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.
>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.
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.
Can I ask how you approached this issue with your employer(s)? I am willing to entertain that trade, but it doesn't appear many employers are willing to even think about it. They might fear it hurts employee relations or is simply too radical to comprehend.
I currently work three days a week for a reasonable salary.
Admittedly I live in New Zealand, so possibly the job market is different here (we're a pretty laid-back culture, and there's a shortage of good programmers).
I would suggest negotiating this arrangement when you're changing jobs. Your existing employer will likely be reluctant to reduce your hours, whereas (if you're any good) a new employer will be happy to have you for half of each week if the alternative is not having you at all. And it needs to be clear that that is the alternative. My current employer made me a couple of good full-time offers, which I declined: "I'm currently only looking for part time work, as I need the time to pursue my personal projects and interests."
Still on the theme of "It's better to have you part-time than not at all", you may be able to negotiate an ongoing part-time position at your existing workplace if you are seriously considering leaving (and thus the alternative is your leaving, and their not having you at all). Be careful about this, though. You want to maintain a good relationship. An ultimatum will do you no good. But if you're genuinely in-good-faith considering leaving, they may consider your offer.
You will probably have to try a number of different companies before you find one that will hire you on those terms. And, as with all bargaining, you need to be able to walk away.
DISCLAIMER: This worked for me the one time I tried it, but that may be complete coincidence.
Well, for example, at Google it's possible, some people I know work less than full week, however I doubt that this option is immediately available to a new hire.
That's a very subjective statement. I don't get even remotely burned out by 40 hours of work per week. I work every day of the week. I work when I want to. I don't have a family. I'm 32 years old. The organization of my life is by strict choice, and I love what I do, so I prefer to work longer hours. I'm more productive when I work 40+ hours.
I spend time learning, doing R&D / experimenting, doing product work, etc. The most fun I have is on the R&D. I've been doing it for 17 years straight and there's nothing else I'd rather be doing, I rarely suffer from exhaustion / burnout (and that's always when somethings fails, rather than feeling tired by the actual work).
This discussion is also going to vary dramatically based on the structure of your current life, including family / job / mood / etc. Adding further to the subjectivity of it.
I'm reading the Execute book by Josh Long and Drew Wilson and just last night they hit on the point that a few hours of 100% focused work mixed with a few 100% focused leisure hours a few times a day is more productive and satisfying then say 8 to 10 hours of 45% effort of work.
This is how Drew Wilson, creator of Space Box and many other works is able to achieve his high level of output. He manages his energy, listens to his body and mind, and does what is most suitable and productive knowing such things.
3 hours at 100% followed by 3 hours of leisure followed by 3 hours of 100% work would be 6 hours of 100% focused work. 6 solid hours of work is better than 8 hours of 50% focus (4 hours). Not only is the actual effort put in greater, but so is the focus and engagement which leads to even greater results.
>Sorry, I must disagree. Two people working 20 hours a week are refreshed, not burned out, have time for educationally side projects, etc.
Take a look at Brooks' The Mythical Man Month for data that demonstrates the opposite, at least in programming; I haven't followed the field closely, but education and industrial organization researchers have done similar work in other professions.
Brooks' was at IBM, they adhere to a 37.5 hours per week work schedule. Programmers who can produce 3-4 hours of real work per day are considered productive. Any more and you will start to burn them out.
We stuck to 37 when I was there, so everyone could take off a little early on a Friday.
I mean officially I was there 37, it was a good week if I was doing real, actual work for 20. Yes, I made up for it by working my tail off when it was needed.
We coders can be absurdly productive for short bursts, or be slow and steady. You can't have massively productive and steady for very long. In your early 20s you have a few years of this, but the more you push it then the more jaded you'll be later.
Not to detract from your overall point, but, as an IBMer, I can assure you that - while my full-time employment contract says max 37.5 hours - the reality is that at least 40 hours are expected.
1. That was about 40 years ago when the waterfall process was state of the art. Modern, iterative processes are much more flexible.
2. The loss of productivity levels off as the team size increases. Going from 50 to 100 developers is not the same as 1 to 2.
All said, I expect some loss of productivity is inevitable due to context switching and communication overhead but it isn't necessarily a major loss.
Pretty sure waterfall was never state of the art, rather an example of what not to do [0]. It's often held up as a straw man argument in promoting 'agile'. Brooks' book emphasises prototyping, and 'build one to throw away, you will anyway' which isn't 'waterfall'.
Brooks' book also clearly demonstrates that applying a dumb formula derived from the number of programmers doesn't predict the output, and using such a formula to estimate a project's timeline doesn't positively affect the project's outcome. It's main argument is that programmers added late to a project will actually cause it to take even longer to complete.
Brooks' book is remarkable - a lot of programming lore and culture originates there or is popularized by it. I'd compare it to casablanca or citizen kane rather than dismiss it out of hand.
In software, there is still economy in scale of a person's time. Throwing more people on a project is still detrimental even if you use something like Agile. It is a major loss.
The easy way to combat this is to have longer timelines for projects, or, if necessary, crunch periods followed by more relaxed recharge periods.
Brooks laid out a method as close to assembly line programming as he could, so yes, number of hours you mindlessly follow a formula would affect output. But no one programs like that now and I doubt they ever did. What we do now is closer to writing stories. How many writers do you know who spend a constant 40 hours per week writing for weeks on end?
It's meaningless to count hours for development work without also talking about how much of that time is spent doing actual work, and their velocity.
Someone who works 40 hours, takes regular breaks and keeps a moderate pace, sure. 40 hours of high pace concentrated development work? In the last 17 years of managing development teams, I've had maybe 1-2 people who could sustain that for more than a week or two at the time.
If it's 20 hours of time-on-task while in flow it's a TREMENDOUS amount of work in a knowledge worker job. We should all be so lucky to be so productive every week.
A lot of people's time is filled by very low-productive work such as excessive communication overhead, or fiddling around with low-quality tooling, etc.
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.
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.
Yes. It took decades of hard fights, including many that ended up in violent confrontations, to get the working day down from 12+ hours to about 8.
May 1 as an international day of labour demonstration was partly inspired by the immense effort of the US unions at fighting for the 8 hour day, and partly as a commemoration of the Haymarket massacre in Chicago that were part of that struggle:
Even today, there's plenty of people who want to reverse those gains. E.g. in the UK, our sitting PM is trying hard to get additional exemptions for the UK from the EU Working Time Directive because it limits how much extra time employers can demand and/or ask for.
>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.
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)
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.
“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
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.
> 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 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.
Another data point : the European countries with the longest holidays (France & Germany) are bailing out countries with the shortest holidays ( Greece Ireland Portugal)
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.
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)
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.
I was in the industry and left, and I know many that people I worked with have left as well after about 10 years.
In the UK, I might be mistaken as I read the article a while ago, but it is the (or top 5) industry where people spend less time compared to other creative/professional careers.
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.
"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.
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.
> Saying that poverty is significantly and astoundingly reduced
... is still going to get a lot of people angry, even if you explicitly limit your scope to the First World. It's a combination of lack of historical perspective coupled with a perception that admitting anything has improved is tantamount to agreeing with the people who think social welfare programs need to be eliminated.
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.
We have an organization here in the UK called the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, who lobby on poverty and publish statistics, but they use a relative measure of poverty as basically, being in the bottom third of the population. So, if your next-door neighbours on both sides are watching Blu-ray and you have a lowly DVD player, then they would count you as "living in poverty" for the purposes of the statistics they compile.
When you consider that the very poorest in the UK have free housing, welfare, free education and healthcare, etc, then "poverty" in a global sense is very obviously long since eliminated here.
> 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.
What if that person is a dad who has two kids, a wife, and parents living locally, who take care of their kids during the day? Not everyone can so easily be uprooted.
Yes, that's a difficult choice. Still, they have the choice. They can take the bus, or ride a train, or move in with the parents. Not to mention the free clinic open 24 hours, and the internet, and food stamps, and on and on.
The point is, its a 1st world problem no matter how you cut it. "My job is not satisfying. I wish I had more money for discretionary spending." These are not 'real' problems.
I gotta tell you: not everyone is on the internet. In the US, publicly usable internet usually comes in the form of wifi, or terminals at the library. Not everyone has a library near by. Not everyone has enough money for a cheap cellphone or cheap laptop to take advantage of free wifi. Internet cafes aren't a going concern here.
And some people are legitimately scared of computers! Is it their own problem? Emphatically yes. Is it also society's problem? Again, emphatically yes. Is it their own fault? Well that's a matter of opinion. I think we should solve the problem and then argue over blame if there is time left over.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is if you are waged. If salaried your lunch break is supposed to be built into your renumeration. But I know plenty of people taking 15-30 minute unpaid lunches verses an hour unpaid lunches just so they can leave the office in a reasonable amount of time.
> 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.
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.
Most of the studies that showed rapid mental decline in old age have been debunked. A 70 year old with no actual problems (e.g., Alzheimer's) is very likely to function perfectly fine mentally.
A 2002 study (published in the Alzheimer's and Dementia Journal) found that ~91% of people 70 and older were capable of normal mental function.
Seriously? How many 70 year old people do you know? Let say you need to urgently take your child to a doctor and can choose between a 30 yo and a 70 yo. What would you do?
Parent cited an experiment that found 70 year-olds to have mental functioning on par with young people. Would you like to argue against the study's conclusion in a meaningful way? Or are you just pointing out that regardless of what is true, humans tend to act in a biased and ineffective manner?
That's a straw man right there. Why would it matter? In terms of the decision making, the one with more knowledge is better. In terms of driving, it depends on if the 70 year old still has the PHYSICAL ability and acuity to drive a car, which is exactly what we weren't talking about.
If you look at a site/product like Lumosity.com, you can compare your results to other age groups. If you accept that the tests on Lumosity do test particular brain functions/areas then its clear to see that from the millions of user that take part, the performance average does decline with age. It's actually quite dramatic to see that a 40 year old that scores in the 90% in a test category, fits in at 50% among the 20 year olds.
You can't really get any meaningful results from a self selected sample.
Since there is no other evidence that a 40 year old in the 90th percentile for mental performance is equal to a 20 year old in the 50th percentile, it seems more than likely that the data is skewed.
Perhaps Lumosity.com attracts above average young people and below average older people (given those results, some variation on that theme is the likely explanation).
An otherwise almost imperceptible decline in mental function could have have a huge impact on ranking among top chess players simply because at the top levels the margins between players are so small.
If chess Grandmasters dropped in mental acuity as fast as those Luminosity results suggested, a 60 year old Grandmaster could be beaten by any young novice.
Also worth mentioning is that competitive chess is favors very quick thinking and action in a way that most careers don't.
>>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.
A 53 year old who has been programming for 30+ years is likely to be a good programmer because they managed to keep programming for all those years. How many of the less-talented people you started out with are still programming?
But I do agree that it without hard evidence, it's unfair to assume older programmers are slower or less capable. I have personally worked with some exceptional older programmers.
...typing and using computers? So you're comparing 20-30 year old programmers with 40 year old people who aren't even comfortable with computers? Yeah, I'd say apples are way better than oranges.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Even if you have robots you will still need a massive workforce to produce them, to get the resources to produce them, to check them, to maintain them, to repair them, to program them, to update them and so on. Or maybe you believe in a state of singularity in which all of this will happen at the same time? :)
Automation has already been happening in many industries, in case you have not noticed, and that did not result in lost job opportunities on the whole of the economy. Agriculture is also largely mechanized all around the world and you have only a very little portion of the population (5% or so) in developed countries to produce far enough for everyone.
Most jobs in developed countries are service related. These jobs will not disappear even if you automate the production part of the economy.
Exactly, nowadays the majority of people in the developed world are "working" in marketing, finance and other useless areas. It would be far better if they just stay home.
So what, then, do you think the purpose of technological advancement is? Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is way, way up. We are producing heaps more wealth per person than at any point in history, and yet we don't have much to show for it. Nowhere near proportional to the productivity increases, that's for certain.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not a Luddite by any stretch and I'm not suggesting we should go back to an agrarian society, but we have a serious economic and political problem where the benefits of technological advancement are going in overwhelming proportion to a very small subset of the population. If something isn't done about that, and soon, the resulting upheaval may force us back to pre-industrial living anyway (or more likely, much worse).
> GNI is just a grand total divided by population;
Right, per capita, as I stated, but really just GNI is fine too.
> people would be making more if the money was divided up evenly but it's not, particularly in the U.S
Unfortunately the google public data didn't have enough US data but take a look at these two charts for India.
First is just India's per capita GNI the second is India's income distribution over the same time frame. Notice how the income distribution is relatively flat and how the GNI is growing.
Actually, the wealth has accrued quite nicely to the top 1%, even more so to the top 0.01%. Whereas the rest of the population has seen real pay flatline as you say. That is the real problem.
Would you care to share your measuring system for how do decide if it is 1:1 or not? It seems complex to measure health, "wealth", happiness, and security. I sure haven't found any actionable or reasonably complete metrics in my readings, maybe I am bad at searching.
Not just ideology, the size of government in Scandinavia is way smaller than in other developed countries. See the economist article last week about this subject.
It's true that regulations are relatively low, in terms of invasive bureaucracy in the economy. Yet in Denmark we have a 37-hour maximum workweek, 8 weeks of vacation, and strong unemployment benefits, and all that doesn't seem to be ruining the country. Perhaps that can't be replicated elsewhere, but I don't see a solidly established relationship between working hours, unemployment benefits, and economic prosperity.
Out of interest, can you find out where the budget of the government in Denmark is spent in, and in what proportions ? On top of that, how much of welfare system relies on private actors instead of governmental/public ones?
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.
> 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.
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.
I think it is a good thing that individuals control their own money, and can choose to give it to whomever they want.
Can we agree that people with no money will starve to death unless they use violence to take food from someone, or the government uses violence to take food from someone on their behalf? The foodstamps of this great depression are equivalent to the soup lines of the old great depression: they prevent people from robbing, looting, and starving in the streets.
I don't know in the US, but here in Europe the gov't does not need to "use violence" for that. It is pretty much general consensus that people with no monies should get money (not "foodstamps") from the gov't, payed by our taxes, so they can live with dignity, independently of what the reason for their unemployment / poverty might be.
When Americans use the "use violence" argument, your argument doesn't work as a response, I'm afraid.
It is a libertarian tactic of assuming that anything the government does they don't like is use of violence, except for government protection of artificial property rights which is somehow usually magically exempt.
Just because naive libertarian polemicists use an argument doesn't make that argument incorrect.
>>>It is a libertarian tactic of assuming that anything the government does they don't like is use of violence, except for government protection of artificial property rights which is somehow usually magically exempt.
In my experience, libertarians universally agree with me when I say "artificial property rights are completely protected and propped up by the government's threat of violence". It is their favorite part of the how governments operate, because they do not recognize the benefits of collectivism (socialism, communism, prisoners dilemma, tragedy of the commons).
Notice how I have not told you anything about my personal political views.
I agree that the governments typically don't need to "use violence". Do you agree that the "threat of violence" is sufficient?
I can't speak to Europe as a whole or the specific country you are from. In the US, you can be put in jail for non-payment of taxes. We have good old debtors' prisons. Also, if you are hungry and take food that does not "belong to you", there are certain criminal laws that can result in imprisonment. How do European governments deal with non-payment of taxes and the taking of food?
By the way, US "foodstamps" are now called "EBT" and you get a normal looking debit card that has certain restrictions on how it can be used (no buying shoes, only food ingredients).
Agree for the current US, which is likely a large part of why they have food stamps, but no "living wage for doing whatever suits your fancy".
An argument could be made that much of the government funded research done at Bell Labs is worthless. An argument could be made that of the worthwhile things that have come out of this government research, transistors, lasers, and CCDs are the most far reaching (since transistors begat miniaturized electronics begat cell phones and computers begat the internet).
These government researchers were largely doing "whatever suited their fancy" and most of it was wasted effort and tax money. An argument could be made that the money and effort wasted was worth the amazing results.
The government and by extension its citizens acknowledge and accept that most government funded research won't pan out. Important details that make this work:
1) Only a very small fraction of the population is doing government funded research. Large population supporting small research operations is sustainable.
2) The research is vetted on some level, and it is in a technical field. Technical research has an established history of paying dividends (even though it finds many dead-ends)
I disagree with your point 1): very many Americans are unemployed or underemployed, and being supported by welfare initiatives such as unemployment, medicare, and food stamps. Some significant fraction could be employed doing basic research instead of sitting at home watching TV and looking for jobs that aren't being offered by corporations that are making more profits than ever through fractional reserve lending and bailouts.
An example of underemployment in our industry: there are very many individuals with government funded computer scientists with BS, MS, and PHD degrees, that are employed in lucrative positions as code monkeys and computer janitors. These people should be inventing the next UNIX and IPV8 and advanced networking algorithms and image recognition and self driving cars. I'm not educated on whether strong AI is a pipe dream or not but weak AI has helped with image recognition and encryption breaking and genetic learning and spam filtering and web searching.
I think your initial point that "citizens acknowledge and accept that most government funded research won't pan out" is highly highly controversial in the US among some democrats, republicans, and most libertarians. Many want to cut non-military blue-sky research completely. These people call themselves neo-conservatives, President George W. Bush was a champion of the ethos. Liberals and normal conservatives are a bit sneakier on their wishes to de-fund research.
I think you do that very real debate a disservice by minimizing the argument in this way. You know that's not the actual argument and it helps no one to propagate falsehoods.
The context of this discussion is this comment by olliesaunders:
> 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.
The whole point here is that we aren't limited to what our employer "allows" us to do. We choose to follow the directions of any particular employer because it typically rewards us with money, which we can use to survive.
You are making the argument that people in the US don't have options. Of course they have options. The costs may be high to exercise those options, but that doesn't mean they don't have them.
And of course, the larger point:
> We should all do whatever the fuck we want, until we die.
Applies equally to employers as it does to everyone else.
>>>The context of this discussion is this comment by olliesaunders:
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, I will try to explain my original comment for you.
I agree with you that starting a business is possible in the legal sense and it is a culturally acceptable thing to do. The US government and the general socio-economic climate of the US makes it morally, legally, and socio-economically possible to start a business. Agreed.
Here is my response to olliesaunders:
>>>Most people in the United States do not have this option [starting a business] because they do not have enough money to do so.
If starting a business takes X amount of time, Y amount of money, and Z amount of skill, my contention is that most Americans do not have sufficient levels of each. To say nothing of the luck involved.
So with that in mind, let me reply to part of your most recent comment:
>>>You are making the argument that people in the US don't have options. Of course they have options.
This I agree with, as stated above.
>>>The costs may be high to exercise those options, but that doesn't mean they don't have them.
This I do not agree with. Starting a business costs Q amount of money. A certain segment of the population will never earn that much money in their entire lives.
To be snarky, I will likely never earn enough money to buy an island. The fact that it is legal to buy an island does not make buying an island an option for me.
Agree for software people, agree for middle class people with no children. Vast swathes of the population are not included. 30% of the population has less than 10k in net wealth. Think someone with a mortgage but no equity(or even underwater) and no assets. For this person, money is a very key issue since they are one non-emergency medical issue(cancer, heart disease, diabetes) away from death assuming they have insurance. If they don't have insurance, they will die if they develop a medical issue due to lack of ability to pay for their treatments or medication.
For those with money, don't forget luck. Also don't forget timing, but I repeat myself.
The money thing comes into play for the lower 30% of the population which has 10k to -infinity in net worth. Here's a tip: price out some business plans, then look up the percentage of the US population has enough net worth[1] to fund or convince a bank to fund their plan.
In any modern economy, you can redefine a business plan that requires capital into one that does not. The problem is rather what will you live off while the business is still taking off? That is where you may need savings. But then again, it is possible for approximately anybody to cut their expenses to less than 25% of what they are today. (1) Move to a cheaper area (2) get rid of everything you can do without. And then you will see what the real problem is: They hang out to things they could get rid off. This is what it truly means: "they do not have enough money to do so".
>>>It is possible for approximately anybody to cut their expenses to less than 25% of what they are today.
I will strongly agree for consumer purchases by people at or above the median household income in America. Strongly disagree for medical purchases, since if you try to save money you may die.
I'd love to see some numbers or studies to prove your claim as it applies to Americans in poverty. Even some anecdotal math would be fine, using craigslist apartments and bus ticket costs and food costs and medical costs and etc. Poverty line is 23,050 for a family of 4.
November 2012: 20% of American children live in poverty
The poverty numbers are cooked to drum up support for the socialist welfare apparatus. For example, if a 17 year old's family moves and they stay behind with a friend's family, they are classified as a "homeless child".
Note: Poverty in my post is intended to mean "low income". I understand that homeless means "without home". How does your post relate to the part of my post that you quoted?
Additionally, do you have any evidence for your assertion?
Yea, if you didn't take that job playing video games for $1M/minute then it's your fault, idiot. Oh wait, that doesn't exist and all and your argument is juvenile.
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.
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.
Wikipedia>>>In some cases, men and boys that have been raped (statutorily or otherwise) by women have been forced to pay child support to their rapists.[1]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
The regulations just put a maximum; there is nothing preventing companies from offering lower hours if they wish. Before those maximums were brought in, you had the same situation as now, just with more hours being standard: you had to agree to 6-days-a-week, 10+ hour days, or nothing. The union movement successfully negotiated that down to 5-days-a-week, 8-hour days as a cap, which was at least an improvement.
Note that there are drawbacks in several countries of not working "full time". You do not get the same rights towards a pension, you do not get the same rules for overtime, and other benefits do not apply. Therefore there is also a strong incentive, based on regulations, not to work less than 40 hours either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Shop at the Dollar Store, Goodwill, Aldi, etc. Look for foreclosed, abandoned, and other dirt cheap real estate; search Zillow.com for sub-$1000 properties (not a typo). Plant a garden. Move. No excuses.
You can eat very healthily on the cheap. Lots of different beans and grains, particularly rice.
Meat is very expensive so generally people eating frugally avoid it nearly entirely, but depending on where you live it may be cheap and practical to raise some chickens if you really feel you need it.
I've found a while ago an article - "eating healthily for $3 a day" (googe it). I found it to be a very interesting read (and an inspiring business idea, BTW). If you start there, you'll get $7/day left for other needs.
I live in the bay area, Married, have 2 kids and work in SF.
Show me how to live on $10/day.
Consider me your student.
Unless your comment of "showing me how to live on $10/day" is really titled "show a homeless 15 year-old with no job, family or financial obligations how to subsist on $10/day"
If you really can show me how to live on less than the cost it is for me to get to work ($7.10, BTW) then i will accept you as my teacher. (I already ride my bike EVERYWHERE - literally - I do not personally drive at all)
If not, then fuck you you smug ass - it costs to live.
> If not, then fuck you you smug ass - it costs to live.
Wow. Now why was that necessary?
Poster makes a valid point – $10 daily will buy you an existence that looks positively palatial to some, and near a pauper to others. You will be living well, relative to any number of other humans, but lacking the things you want.
For example, you probably stop living in the Bay Area.
You do realize that the bay area's cost of living is astronomical, right? He's not slagging on the area or anything...
Regardless, if you actually have an interest in low cost living, hit up Joey Hess. He, in this country, pays something around $4-5 a day in rent/utilities. Using the remaining money frugally for food and other needs is fairly trivial.
If you want to live in the bay area, you have to work for it. If you want to live on $10 a day, the point is you dont want to work for it. You can't have both.
Living on $10 a day can be done. Go build an earthship in Taos.
Sure you do! So do I! You and I probably live in the most expensive 1% of places on the planet. We live incredible lives - our existences are better on average than anything any king had 150 years ago. We have whatever food we want at whatever time in the year we want it. We have phenomenal connectivity and mobility and, if we need to be on the other side of the planet in 48 hours time, that's doable.
Of course, I want more. The guy next door has a Range Rover and a Porsche. But I know there are literally billions of people who cannot imagine the luxury in which I live.
The gargantuan difference between kings of old and us today, the critical difference that these comparisons always miss, is that whatever lifestyle you choose, you have to work roughly the same number of hours to maintain it.
If you are a programmer, you can't just decide to work 10 hours a week for $25k and live a $25k lifestyle. If you want to earn $25k, you'll probably still have to work full time to do it. Regardless of the comforts we enjoy, we are still slaves to the workweek (there's not enough contract work for every programmer or designer to go freelance), and that is why it's right to complain.
We may have more "things" per person than Arthur himself, yet we lack the freedom and status of being royalty.
Stay in the USA. Easy to find affordable real estate no matter your budget.
Too many naysayers don't realize how ridiculous their local cost of living is, and how a simple move can cut that by orders of magnitude.
The key is being willing to move. Once you are, options abound. Get busy on http://zillow.com and search regions and price ranges; to get in the mindset, start by searching whole states for properties under $1000 (not a typo).
I've noticed (at least grokking it more than usual) of late "it costs to live" is a very popular, and deeply misguided, and financially devastating, frame of mind. Yes, of course, on its face the statement is true ... but it belies an existence which is completely ruled by our advertising-driven culture, in an ultimately self-destructive (in a "keep the host alive as long as possible" way) manner. The mindset places spending as the top priority; doesn't matter what the income is, what orders-of-magnitude-cheaper alternatives there are, or the long-term financial consequences, so long as swiping plastic gets results then spend we shall because "it costs to live."
Thus we have a nation saddled with $54K debt per person, and intelligent productive people getting obscenely abusive about the suggestion that living in one of the most expensive places in the world probably isn't a good idea.
Right now in arm's reach on my desk I have a can with enough seeds in it to plant an acre. Being non-hybrid/GM seeds, the $40 cost amortizes to $1/year to feed a family of four for the rest of my life. Yes, it "costs to live" - but you're loading the phrase with far more baggage than necessary.
> 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."
Jesus, you and ctdonath sound like 20-something morons.
Get a fucking life with several mortgages and children.
Or, better yet - go live the idolized life of the genius software development hermit you both appear to think yourself to be. What a wonderful life that will be.
I am so sick of these douchebag HNers that all think of themselves to be the next rails revolution and have no fucking clue as to what it actually costs to live a normal life in Silicon Valley with kids (even when, as I have, you have been living and working in tech for 20 years)
> "Get ... several mortgages and children."
> "live a normal life in Silicon Valley with kids"
It seems to me this is exactly the point being made. You can live on a lot less money than whatever you currently consider "normal", but not necessarily in your current location or at your current level of consumption.
Whatever it costs you to live comfortably in SV with kids, it probably costs me half that to live comfortably in Denver with kids. I know of families living on less than half of what I do in places like Japan, who would consider themselves quite comfortable.
If financing your current lifestyle leaves you with no free time to enjoy life, you're a slave to that lifestyle -- whether it's on $5k or $500k a year. If "living in Silicon Valley" is non-negotiable, it's going to take a lot more earning power to get out of that type of "slavery" than if you're willing to live in Belize.
> it probably costs me half that to live comfortably in Denver with kids.
That's a horrible comparison. The difference in potential salaries, potential connections, business opportunities and so on would put make Denver the expensive one IMO (costs half as much as SV to have none of those advantages? wtf!).
> "The difference in potential salaries, potential connections, business opportunities and so on would put make Denver the expensive one IMO"
If you're one of those near the top of the spectrum, making 25 or more times the median salary or starting up a business that truly blows up, perhaps. In which case you wouldn't be complaining that it's hard to raise kids in SV.
If you're an average joe coder, or even fairly above average, you're making 10% less in Denver and you have fewer options for tech companies (but still plenty locally, and some decent remote options). But you can buy a nice house here for well under $200k and live ten minutes from work. For the vast majority of people, it's far less expensive.
The point here is not to convince you, personally, to move to Denver. Just to clarify that there's a whole spectrum of places to live at all sorts of prices, with all sorts of advantages and disadvantages. The GGP post implied that "live a normal life in SV" was the only option, which is of course absurd. There are advantages to living in SV, but they do not come without costs.
If something else about life is bothering you, it's probably best not to take it out on us naive 20-somethings. Either way it's clear something about this thread has deeply upset you (happens to all of us), so if it's something deeper going on I wish you luck sorting it out. If not, at the least, I too wish it was possible to live on $10/day and still have some semblance of a family and social life.
I met a lot of people probably like samstave, making a lot of uninspired decisions, like drowning themselves in debt and such, then here comes someone telling about $10/day... Those people feel miserably and "deeply upset" of course, especially because there is no easy way out.
It doesn't even have to take "uninspired" decisions. Simply having other human beings depend on you for their existence is enough to make escaping the system impossible, along with a number of other hurdles like lacking transportation to wherever $10/day is enough.
> ... what it actually costs to live a normal life in Silicon Valley with kids ...
By design, the Valley's zoning laws create an artificial shortage of housing units. It costs a lot to live a "normal life" in order to keep out the riff raff.
> 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).
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.
Actually, monopolies come from the government explicitly banning or regulating away competition.
Yes, it's true that you can't get the nice properties of a free market without some conditions being met. Specifically, you need the government to be the arbiter of physical force between people. Otherwise, you have gang warfare (anarchism).
All economic discussions of free markets that I have ever heard have implicitly or explicitly stated that one of the necessary oversights of government is to break up or regulate natural monopoly-prone industries.
It's just that it's a false concept that doesn't actually exist.
Take electricity, for example.
First, there are many large companies that could raise the necessary capital to build power plants and electric transmission lines.
Second, people can always get together and form a non-profit power company if the normal market isn't providing stable, competitive prices. (By "people" I mean, say, the people of an entire US state.)
Third, having deregulated electricity systems would open up the field to innovation, such that we'd probably all have small nuclear reactors at our houses, or wireless power transmission, or something.
So, in conclusion, a "natural monopoly" is not a true monopoly. It's a false concept.
>>> It's not like I've never heard of [the concept of natural monopolies].
You have the benefit of the doubt from me, but your specific arguments leave out the installation phase of the electrical grid, which I'm sure you are very familiar with.
>>>First, there are many large companies that could raise the necessary capital to build power plants and electric transmission lines.
Agree, but capital isn't the only thing. You have to put the electrical lines into the ground, disrupting traffic. The costs and capital of the electrical system are not what makes it a natural monopoly, the physical reality of our current technology does (pending wireless transmission as you mention later).
The current physical reality is solved by having the government own the last mile(for some definition of mile), while electrical providers can connect at hubs. This is how it works in places where the population understands the specifics of natural monopolies.
>>>Third, having deregulated electricity systems would open up the field to innovation, such that we'd probably all have small nuclear reactors at our houses, or wireless power transmission, or something.
The biggest problem is that these technologies do not yet exist. Maybe in the future they will be stymied by regulation, but if they were invented today I can't think of an electrical grid regulation that would stop them. Remember, consumers can hook up power generating technology to the grid already: solar panels.
>>>Second, people can always get together and form a non-profit power company if the normal market isn't providing stable, competitive prices. (By "people" I mean, say, the people of an entire US state.)
Businesses are in the business of making money. When a corporation thinks it can make money by suing municipalities that form broadband networks, they do so. Like in Lafayette.
Want to know why this isn't all over the news, with the competing ISPs and cable companies badmouthing these bad corporate actions? Because the cable companies and the ISPs and the media companies are largely owned by the same people, and collude monopolistically. This is a very recent accomplishment: regulations existed to prevent it but were overturned by the deregulation achieved through the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
I was under the impression that the "last mile" was owned by whatever company had been granted the local monopoly. If the "last mile" is owned by the government, and the power companies connect at hubs, then there is no actual "natural monopoly." I think that's actually a good solution.
A better solution would be to have the "last mile" owned by the people who own properties, but that may be nit picking. And I think that's probably how things would have eventually developed without government intervention.
Now, I think that in reality, power companies (in the US, at least) almost always are regulatory monopolies, i.e., government-granted ones. But, because of the "last mile" solution, they don't _need_ to be.
In summary, I feel like my point that natural monopolies don't exist is still supported.
When a corporation thinks it can make money by suing municipalities that form broadband networks, they do so. Like in Lafayette.
You can't (logically) use one abuse of government power to justify other government power that counteracts it, which seems to be your argument.
In the example you gave, the abuse is being able to win invalid lawsuits, and that is being used to justify government regulation of arbitrary industries (telco, in this specific case).
Better to just make it so you can't win invalid lawsuits.
Because the cable companies and the ISPs and the media companies are largely owned by the same people, and collude monopolistically.
They do collude monopolistically: the telcos have government-granted regulatory monopolies.
deregulation achieved through the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Given that the telco industry is 100% made up of government-granted regulatory monopolies, this act clearly did not implement deregulation.
>>>Given that the telco industry is 100% made up of government-granted regulatory monopolies, this act clearly did not implement deregulation.
I do not think it is controversial to say that deregulation is the act or process of removing or reducing state regulations. I have checked several dictionaries and encyclopedias, on line and dead-tree.
So a slight reduction in the regulatory laws that contributed to the formation of "government-granted regulatory monopolies" is deregulation. Therefore, the 1996 telecommunications Act of 1996 is deregulation, since it reduced and removed some, but not all, regulatory laws.
If we can agree on this, I will reply to the rest of your comment. If we disagree I can still reply, but the definition is really important to my argument.
I think that a _proper_ definition of "deregulation" is "completely removing regulation." Anything short of that is "partial deregulaiton."
I think that many people act as if and/or think that a proper definition of "deregulation" is "reducing regulation."
However, I see no point in arguing about definitions. I propose that we just use the terms "complete deregulation" and "partial deregulation" from here on out, so as to be non-ambiguous.
Given this, let me state my stance on partial deregulation. I thought about stating it earlier, but it seemed just barely too tangential.
I think partial deregulation is often much worse than regulation.
For example, regulation may take the form of "Cable company X has the exclusive right to lay coaxial cable in our city. In return, cable company X must allow our city to have our own special channel where we can post public announcements; and, it must lay wire to all areas of the city, regardless of income level; and, it must allow the city to set rates that subscribers can be charged."
Under partial deregulation, X may be allowed to set whatever rates it wants, but still have the exclusive right to lay coaxial cable. So, it can gouge customers.
In this case, partial deregulation didn't correct a situation in which the government was overstepping its bounds. It partially corrected it, and in doing so, made things worse.
I think this is overwhelmingly the kind of thing that happens with partial deregulation, and I think partial deregulation is overwhelmingly what happens these days when politicians talk about deregulation.
Sorry, I know you just wanted me to agree/disagree with your definition rather than adding a bunch of new intellectual content... but I figured the above would be helpful (and likely similar to what you were thinking).
>>>However, I see no point in arguing about definitions. I propose that we just use the terms "complete deregulation" and "partial deregulation" from here on out, so as to be non-ambiguous.
Agreed. All dictionaries disagree, but I'm not talking to any of them.
I believe that all reasonable people agree that history has shown that monopolies are inefficient in a capitalist system(see the 1920s for example). I feel that government-granted regulatory monopolies are also inefficient in a capitalist system. From your comments, I assume that you agree with both of these things, please let me know if you have a different view.
My understanding of the invention of regulations is this: Full deregulation of business seems like the best possible solution, until the point that companies become so big that they form monopolies that stifle competition. Then the government has to come in and regulate them until they are no longer monopolies. From your comments, I assume that you agree with this, let me know if you have different views.
I have to go eat but I have a comment written up about natural monopolies with relation to telcos ready to be edited and then posted.
Full deregulation of business seems like the best possible solution, until the point that companies become so big that they form monopolies that stifle competition. Then the government has to come in and regulate them until they are no longer monopolies. From your comments, I assume that you agree with this, let me know if you have different views.
Well, I don't think natural monopolies exist (as we discussed previously), only regulatory monopolies.
So, I don't think companies can become so big that they become natural monopolies.
I had written about some example cases that help support this (IBM, MS, Bell Telephone), but it was too long and probably not worth it, so I removed them.
If you can explain to me how anarchism would work "in practice" so as to not be gang warfare, or point me to an explanation, I'd appreciate it. So far, nobody has ever taken me up on this. I'm pretty sure I'm right, but I'd like to see good arguments against my own position.
Probably no one has ever "taken you up on this" because the body of literature on Anarchy is enough to be a library on it's own. Since you've somehow managed to miss it means you're unlikely to read anything anyone would point you at.
It's heavily cited so you can go as deep as you care to.
P.S.: The short answer is: the "gang warfare" scenario comes from bartering, whether with money or direct bartering (e.g. trade 100 loafs of bread for a bicycle). For Anarchism to work, you'd need to get rid of capitalism and bartering completely. Think Star-trek.
Also note, I'm not arguing for anarchism but rather against ignorance. I personally don't think the world is ready for anarchism but at least I know what it actually is.
If you believe this, do you also believe in minimising government enforcement of private property rights?
I ask, because this argument about the "proper role" of government tends to start growing all kinds of exceptions that expand the role of government the moment someone starts taking it to its logical conclusion and argues for removing protections of exclusive access and use of land in particular, as a means of maximising liberty by removing government enforcement of artificial monopolies.
Most countries even today do have substantial exceptions to private property rights for the purpose of increasing liberty for society as a whole (e.g. granting access to natural resources to society as a whole).
If you believe this, do you also believe in minimising government enforcement of private property rights?
I think government should enforce all private property rights, although perhaps at an indirect level (e.g. you still have to lock your door, but the government ultimately will punish people who break in).
However, the question of what is a property right and what is not is germane.
argues for removing protections of exclusive access and use of land in particular
If two people can do something simultaneouly without one initiating force against the other, then property rights don't apply. Sometimes it falls to the legal system (e.g. convention) to stipulate the precise boundaries.
For example, if a utility company wants to run power lines below my land, then unless that prevents me from doing something underground that I'm already doing, I think they have the right to do so, as long as the lines can be installed without causing me significant inconvenience (and with proper forewarning).
So, basically, you establish property rights by actually using the property in a certain fashion.
have substantial exceptions to private property rights for the purpose of increasing liberty for society as a whole
I think that's a false example. Society is just composed of individual people. If you take away one person's rights, it may increase somebody else's access to something (e.g., say, birth control), but it does not increase _liberty_.
(e.g. granting access to natural resources to society as a whole)
I don't really see how natural resources _wouldn't_ be available to society as a whole.
That's where you'll get disagreements; your reasoning doesn't apply if the exclusive access and use of land isn't considered an artificial monopoly. Particularly, 'artificial' is usually defined as something man-made, yet property rights are extremely common among other animals as well, even if they haven't developed a moral framework to justify them.
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.
Only the top 1% has seen a dramatic change in tax burden over that time frame, for everyone else taxes have either stayed steady or gone up overall. The most important parts of this graph are the middle, second, and top quintiles, who should be the most capable of putting money aside. However, their federal tax burdens all rose substantially. And the recent reduction in tax rates has only occurred during a massive economic contraction so there hasn't been a true opportunity for most people to make use of the lower rates yet.
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.
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.