We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

http://sciencenordic.com/we-should-only-work-25-hours-week-argues-professor

236 271 13 years ago

Zigurd• 13 years ago

Until we come to grips with what will likely be a post-labor world, this is a good transitional approach. The 40 hour week is an arbitrary standard, and it may now be rational to reduce that number. Few jobs are now so arduous that 70 year olds cannot perform well. We are suffering from outdated standards for work weeks and retirement age, and un-sticking our assumptions is likely to benefit the situation.

bertzzie2• 13 years ago

> Few jobs are now so arduous that 70 year olds cannot perform well.

I think it's mostly physical jobs that 70 year olds cannot perform well. And that kind of job can be automated by robots anyway. For job like programming or CEO, I kind of think that 70 year olds can do better than say 20 year olds.

danso• 13 years ago

Mental acuity is very much a physical quality. Yes, there are 70 year olds who can think and mentally adapt exceptionally well, just as there are 70 year olds who can do one arm push-ups and live till 100. But it doesn't mean that 70 year old are just like 30 year olds, but with more experience.

mattschoch4• 13 years ago

>>For job like programming or CEO, I kind of think that 70 year olds can do better than say 20 year olds.

Maybe in 50 years, but currently I'd say a 20-30 years old is the prime programmer age. Young people tend to learn new tech quicker, and be faster/more efficient at typing and using computers.

_delirium8• 13 years ago

More years at fewer hours per week is an interesting idea. Managing burnout could be one way to make it reasonable for people to work into older age, and having norms with fewer hours a week could be one part of that. You see a lot of burnout in tech currently even by middle-age, but I'm not sure the subject matter fundamentally requires it.

ekianjo8• 13 years ago

> what will likely be a post-labor world

Says who ? This preposterous way of thinking has been around for x years already. "when the world population will reach 4 billions people, there will be no jobs for everyone", yet the population is still increasing beyond 6 billions and most people still work to live/survive. There is no hint we are moving to a post-labor world.

You will see that there is a strong relationship between reduced employment/working hours, welfare benefits when not working, and government spending. And somehow most of the countries which went down that way have now humongous public debt problems to solve. Their model is not sustainable in the long term.

_delirium8• 13 years ago

> And somehow most of the countries which went down that way have now humongous public debt problems to solve.

This is just ideology, and not factually accurate. (P.S. Cheers from Scandinavia.)

rndmize2• 13 years ago

You seem to be misunderstanding something. A post-labor has nothing to do with population and everything to do with automation. As it becomes more efficient to have robots and computers to do what was previously human work, we will eventually reach a point where just about every conceivable job that we currently employ people for could be automated.

Most likely, a post-labor world should be capable of arriving well before that. Once we can automate the production of basic necessities, working should become largely optional.

zanny5• 13 years ago

Well one, getting to post-labor has nothing to do with raw population figures. No matter how many people you have, they want to eat, probably want comfortable living (housing + climate control), and in a modern context want Internet access and electricity.

You could have a hundred billion people and everyone would still want that. The difference is post-labor comes when you don't need human capital (or at the worst, a negligible amount) to produce the necessities for people to survive. We are approaching that, look at how manufacturing is returning to the US in 99% automated facilities. Once you can grow food (or fabricate it with molecular engineering) without requiring human labor to produce it, you can already distribute it with automated vehicles, and you can produce electricity via solar, hydro, or nuclear wtih very little human capital involvement after you set the system up.

The idea is you put systems in place that the fruits of them are effectively infinite without human engagement. Once you can do that, you have post-scarcity bounded on the limits of the planet and our ability to deploy infrastructure, not in how much labor we can produce. We are getting there, but the fundamental problem is we try to squeeze these no labor return systems into classic market capitalism and it isn't working (a concentrated wealthy class ends up owning these means of production, and power and wealth are concentrated as a result).

scotty792• 13 years ago

You can see transition to post-labor world in observing growth of the labor force paid with tax money (lots of them doing unnecessary or things harmful to others), growth of prison population (these are the people who are provided for because they couldn't get jobs), increase in percentage of people working in services, increase in number of lawyers...

We are moving away from doing anything useful and we are now even running out of excuses that could entitle us to getting some money to provide for ourselves.

pteredactyl3• 13 years ago

I agree we are stuck in an outdated model however I am not keen on someone me telling how many hours I can or should work.

pogden• 13 years ago

If you're like most people, somebone already does: your boss, who answers to "convention."

wildgift6• 13 years ago

I don't see how a shorter work week prevents anyone from working longer, or even less than the minimum. There are plenty of people working more than 40 hours, and plenty working fewer.

The only that the 40 sets is the threshold at which workers attain specific rights regarding overtime, benefits, and other things.

rndmize2• 13 years ago

I'm fairly sure the 40 hour week is far from arbitrary. There's someone on HN who has a long post about working hours and the wide variety of studies that were done demonstrating that 40 hours resulted in higher efficiency than 50 or more as far back as the 1930s, and that peak efficiency for white collar work is even less (6 hour days). I'll have to see if I can find it.

electromagnetic• 13 years ago

The thing is, 40 hours less my hour lunch a day ends up at 35 hours, which over 7 days is only 5 hours. To me personally I would prefer to work 5 hours a day every day than be getting up at 6am to get home for 6pm, and forget it if I want to do groceries on a night, I'll be getting home in time to have a shower, read a chapter of a book and fall asleep.

My weekend work usually averages around 4-5 hours a day, I get to relax, I get to run out and do groceries and don't even notice having worked.

bertzzie2• 13 years ago

This is interesting. I live in Indonesia, where except on our capital (Jakarta and most Java), working 60 hours a week is the norm. I have noticed (and I think this has been proved over and over again) that people who works 60 hours a week is actually less productive and less happy than those who have a free weekends and work only 8 hours a day.

I wonder how much working time can we cut until the benefits disappear.

zht• 13 years ago

do you have extremely long days but 5 days a week or do you spread it out over 6 or 7 days?

ekianjo8• 13 years ago

In Japan, by the way, it is not uncommon to work 6 days a week (Saturdays). It depends on your contract.

mikecane2• 13 years ago

>>>working 60 hours a week is the norm

What kind of labor is that? White collar or factory assembly?

jdotjdot5• 13 years ago

I agree with this from personal experience. And I have a US white collar job, 70/hr week average, and i'm way less productive than I used to be before that.

_delirium8• 13 years ago

Centrist professor takes a moderate position about halfway between the "standard" workweek and Tim Ferriss's 4-hour workweek. ;-)

shasta• 13 years ago

The time you spend past 25 hours a week is making you less productive anyway...

eliben• 13 years ago

I assume you speak from personal experience. Allow me to disagree.

timfletcher• 13 years ago

I do this but in a different way. I work 40 hours a week for most of the year and then take off a few months at a time. This allows me to travel with my family before I'm retired and too old to climb mountains etc. You have your whole life to live, it doesn't begin when you retire. I'm fully prepared to work past the standard retirement age.

mikecane2• 13 years ago

Twenty-five hours a week at what rate of pay? There are people working at Walmart and such who make in a week what I would make in a day or two in past years. I also did 60-80 hour weeks in my life (eejit that I was). With all the opposition towards a living wage (read: serf wages), I'll file this under the category that includes jetpacks and flying cars -- and I'd bet on those appearing first.

_delirium8• 13 years ago

Well, the biologist quoted in the story is Danish, so may be starting from different norms. The de-facto minimum wage [1] is already around $18/hr, and would probably increase if the work-week were changed. That could perhaps be funded in part by putting less money towards retirement (current employer contribution is 17% of salary), since his proposal is to raise the retirement age considerably as well. Serf wages are a bit less of an issue in any case when that's the starting point.

[1] A bit complex: "de-facto" because Denmark has no statutory minimum wage. Nonetheless, a negotiated wage floor of a bit above 100 DKK/hr (~$18/hr) covers most workplaces. Denmark's labor system, partly driven by law and partly by cultural norms, makes heavy use of sector-wide bargaining agreements between large employer confederations and large cross-company unions. The whole process tends to be very consensus-oriented (strikes are rare), and reaches blanket agreements that apply sector-wide. Small mom-and-pop stores, freelancers, independent moving-van operators, etc. are the main exceptions, since they aren't part of one of the employer confederations that's party to those agreements.

r4dius• 13 years ago

If I didn't have to answer email or deal with any middle management, this could work. But the paradox is that the only scenario in which legitimate optimal efficiency can be attained is in a small-group, highly-communicative environment (like a startup); in that kind of environment, you're putting in 80-hour weeks so you can get profitable as quickly as possible, so there's no way anyone is saying "I've put in my 25 hours, see you guys next week!"

zanny5• 13 years ago

But those startups are people basically willingly surrendering themselves to the ideology. The article isn't about the empassioned individuals who want to make it big, it is about Average Joe who works at any middle class company 40 hours a week without any desire to do it and no passion to continue.

If you have the drive to try to do something big, putting all your time into it is kind of mandatory. But if you just work for the money to survive on, you shouldn't need to put in such a significant portion of ones time.

wildgift6• 13 years ago

The average joe might have passion for work, but also a family and other responsibilities that preclude extended periods of long workdays. They might not want to get divorced.

msoad• 13 years ago

I don't get it. Why we have fixed number of working hours when we have deadlines for our tasks?

You want me to solve that problem for you by Friday? Why should I come to office and stare at monitor four days if I figured it out right in Monday?

mylittlepony• 13 years ago

When I worked as an employee, I learned to slow all my tasks down to finish them right on time. That way I wouldn't be assigned more tasks than my coworkers, in punishment for being efficient and fast.

lnanek2• 13 years ago

That would be nice, then startups where people work 80 a week will be even more magical and money earning. :)

tikhonj• 13 years ago

Except that there's no guarantee that working more hours makes you more productive. If anything, studies seem to have shown the opposite. Ultimately, efficiency trumps hard work--there are only so many hours in a week where the limit on your efficiency is much further away.

sievert3• 13 years ago

This is exactly what I thought when reading the article. One of the reasons I'm interested in start-ups is the idea of condensing my career so I can have more time to do the things I love later on.

mattschoch4• 13 years ago

Great idea in theory, but there's a reason young people work such long hours: money. If a 22 year old graduates from college and works 25 hours a week, they won't have enough money to pay off their (almost certain) debt and live comfortably, much less have excess money to spend traveling and doing fun things. Young people work so hard so they can have the money to buy and do the things they want. Most just never stop working that hard in order to enjoy those things. Working 25 hours/week would basically push "life" back a few years, meaning maybe you rent a small apartment and drive a old car until you're 35-40. As they saying goes, young people have lots of time and no money, but older people have lots of money and no time.

Zuph• 13 years ago

Not every country saddles their young graduates with tens (to hundreds!) of thousands of dollars in debt.

mattschoch4• 13 years ago

Touché. I guess I'm speaking of the average middle-class American.

sievert3• 13 years ago

In Denmark college is free or close to it, I don't think they've got massive debts to pay.

jblow• 13 years ago

Costs of stuff like rent and cars are normalized to average income levels. (Though of course with cars there is a base cost of manufacture that makes them less flexible than something like rent).

Which is to say, if everyone works 25 hours a week, rents will go down (because if they don't, you have most properties sitting empty). If instead everyone works 60 hours a week, rents go up.

Of course, economics is really complicated and rarely works out this simply. But that's the idea. It's a little silly to post here presuming that someone in Mr. Vaupel's position has somehow not thought of the fact that when you work fewer hours your nominal earnings go down. (I think this qualifies for what pg was calling Middlebrow Dismissal). It's a more reasonable response to say, well, of course he has thought of that, but I wonder what the answer is?

mattschoch4• 13 years ago

Sure, I'm sure he thought of that, and I'm sure prices would change since there would be less money earned and therefore less money in circulation. This would also require a change in standard of living though. My point is simply that people cannot maintain the same standard of living and work less, even if the entire world cut back hours at the same time. Less goods would be produced, so with the same demand then prices for everything would rise, or standards of living would fall.

zanny5• 13 years ago

As a 21 year old, I'd love to only work 25 hours a week. I'd just get involved with more FOSS projects and work on what I want to rather than what someone paying me wants me to do.

ekianjo8• 13 years ago

25 hours to earn less? What's the point of having more free time if you have no money to do anything with it ?

There's a reason why we have a current optimal 40-60 hours kind of range for working hours in most countries. That's an equilibrium point between how much people are willing to work vs how much they are willing to earn. Everyone still wants to have free time, but not at the expense of their well-being or the future of their family (education, etc.).

Working 25 hours and earning the same amount as working 40 would not sit well with companies (if this was made mandatory by state regulation, for example). Local companies would lose their competitive edge vs other companies elsewhere and this would end up in increased unemployment.

Let people work how long they want. That's their choice.

_delirium8• 13 years ago

Because of standardization on "normal" workweeks, it's pretty hard to have the choice even if you're willing to forego salary for fewer hours. Google won't let you work a 4-day week for 80% of the regular salary, for example (or even for 60% of it!), and more traditional companies are even less likely to. You take their 5-day, 40-hour offer or you don't. You typically only have an option to work a 25-hour week if you have either a consulting/freelance career, or a very low-end hourly-wage job.

ekianjo8• 13 years ago

Note that the standardization you are talking about is also heavily driven by work regulations, saying that a work week is x hours and nothing else. If such restrictions were abolished I believe there would be much more flexibility (up and down) in the job market.

zanny5• 13 years ago

One other problem is that the whole 40 hour thing is also a farce in the presence of salaried positions - most places want you on site all day, under the assumption that they can keep you during crunch. If you are only working 4 days, unless you have infamous "come in on Sunday" talks with your boss, they have less opportunities to keep you for free overtime since you are salaried and they often put on weekly caps on extra hours before they have to pay overtime (or none at all, depends on the company).

hmsimha• 13 years ago

Google is actually known for encouraging their employees to work 80% of their work week on task, and the remaining 20% on creative pursuits of their own choosing, so in that sense I would argue that google is fostering creativity (which probably ends up benefiting the company overall) while being less demanding of their employees' time in a traditional sense.

sievert3• 13 years ago

The argument here is about quality of life. I suspect the reason you mention income is that you believe it is nessecary to be able to do things outside of work.

I personally earn more than I need to get by, and I'm sure as I get older and have more commitments I'll want to forgo money in exchange for time.

Also income (or at least productivity) and time spent at work is not a linear relationship. I think this is a great idea.

zanny5• 13 years ago

If I could make enough to eat, keep the lights on, and pay an internet bill, I'd be satiated.

Problem is that unless you go for contract work (which doesn't really translate into 25 hours a week), you won't get a 20 hour a week part time software development gig, even if it had a 35k salary attached. I much prefer working on the projects I want to than those that people are willing to pay me for.

readme5• 13 years ago

This guy might be on to something, but I have an even better idea, and it required 0 scientific research to synthesize.

We should all do whatever the fuck we want, until we die.

olliesaunders2• 13 years ago

> We should all do whatever the fuck we want, until we die.

Yeah but we’re not allowed to. Most employers will demands you show up for 40 hours a week and then frown at you or, at least, never promote you if you don’t stay for a lot more.

ahomescu1• 13 years ago

You could start your own company, be your own employer and work as much as you feel like.

lotu• 13 years ago

You are allow to do what ever the fuck you want until you die just don't expect me to give you money for doing what ever the fuck you want. As I too am doing what every the fuck I want, which happens to include only giving money to people who do something useful for me.

readme5• 13 years ago

We are allowed to. You choose your employer, ergo, you choose your work schedule.

_delirium8• 13 years ago

If you're wealthy, that's of course an option: your ability to do whatever the fuck you want is completely unconstrained by any need to eat or pay for shelter or healthcare. In other cases, you have to balance risks and material necessities, which sometimes (often) requires bending to external constraints and doing things you do not, in fact, want to do. And what your options are there strongly depends on prevailing economic/legal/social norms.

revscat• 13 years ago

Says someone who obviously doesn't have a child support payment.

obstacle12• 13 years ago

Yes, looks like he chose to not get married, not have a kid, and not get divorced.

clavalle• 13 years ago

Your wish is granted.

The catch: you will die a lot sooner depending on how much you take other people's needs and wants into consideration when deciding what you want to do with your time.

You're welcome.

ctdonath8• 13 years ago

Build a man a fire, you keep him warm for a day.

Set a man on fire, you keep him warm for the rest of his life.

To wit: there is a strong correlation between what constitutes doing whatever the fuck you want, and how soon you'll die.

readme5• 13 years ago

Sure, if what you want is harmful to yourself.

The things I want are all things that make my life better and safer.

Some people want bad things.

jebblue• 13 years ago

I wonder if this could be where we're headed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine_(1960_film)

harshpotatoes• 13 years ago

As a 26 year old, I can agree with his conclusion (or at least want his conclusion to be true). With 40-60 hour work weeks for both my girlfriend and I, it can be difficult sometimes. Similarly, new friendships can be hard to come by. With current job dynamics, moving can be an almost certainty, increasing the difficulty of maintaining friendships.

However, I have to wonder, would 25 hour work weeks actually increase the length of our employ-ability, allowing us to work until the age of 80? I thought part of today's current long term unemployment problem (in the US), is that finding employment for older, more skilled, adults was difficult, due to perceived overqualifications or lack of training in newer technologies. I thought part of the point of work hard while you're young, was to save enough money to allow you to survive the possibility of permanent unemployment in old age (either due to health or over qualification in unused technologies).

michaelochurch• 13 years ago

25 hours is a good number for average people. I'd say 15-20, even.

Ambitious or highly dedicated people will always work more than that, and that's a good thing. What they should have is a lot more freedom in how they spend that time-- working two jobs, one job and school, side projects.

The problem is this bullshit conformist fiction in which everyone has to pretend to be ambitious (but only internally) and dedicated (despite mediocre social status and compensation, that fail to justify such dedication). I don't think that such a problem can be legislated away. The best that the law/government can do is to break up the collusions (e.g. among VCs) that keep talent trading at such a dog-low rate against property.

The other problem, and one of the main reasons why the 40-60 hour anachronism lives on, is that companies aren't really buying (as they see it) 40 hours of time. They're also buying (in their entitled view of the world) single-minded loyalty. That's why they demand hours at such a level that a person can't possibly hold two jobs, even if she is easily capable of the work. The goal isn't just to get some quantity of the person's work, but to take that person off the market so no one else can hire her.

samstave5• 13 years ago

I think that the title should be: "It should only require 25 hours per week to make a comfortable living"

We should all put in the most amount of time to our lives and passions, but to maintain a comfortable life should not consume 100% of our available productive hours. (assuming productive hours == 8/day, 5 days/week)

If maintaining a living (comfortable or not) requires 100% of our productive work time (40 hours/week) then how are you not a slave to that subsistence lifestyle?

burntsushi3• 13 years ago

> (assuming productive hours == 8/day, 5 days/week)

Bad assumption.

> If maintaining a living (comfortable or not) requires 100% of our productive work time (40 hours/week) then how are you not a slave to that subsistence lifestyle?

What is "subsistence" about it? I understand subsistence living to mean "having just enough to survive."

ctdonath8• 13 years ago

The problem is what constitutes "maintaining a living", both in your own choices and governmental influence. I can show you how to live well on $10/day, but then you'd complain about not having X Y and Z (starting with two cars and a mortgage in a narrow geographic range).

If you can't do without what amounts to luxuries to 75% of the world population, discussing how many hours a week you "should" work is a non-starter.

Volpe• 13 years ago

> We should all put in the most amount of time to our lives and passions

Should we? Is that the ultimate goal here? The problem with trying to tell people what their life is about, is that you are wrong as soon as you start.

> how are you not a slave to that subsistence lifestyle?

Subsistence is 'surviving' (like, not dying, not not unable to pay rent).

javert9• 13 years ago

The best that the law/government can do is to break up the collusions (e.g. among VCs)

No, the best that the government can do for startups and the economy is just get out of the way.

yakiv• 13 years ago

I doubt it. If you don't ban monopoly power, people sometimes get it (like Rockefeller sort of did). You don't get all of the nice properties of free markets unless some conditions are met, like the absence of monopolies.

Edit: That being said, government can get involved in the wrong ways and cause problems with subsidies and bad regulation.

derleth2• 13 years ago

> No, the best that the government can do for startups and the economy is just get out of the way.

We've tried that and it failed. Does the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire ring any bells?

InclinedPlane3• 13 years ago

In my opinion the biggest problem is not either of these things, it's the labor and tax laws.

Today working around 40 hours a week is an important prerequisite for a great many important things such as the traditional suite of full-time employee benefits (health insurance, for example).

Additionally, social security and medicare taxes take 14% of income right off the top, and then federal and state income tax adds onto that. Such high tax burdens make it much more difficult for people to build up their own savings, and it's no surprise that savings rates have plummeted over the years. Lack of savings results in greater dependence on employers and less negotiating capability for non-traditional work hours.

Mvandenbergh• 13 years ago

If that were the case then savings rates should have trended upwards over the last few decades as tax rates have come down in the US.

olliesaunders2• 13 years ago

Incidentally, an enforced max number of hours per work week is a potential solution to the high unemployment a lot of countries have right now.

youngerdryas• 13 years ago

Please no. More useless busybodies and paperwork. It would probably be cheaper to extend unemployment benefits.

fnordfnordfnord• 13 years ago

So you prefer that we actually cultivate a loafer class and a worker class?

marksbrown• 13 years ago

Such a limit exists within the EU already. The working-time directive[1] limits people to 48 hours work per week. High unemployment is unfortunately still about despite this. As to reducing this to a lower number, the UK already has 1 in 10 people 'underemployed'[2]. Fewer hours would of course be preferable, but housing and a disposable income does come first.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive [2]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20526259

noarchy• 13 years ago

I am sure that I get 25 hours of real work done per week, if that. Once I factor in the meetings and phone calls that knock me out of the "zone", it is certainly less than 40.

scotty792• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35-hour_workweek

Claudus• 13 years ago

I left my job a year ago, and started doing remote work for a small company. Since then, I've worked between 15 to 25 hours a week. As a result:

- I'm more rested and stress free

- I get a lot more exercise and I eat healthier

- I'm much more efficient and motivated in my work

- My creativity and exploration into new fields has bloomed

I used to put almost all of my effort into my work, with not enough time devoted to maintaining and improving myself.

jdotjdot5• 13 years ago

Absolutely agreed. I just did the opposite--quit remote freelancing to take on a full time job (this one with insane hours unfortunately, 14hour/day average)--and my level of stress and unhealth has skyrocketed. Autonomy and agency matter, and part of that is the ability to choose the amount of and timing of working hours that are best for you.

wildgift6• 13 years ago

Technically, that's not a "full time job". It's nearly two full time jobs.

codewright• 13 years ago

I'm considering getting back into remote work and/or contracting but it's been some time since I last did so. For exactly the same reasons you're enjoying it now.

Do you have any pointers on finding permanent or contracted remote work? Most of the connections I had fron before have since died out.

xijuan• 13 years ago

But ....what about college students???? People rarely talk about the fact that college students can be as stressful if not more stressful. In graduate school, students are expected to work/study almost all the time... Should we also have a reduce in our work/study load?

marvin• 13 years ago

You could in principle do the same. I'm currently in a Masters program and have been doing what this link describes since I first started university: Four or five hours of very focused work each day, followed by real leisure time.

Granted, it might be different if I were doing a PhD, but at least up until where I am now this has worked perfectly. I get done just as much while being less stressed and feeling a lot better about life.

newbie12• 13 years ago

Of the 40 hour week, from 10 to 30 hours are spent working for the government. Your tax rate is dependent on where you live and how much you earn, of course.

jdietrich• 13 years ago

In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more consumption. The cost of living hasn't meaningfully increased, we've just continually redefined luxuries as necessities.

My grandparents are perfectly typical working-class people. They grew up in cramped, damp houses with no central heating or indoor plumbing. They ate mainly seasonal vegetables, considered a chicken or roast of meat a rare treat and often went to bed hungry. They bought new clothes or furniture only when their old ones were beyond repair. They aspired to owning a bicycle, not a car. The only people they knew who had been abroad had done so while in uniform. They didn't regard themselves as materially deprived, because that was the only lifestyle they knew.

As much as we might deny being materialistic, the naked truth is that what we consider to be a basic comfortable lifestyle today was, within living memory, unattainable luxury. We continue to work 40 hour weeks because we have adjusted our expectations to our income. We overwhelmingly choose to work the greatest number of hours we can sustainably tolerate (somewhere between 40 and 60 hours for most people), in order to maximise our spending power.

The recent kerfuffle over "The 1%" is illustrative of this phenomenon. There was widespread mockery of people earning 500k who regarded themselves as just making ends meet. In a very real sense, we are all a part of that laughably oblivious 1%. The lifestyles we consider just about tolerable are, by any historical or global standard, utter luxury. Almost everyone who has ever lived (and almost everyone living today) would consider themselves lucky to have the spending power of an American on minimum wage.

pteredactyl3• 13 years ago

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” -- Edward Bernays, 'Propaganda', 1928

Androsynth2• 13 years ago

If anyone else wants to find out more about Edward Bernays, and how he created the field of public relations, I highly recommend the bbc documentary The Century of the Self. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

It is very much in line with the quote that pteredactyl posted. He also did a lot of early work in consumerism and marketing.

ruswick2• 13 years ago

My life has exhibited at various points a preponderance of the issues that your grandparents faced. Most people I know still cope with issues mentioned above. I'm not sure why you believe that poverty has vanished even among people on minimum wage: it has absolutely not.

chad_oliver• 13 years ago

Saying that poverty is significantly and astoundingly reduced is not the same thing as saying it has vanished.

yummyfajitas• 13 years ago

Depends on your definition of poverty. Poverty in the sense of the aforementioned grandparents has - only a fraction of a % of the population of the US lacks indoor plumbing.

In the US, people with earned income < $5k/year still tend to consume $23k/year.

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt

By the standards of the past, poverty more or less has vanished. We just raised the bar for poverty so that we have someone to feel sorry for.

jseliger2• 13 years ago

>In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more consumption.

I'm not convinced this is true: there are also intense coordination costs and learning costs. Two programmers working 20 hours a week, for example, are way less productive than one programmer working 40 hours a week. And the one programmer will learn faster because she's putting in an extra 20 hours a week.

That's true in virtually all knowledge / creative / intellectual professions.

If people are simply executing a set of tasks, maybe working 20 hours a week can make sense, but those jobs are basically commodities, and commodity jobs are a) highly competitive, b) not that remunerative, and c) because of a and b, not that much fun.

EDIT: In response to the commenters below, take a look at Brooks' The Mythical Man Month if you'd like data, at least as far as programmers are concerned.

learc834• 13 years ago

>Two programmers working 20 hours a week, for example, are way less productive than one programmer working 40 hours a week.

That makes assumptions efficiency as it relates to number of hours worked that I'm not sure you can make.

How many of those 40 hours are really spent working?

40 hour work weeks are the result of labor regulations, and the binding of health insurance to full-time employment, not a free market equilibrium.

mark_l_watson• 13 years ago

Sorry, I must disagree. Two people working 20 hours a week are refreshed, not burned out, have time for educationally side projects, etc.

I am in my early 60s and for my whole life I limited my work hours to 32 hours per week, even working for large companies. I had lots of time for educational side projects, exercise, extra time with family and friends, and mediation.

My only regret was not perhaps cutting this to less than 30 hours. I did not work Mondays, and every Tuesday morning I was refreshed and enjoyed my work. Leaving about 20% of my salary on the table was a good trade. Some of my bosses did not like this, but when I worked I gave them 100% effort.

31reasons• 13 years ago

>Two programmers working 20 hours a week, for example, are way less productive than one programmer working 40 hours a week. And the one programmer will learn faster because she's putting in an extra 20 hours a week.

From where did you pull out that data ? It is always possible that one programmer working 20 hours is more productive than two programmers working 40 hours. It depends what they are actually doing.

moconnor• 13 years ago

I have some datapoints here. Twice in the last five years I have spent a year working half time (German parental leave is incredible). I noticed spending a higher proportion of my time on 'overhead' - emails, code reviews etc, but my overall productivity did not drop.

I measured the bugs fixed over time, commits made, lines and files changed, emails sent, all proxies for activity.

Some results are shown in this otherwise tangentially related blog post: http://yieldthought.com/post/6070927890/metagame-productivit...

Bear in mind when looking at the charts that they are corrected for man months not calendar months - my calendar productivity remained about the same or slightly better over the measured period.

I recently reduced my hours to 27.5 just by asking. Without these positive experiences for all concerned that may not have been so easy.

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

This is best seen through the lens and A type work and B type work. A work is what you get paid for - the delivering value to clients, committing code work. B work is education, design, clearing the desk, sharpening the saw.

40-60 hours a week of A work - or just tryi g to do A work leaves us without B work - soon this piles up into lack of education, lack of preparation.

I would be far better off and more productive if I limited myself to just 5 hours client work a day (or more likely 10 then 0) than the current mad rush.

We need to balance A work, B work and probably A leisure (time with kids) and B leisure ( housework, tv)

flyinRyan7• 13 years ago

Major citation needed. 40 isn't some magical number, it's completely arbitrary. I've never seen a study that found a global optimal number for programming hours per week but if it somehow came out to be 40... that would be a coincidence of galactic proportions.

zurn4• 13 years ago

> We overwhelmingly choose to work the greatest number of hours we can sustainably tolerate (somewhere between 40 and 60 hours for most people), in order to maximise our spending power.

Not so: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=AVE_HRS

(the statistic above excludes vacatyion and national holidays, sick leave, paid maternity/paternity leave etc, which are also much more generous these days)

Note how the well off countries tend to have shorter working hours.

Anecdotally, I only know maybe 2 people who I'd say work more than 40 hours and they're small business owners who really like what they do.

__--__• 13 years ago

Considering I just spend the last month putting in 80+ hour weeks along with all of my co-workers, might I humbly suggest you put "n=1" after your post? Then again, I work in video games. Long hours are the industry standard.

svachalek5• 13 years ago

Are you in Europe or something? In Silicon Valley, 50 hours is a fairly typical week most places I've worked and in some companies much higher numbers are the norm. (edit: and all forms of leave are decreasing rather than increasing)

jvm• 13 years ago

I really wish the US was on that chart!

rmc• 13 years ago

Another data point : the European countries with the longest holidays (France & Germany) are bailing out countries with the shortest holidays ( Greece Ireland Portugal)

ozgung• 13 years ago

Wow, one of those lists that we're at the top position as Turkey, with an almost 50-hour work week (plus 10-15 hours for commuting). I work in a science park inside a university campus and it's mandatory to work at least 45 hours a week. I always thought this is an insanely counter-productive policy and now I have statistical proof.

stdbrouw• 13 years ago

While I agree with you in general, to some extent poverty/luxury really is relative. If getting a decent job (or starting your own business) means learning how to operate a spreadsheet, then suddenly you're going to need a computer. People didn't have personal computers 50 years ago, but does that make them a luxury now? Likewise, if not having central heating and an indoor toilet makes you a social outcast (who would want to come and visit you in a cold, dark house?) then it stops being about just personal comfort and becomes essential to a happy life.

So, yes, perhaps we don't always have our priorities right (choosing money over time) but it's not necessarily something an individual can do something about -- there's a huge social dimension to it.

Nursie2• 13 years ago

"We overwhelmingly choose to work the greatest number of hours we can sustainably tolerate (somewhere between 40 and 60 hours for most people)"

I'm doing that short-term, directly for cash at the moment. Then I'm going to take a month off.

Most of my working life (12 years so far) has been working at the 37 hour mark, mostly because that's what was asked of me at work. There might have been some benefit in working longer hours voluntarily, but I would not have been directly compensated for them and I have a life to live outside of work.

I know this is the privilege of the skilled European tech-worker, and thank god I am one.

pc86• 13 years ago

> Almost everyone who has ever lived (and almost everyone living today) would consider themselves lucky to have the spending power of an American on minimum wage.

And those people you're speaking of live in rural China or sub-Saharan Africa. Someone is not "lucky" by any global standard to be making minimum wage delivering pizzas in NYC or LA.

JoeAltmaier2• 13 years ago

Oh come on. That person is a bus ride away from some cheaper place, where they can live in comparative comfort.

Its exactly those available resources that separate 1st-world from 3rd-world. We are like fish, who cannot sense the water.

minopret• 13 years ago

I suppose nearly all of those reading Hacker News (and the majority of the people in USA) are in the global 2% or so, at least if we measure similarly as here: http://www.globalrichlist.com/

ruswick2• 13 years ago

The idea is obviously appealing, but is a pipe dream to which employers will never agree. Employers don't care about one's utility over a lifetime, because they only have access to laborers for a finite period of time. (In most cases 3-6 years.) Employers thus want to maximize utility in the short term. Fewer hours means less work and thus companies have to lower salaries, which may make this untenable for workers, and hire more people to compensate for these reduced workweeks, adding to fixed-costs like healthcare and making this untenable for employers.

Would it be great to spend more time with friends, sleeping or otherwise pursuing leisure? Obviously. But the labor market doesn't care about one's happiness (and the companies that do institute "leisure cultures" usually explicitly state that they do so simply because it increases productivity. In this case, companies don't care about you for your sake, they care about you for their own sake) and pursuing it comes at a loss of compensation.

seagreen• 13 years ago

Spending more time with kids is good, still . .

I want a beautiful and open network all across the planet. I want to see North Korea become free, and sit drinking coffee in a café in Pyongyang. I want Africa to become a garden stretching from Cape Town to Khartoum. I want to visit the Silicon Valley of the Congo, and take the suborbital to Tokyo if I'm in the mood for sushi that night. I want cold sleep and ramships and I want to see sunrise on Alpha Centaur Bb (after moving its orbit out a bit:)

No matter how good leisure is in the short term, if it slows those goals down I'm against it.

There PG, call that middlebrow criticism!

dscrd• 13 years ago

We should work exactly the correct amount of hours a week. The correct amount varies between fields and people.

loca• 13 years ago

The New Economics Foundation (nef) proposes 21 hours:

http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/21-hours

A ‘normal’ working week of 21 hours could help to address a range of urgent, interlinked problems: overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life.

cllns• 13 years ago

For those who are interested in more than the cursory description offered in the article, I also came across this:

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13339-the-25-hour-work-

Osiris• 13 years ago

It would be interesting if people were paid on some measure of productivity rather than just raw hours. Then we could get paid based on our contribution to economic output. Of course, the problem with that is how to do you measure productivity?

wildgift6• 13 years ago

How do you measure productivity for management, especially.

rowanseymour• 13 years ago

A counter philosophy to this is that we should be striving to find jobs that we enjoy and find so fulfilling that we don't mind working 40+ hours per week... until we're 80...

I say that wondering how realistic that is and whether that's a yet another imaginary carrot dangling over our heads to make us work harder. I like my job a lot (software developer making medical software for clinics in Kenya) but flip I'd love a 4 day week because there's always something more enjoyable than work. And I'm not sure if every single job we need people to do can be that fulfilling raison d'être for someone.

afterburner2• 13 years ago

Let's get 6-8 weeks of vacation like Europeans too, that's what I keep arguing for...

enraged_camel• 13 years ago

Well, 25 hours a week is for how long your average worker is productive throughout the typical work-week anyway. The rest is spent dicking around on the Internet and socializing with coworkers.

I feel like if we cut down the "official" work to 25 hours, people would suddenly realize that they need to be a lot more productive to get the same amount of work done. No more pointless interruptions. No more bullshit meetings. Everyone would try to get shit done, and enjoy the extra three hours they get everyday and be a lot happier.

pkorzeniewski• 13 years ago

Being on site is just as important as being productive. Employers buy your time and in these 8 hours a day, whenever something pops up and has to be done quickly, you have to be ready to take on it.

simonh• 13 years ago

One problem I've come to appreciate in Britain is that we are all in direct competition with each other for access to good housing. As disposable incomes go up, property prices rocket as the middle class use their new wealth to bid up the price of houses in an attempt to trade that wealth for a nicer place to live. I'm keenly aware of this because that's exactly what my wife and I have been doing. A big chunk of our income goes into our mortgage.

The dynamic my well be very different in other countries. In the USA for example there's much more scope for increasing the supply of housing, something that's harder to do in a more densely populated country like the UK. I think this is why the US had a property crash while we didn't - the housing market here is a lot less elastic.

Still, my point is that if incomes generally go up, a proportion of that will be expended in price wars over scarce local resources, property being the most obvious example.

wildgift6• 13 years ago

"We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor after pulling another 14-hour day of intensive data gathering and number-crunching."

gergderkson• 13 years ago

If everyone only worked 25 hours per week, nothing of value would be accomplished.

nacker• 13 years ago

Why just extend work in the direction of the aged? I think that instead of going to school, children over the age of 12 should have the option of working 25 hours a week as apprentices.

kyllo• 13 years ago

The true sign of progress will be that everyone has a bit more freedom to decide how many hours per week they work. In order for that to happen, the job market needs to become a lot more liquid. That will happen when needed benefits like health insurance and basic income are met by the government, and most people are able to work on a freelance or contract basis, and are able to take time off in between jobs without so much risk, because they are not dependent on a specific employer. I don't think 25 hours will necessarily be the standard, so much as I think that there won't really be a standard that everyone is expected to adhere to anymore. 40 hours is totally arbitrary in a way that smacks of Communism.

czbond• 13 years ago

The reality of what will happen in the U.S. is the exact opposite. If anyone watched the recent Davos Economic Summitt - U.S. companies can no longer easily grow using debt instruments, which just leaves productivity and competitiveness.

Translation: Employees will be working more hours for easily the next 5 years.

We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

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