-widening disparities. If automation keeps advancing, humans will eventually become unnecessary — and then how will the market be maintained? We cannot give everyone a claim on automated production. In the end, a ruling class and a ruled class will inevitably exist, and the question becomes how the ruling class can rule entirely with the consent of the ruled. Lately, it seems this principle no longer works in capitalism.
There is hope for fully automated robotic companies that are owner-less, and undercut any profit-making entity since they have no profit sharing to do. See https://lorenzopieri.com/robotic_commons/
Just to touch on one important problem for which one must account:
Productivity over time is how much stuff you get out vs what you put in, from one time period to the next. Inflation is what the stuff costs over time.
But what do you do with stuff you used to make that you don't make now?
And the opposite: what do you do with stuff you make now that you didn't used to make?
If you look only at the the things that are almost exactly the same from one period to another, usually you find that the intuitions hold: food used to take 10% of our hours, now it takes .6%, etc. etc.
If you dig into the details of CPI and PPI, you'll quickly say, "waiiiiiit a second, can you really just do that?"
For example: they'll say that your tv or car now is "more stuff" because of "features." But if you had to make the old car now, you might be able to make way more of them for the same inputs.
1. Boyce, Brown & Moore (2010), “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction”
The "golden billion" people almost all live in luxury, by the standards of an early industrial society like the early 19th century Europe which Marx described, and daily use a ton of amenities which even the mightiest king could not afford 1000 years ago. But we take it for granted.
I could have taken my savings and downshifted to a comfortable life in a third-world country. But instead I've put them in my wife's business, and keep working, while living in one of the most expensive cities in the Solar system. This is because I want a better education for my children, and success for the business. (The city is also enjoyable when I have the time.)
Then, some amenities are still expensive. Think about medical care, especially larger-scale like cardiac surgery. Well, think about the cost of a Claude subscription if you live otherwise happily for $25 / day in an inexpensive third-world countryside.
We work so much because there's still utility in it, in many cases. We have plenty, but not plenty enough.
I realized it wasn’t making me happy. Sitting inside everyday is not how I want to spend my life. Now I live in a mountain town of 10,000. I work 10-20 hours a week on writing and books. I snowboard 100 days a season. We took our 6 month old on a trip for a year (wielded got 18 months maternity leave) she works 3 days a week.
I cut our firewood so we have no heating bill, have no phone, no tv. We really enjoy the simple life. We have plenty of time to host dinner gatherings, hang out with our daughter, etc.
The choice is there.
This is a significant claim. What do you base this on? Are there any studies or references?
"Research shows that average U.S. income growth is strongly related to rising house prices but is essentially unrelated to changes in the supply of housing units across metropolitan areas."
San Fran is a clear example, tech money is driving the price for scarce homes up substantially. Go peruse Zillow and see the insanity
That's not what your data shows. It just shows that people don't want to be near the bottom of the pile, because it indicates they're being mistreated (which they are).
People don't want to "do better then their neighbors," they just don't want to be left behind by society.
Framing it the way you do makes it seem like everyone desires brutal social darwinism. It's not true. People just want to be treated fairly and live in a relatively egalitarian world.
I'm not dismissing what you are saying, but do you have evidence for what "people want"? In my experience, when somebody claims to know what people want then it tends to be a mix of "I want", "the people I know want", "I hope people want", "people should want", and a few others, rarely with any evidence.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315944588_Why_peopl...
Hey, hopefully some of you techbros can 'disrupt' the status quo.
This creates crank where even billionaires will whip their workers to death over competition with their neighbors.
A typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.
We need to react to it with the same intentionality that we did a century ago when we won the 40 hour work week, which still hasn't been entirely eroded despite half a century of chipping away.
What do you mean won? The 40 hour work week was instituted during the Great Depression (hence why you see 1938 in the link) to try and get more people back into the labour force. The idea was that, like, if those working 60 hour weeks were forced into working 40 hours then 20 hours would open up for someone else, giving them some spending money to open up the economy again.
The 40 hour work week was originally conceived of by labor, which may be what you're thinking of, but it wasn't put in place for them. That was for businesses so that they could have more customers.
You need to read up on your history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
The 40 hour work week came in 1938. This is even echoed in the original link, as mentioned earlier.
But it remains that 6 days per week was the norm prior to 1938, so 48 hours would be typical. We're talking about 40 hour weeks being typical. Stay on topic, my man. The 40 hour work week was not won, unless you think the Great Depression was caused by a labor uprising?
Work for a ramen noodle startup? Sure. Work for a typical profitable company (Atlassian/Xero, whatever) - and I just don't see it.
Especially with the leverage of good LLMs operated well - if anything I find I have less time pressures than more, and I over deliver as compared to almost every one of my peers.
The most powerful members of our society (not the hardest working ones) are the ones who set the tone for the rest of us. We only need to continue working this hard as long as we accept their dominion over our society.
That's a choice we make as a society every day, and it's probably a result of the simplistic form of thinking you offer in your comment.
Dig deeper.
Let me fix that for you.
The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society [hoard wealth beyond the wildest imagination of those in the bottom 99%.]
So much wealth they quite literally don't know what to do with it, and for a cherry on top they're not even happy. The richest man on the planet is a depressed Twitter troll.
Until the general public rightfully takes back the money they've worked generations to generate that _mostly_ flows into the pockets of these (t|b)illionaires, we will continue to see a more stressed and less happy society for all.
The problem is the fact that any couple, of any combination of sex or gender, now cannot afford a decent life without 2 full time salaries (or more, in many cases. That's a bad result of natural market forces that should definitely be addressed.
"I think the problem we've had is, people decided they didn't want to work so much anymore. (...)
We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. (...)
So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude, and it's go to come through hurting the economy, and that's what the whole world, the governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality."
-Tim Gurney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJHP0VfeOrU&t=12s
". . . the justification for the existence of the investing class is the service it renders the working class, measured in terms of wages and desired goods. The contrary is not true. The working class does not exist to serve the investing class. The working class has the right to insure itself through organizations composed of its members or through government, thereby eliminating the investing class." - Levy
Jerome Levy was a committed ideological capitalist.
From that perspective the idea that workers need to be reminded to suffer is like saying insurance companies need to stop paying so many claims to remind us of the risk of house fires....
Some are filling hours with more work however it seems like many are not increasing work volume, just quietly reducing the amount of labor.
Of course "some folks say they work a lot more than they actually do" is also nothing new to AI anyways.
I have.
It's hard to see this if you're a typical HN reader because we're all a pretty motivated lot who tend to enjoy what we do, and what we do is fairly concrete. But survey the typical office and you will be blown away by how little effort people are putting in. And of the "work" that is getting done a lot of it is never used, or the sort of thing whose quality can't be easily evaluated so it trends towards the min viable product.
I used to work at a company where a significant fraction of the workforce just spent all day producing "decks" (PowerPoints). They hardly sent emails or wrote documents - even things you'd expect to be a Word file were decks - and on the few occasions I gently enquired about how long they'd been working on their current "project" (a deck) I'd always regret it, because the answer would be something like several weeks. Total output from those weeks: a dozen badly made slides that said very little, and which could have been an email.
And that was in fintech! Go look at the public sector, academia or NGOs and be amazed at the endless armies of people who can spend an entire year on making a single PDF that your average hyped-up Valley engineer would produce in a week.
These people are all technically working a 40 hour week but in reality a lot of their time is spent on YouTube, napping, walking the dog, taking care of kids, listening to podcasts, researching their next vacation etc. Their managers don't hold their feet to the fire because they're doing the same things, and the company produces enough profits that nobody is really motivated to do layoffs.
a) people don't just work to make X dollars per year. They work to have a similar or higher standard of living than their peers (the famous "keeping up with the Joneses"). Sure there are dirt cheap housing in the middle of the country, but everyone wants to live in NYC. This is not about getting to a fixed point, it's a competition. So no matter how much more productive we get, we'll work as much as we reasonably can, which for most people is 40-60 hours/week
b) the issue with doing redistribution with taxes, is that the government doesn't just give the money back to the people. They waste it by proclaiming they can put it to good use, via custom benefits, non profits, etc. This is (usually) a huge waste of resources. So taking in an additional 30% of GDP as taxes won't make everyone 30% richest; it'll go in the pockets of the well connected or those willing to commit fraud and grift. And the politicians in governmetn have strong incentive to continue doing it this way because they get support and votes in return (e.g. through media corruption or special interest groups that vote as a bloc)
c) we have taken some of the productivity back - we have life saving drugs, clean water, cheap energy, all the entertainment in the world in our fingertips - things that 100 years back were reserved for royals and kings. But because of point (a) of course, nobody's happy having "just" that
d) even if the macines become super productive, it doesn't mean the price of everything is going to zero. There's still only so many apartments to rent or own in manhattan, and the price of human service will skyrocket (as it has done over the past few decades - compare the price of a TV to the minimum hourly wage for example). So it's a misconception that the value of money will go to zero, as Elon recently said
We're very good at absorbing productivity improvements. Hell that's the whole goal of software – make things faster then eat the edge by making them faster for everyone.
I work and do something very specific, a lot of people around me do not need what I do.
I need water, food, energy, I don't know anyone personally who is providing this for me.
Then we have A LOT of people in our society (no critisism here) who get food, housing energy etc. without satisfying anyone.
What i want to say: 1. in a highly automated society there is a real disconnect between you getting something and you doing something for it.
money =\= purchasing power. if they print enough (and spend it themselves first into the economy), then the purchasing power is being siphoned away towards the source of the new money.
see the cantillon effect.
If 2 people both need something to survive, then collectively the group needs to produce 2 of those things. But if 1 of them demands 1000 of that thing, then collectively they need to produce 1001 of that thing to satisfy the demand.
The _problem_ is that the demand for the extra 999 is given equal weight and competes for production resources vs the 2 that are actually needed instead of explicitly prioritizing the 2 and then letting the 999 come from a secondary market of post-needs-fulfillment labor. Right now if the group produces only the needed 2, then most of the time the person who only wants the 1 that they need won't get anything at all, and in many cases that means they starve and die.
When the consequence of collectively producing less than the total sum demanded by the wealthy is that some people will then starve and die, that hangs like an inverse sword of damocles over the heads of the poor and middle class, always threatening those who can't just buy their way out into laboring more than would be otherwise needed.
The very obvious to me solution is to structurally prioritize meeting everyone's common needs for food/water, shelter, and medical care first before then satisfying the desires of the rich who want more. That way rich people can still get all their private jets and fancy cars, but they'll need to pay more to convince people that the loss of their leisure time is worthwhile instead of everyone in the underclass living under constant threat for survival.
Personally I think the constant political drumbeat to have more jobs instead of literally anyone trying to maximize collective leisure time is the greatest tragedy of modern capitalism. It's always jobs jobs jobs instead of needs and rest.
Almost 13 years of data on this. The only time my productivity tanks is when I grind 40-50 hours a week for months on end.
Also has to do with demand for savings. The US has a bunch of mostly accidental policies that juice that demand.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Idleness_and_Othe...
We still work hard and will continue to do so because we are conditioned for the first 21 years of our lives to work hard at school.
21 years is a third of your productive life, a time when you body still works reliably, can repair itself rapidly, you have very little responsibilities and thus can take more risk and explore the frontiers of possibility.
The math teacher tells you to write out twenty tables of addition, so you do it.
The chemistry teacher tells you to balance out fifty chemical equations, so you do it.
The English teacher tells you to write out 500 word essays to explain why Sherlock was not a villain but just misunderstood, so you do it.
If you question why, you fail.
If you question is there's a better way to demonstrate the understanding, you fail.
If you refuse to do these assignments and start a lemonade stand, you fail.
Thankfully working hard is getting disrupted. An LLM doesn't sleep, take breaks, fall asleep after three 6 hour shifts or take sick leave. Nothing works as hard as an LLM and even basic LLMs that can run on commodity GPUs with 6GB of VRAM can write out twenty tables of addition, balance out fifty chemical equations and argue both for and against why Sherlock was a villain.
People will argue that balancing out fifty chemical equations and writing out twenty tables of addition is necessary to gain the foundation necessary to do more abstract tasks.
That to be an effective writer, you need to read two works of Shakespeare and critique in a manner that appeals to your teacher or the AI that grades your writing assignments. People who never got to do this are idiots and their writing is just garbage, unfit for human consumption.
That to be an effective Front End developer you need to code in x86 assembly. I would like to save those debates for another day.
But people actually don't give a s*it if you work hard or not!
They only care if you're giving them value for either their time or money.
Those who don't realize this will keep working hard for those who will put them to work. Those teachers will keep joining unions and complaining they don't get paid enough while they will reject the truth, the reality.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Someone from the shadow wizard money gang will have to chime in and explain how this is all actually a good thing ;)
We aren't competing with workers from 1973, we're competing with other workers leveraging the same accelerated efficiency.
The additional compensation is a statistical artifact that accounts for air conditioning, iPhones, reliable cars that last 20 years, the Internet, etc.
But let's say I decide that I'd be happy with my life at 50% of my current pay, and I want to do 50% less work in exchange. 20 hours per week instead of 40. If you're in the kind of job that makes enough for this to work, you probably can't do it. 20 hours per week is for crappy jobs in retail and food service. It's very unlikely that you'll find a tech job willing to employ you part time at any pay level.
So even if I, personally, am sufficiently productive and sufficiently compensated that I could afford to work a lot less than people did 50 years ago, I can't do it. At least, I can't do it on a rolling basis. The closest I can come is to retire early. Or maybe take some years off in the middle of my career, but that's extremely risky. I definitely can't cut my hours and pay in half over a week, or month, or even year.
Some people are working hard. The growing demographic is the retired, the trust-funded and those NEET-ing around on various forms of subsistence income. Another few years we'll be back to post-war levels ~%58 of participation, where two-parent homes prevailed, and one stayed home.
The fact that we can do in 16 hours what we used to in 40 doesn't suddenly mean that people are only willing to work 16 hours.
it's strange that all these articles about how much we're working don't even peek into the history of how our current structure was formed
the current productivity gains have mostly been captured by the richest, and everyone else is competing against each other for the scraps... if you choose to work less, you are out-competed and lose your status (guess what kind of groups can help avoid this!)
We could just get rid of any inefficency.
Capitalism is driving our current economy, it doesn't has to.
There is no real reason why we couldn't decide tomorrow that every car is electric and depending on some factor you can just request a car.
Planet earth has resources x, the only question is for what we use it and how we distribute it.
But no if i want to be self sufficient (100%) i can't do this.
If i want to exit capitalism and build up a country not defined by it, i can't either.
If i kill bad leaders, i will be thrown in prison.
We're still working this hard because we, as a group, want to. It is as simple as that.
Next!
A ruler will always prefer to rule over 100 wretches, than be an equal with 100 peers. And people all over the world have been bred to submit by relentless head stomping by family, school and media.
But the current order will end without violence and be forgotten as foolishness, just like the spell of the feared Soviet terror regime ended as if people woke up from a dream. Just like the strangle grip of popes, priests and monks ended and is now the source of ridicule. Our children's children will look with nothing but disgust at how the current population worship "governments", "authorities" and so on - all of these illusions made up of some of the least admirable people alive.
But if machines produce more, couldn't the state provide free services rather than cash? In kind provision could be less dependent on wages than taxation is.
Then couldn't we divide the monetary system further — not as banknotes, but by subdividing it? Would the administrative system be too difficult after all?
In other words, if the problem is that only the "wage" earned for participating in production grants the right to consume, then shouldn't tickets to the means of production also be distributed?
Still, no matter how I think about it, in the end it comes down to the problem of distribution. The OP also gives capital ownership as an example, but...
If automation can enable substantial production without human labor, then what on earth is the reason we should keep demanding that humans do wage labor for survival? I find myself thinking about this a lot these days.
Someone who did not participate in production can consume the product because they own capital. Then what is the basis on which that right arises?
In fact, economic logic, when you think about it, seems to be mostly a kind of circular reasoning. It says "capital's share equals its marginal contribution," but that market itself is ultimately something created by power.
Sometimes I have thoughts like this. In fact, the core of capitalism is the ownership of the means of production, and such ownership will keep accumulating ever-widening disparities. If automation keeps advancing, humans will eventually become unnecessary — and then how will the market be maintained? We cannot give everyone a claim on automated production. In the end, a ruling class and a ruled class will inevitably exist, and the question becomes how the ruling class can rule entirely with the consent of the ruled. Lately, it seems this principle no longer works in capitalism.