The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor

https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/qje/qjab013/6217436?redirectedFrom=fulltext

by rustoo • 5 years ago

230 202 5 years ago

academic.oup.com

Just imagine what we'll do to the labor supply if we can figure out a way to keep the poors working 24/7 and have them not suffer any ill effects from it!

codekansas• 5 years ago

Read the abstract...

alfiedotwtf3• 5 years ago

Britain’s Factory Laws were created to prevent 8 year olds from working 16 hours per day with only a single break, but weren’t really enforced until automation made child labour obsolete.

If we had the technology to force people to work 24/7 but proved to it was detrimental to people’s health, somehow I know deep down that society would just bite the bullet and people would burn the midnight oil for a few more dollars.

astrange3• 5 years ago

It probably wouldn't be a good idea because demand would collapse, and there's no work without customers.

This is actually why economics is called the "dismal science", it's not because everyone hates economists, a slave-owner gave it that name because he was mad economists didn't like slavery.

Guthur3• 5 years ago

This sort of inflammatory mind set is not helpful, and in this case the abstract describes they are actually getting adequate time in bed, just having interrupted sleep.

The causes of the interruptions could be manifold but i would hazard a guess that the primary cause would be interruption from young children in small domiciles and lack of could social responsibility within the neighbourhood.

I've experienced both having a young family and currently living in relatively low social economic neighbourhood. Just last night I was disrupted by someone deciding to burn something rather noxious at 0100 in the morning.

movedx2• 5 years ago

This sort of inflammatory mind set is not helpful

Although not completely relevant to the topic, it's not outside the realm of possibility for what was stated to become a reality. And it's very much an important idea to explore, because to not do so would help those willing to exploit such "zombie workers" actually go through with it.

minikites• 5 years ago

This sort of inflammatory mind set is not helpful

It's not inflammatory because it's an accurate description of the capitalist mindset. You wouldn't get a CEO to admit it out loud, but they all believe that in their heart, otherwise they would be replaced by someone who does.

schappim• 5 years ago

Those in the study were low-income adults in Chennai, India who sleep only 5.5 hours per night on average despite spending 8 hours in bed.

The key takeaway was:

   > increased nighttime sleep had no detectable effects on cognition, productivity, decision-making, or well-being, and led to small decreases in labor supply.

I find the result surprising. When I get under 6 hours I see a clear drop off in performance.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 5 years ago

Good grief. It almost makes me question what information is missing from the abstract since I don't know how one can consistently run on fumes without it affecting cognition, productivity or decision making.

llarsson• 5 years ago

The insane stress levels from being in their situation also affects cognition.

So I am not surprised if merely looking at sleep amounts fails to explain differences.

throwawaysleep• 5 years ago

Throwaway as I don't want to admit that I feel permanently cognitively impaired.

Anecdotal, but I spent years not sleeping through university and sleeping in airports or on the train. Studied engineering and did a lot of hackathons and events and stuff. I figured out then that I didn't need full cognition or excellent decision making. I needed more hours cranking out work. I spent years sleeping just a few hours and often not sleeping on Saturday at all.

I do a lot less of that now as work never has 2AM deadlines but it is as though I am permanently in that 80% functionality state. I never felt that I got out of that state. I have never regained my ability to be detail oriented. I am still reliant on the crutches of spell check and Grammarly and my IDE to make sure I don't do something stupid. I use task lists for every little thing in my day.

So it is not that it does not impact cognition (at least in my case), it is that you get used to that impaired state and can't find a way back.

Only a year and a half removed from that, so maybe it takes more time, but I still feel heavily optimized for output over quality, even though that is no longer needed.

My baseline cognition was already impacted. More sleep just did not repair it.

methyl• 5 years ago

increased sleep duration by 27 minutes per night by inducing more time in bed

Maybe 27 minutes is just not enough? I’m sure the results would be different if they started to get 7 hours instead of 5.5.

Izkata• 5 years ago

Possible "misaligned" is a better descriptor? I don't know about most people, but according to a sleep app I've been using for a while now, my REM cycles seem to be around 1.5-2 hours. Waking up at between cycles works well, adding a half hour does not.

hawos• 5 years ago

My thoughts as well. They still got less than 6 hours a night, and were already in a state of constant sleep deprivation.

larsrc5• 5 years ago

+1. Though remember we're talking averages, and different people have different sleep needs. One would think some of them saw enough increase in sleep quality to show up in the stats.

Scoundreller3• 5 years ago

The sentence before that is: "Contrary to expert predictions and a large body of sleep research".

Was this study better science that disproved the existing body? Or poorer science? Or is there something problematic about sleep in Chennai? Or special about the people in Chennai?

The full paper states:

An enormous body of research, mostly conducted in sleep labs in rich countries, documents severe negative impacts of sleep deprivation on a range of outcomes from attention and memory to mood and health (Lim and Dinges, 2010; Banks and Dinges, 2007).
While experimental evidence on the impact of increasing sleep in field settings is scarce, there is a widely-held belief among researchers and the public that reducing sleep deprivation would lead to improvements in economic outcomes (Walker, 2017).
To document these priors, we surveyed 119 experts from sleep science and economics who predicted sizable economic benefits, including a 7% increase in work output, of increasing sleep by half an hour per night from the low levels observed in our setting.

Social science is fun.

buu7002• 5 years ago

It could also be a function of their jobs, which weren't specified in the abstract.

While insufficient sleep might cause physical discomfort and contribute to long-term health problems, if their job weren't highly physically or mentally demanding, I suspect that most people could get through the day with negligible detriment to their short-term economic output after having a cup of coffee.

peepholeperson3• 5 years ago

I don't think it's necessarily incompatible even if it seems contradictory unless there's research that quantifies the harm as a function of sleep deficit. Could easily be some range of sleep deprivation in which you're just bad at things, you move slow, and you're unmotivated. Intuitively we'd think that it's directly proportional to the amount of sleep deprivation, but I don't know if I've seen research that makes that claim. It would be interesting to see more papers that lead to a model of the benefit of sleep as a function of the amount of time slept.

gnopgnip• 5 years ago

What does spending 8 hours in bed but only sleeping for 5.5 hours mean specifically, and how is this measured?

What is the expected amount of sleep for a healthy person that spends 8 hours in bed?

lelanthran• 5 years ago

What does spending 8 hours in bed but only sleeping for 5.5 hours mean specifically

It means that the TV is in the bedroom.

larsrc5• 5 years ago

For a healthy person in a good bed without interruptions, 8 hours. But if you have trouble falling back to sleep after being woken up, you can lose a fair amount in a noisy environment. If your bed is bad, you may wake up or not fall into a deep sleep. And there are medical conditions that can make you be unconscious but not actually sleeping. Plus, high stress levels interferes with sleep.

ArkanExplorer• 5 years ago

The study also needs to examine:

- Noise pollution

- Air pollution and ventilation (PM2.5 and CO2)

- Bed comfort

- Temperature and humidity

Its possible that the home environment is so bad, that any increase in sleep yields no improvement. By contrast the workplace might be comparatively better controlled.

Getting rid of fossil-fueled cooking, power generation and transport solves some of these issues.

vinay_ys• 5 years ago

A lot of homes in crowded cities like Chennai and Bangalore are tightly packed, congested and poorly ventilated. Air (dust) and noise (human activity) pollution is very high. Within the same congested dwelling, there maybe people who have to get up very early and go to work or come home late and sleep late which disrupts everyone's sleep. So it is highly likely that there is only 4-5 hour window at night when things are quiet enough to get good sleep.

jonplackett3• 5 years ago

I read it as then saying they just got them to spend even more time in bed, despite the problem being they already have a lot of non-sleep time in bed. So it just reduced their time available to do other stuff. Am I misunderstanding?

andi9993• 5 years ago

I read the abstract like the managed through information to reduce the non sleeping time in bed. They shd have used a fitness tracker to confirm, relying on the answers of people who might think their income depends on giving the 'right' answers is dangerous.

teachingassist• 5 years ago

increased nighttime sleep... led to small decreases in labor supply.

This indicates to me that they found something better to do, than this study.

bjornsing• 5 years ago

Is it so surprising? The key takeaway could be rephrased “Healthy humans living under conditions similar to our evolutionary past naturally sleep an optimal amount of time at night.”

When I get under 6 hours I see a clear drop off in performance.

Or is it “When I temporarily find myself in an environment with stress-levels similar to those of the people in the study I a) start to perform like them on modern day tasks and b) start to sleep like them.”?

rattray• 5 years ago

They were only able to induce a 27 minute increase, so still no more than 6 hours of sleep total.

matwood• 5 years ago

When I get under 6 hours I see a clear drop off in performance.

Same. I have a hard line at 6 hours. Over 6 and I'm good, less than 6 and I'm dead all day. I don't use an alarm and wake up naturally after around 7 hours of sleep, but that last hour I'm normally aware of the lighter sleep stage I'm in.

dukeofdoom• 5 years ago

Having stayed in an Indian city. Traffic noise and pollution is horrendous. I can see how these two factors would mess with sleep quality and duration.

pumaontheprowl• 5 years ago

I would look at the eight hours in bed as a possible explanation. While they weren't technically asleep, they likely still saw resting benefits just from laying down for a prolonged period of time.

__te__• 5 years ago

    > ... only 5.5 hours per night ...
    > ... increased sleep duration by 27 minutes per night ...

I'm not surprised. On average, they were still under 6 hours, if barely. And if the sleep problems are interrupt-driven, this study does not appear to account for sleep quality.

88840-8855• 5 years ago

Ok, then we could assume the hypothesis: Either you sleep 8 hours and are productive or you go down to 5.5 because 6 wont increase your efficiency levels either.

AndrewKemendo• 5 years ago

That wasn't the entire result. What I took away was this:

In contrast, short afternoon naps at the workplace improved an overall index of outcomes by 0.12 standard deviations, with significant increases in productivity, psychological well-being, and cognition, but a decrease in work time.

abandonliberty• 5 years ago

The better takeaway is that napping is awesome! Moving work time into nap time resulted in a net productivity increase! That's amazing.

If you consider taking 30 minutes of a 6 hour shift to nap, that means they have to be 10% more productive for the 5.5 hours after the nap. I'd suspect hawthorne here, even though it didn't show up in the night treatment group, but it would be interesting to see if this productivity increase is sustained in the long run.

In contrast, short afternoon naps at the workplace improved an overall index of outcomes by 0.12 standard deviations, with significant increases in productivity, psychological well-being, and cognition, but a decrease in work time.

Time spent napping >> time in bed. They're sufficiently exhausted by mid-day to get higher quality rest than they would by spending the same time in bed.

If you're tired, you're better off getting up at your normal wake time, then taking a nap later.

GIFtheory• 5 years ago

They increased the participants sleep from 5.5 hours to 6 hours per night and expected improvements in cognition. This is not how sleep works, AIUI. This is like expecting to get rich after overdrawing your bank account by $140 per week instead of $175 per week.

astatine2• 5 years ago

Looked initially like a ripe candidate for the ignobel prize. But, it seems to distinguish sleep from hours in bed and finds that less sleep than time-in-bed doesn't seem to affect them much. Wonder if the type of work was the reason for their different conclusion - assuming that the poor were involved in more physical labor kind of work while the other studies it mentions were probably not.

Edit: adding the link to an article I happened to have open: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our...

krisoft• 5 years ago

“finds that less sleep than time-in-bed doesn't seem to affect them much”

The abstract of the article doesnt say this. It finds that the intervention managed to increase their average sleep length by 27 minute from 5.5 hours to ~6 hours. Thats still way bellow the recommended length. It also finds that this intervention didn’t improve their work performance.

This might be because “less sleep doesnt seem to affect them much”, but it might equally well be that it affects them tremendously and the 27 extra minutes were not enough to help them.

astatine2• 5 years ago

You are right and your explanation is more precise. The fact there was no cognitive or other change due to the 27 extra minutes implies my interpretation. It's possible that the baseline using 5.5 hours of sleep is not the right one to use and 8 hours of sleep might show a positive impact, which the extra 27 minutes is not showing.

Scoundreller3• 5 years ago

Here's the full study pdf:

https://economics.mit.edu/files/16994

shash• 5 years ago

Yes, the full study explains a lot. I don’t think they can come to the conclusion that “increased nighttime sleep had no detectable effects on cognition, productivity, decision-making, or well-being” based on the data they’ve shown.

1. Their interventions increased sleep time only by increasing time in bed, not sleep efficiency. In other words, without interventions, if participants were sleeping for 5.5 hours with 8 hours in bed, after their interventions, they slept 6 hours after 8.5 hours in bed.

2. This means that the night sleep they measured post-intervention was still extremely disturbed. I doubt if it was restorative in any way.

3. The nap time at work WAS probably of much higher quality because the environment was much better.

4. A word on the interventions; I cannot figure out why they didn’t give out mosquito nets or repellant given that they correctly identified mosquitoes as a major problem (reported by 70% of participants). The best way of getting a good night’s sleep with mosquitoes around is with nets and the second best is some kind of repellant.

5. I think the real conclusion should be that sleep quality matters. Not just amount of sleep, especially if it’s disturbed.

I feel like the conclusions are slightly post facto. As in, they set out to test their interventions and didn’t end up proving them so they switched to nap time.

Pyramus6• 5 years ago

I agree with your assessment that 'more of something bad' is not necessarily better.

In addition it should be noted that the study relies on actigraphy, yet the shortcomings of actigraphy are waved away. This doesn't mean we can get good before-after estimates, but they should not be compared to estimates from PSG.

jonesn11• 5 years ago

No offense, but why was this question even asked? What are the people's needs in the first place? I saw a similar study that suggested the best way to improve mental health and economic consequences among the poor is to *drumroll give them money. Then they will create sustainable interventions that don't require source of money to improve the lives.

larsrc5• 5 years ago

Plenty of offense: why are you even asking why they're doing research into ways to improve people's well-being, especially poor people? Yes, giving money helps, I'm all for UBI, but maybe there are other approaches that are cheaper or complement UBI. How about we find out and _improve people's lives_?

nednar3• 5 years ago

Could you give people money and allow them to take a nap?

TekMol• 5 years ago

    short afternoon naps at the workplace improved an
    overall index of outcomes by 0.12 standard
    deviations, with significant increases in
    productivity, psychological well-being, and
    cognition

Is it possible to learn that? To me it seems impossible to do a "short nap". Even when I feel low energy, I don't feel like I could just lay down and sleep during the day.

th0ma5• 5 years ago

I was always told to avoid naps, but if you must do like 90 minutes. But in general you ideally want regular good amounts of sleep daily at the same times.

fendy3002• 5 years ago

Seems like different for each person and activities / health.

For me it's easier if I was sleep deprived after several nights, and when I've not exercised for long.

barry-cotter4• 5 years ago

Is it possible to learn that? To me it seems impossible to do a "short nap".

Yes. If you have to look after an infant you too may discover how wonderful 12 minutes, or seven, of closing your eyes can be. Did I sleep? Maybe, but I definitely feel better.

dtjohnnyb• 5 years ago

I was in the same boat until I had a baby who was a _terrible_ sleeper during the night. Once I was down to 4-5 hours sleep a night, napping during the day was heaven!

Sometimes I'd have had too much coffee or been overstimulated through work or something, I found [these tips from the military](https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/the-trick-soldiers-use-...) really helpful. Even now, I pretty much only need to relax my jaw and do a few rounds of 4-7-8 breathing and I can have a nap on demand!

larsrc5• 5 years ago

Yes. I do 20 minutes of nap most afternoons, and it helps immensely. Though "nap" is a misnomer, I don't actually try to sleep, just sit or lie comfortably with my eyes closed and as few noises and interruptions as possible. A 20 minute timer has taught my body to get ready to work again after exactly 20 minutes. The goal is to let the mind relax for a bit.

_pastel• 5 years ago

Yes! It just takes practice.

I started out finding a comfortable position and relaxing with a timer set for 15 minutes. After years of practice, I now hit REM almost immediately and wake up feeling rested without a timer in 15-20 minutes.

It's easier for your body to learn if you have a specific place (e.g. a coach), time (e.g. immediately after lunch), and position (I cross my ankles and steeple my hands on my chest). These make it feel qualitatively different from night sleeping and easier to wake up naturally.

You also want to pay attention to sound and light. I use noise-cancelling headphones at work and earplugs + white noise at home. I choose a well-lit area, preferably with natural lighting, and then cover my eyes with a cloth or sleep mask. It's easier to feel refreshed when you uncover your eyes to bright sunshine, rather than waking up in a fully dark room.

Honestly, the main challenge is feeling self-conscious when napping at work. Originally I would lock myself in a shower room or go out to my car, but I'm finally self-confident enough to sleep on a public coach.

namelosw2• 5 years ago

It's easy. In China most people do that at noon, even there's no bed around. People usually take a 20 mins nap at their desks. Preferably after lunch because it's easier to fall asleep because the blood sugar would rise after eating.

Sleep at a desk might not be the most comfortable thing, but it's not bad at all once you're used to it. Or get a small bed around if you can. Sleep masks are surprisingly helpful, too.

Just relax and don't be upset if you cannot fall asleep fast, even if you can't fall asleep you'll find yourself more productive in the afternoon - it's like an implicit meditation. There are also times that people only actually sleep like 5 minutes out of 20, but it usually subjectively feels much longer than '5 minutes' because time feels longer when sleeping and it's very refreshing.

As time goes by it will become a habit and you'll fall asleep fast. The downside is you are likely to feel worse if you have things to do at noon and miss the nap.

IMO the best thing about taking nap at noon is it reduces the fear of sleeping too little at night because you know you can more or less take a nap and get a partial reset at noon.

nednar3• 5 years ago

Why do you associate high blood sugar with more sleep? Could it also be something else, like the cooking oil used with the veggies and meat/tofu?

nednar3• 5 years ago

It might need some training, but it's possible. Especially when you are very tired from sleeping only 5-6 hours every day, it should be very possible have a very deep sleep even in a 20 minute "nap" (i.e., a real sleep loop that gets broken unhappily after 20 minutes).

jakubp• 5 years ago

While 27 minutes nighttime sleep didn't affect outcomes, another effect they observed was that afternoon naps DID increase productivity and well being. So it's not that more sleep can't help -- maybe it depends on specific type of work / life situation?

larsrc5• 5 years ago

Naps are great. Taking 20 minutes of nap turned my afternoons from distraction zone into my most productive time.

dr_dshiv• 5 years ago

This is brilliant science. Spending more than 8 hours in bed isnt necessary, but naps are still helpful. With young children 5.5 hours in bed is not abnormal.

yosefjaved1• 5 years ago

It would be great if we could look at the sample data size, look at its distribution, and type of significance tests used for this study.

legitster• 5 years ago

I wonder how much of the conventional wisdom on sleep is wrong. I know a lot of people (especially post military) who claim they have essentially trained themselves to live adequately on 5 hours or less a night. But most sleep studies seem focused on short-term changes or average populations.

Maybe I'm weird, but I hate sleep. If I had the option to function off of 3-less hours a day, that would be like getting back 45 days worth of my time every year.

Pyramus6• 5 years ago

Per design the scientific method can only make claims about large samples or 'averages'. If we assume a claim is normally distributed there will always be folks in the left and right tails which are not average - in fact 32% will lie outside of one standard deviation!

redmeatforchina• 5 years ago

Earplugs are cheap. Helps you sleep.

WarOnPrivacy3• 5 years ago

That depends on the whether they produce discomfort, frequency of the noise, whether the wearer has tinnitus, blah blah blah

blunte• 5 years ago

Perhaps the lack of measurable benefits was because the total sleep was still well under what we believe humans need.

Also the period of improvement was merely days. Maybe benefits take longer to begin to show.

TheTrotters• 5 years ago

Right. Suppose someone has been living on 1500 calories per day for a while. If researchers increased his intake to 1700 calories day they may not be able to detect a significant improvement. That doesn't mean undernourishment isn't a problem!

nerdponx• 5 years ago

This was my instinctual response as well. However I agree with another poster that I am happy to see a "negative" result published.

davidhbolton• 5 years ago

I'm a 62 year old software developer. My normal sleep is between 4 and 5 hours with occasional 6 hour sleep according to my Fitbit. Anything less than 4 and I feel tired but I'm putting in a full days work with four or more hours sleep.

In the past while driving long distances, if I started getting fatigued, pulling over to a Motorway services I could fall asleep for 20 minutes and that freshened me up enough to finish any journey.

anticensor2• 5 years ago

Are you a former professional driver?

Tenoke6• 5 years ago

The majority of comments seem to have the belief that the need for 8 hours of sleep is truth, and seem to mostly be making up various excuses why the increase in sleep here doesn't show results.

As far as I can tell, the 8 hours figure is on pretty shaky grounds and most believe it due to pop-science books like 'Why we sleep' and it could easily be the case that this is just another study showing how exaggerated that claim is.

bdibs• 5 years ago

Between 7 and 9 hours of sleep has been recommended from every sleep research group I can find, long before that book came out.

Recent consensus statement: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4434546/

Pyramus6• 5 years ago

This estimate is quite robust, e.g. researchers observed how long different hunter-gatherer societies sleep etc.

In addition it should be note that it's distributed like a Gaussian distribution, so there will be plenty of people outside this range.

Tenoke6• 5 years ago

Long before that specific book came out. If you look at how they arrived at the recommendation here, a lot of it was based on discussions and voting by 15 experts chosen by the US Department of Health.

Actual studies are much less conclusive (see the one we are commenting on for example) and the evidence for 8 hours of sleep is shaky and the difference from 6 to 8 is rarely especially big even when it is supported with anything under 6 and over 8 having negative effect.

Check this systematic review (first result of my search[0]) which seems extremely sympathetic to 8 hours, yet the actual results are:

compared with 7 h of sleep per day, a 1-h decrease in sleep duration was associated with 6% increased risk of all-cause mortality and a 1-h increase in sleep duration was associated with a 13% increased risk of all-cause mortality (N = 241 107 adults in 43 articles)

So, going from 7 to 8 hours increases risk more than going from 7 to 6!

Further

Itani et al. (2017) reported that short sleep duration (<6 or ≤7 h/day) was not significantly associated with the incidence of depression compared with normal sleep duration (N = 16 257 adults in 2 articles)
Lo et al. (2016) reported that extreme sleep durations (both short and long) were associated with cognitive decline compared with the reference sleep of 7 to 8 h/day (N = 97 264 adults in 18 articles)

But again it's only at the extremes that there is decline, which seems to be more like 3+ hours less than 8 a day.

Health-related quality of life No systematic review was identified that examined the association between sleep duration and health-related quality of life.

etc. If you go through actual studies and systematic reviews it is really hard to make much of a case that 6 hours is much worse (if at all) than 8, yet alone anything more than that.

0. https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/full/10.1139/apnm-2020-0034

currymj2• 5 years ago

I need probably 7.5-8 hours of sleep. I'm very confident about this. If I get only 5-6 hours sleep for a couple nights, I become quite cognitively impaired; if it goes on long enough there are serious emotional effects too.

There are people who insist that actually, 5-6 hours is fine, and that I must be lying, lazy, or deluding myself. These people are trying to make me stupid and miserable.

It's an issue that provokes a lot of strong emotions, especially on the side of people who feel pressured to sleep less than they need.

Tenoke6• 5 years ago

It's an issue that provokes a lot of strong emotions, especially on the side of people who feel pressured to sleep less than they need.

Perhaps you feel like it is much worse for the side you perceive yourself to be on. I, and plenty of other people have had very negative experiences and sleep-related anxiety because of all the people insisting that getting less than 8 hours of sleep is bad for you on flimsy evidence.

shlep212• 5 years ago

Surely you concede that, even if 5-6 hours is not enough for you, it might still be enough for them.

nojs• 5 years ago

It’s great to see negative results like this, that go against current popular research trends, published. It makes me realise how rare it is to see “we studied this thing and contrary to our predictions saw nothing interesting”. Presumably because of publication bias.

belly_joe• 5 years ago

True, but to be fair a null result is much more interesting (and thus publishable) when it cuts against a large body of prior empirical work or theory.

Thinking specifically of Card and Krueger (1994) finding zero impact of the minimum wage on employment

Ghostt8117• 5 years ago

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...

This study used cognition, productivity, decision-making, and well-being as outcomes. It did not discuss the economic effects related to deleterious health from long-term sleep deprivation. Is higher productivity and output from increased time at work and decreased sleep time outweighed by the burden taken on by society from the other effects? I worry that some people will see this research and use it to feel better about making their employees work more hours and exploiting low income labor.

scythe• 5 years ago

This treats only short-term effects and relies on a small (0.45 hours) self-reported increase in sleep time obtained by just telling people to sleep more. Effects on children are totally absent.

It's not sufficient to even reduce interest in improving sleep quality because it doesn't measure most of the effects and the methodology is questionable: did participants accept, e.g., lower-quality meals in order to find more time to sleep?

It does show that rich people telling poor people what to do rarely produces any improvement — we've seen that before.

moron4hire• 5 years ago

They mentioned that sleep efficiency was already poor. They mentioned that the increase in sleep was achieved through increased time in bed, not increased efficiency.

Most of the restorative benefits of sleep happen during long stretches of uninterrupted sleep. If the sleep efficiency problem is due to multiple interruptions to the nights sleep, that is a very different thing than people having a hard time getting to sleep, but staying asleep once they are out.

If the underlying sleep efficiency issue isn't addressed, it's not really all that surprising that there wasn't a measurable improvement in productivity.

hedora• 5 years ago

In California, rental apartments are built to a lower standard than condos. In particular, they don’t require noise proofing between units.

Noise proofing interior walls costs almost nothing (something like 1% the price of construction), but has a huge impact on quality of life.

I’m continually shocked at the systematic discrimination built into California housing.

polalavik• 5 years ago

the standards for noise proofing apply to all construction (condos, townhomes, apartments) https://www.astm.org/DIGITAL_LIBRARY/STP/PAGES/STP35976S.htm

chiefalchemist• 5 years ago

Poverty is not simply a financial condition. It is - for lack of a better term coming to mind - a disease; and certainly not a diseaae anyone chooses. In fact, poverty creates tunnel vision. It limits vision. It, in the minds of the impoverished, limits choice.

It's complicated.

Matt Desmond's "Evicted" was a profound moment for me. Similar to this study on sleep, he highlights how areas of higher eviction rates ultimately destabilize the broader community. That feeds back into the disease and the cycle perpetuates, like a virus.

https://www.evictedbook.com/

The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor

Related Stories