Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

http://evonomics.com/less-work-job-creation-peter-gray/

by azemda • 7 years ago

244 174 7 years ago

Neat! Gray is the person who first pointed me towards anarchism (back in 1999, wow) as a political philosophy, after reading about his Sudbury Valley School and following a link to the Anarchist FAQ.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-ed...

rmdashrfstar• 7 years ago

...or how about let's just create more jobs?

Can_Not• 7 years ago

They're also under concerned about useless and wasteful jobs.

mruts3• 7 years ago

I dunno, I like working. I don't think I would want to go on an extended period without working hard. In fact, retiring early increases mortality[1].

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/627711

toomuchtodo2• 7 years ago

Surveys indicate you’re in the minority. Most people don’t enjoy their job, or want to work less.

We’re long overdue to move past “maximizing employment” at an economic policy level (looking at you US Federal Reserve).

Konnstann2• 7 years ago

The problem is how to incentivize companies to pay workers the same amount for less work. A lot of people, for example, the service industry, can't just work shorter shifts for the same pay. If your job is delivering a product then you can, and a lot of people do, work hard enough to deliver and then goof off for the remaining time.

Take a Starbucks employee: They get paid per hour worked, so if they want to work less, they need more money. Now Starbucks needs to pay more people more money to maintain the same hours. This circles back to the popular discussion of automation and UBI or whatever, where Starbucks now has robots and the employees don't exist anymore.

On another note, I'd rather work a job I don't enjoy than be unemployed, I've had periods of unemployment and they were pretty bad.

topkai222• 7 years ago

I don't think you are right about people not enjoying their work, in the US context at least. The vast majority of workers seem to have pretty high job satisfaction. In fact, a quick search shows concern when average nationwide job satisfaction drops below the mid 80%s, which seems phenomenal. (https://news.gallup.com/poll/147833/Job-Satisfaction-Struggl...)

As for wanting to work less, that's probably true, but I'll bet you could get that result for almost any question involving extensive time commitment- for example, I love my kids dearly and love spending time with them, but if grandma offers to watch them I'll take her up in a hot second.

JamesBarney• 7 years ago

There is probably a lot of selection bias there.

tuesdayrain2• 7 years ago

I hate to admit it, but my life just seems to be more productive and organized when I have a job eating up most of my time and forcing me to make the most out of what's left. I took a year off from work to start my own business..after about 2 weeks I was spending probably 95% of my time relaxing. I recently started a traditional job again and the amount of progress I'm making with ~2 hours of free time is greater than what it was when I had no job. It really gave me some respect for the willpower required to run your own business.

majewsky2• 7 years ago

You're dealing with a mind virus, one that I'm familiar with myself: We feel like we need to spend our free time productively. I'm actively trying to get this out of my head. Not saying that I want to slack off, but I definitely need to slack off from time to time, and I struggle with allowing myself to do it.

dqpb• 7 years ago

I also like working. But I don't particularly like working to make someone else rich.

andrenth• 7 years ago

Create your own company then.

kachurovskiy• 7 years ago

Sometimes I think that decades of spending all our productive time in a 'work' setting make people feel like they like it, might be a basic psychological adaptation mechanism. In fact, being an able human and having months of time at my disposal is scary :)

klyrs• 7 years ago

In fact, retiring early increases mortality[1].

I suspect that has a lot to do with the structure of our society, and our relationship with work.

From TFA:

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. Even hunting and gathering were not regarded as work; they were done enthusiastically, not begrudgingly. Because these activities were fun and were carried out with groups of friends, there were always plenty of people who wanted to hunt and gather, and because food was shared among the whole band, anyone who didn’t feel like hunting or gathering on any given day (or week or more) was not pressured to do so.

It's quite possible to like work. But that isn't really true in a lot of jobs. People who are overworked and underpaid; low-level bureaucrats; middle managers... there's a lot of thankless, unrewarding jobs out there, where people can't see a benefit to their work, where people see a negative impact of their work on society.

badpun2• 7 years ago

Sounds lovely, I wonder why they abandoned it for agriculture.

thrower123• 7 years ago

There's so much other "work" that needs to get done that I could easily fill it up if I didn't have to be at work so much. As it is, I've put in 20 hours this weekend around the house and I've barely put a dent in my todo list; I've got to go back to work tomorrow to get some rest.

antisthenes• 7 years ago

Or people in poor health are forced to retire early because they can no longer work.

rini17• 7 years ago

Theoretically it's fine, why not. In practice, who would opt to coordinate twice as big group of people with halved worktime?

majewsky2• 7 years ago

That's the big problem. If you cut your work week down to 20 hours, it can be tough to get anything done at all. The amount of meetings is not going to decrease because (most) managers need to waste other people's time to feel important.

tonyedgecombe• 7 years ago

Why don’t we have half as many people working 80 hours then?

barry-cotter3• 7 years ago

Because employers aren’t generally willing to pay the premium necessary to get workers to do that. In some fields they are and the workers do, e.g. law, investment banking, medicine.

pjdemers• 7 years ago

Economists are obsessed with job creation because the leading ones started their careers in the late 70s and early 80s when the number of jobs was shrinking, but the number of people who wanted a job was growing faster than ever.

embersbreaking2• 7 years ago

"70s and early 80s when the number of jobs was shrinking"

That's very interesting. Got any cites for that? Would like to explore. Thx.

neilwilson2• 7 years ago

The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth).

We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume.

But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people that are actually required to make enough stuff and stop work on Tuesday - having the rest of the week off.

So we all give up full weeks of our finite lives in solidarity with those who we need to give up full weeks of their finite lives if we're actually going to get the goods and services we need to live. And that's because we're a species that tallies our debts with each other - the reciprocity principle (https://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2016/paulus_s...)

Or to put it in other words, sharing out the needed work is rather more difficult in practice than it is in theory where fungibility is largely assumed. And the more advanced our technology, the harder the sharing becomes and the more difficult it is to maintain the illusion of sufficient reciprocity.

deadA1ias2• 7 years ago

This is exactly right, and I wish I could have put it as succinctly as you. I fear it will take longer than expected for society to adapt to this dynamic.

petra5• 7 years ago

The Israeli Army is mostly made out of 18 year old people who get drafted for 3 years, reserves that come for a few weeks a month, and a small percent of career employees.

Many of those people fullfil complex , Critical roles, successfully.

But most of it's "employees" are easily replaceable.

So why won't this work in the general economy ?

perfmode• 7 years ago

the command structure consists of lifers.

sooheon• 7 years ago

A draft does not guarantee efficiency or efficacy of work. The Korean military has a monopoly on labor of a certain age (and gender), any roles it needs will of course be filled, but from experience the arrangement is rather far from peak human output.

devcpp• 7 years ago

I can tell you that I gave my best during my 5 years at the IDF solely because I knew how well I would be paid afterwards if I did well, and I got directly hired at a FAANG. I can say the same about almost anyone I've known during my service across all programming units and beyond. Even the ones who knew they would stay did it for the chance to become Lt. Colonel and then director afterwards as a civilian. As for the ones claiming to be motivated by patriotism, they too usually ended up pursuing more lucrative venues.

As for IDF jobs with less potential, they are usually accomplished by people with fewer ambitions doing much less than their best and placed there because of that (think of military HR, secretaries, nurses, cleaners).

In short, there are no surprises. The Israeli military service is just a minor inconvenience in the path of ambition that is fueled by the capitalist spirit of the general economy, rather than being a replacement for it.

imgabe• 7 years ago

We are not in a static equilibrium. I don't think anyone believes we have reached an ideal state of technology where we don't need to progress any further. People who are not producing things that are immediately useful can be working to improve processes for building things, inventing new things, doing basic research, and supporting people who do that.

There's also the issue that the population is constantly growing and in flux in different areas. Nobody knows the exact right amount of stuff to make to serve everybody and underestimating can have dire consequences and get lots of people killed, so we can and should make more than might be necessary.

It's a huge oversimplification to say we just need 100 units of food so get the 5 people to make 20 units of food each and then we're good, no need for anyone else to work.

sonnyblarney3• 7 years ago

"The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals"

No, the majority of work is laborious and tedious and it's not a 'small number of people' doing it.

Do you realize how many retail service workers, customer service workers, restaurant servers, cooks, line pikers etc. there are?

This idea that somehow it's just a 'small number of folk working' is mythology.

And a lot of middle management is brutal - though it is often very inefficient, it's still essential.

Yes, a lot of jobs could dissapear overnight, but most could not.

0815test4• 7 years ago

That majority of work only accounts for a small portion of value on the margin. You could reduce that work quite a bit with very little overall effect. In fact, this could even increase total product since the unskilled do tend to be heavily liquidity- and risk-constrained, so freeing up some time and effort on their part (without the stress of involuntary unemployment!) would significantly incent them to do such things as retraining, starting businesses, entering formal education etc. etc. This is a major argument for UBI, in fact - which would work a lot better than cutting working time across the board by fiat!

perfunctory• 7 years ago

I am not really sure I understand what you are trying to say. 40 is not a magic number. Just like we once standardised workweek to be 40 hours, we can now (re)standardise it to be 32, or 16. Why not.

I've been working 4 days a week or less for more then 5 years already. No problems.

jacobwilliamroy2• 7 years ago

What about the slave laborers in foreign nations who produce raw materials and manufactured goods for the products consumed here in the U.S.? Surely they do the majority of the work?

brighter2morrow2• 7 years ago

No they don't. According to Amnesty International there's about 40million slaves in the world, which sounds like a lot until you realize that's only about 1% of the world's workforce. The reason they are slaves is not to make things cheaper forthe rest of us but because they live in corrupt societies that allow it. The amount of slaves in a country is highly correlated with that country's placement on the WBO's global corruption index.

brighter2morrow2• 7 years ago

This is very interesting way to view it, but in my office there's a few people who do literally nothing and honestly I would like work more if they didn't have to be there.

pm904• 7 years ago

I didn't truly understand how powerfully demotivating bad coworkers can be until I actually experienced them.

Good coworkers are encouraged and inspired when you do great work, or create automation that saves time and do more. Bad coworkers get jealous and feel threatened. if you're the kind of person who generally like to avoid conflict (most geeks fit this category), that alone is a powerful de-motivator .

jandrewrogers3• 7 years ago

To rephrase:

Surpluses and shortages of skilled labor are very unevenly distributed. Differences in ease of automation will magnify this. If there is a demand for 100 neurosurgeons and then cut everyone's hours by 20%, you effectively created a shortage of 25 neurosurgeons. Decreasing hours doesn't increase supply and supply of highly skilled labor is not fungible i.e. you can't trivially retrain a PhD in electrical engineering or truck driver to become a neurosurgeon.

This leads to the following conundrum:

If we forcibly cut hours for everyone across the board then it will create severe supply shortages for the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate, some of which already have severe shortages because it is so difficult to create supply. If we cut hours such that labor supply is proportional to demand then the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate will be required to work by far the most hours, which isn't fair to highly skilled labor and creates a disincentive for required labor.

Systematically reducing working hours may benefit the majority but it creates perverse social and economic dynamics for the highly skilled minority whose labor society can't easily replace.

SubiculumCode• 7 years ago

Forcing hour cuts would seem to me to have more unintended consequences than sat UBI policies.

petra5• 7 years ago

The assumption that highly skilled jobs are harder to automate may turn out as wrong.

Also, many given the right augmentation tools, the training time for highly skilled jobs may be much shorter.

Doctors(but maybe not neurosuregeons) is such case, because of regulation. Nurses , with some training and tools could replace many.

But this could be true for other professions.

Retric3• 7 years ago

We already forcibly cut doctors hours by giving them inefficient education and excessive paperwork. A doctor working 3 days a week in an efficient system could spend more time with patients in a lifetime than the average US doctor does.

The US labor market only really has shortages by design.

nerdponx• 7 years ago

The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth).

Citation needed?

thatfrenchguy3• 7 years ago

The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable

This speaks personally to me as why tech workers (and multi-generation urbanites) are seen as widely disconnected: being persuaded a small number of people "create value" while forgetting about the people building your stuff, growing your food, extracting your oil (and killing the planet in the process), moving your stuff around, nursing people, building your house, installing your AC, shipping your amazon packages, and all the other ultra-necessary jobs (that are usually underpaid) that I don't even realise exist.

Without the drivers, Uber does not exist. Without Foxconn and its army of underpaid labor, Apple does not exist. It's not a small number of people creating value, it's a small number of people capturing all that value thanks to shitty wages and work conditions for everyone else.

We can all pretend "automation" will replace people, but it's obvious the complexities of those tasks will always mostly done by humans.

throwayEngineer• 7 years ago

Because making the tech that is safe and reliable enough for technician's to use is the hard part.

I can teach anyone how to clean a mold.

I can't teach just anyone how to design a mold.

And if you designed a mold before, you have been stressed AF designing and reviewing it. For some reason that is disconnected? I still work 40+ hrs

roenxi• 7 years ago

while forgetting about the people ...

You might be reading the comment slightly sideways. My read was that the people you list are from small businesses creating value, and most of the tech workers are creating very little value with a few peakers who do amazing things.

Without the drivers, Uber does not exist.

Personal bugbear, there is as yet no evidence that Uber is creating more value than it destroys. It has a pretty basic business model, trivial positive externalities and is making loss. It looks like it is slow-burning value until someone goes broke.

Uber could be cited as evidence in favour of the idea that most people don't by default know how to create value.

That might be the core disagreement here. There are a lot of people doing activities that are useful. I struggle to think of them as value creators because what they are actually doing is whatever someone tells them - there is a lack of agency in deciding what they do, so I have difficulty attributing outcomes to them. They are fungible, but the people telling them what to do are not. If you tell them to do something stupid, they will do it (as seen with Uber).

Not a comment on personal worth; economic value isn't everything. But the people who make decisions are just more important than laborers. Small businesspeople in particular are a backbone of society in a way that most workers really are not.

spaced-out4• 7 years ago

forgetting about the people building your stuff, growing your food, extracting your oil (and killing the planet in the process), moving your stuff around, nursing people, building your house, installing your AC, shipping your amazon packages,

What do you mean "forgetting"? I pay those people for their services out of the money I earn. They're not doing all those things out of the goodness of their hearts, they working for the same reason I'm working, for a paycheck.

and all the other ultra-necessary jobs (that are usually underpaid)

Their pay, just like my pay, is set by the market. If you don't think that's fair, your issue is with capitalism. I'm actually open to the idea of moving away from capitalism, but very few people, especially in the US, are, and I have no expectation that will change in my lifetime.

pojzon• 7 years ago

Unfortunately with how the world works it requires some level of slave-like population to operate.

Noone really likes to talk about that because that hits our morality itch, but thats how it is. Without slavery-like labour, our society would collapse.

hedvig• 7 years ago

I agree. In that there are still U.S. fortunes that originate from slave ownership that have not been reciprocated

mrob• 7 years ago

Unproductive people must do pointless work or the productive people will be unhappy. But conversely, the productive people are paid less than the value they create, to keep the unproductive people happy. Why didn't Norman Borlaug die the richest man alive? Most people have never even heard of him. It's human instinct that only people of great social status are allowed great wealth. Obviously the CEO has to be paid more than the engineers, because the CEO has mastered the (zero sum) social status game. They were lucky enough to be born tall, attractive, well connected, sociopathic, intelligent, etc., and exploited their natural advantages. According to common sense this makes them a better and more deserving person.

There's an obvious positive sum trade: the useless people get to slack off (e.g. living on UBI), and in exchange the useful are paid commensurate with the value the produce. The useful are happy because they're fabulously rich, and the useless are happy because they're not the ones working so hard. The only real losers are the social status masters, and social status is positional, so they'll always be a small minority.

Unfortunately that small minority controls the cultural narrative. They can reinforce the natural human tendency to zero-sum thinking, and they can hold out the false hope that the useless can become successful parasites too. Everybody is born equal, so if you're not rich it must be because you didn't work hard enough! It's easy to fall for it when your brain is hard-wired with the just-world fallacy.

This combination of cognitive biases and active manipulation means I don't expect to see any improvement before environmental collapse renders the whole thing moot. The 1% rule and everybody else is either overworked or underpaid. You'd have to think like an economist to even see the possibility of escape, and who wants to do that?

neilwilson2• 7 years ago

"and in exchange the useful are paid commensurate with the value the produce. "

The trouble with that is that there is a fallacy of composition there. The only thing you can have in that system is more money. You can't have more stuff because by definition there is no more stuff being added to the pubic value pool.

And if you have more money, but the same amount of stuff, then all that happens is prices go up. Unless you believe more people than now value money for its own sake.

Trying to hide a transfer using a money illusion only works for so long. Then people work out they are being fiddled and have the system shut down politically. Which is historically what has happened in every single case it has been tried.

Alms to the poor is resented not just by those forced to provide the alms but by the poor themselves who resent being patronised and seen as useless.

Such systems are generally put forward by those who believe they can value signal to their peers by being the ones handling out the alms.

doboyy• 7 years ago

The definition of a highly skilled worker kind of hinges on the fact that there are few. If everyone was skilled then we'd raise the bar.

Your argument makes sense, but I'm suspicious that there is that wide of a gap between the 2 classes of people described.

eevilspock• 7 years ago

The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth)

That's a very arrogant and elitist attitude. I wish Galt's Gulch actually existed and we could exile elitists there. Let's see how they do without all the lower castes in society who pick their fruit, clean their toilets, cook and serve their food, take care of their children, pick up their garbage, and have to smile at them in order to have the honor of serving them.

Gold is more expensive than water because gold is rare. But no one would choose a world with plentiful gold and no water. Gold is not worth more, it is just priced higher by market dynamics.

Putting a value on one's work by the price the market gives it, and then justifying the market as the arbiter of value by the total price of work it incents people to do is amazingly circular.

Viliam12342• 7 years ago

pick their fruit, clean their toilets, cook and serve their food, take care of their children, pick up their garbage

Already doing most of this, so... if I start picking my fruit (and vegetables) and learn to drive a garbage truck, what do I get in return?

iamnothere• 7 years ago

Or, perhaps those people could be rewarded in proportion to the value they deliver compared to others. You could then choose to live simply (but with life's essentials), working less, or alternatively you could work hard to obtain prestige and money.

You could say that our society works that way now, but there are innumerable pressures at work (many of them created by our public policy) that compel the less driven and the less capable to work ridiculous hours in "bullshit jobs" just to survive. It isn't necessary to compel less-skilled or less-interested people to work full-time just so that neurosurgeons will go to work. The people at the top of the skill pyramid get there because (a) they want to be seen as "the best" and (b) they want access to the money, power, and/or social prestige that comes with their chosen profession.

So many jobs are either not necessary or could be done in 1/4 the time. Our allocation of labor is massively inefficient, and it can't be just because we are afraid of making hard workers unhappy.

badrabbit• 7 years ago

But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people that are actually required to make enough stuff and stop work on Tuesday - having the rest of the week off.

Reward for the extra day worked? If top performers are rewarded more than everyone else and working the extra day or two is optional,everyone else can opt to not work the rewardless extra day while top performers opt to work a full week for the reward.

It's much like competitive shift jobs for waiters, the good performers get the hard well tipping shifts.

Does this simply not work at scale?

scottlocklin2• 7 years ago

The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable

C'mon man, that's not even remotely true. Even taking the outlier; google, $360,000 revenue generated per employee. Big deal; I'm pretty sure a decent accounting firm creates more value per employee.

Consultant32452• 7 years ago

I didn't read it as Google employees are productive while $othercorp employees are not. Even within google, things like Price's Law apply. Essentially half of all productivity is accomplished by the square root of the workers. So if Google has 10k developers. 100 of those developers are producing half of the value. The other 9,900 work together to produce the other half.

https://www.am1st.com/another-reason-companies-fail/

hurryskurry2• 7 years ago

Can you provide actual sources to support the claim that a very small number of people are responsible for output?

rayiner• 7 years ago

The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth).

This is an HN conceit that’s not actually true. Take something like health care. It takes a large number of individuals to produce health care services, and technology hasn’t really reduced that amount. The other day, I needed to schedule an appointment for my son, to follow up about his ear infection. I called the nice lady at reception who set everything up. I could’ve used an app, but that’s like saying you don’t need chefs because you could just eat grass. You can, but you don’t want to. Likewise, dealing with a computer to do something like this is an exercise in self abuse. And computers haven’t gotten any better at interacting with a human at the human’s level in decades. (On that front, I think self check out machines are similar. There is a reason Whole Foods mostly has regular cashiers. It’s because computers haven’t automated away the cashiers job, they just make it possible for customers to save a few cents by doing the job themselves.)

Likewise with pretty much everything else. In the legal field, secretaries have universally been downsized to cut costs. The result is just reduces efficiency, where $700/hour lawyers waste their time doing something a secretary should be doing. (Computers have done precious little to actually eliminate any of that work.)

Conjoiner• 7 years ago

Growing Bureaucracy

https://images.huffingtonpost.com/2015-12-08-1449597231-8924...

kadendogthing• 7 years ago

How in the absolute fuck is this the top comment? There's so many platitudes stuffed side by side it just needs to be flagged.

That is to say: citation needed. For all of it.

llamaz• 7 years ago

This is just Ayn Randian reactionary propaganda, a society based on these hateful ideas is not one I would want to live in.

bantersaurus• 7 years ago

Time for a period of degrowth, the only way we are going to deal with depleting natural resources and global warming.

ameliaquining• 7 years ago

Are economists obsessed with job creation? Government economists tend to focus on it because that's literally their job, but my sense of academic economists has always been that they're pretty good at not eliding distinctions like between employment and economic value.

jacobwilliamroy2• 7 years ago

100% employment is possible. Just look at any U.S. military base. Without poverty, capitalists lose some of the leverage over the working class which makes the current levels of exploitation difficult to maintain without massive price hikes. I think the U.K. had an experience with mass employment that convinced capitalists to raise the prices of their goods just to maintain the exploitation which poverty allowed.

whatshisface• 7 years ago

Capitalists can't just raise the price of goods, unless they're in a cartel which is illegal in most of the western world. They'd be unable to coordinate thanks to competition. It's a double-edged sword, they can't coordinate to save the earth or uplift humanity, but they also can't coordinate to stamp down the proletariat.

sokoloff• 7 years ago

Or maybe the increase in employment created surplus demand for goods and services which would raise the market-clearing price.

atemerev• 7 years ago

Sure, we once had an entire country with 300 million population, living like on a military base: barracks as residences, the same assortment available in department stores, symbolic salaries, some involuntary labor, and no freedom of movement. It was the USSR.

Not everyone liked this lifestyle. At least the personnel on military bases know when their contract ends, so they could return to life of freedom and opportunity.

cryptica3• 7 years ago

If market competition wasn't so aggressive, we could start to focus more on value creation. Right now the economy is all about capturing existing value, monopolizing markets to keep competitors out and using targeted advertising to divert people's attention away from real value. Journalism is in such bad shape that if an independent scientist invented a cure for cancer, most people probably wouldn't hear about it and that scientist would end up homeless. If there is no big money behind something, nobody cares!

Try starting an open source project these days; your chance of getting any traction is close to zero. Influencers are unlikely to help you to spread awareness of your project unless there is something in it for them financially; they're more likely to help promote an enterprise competitor who will pay them.

Journalism is dead, now everything we believe in is decided by so-called 'influencers' but these are typically the most shallow, superficial, scheming, manipulative individuals that have ever walked the face of the earth. These people wouldn't know how to tell the difference between real value and a steaming pile of shit. Most influencers are just idiots with rich friends.

Capital has replaced our values. We need to bring back real values like honesty, integrity, humility, experience, pursuit of knowledge, empathy, efficiency...

badpun2• 7 years ago

Try starting an open source project these days; your chance of getting any traction is close to zero. Influencers are unlikely to help you to spread awareness of your project unless there is something in it for them financially; they're more likely to help promote an enterprise competitor who will pay them.

This is interesting. You're saying you would be giving away something valueable for free, and yet there would be no takers? Maybe it's not so valueable after all then? Stuff that is genuinely solving some yet unsolved pain or problem should, given time, take on its own, without influencers.

cryptica3• 7 years ago

> Stuff that is genuinely helpful and valueable and unique should, given time, take on its own, without influencers.

This is completely false. It depends entirely on your social network.

My main OSS project has over 5K stars on GitHub; it's used by thousands of companies and has been growing steadily but I'm certain that if it hadn't been on the front page of HN 5 years ago, nobody would be using it today. These days it accumulates more GitHub stars every day and I don't do any marketing at all. GitHub stars compound like dollars in a bank account. It got to this point because of HN. Being a useful product was just the prerequisite. There are plenty of potentially very useful products which no one will ever use because people are poorly informed.

Some niche projects are obviously useful, but there is a significant category of projects which are highly valuable but whose value is not immediately obvious; in these cases it can take years to build momentum and you NEED influencers to help you to get that once in a lifetime chance to make even a small impact in your industry.

Also, the opposite is true; there are projects that seem valuable at a glance and which can get a lot of attention (if promoted by the right influencers) but they are an anti-pattern and they provide negative value in the medium and long term.

I've seen many great projects go nowhere and I've seen really terrible projects become exceedingly popular.

The masses are not rational at all; most decisions are based on shared delusions. How many times in human history have huge amounts of people believed things that were proven to be completely false. Too many to count. There are many things that we believe today which will someday be proven to be false. Humanity has not gotten smarter over the past few decades, if anything, we've become complacent and as a result we've developed tunnel vision and have become dumber.

amelius• 7 years ago

Capital has replaced our values. We need to bring back real values like honesty, integrity, humility, experience, pursuit of knowledge, empathy, efficiency...

But how?

kjsbfkjbf5• 7 years ago

Usually? Revolution.

40acres• 7 years ago

Outside of a autocratic, centralized economy I would wager that it's natural for an economy to "find new work" for labor. The fact that we have increased automation does not mean that the labor force should shrink along with it, it should mean that over generations people do new things. An office supply company in the 70s would bet big on fax machines, with the ubiquity of email a comparable company today might focus on ergonomic office supplies.

_vk_• 7 years ago

Economists aren't "obsessed with job creation". Politicians are.

jvm• 7 years ago

…and they are obsessed because _voters_ are.

topkai222• 7 years ago

Less work is harder then it sounds because (in advanced economies) MOST jobs are skilled jobs, even the ones that don't seem that way, and developing skill takes time, skill, and practice. As others have noted, labor isn't nearly fungible as we often pretend, and two workers doing 20 hour schedules generally aren't as productive as one worker doing a 40 schedule. This shows up in the "part time penalty" for workers amongst other things, but should resonate with anyone who's had to onboard others to a team or project.

There is also obviously a point where more effort out of individual workers is counter productive (see Ford and the 40h work week), but it seems 32-40h weeks may be near optimum generally.

cleandreams• 7 years ago

I live in SF and I have been in and out of the tech industry, so I know the city from both perspectives. (I now work at one of the big tech companies.) So many people outside of the industry work more than one job. They need to. Wages are too low. That is the problem, wages. Focus on that, economists, so ordinary people can get by on one job's wages.

dvtrn2• 7 years ago

Wish there were more comments about this. Like you, I too worked in an industry that wasn’t technology (home repair services, carpenters, electricians and plumbers), and saw it for what it was.

It’s atrocious what some of these people are asked to do and the wages they’re expected to perform at.

But beyond that, even wages aren’t even the entire picture. I live in Chicago. I managed a fleet of workers who not only had to content with a company that paid laughable wages, workers were on their own for parking, vehicle maintenance, equipment and materials, ancillary costs of maintaining their tools.

End of the day the $25 we paid to our licensed and insured electrician translated to $12/hr coming home.

I fought for a year to get those fellas better pay. Our managing company was hearing none of it. The guy who ran the entire operation took home six figures. I know this because I saw the books.

totablebanjo• 7 years ago

Labor’s been screwed the last 50 years. What kind of six figures are we talking, mid?

pitaj• 7 years ago

Wages are too low.

Compared to costs

We know mainly why costs are too high in the Bay Area, and it's mostly housing. Which is a solvable problem, if only the market was able to expand housing supply.

snidane• 7 years ago

if only the market was able to expand housing supply.

If only.. there was more land. Building houses is not the bottleneck. Land is. You'd have to create a 'second floor' of land to mitigate the problem.

thatoneuser• 7 years ago

Don't live in a place that you can't afford. If enough people moved away from SF to the Midwest then they'd live comfortably and local companies would have no choice but to increase wages to keep the rest around.

nerder92• 7 years ago

"Band hunter-gatherers, who, as I said, lived a life of play, are famous among anthropologists for their eagerness to share and help one another"

I can find a lot of similarities with the IT industry, or at least in the early days. This is what other industries misses a lot.

"Work less. Play more" I totally buy this slogan, our life is about us and our loved ones at the end.

TomMckenny2• 7 years ago

In principle from a capital stand point, it is always better to have one unemployed person and one over worked person who is terrified of becoming unemployed than two employed people. So reducing workload to increase employment rates is completely unacceptable to those who own society.

Wage presure from near full employment is also undesireable to them but must be considered the lesser of two evils and is fairly fudge-able by changing the definition of employed.

dahfizz3• 7 years ago

That's a pretty big claim you're making with nothing to back it up.

Do you think it's the "terror" that makes that situation prefferable from a "capital stand point"? In times of historically low unemployment, I hardly think the general populace is holding such terror. And even so, why would splitting the work reduce this terror?

TomMckenny2• 7 years ago

That's a pretty big claim you're making with nothing to back it up.

It includes the following assumptions:

Low unemployment causes upward wage pressure.

Organizations are aware of this.

Organizations cooperate politically to achieve their goals.

In times of historically low unemployment, I hardly think the general populace is holding such terror.

Exactly. Lower unemployment increases confidence. (and reduced hours would lower unemployment)

Higher up in this thread is a suggestion that: 1) almost all productivity comes from a few workers and 2) it is impossible to reduce their work load and 3) employers retain low productivity workers for long hours to encourage them. All of these assumptions are highly dubious but the theory is popular because it appeals to comforting, entrenched ideas. Which is why no one notices that is a big claim with nothing backing it up.

barry-cotter3• 7 years ago

In principle from a capital stand point, it is always better to have one unemployed person and one over worked person who is terrified of becoming unemployed than two employed people.

It’s preferable to have more production, which could be one person working 60 hours or two working 30 hours. Sometimes due to lower switching and communication costs and returns to specialisation/learning by doing 60 hours will be more productive. Sometimes the costs are low and the returns to one person working more hours will be low and it won’t be. If there are fixed costs to employing a single worker this will militate against splitting up the work.

So reducing workload to increase employment rates is completely unacceptable to those who own society.

Then the German system of Kurzarbeit[1] during economic downturns should be unworkable. It isn’t, it’s just difficult to coordinate.

Wage presure from near full employment is also undesireable to them but must be considered the lesser of two evils and is fairly fudge-able by changing the definition of employed.

Changing definitions do not affect whether there are too many or too few workers for the production demanded. If there’s an increase in demand for labour some people will work more and some people will come out of unemployment as wages are bid up by the greater demand.

[1]https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/08/01/anthropology-of-financi...

In the 2008-9 recession, in response to falling orders, German firms reduced labour utilisation by cutting back work hours rather than by laying off workers. In fact, a whopping 90% of the drop in total labour inputs in the German economy in the Great Recession is to be explained by reduction of hours per worker ! This kind of “labour hoarding” does not normally happen during recessions in other countries, but did happen in Germany this time. This mini-miracle now has people on the centre-left all over the world seeking ways to replicate it in other countries, and has spawned a substantial literature.
In Germany, firms face restrictions on sacking workers in the first place, but in case of economic difficulties, they can apply to the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit) for “short time” or Kurzarbeit. (Not the same as the 35-hour work week made famous by France, which is a statutory definition of full-time work.) The application entails a protocol for reducing work hours per worker, with the request triggering a process of consultations between the BA, management and works councils inside firms. After an agreement, workers can receive unemployment compensation in proportion to the loss in working hours.

handedness• 7 years ago

“The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.”

--Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1932)

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

vivekd• 7 years ago

I disagree. I think it largely depends on the work you do. If you are doing something you dont enjoy.or don't find meaningful, the work is just a means to an end. But for many people a job is something they derrive meaning from, many craftspeople have notions of pride in their work. I think probably the best example is people who work with the mentally handocapped, studies reveal they tend to be the happiest and most fulfilled, likely because they are getting that sense of fulfillment from their work.

I think the author is wrong about our work culture impaacting peoples need for work. I think people actually want to feel like they are contributing to society, like they are useful. The question to me isnt how do we create less work, its how do we make work more meaningful for people

Viliam12342• 7 years ago

I don't need a job to give my life meaning. Thanks, but I already have friends, family, hobbies, etc. It's the need to have a job to pay my bills, that reduces the time I can actually spend with my friends, family, hobbies, etc.

So, the current system gives meaning to some, and takes meaning from some. I'd have to see some math first, in order to believe it is actually a net benefit on average.

many craftspeople have notions of pride in their work

Yeah, the job keeps me advancing at my craft; I think alone I would be doing similar things anyway, but probably more slowly. At the same time, the job often forces me to cut corners; alone I would prefer to do things properly, rather than hurry up towards a bullshit deadline only to fix things later when they start falling apart. Again, the pride is both given and taken.

I think people actually want to feel like they are contributing to society, like they are useful.

But that's quite different from having a job. With more free time, I could contribute to society in ways that are not predictably profitable (which is why I am not doing as a source of income now), but would probably have more meaning that what I am doing now.

how do we make work more meaningful for people

If you make it voluntary, at least the smart people will have freedom to optimize it towards more meaning. Maybe stupid people will need more guidance. If so, let there be some provided, but again, make it a bit more voluntary than "obey or starve".

qntty• 7 years ago

There's a lot of work that could potentially be meaningful but isn't because it's done under bad conditions. A craftsperson who isn't able to put enough time into the thing they make because of the demands of their manager, for example. Or a person who works on an assembly line who doesn't feel like they "make" anything at all because they are responsible for only a small part of the final product and never get to see the whole thing come together. Part of the battle has to be a recognition that workers ought to have far more rights than they are currently thought to have. They ought to have the right to feel satisfaction in their work as much as possible.

chewz• 7 years ago

Worth reading on Keynes famous prediction that productivity gains will result in 15 hours workweek.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequal...

ptah• 7 years ago

for many, it is a huge ideological taboo to even consider distributing resources outside current investment/wage model

AtlasBarfed• 7 years ago

There already was great efficiency growth that would have enabled "less work".

It was all taken by the ruling "elite".

Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

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