The 24-Hour Workweek That Never Arrived
Why are we still working this hard?
An hour of American work now produces two and a half times what it did in 1973, yet the forty-hour week is unchanged and hours per person are 10 percent higher. The author traces where the freed time went: eighteen hours never reached ordinary paychecks, and six more arrived as higher pay that couldn't be taken as time. The culprit is the wage itself, which must act as a price, a ticket to a share of output, and a place in the world — three jobs that no longer pull the same way.
The day a machine learns your job, you are working exactly as hard as you did the day before, and your hour is worth less.
- j2kun
> I wrote this with Claude Fable 5.2, Anthropic’s AI model. If you don’t trust AI, just know that these are the same models that are currently wiping the floor with every other field, and I really didn’t try and force fable to write something I already agreed with. Actually, this whole experience has been me realising just how wrong I am about some things. Anyways, Claude did the measurements with me, drew the figures and drafted most of the text from my earlier essays.
Condescending attitude aside, if I wanted to hear what Fable says about this, I'd ask Fable myself. I want to hear what YOU have to say about this.
- jpatten
I'm no economist but it seems like competition for housing drives up prices as wages increase. Also, more generally, people's happiness seems to be more correlated with their economic rank in a society, rather than their wealth in absolute terms [1]. So, people want to do better than their neighbors, not just do well.
1. Boyce, Brown & Moore (2010), “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction”
- kjshsh123
So this is wrong mainly for two reasons:
1. We consume a lot more now than we did before. You could work less and consume more than you did in 1973 or whatever. But you wouldn't have the newest phone, half your kitchen's appliances, seatbelts or seatwarmers and a gps in your car, or air conditioning in your home. Even average home sizes have nearly doubled since 1973.
2. There is no economic law that productivity should equal wages. When there's decreasing marginal returns to labor, it's marginal productivity that determines wages. That's the current case. When there's increasing marginal returns to labor, then you get the corner solution where wages equal average labor productivity. That was rhe case before and what changed in 1973. That's when America's frontier closed and instead of growing outwards, America started to be forced to have to do more with what it already had.
The way out is to reopen the frontier which largely requires relaxing land use laws to allow building up and out.
Keynes is 100 years outdated as an economist. He's more relevant than most for some of his contributions. But his predictions and reasons for them were clearly not all correct.
- djoldman
Productivity and inflation are big subjects.
Just to touch on one important problem for which one must account:
Productivity over time is how much stuff you get out vs what you put in, from one time period to the next. Inflation is what the stuff costs over time.
But what do you do with stuff you used to make that you don't make now?
And the opposite: what do you do with stuff you make now that you didn't used to make?
If you look only at the the things that are almost exactly the same from one period to another, usually you find that the intuitions hold: food used to take 10% of our hours, now it takes .6%, etc. etc.
If you dig into the details of CPI and PPI, you'll quickly say, "waiiiiiit a second, can you really just do that?"
For example: they'll say that your tv or car now is "more stuff" because of "features." But if you had to make the old car now, you might be able to make way more of them for the same inputs.
- Dr_Birdbrain
The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society are willing to work this hard. The hardest working participants of the labor market will set the tone of the competition for high-paying jobs.
A typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.
- andai
This reminded me of a strange quote I heard a while ago:
"I think the problem we've had is, people decided they didn't want to work so much anymore. (...)
We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. (...)
So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude, and it's go to come through hurting the economy, and that's what the whole world, the governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality."
-Tim Gurney
- an0malous
Productivity gains have mostly gone to the investor class, they’re not only not working but making more for not working than they ever have. Elon could go sniff glue for a day and he’ll make more money than most of us would working 10 jobs for the rest of our lives.
- XenophileJKO
Nobody wants to admit they are having a 15 hour work week with AI, but if in office attendence is any indication, I think many knowledge workers are starting to reduce work hours. It is much easier to do so remotely.
Some are filling hours with more work however it seems like many are not increasing work volume, just quietly reducing the amount of labor.