> 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.
Ohhh this explains why it was kind of awkward to read. I'm not sure how to explain it, like look at this:
> Benefits look like a second source for everyone else. But 68 cents of every tax dollar in America is raised from pay for work, so a benefit is mostly a claim on somebody else’s wage. Follow the money far enough and nine households in ten are living on each other’s wages. We live off the earth and off the machines we’ve built on it. Our share of what they produce reaches us through one narrow channel, which is being paid for a job.
It's like you're reading something backwards. The content is there, but it's like I have to do a double take after every sentence.
In my experience, many Americans hate having discussions about inequality. I think to them, taxing the successful to subsidize the unsuccessful feels like punishing the winner for playing well and rewarding the loser for resting. It's a very black and white view of the world.
Americans overwhelmingly believe they are "not yet millionaires" and also victims at the same time.
This manifests as policy that harms most Americans while benefiting the rich/elite. Americans idolize the rich/celebrity while also claiming to be victimized by them. Its so weird.
"When I'm rich I want these privileges."
Americans also overwhelmingly misrepresent themselves as better as they are in regards to a variety of social stances. Animal rights, trans rights, race in general, the environment, homelessness, China/foreigners, etc. Americans say they support causes but their actions are the opposite, because "in my circumstance" excuses. There is always an excuse.
My saying this will really piss off a lot of Americans who misrepresent themselves. Thats why we hate having conversations about it, it means we have to be honest and that really upsets a lot of Americans. A lot of Americans also will take a "Okay sure but I'm a victim" stance. Call em out and see how quickly an american claims businesses, politicians, or something else is the bigger issue. No accountability for the outcome of our actions. It's just a bunch of dishonesty
Hey, just to help set the record straight, I wrote the original piece and I want to say that I edited the post to add "the help of", as I thought that was more accurate anyways after seeing the above comment. So, they didn't do anything wrong beyond perhaps being a bit too harsh on my work.
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”
This is why Keynes' prediction "... that technological progress and rising productivity would lead to a 15-hour workweek (about 3 hours a day) by the year 2030." was so wrong. He couldn't imaging the increase in our demand for standard of living which has becomes a hamster wheel. He just saw that we'd no longer need to grow our own food or collect water or chop wood to stay warm or hand wash clothes or any of the other huge labor needs of the previous century.
I would work fewer hours/days if I could. Employers mostly don't like this. Also, working fewer hours could affect my ability to obtain health insurance in the U.S.
I guess the point is that you cannot work less if the others don't.
If we all agreed to work less (and have less), it would actually work. But as soon as competition enters the game (some people work more and have more)...
> I guess the point is that you cannot work less if the others don't.
Ah, damn, that's the catch with everything isn't. As alway, the only winning move appears to be not to play, and to even get to state where you can drop out, you need to play well for at least a while.
If anything, it’s many of the basics that have become more expensive. Housing and education are far more expensive today then 100 years ago (as a share of average salary). And some essentials like health care, while more effective today, definitely absorbs a much higher share of people’s wallets (and the nation’s GDP).
Totally. If business can ship more in less time. They won’t stop at 15-hour, they will keep shipping more because competition and hamster wheel. In fact, I feel like the amount of work is actually increasing too…
> people's happiness seems to be more correlated with their economic rank in a society
That may be broadly true, but it's descriptive, not prescriptive.
There are many relatively poor people (with physical needs met, but not always) who are far happier than most of the top 1%. The secret is character -- things like contentment, thankfulness, and showing faithful love to family and people in general.
more simply, my happiness is correlated with how few obligations i have, especially obligations im uninterested in, such as paying banks interest on loans
The "golden billion" people almost all live in luxury, by the standards of an early industrial society like the early 19th century Europe which Marx described, and daily use a ton of amenities which even the mightiest king could not afford 1000 years ago. But we take it for granted.
I could have taken my savings and downshifted to a comfortable life in a third-world country. But instead I've put them in my wife's business, and keep working, while living in one of the most expensive cities in the Solar system. This is because I want a better education for my children, and success for the business. (The city is also enjoyable when I have the time.)
Then, some amenities are still expensive. Think about medical care, especially larger-scale like cardiac surgery. Well, think about the cost of a Claude subscription if you live otherwise happily for $25 / day in an inexpensive third-world countryside.
We work so much because there's still utility in it, in many cases. We have plenty, but not plenty enough.
You weren’t talking about running a business, but in investing into one. The question is do you primarily care about what the business is accomplishing in the world, or do you mostly just care about the money you get out of it.
Investing in my wife's business inevitabily comes with also doing quite some work for it :) I'm just not at helm. And it's not primarily money I care about here, but money is the lifeblood of business, you can't avoid earning and spending rather noticeable amounts.
> This is because I want a better education for my children
The research strongly suggests that the most important factor in giving a child a better education is the degree of parental involvement. Do you think working and focus on business success gives you more attention capacity to be involved with your child's education than the downshifted option would have?
Above some nonzero level of parental involvement, the peer group dominates. I want my kids to be around brighter, nicer kids; many of them gravitate to schools in expensive locations.
The research does show that peers do become significant in the teenage years, but suggests that parental involvement is still most important even then. Prior to that, the peer group seems to have little-to-no effect.
So, the good news is that even if you want to give your best in that area, you only have to endure for five years, give or take. Something tells me you won't be packing your bags after that, though. It may not be your intention, but the combination of words gives the impression you're actually more interested in the appearance of giving your child a good education than giving a good education.
I was one of the dumbest among the smart kids I hung out with, the bad influence, but we did have fun.
peers count for alot, parents count for alot. but what counts the most is the kid him/her self.
I say this because there came a moment, and I remember it well, when I knew that I knew how to learn. before that, I didn't not know that.
I knew WHAT I wanted to learn, just not how to learn it, how to nurture and guide myself. it was a big deal and it still is
I used to live in a big city and work as a software engineer.
I realized it wasn’t making me happy. Sitting inside everyday is not how I want to spend my life. Now I live in a mountain town of 10,000. There is no traffic. We ride everywhere in town. I work 10-20 hours a week on writing and books, depending on the season. I snowboard 100 days a season. We took our 6 month old on a trip for a year (wife got 18 months maternity leave) she works 3 days a week.
I cut our firewood so we have no heating bill, have no phone, no tv. We really enjoy the simple life. We have plenty of time to host dinner gatherings, hang out with our daughter, hike, camp etc.
We did a 10 day wilderness canoe trip with friends this summer, it was unreal.
We realized More money will not make us happier. We don’t want more money. More time doing the things we love with family and friends will.
The choice is there.
I live in a big city and work as a software engineer.
I love the city, the friend group, being into some communities that do not exist in small towns.
If you'd put the outdoorsy small town lifestyle on me, I'd kill myself.
I'm really happy for you it worked out, but what you suggest is not an overall solution. (And just imagine how your town would look like, if we all moved out of the cities ... we'd create new cities).
The fact that cities are big is cause by people wanting to live there, not elsewhere.
I am also very happy your choice has worked for you and you are happy.
Obviously it’s horses for courses.
That being said, would you take an extra paid week of leave if offered? What about two or three?
Would you be happier?
What if you had 20 weeks of paid leave? Would you be happier?
I think the very vast majority of people would work less if they could.
What do you do for health insurance? That seems to be the big thing at least when I was not a W-2, and the state marketplaces are not cheap and way worse than insurance from any employer I've had.
I work, earn money and pay taxes. So does my wife. We have a mortgage, and pay property taxes too.
Is it a requirement of society to work maxx?
If a doctor can earn $50k a year working one day a week and a Walmart worker has to work 40 hours a week to earn $50k, does the doctor have some kind of obligation to work and earn more? What if they just want the kind of life $50k a year allows for?
Should the Walmart worker do 80 hour weeks to contribute the same taxes as an engineer working 40 hour weeks?
Surely we all get to choose how much we work.
If I want to live in a 100 year old house and ride my bike with no phone and no tv, and modest lifestyle, it’s absurd I should be forced to work “full time” when I earn as much as I want to live the life I want. That is my choice.
"Research shows that average U.S. income growth is strongly related to rising house prices but is essentially unrelated to changes in the supply of housing units across metropolitan areas."
On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation by David Ricardo.
This book is most famous for being misquoted by nitwits trying to argue that globalization is always good for everyone, but if you had asked David Ricardo he would have said his most important result was that of Rent (later specified as differential rent or Ricardian rent), the idea that economic productivity tends to get squeezed onto land prices. A modern update would argue that this applies to assets more generally. Assets go up by squeezing productivity out of the main economy. Whether you think this is brilliant or terrible depends largely on whether you own lots of assets.
This. The last time I looked at this, worldwide (per-country*) median salary to house price ratio has stayed stuck at about 5 years for the past few decades.
Hey, hopefully some of you techbros can 'disrupt' the status quo.
> So, people want to do better than their neighbors, not just do well.
That's not what your data shows. It just shows that people don't want to be near the bottom of the pile, because it indicates they're being mistreated (which they are).
People don't want to "do better then their neighbors," they just don't want to be left behind by society.
Framing it the way you do makes it seem like everyone desires brutal social darwinism. It's not true. People just want to be treated fairly and live in a relatively egalitarian world.
I'm not dismissing what you are saying, but do you have evidence for what "people want"? In my experience, when somebody claims to know what people want then it tends to be a mix of "I want", "the people I know want", "I hope people want", "people should want", and a few others, rarely with any evidence.
For the interested: people prefer a 'fair' society, which means if a person puts in more effort it is fair they receive more, which creates inequality by the simple fact some work harder than others, some work less, and it is only fair they each are compensated equal to their effort.
Fortunately, it also makes unwinding the situation easier because assets can fall without upsetting local ranks (relatively speaking, on all three counts).
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.
> 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.
We're not allowed to do that. Environmental regulations, crash safety, the operating environment has changed dramatically.
It's quite possible to make a safe, no frills vehicle for significantly less than standard cars.
Look at the Chinese cars we aren't allowed to buy here. But even more, look at "quotas" for Japanese cars from much earlier - these had the result that the Japanese and the Americans upped the features and price of the vehicles since how many they could sell was limited. Now, the basic situation continues with multiple means of maintaining.
And oh, look at how zoning keeps people from building small houses, etc. etc.
And there are many factors with environmental regulations sometimes being involved but a whole of the situation being tacit collusion to sell only "big" things.
the world operates a lot more like Massdrop than people think. it's just that for a lot of things they do not need to check for demand. But operationally, its still large batches of product sold at a good price while the batch lasts. this includes our own labor!
if you had to make an old car now, it would cost you way more unless you do intend to make and sell way more of them. you could make more of them now then you made then for the same inputs, but you couldnt make more of the old cars now than we make of the new cars now for those inputs. This is much more relevant to farming. they dont own the seeds because they can get much more product out of buying the new seeds than using 'old style' seeds.
but overall i like the point you bring up, and inflation and productivity are fundamentally hard to compare. we know that borrowing from the future increases the cost of money in hte future which yields inflation. but the money is the benchmark for things so its like trying to measure the expansion of the universe with rulers that are expanding with the universe
I bring up massdrop because it has helped me realize that for an individual it is best to keep an eye on what is actually being produced right now that may not have the same kind of demand in the future. A lack of demand does not necessarily mean the product isnt good, as it could mean everyone already bought what they needed and you missed the boat.
The past was able to think a lot less about it in this way because there was always large population growth happening creating demand for any good product because new people need their own copy. With that leveling off its going to pay a lot more to stay in the loop with timing buys with others, even though its not really coordinated.
> food used to take 10% of our hours, now it takes .6%, etc. etc.
on average, in the US, food consumes 13% of annual household expenses [0]
in our household it's higher than that, because in order to buy primarily healthy food, it costs a lot more than the average shopper spends, and it's more expensive than it used to be
You are repeating an argument a lot of people make so you're not alone in this.
> But if you had to make the old car now, you might be able to make way more of them for the same inputs
All these arguments miss that inflation is a proxy for the improvement of quality of living over time.
You don't make a 1998 Camry in 2026 because the 2026 Camry is a much better car for the end user than the 1998 Camry.
The 1998 Camry is easier to maintain and lasts a long time but if the end user doesn't keep a car longer than 7 years and they have to pay a mechanic to change their oil, they dont care about "easier to maintain and lasts a long time". They care about AirPlay, Remote Start, Parking Assist and ass warmers. No 1998 Camry has any of that.
You could chop wood for heat, grow your own vegetables and meat, living off a few hundred dollars a month if you wanted but most people won't do that because it's not very entertaining and a lot of hard manual labor.
Things cost more over time because people demand more over time. More things cost more, so people demand more money to get paid.
cheap cars would sell like hotcakes. so i don't think what you say is true. especially with inflation for things like food or shelter - it's not like the same bag of chips that doubled in price has more "features", if anything it just has less volume.
they don't. If they did, the retail car market would be flooded with cars that are made specifically for Hertz, Enterprise and the like that are built to hit a specific low price.
People want a good deal but they don't want to drive a cheap car everyday. They are fine with it when they have to rent a car because then their focus is on the daily rate, perhaps because they are focused on having fun on a vacation or thinking of a business opportunity etc.
people want cheap cars so bad that the price of used cars is increasing because there literally isn't enough used cars on the market and demand exceeds supply. i think people would much rather spend $10k on a brand new low tech barebones vehicle than $10k on a 15 year old used joint with unknown issues and wear and tear. i know i would.
i doubt that it's really possible to manufacture cheap cars these days. tech is being forced into the cars by legislation.
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.
The mismanagement of inelastic labor supply into soggy labor demand in order to minimize wages is completely intentional.
We need to react to it with the same intentionality that we did a century ago when we won the 40 hour work week, which still hasn't been entirely eroded despite half a century of chipping away.
What do you mean won? The 40 hour work week was instituted during the Great Depression (hence why you see 1938 in the link) to try and get more people back into the labour force. The idea was that, like, if those working 60 hour weeks were forced into working 40 hours then 20 hours would open up for someone else, giving them some spending money to open up the economy again.
The 40 hour work week was originally conceived of by labor, which may be what you're thinking of, but it wasn't put in place for them. That was for businesses so that they could have more customers.
The industrialists tried to coup FDR. They filled the air waves and newspapers with paid opinions about how his pro-labor policy would sink the economy. And then it didn't. Not only did it not sink the economy, it led to arguably the greatest period of middle class prosperity ever seen.
I think there was another small event that occurred around the same time that confounds things a bit. An event which VERY heavily involved industrialists.
Funnily enough, there is a compelling argument that France adopting the 40 hour work week weakened its army and that is what encouraged Hitler to become aggressive. That small event might never have occurred without the 40 hour work week (albeit not the US 40 hour work week that the rest of the discussion is about).
What we do know is that the 40 hour workweek went by the wayside during the war. The US, for example, mandated a minimum wartime workweek of 48 hours in 1943. It would be quite reasonable to conclude that Hitler would have won if labor didn't take the loss. Presumably that is what you are expressing?
I guess what you're struggling to get out is that those sayings were true and thus became adopted as common knowledge? It is the case that people stop talking about things that are already commonly accepted. If it weren't that way we'd be sitting around talking about 1+1=2 all day, every day. It still remains unclear what you think that adds to the discussion, though.
Your calculator must be broken? As your own link tells, the Haymarket Affair ushered in the 8 hour workday, not 40 hours per week. 8 * 6 (sometimes 7) = 48 (sometimes 56).
The 40 hour work week came in 1938. This is even echoed in the original link, as mentioned earlier.
Not sure why you insist on continuing to use that broken calculator. Four 10 hour days, for example, also allows a 40 hour work week. A 40 hour work week is in no way dependent on an 8 hour workday.
But it remains that 6 days per week was the norm prior to 1938, so 48 hours would be typical. We're talking about 40 hour weeks being typical. Stay on topic, my man. The 40 hour work week was not won, unless you think the Great Depression was caused by a labor uprising?
Then the forest mustn't be relevant. The only reason we're here is because an earlier commenter doesn't understand basic math. If they did, they'd have realized that the discussion was talking about something else entirely.
> 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.
Is this true? It does not matter if Bob works 100 hours a week if his output is not desireable. We are in this state because we WANT more, and there's apparently people out there that are willing to work to give us that.
Also, the West is quite literally living on the backbone of other industrial economy for the past 20 years. So you "luxury" is completely unsustainable with the amount of "work" that you put in because you outsourced all of the labors out.
> A typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.
In specific bubbles like Silicon Valley startup culture or FAANG this is true.
Greater than 40 hour weeks has been the expectation at several non-FAANG, non-Silicon Valley, non-startup companies where I've worked.
But I don't think people in those jobs realize how uncommon it is. The jobs in the middle of the curve, even tech jobs, are not all that demanding. They also don't pay the high salaries that we correlate with demanding tech jobs, but that goes with the territory.
It's a weird feeling if you've only known hustle-and-grind companies and then you stumble into a more traditional company where nobody is in a rush to get anything done and few people even work for more than 2-4 hours that they're in the office. These jobs are everywhere, though.
Typical? I know a bunch of tech folks, and none of them are pushing huge hours.
Work for a ramen noodle startup? Sure. Work for a typical profitable company (Atlassian/Xero, whatever) - and I just don't see it.
Especially with the leverage of good LLMs operated well - if anything I find I have less time pressures than more, and I over deliver as compared to almost every one of my peers.
Moreover, for creative professions, including programming and engineering, the number of "worked" hours is emphasized only by incompetent managers who do not really know how to measure the productivity of the employees.
When competent programmers or engineers have a difficult problem to solve, they will think about it all the time, regardless whether they are "working" long hours in the office or they are doing any other activities, at home or on the street.
It is quite frequent to have the best ideas when you are not in the office "working". For things like programming or designing, the time required to type on a keyboard the solution is never a bottleneck.
At least for myself, the majority of the technical solutions to the problems on which I have worked have come to my mind at home, in the morning, immediately when waking up, and the "work" done in the office has always been mostly in typing whatever solution I already had in mind when arriving at the office.
Anyone who believes that a programmer or engineer who "works" e.g. a 50-hour week is more productive than one who "works" a 40-hour week is naive, to not use a more insulting word.
This is true regardless how competitive the company is believed to be. How many hours one stays in the office in the front of a computer, while being watched by a manager who believes that this is how you "work", has an extremely poor correlation with the amount of useful work that is actually completed.
> 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
Let me fix that for you.
The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society [hoard wealth beyond the wildest imagination of those in the bottom 99%.]
So much wealth they quite literally don't know what to do with it, and for a cherry on top they're not even happy. The richest man on the planet is a depressed Twitter troll.
Until the general public rightfully takes back the money they've worked generations to generate that _mostly_ flows into the pockets of these (t|b)illionaires, we will continue to see a more stressed and less happy society for all.
I think we don't talk enough about this. I'm neutral on the previous distribution of work, but I think it's very unfair what the society is doing to women now. Workers have never been paid so low in a lot of countries in purchasing power of something essential which is housing, while women have never worked that much in a lot of countries. And it's a choice societies made, because work could pay more, and everything else could pay less. Rich countries don't lack of wealth, they just distribute it differently, and when women started to work, they decided they wouldn't distribute as much wealth to workers anymore.
Even if we assume that they didn't before (which is not really true to start with, for the overwhelming majority of the population), I don't see anything wrong with the fact that women now have to justify their value to society like everyone else.
The problem is the fact that any couple, of any combination of sex or gender, now cannot afford a decent life without 2 full time salaries (or more, in many cases). That's a bad result of natural market forces that should definitely be addressed.
The simple answer is wrong obviously, because it fails to address the nuance.
The most powerful members of our society (not the hardest working ones) are the ones who set the tone for the rest of us. We only need to continue working this hard as long as we accept their dominion over our society.
That's a choice we make as a society every day, and it's probably a result of the simplistic form of thinking you offer in your comment.
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.
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."
"The working class is the original and fundamental economic class. . . . The function of the investing
class is to serve the members of the working class by insuring them against loss and by providing
them with desired goods." - Levy
". . . the justification for the existence of the investing class is the service it renders the working
class, measured in terms of wages and desired goods. The contrary is not true. The working class
does not exist to serve the investing class. The working class has the right to insure itself through
organizations composed of its members or through government, thereby eliminating the investing
class." - Levy
Jerome Levy was a committed ideological capitalist.
From that perspective the idea that workers need to be reminded to suffer is like saying insurance companies need to stop paying so many claims to remind us of the risk of house fires....
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.
You don't need investors for this. Example from a non-profit that does R&D, café and music events (and has no investors per its NPO status): no matter how much faster R&D work can be completed, the work hours will never be reduced as this would be unfair to all the other teams. If work gets completed faster it just means that more projects will come in to fill the free time.
People who make money based on what they own, rather than what they do. When you retire, you could arguably be there but it's not what most people mean.
That still sounds like every retired person in the US - I’m really not trying to be facetious here, I just don’t know if this is a use of the word I personally don’t see often, or if it’s really that people are somehow against the common ownership of stock.
To be clear, I do not support the disparity of wealth, I’m literally just trying to make sure I understand people…
I think it's a bit of a continuum based on the degree to which someone is paid for work they do vs how much they are paid for their position and assets. I think if the business can keep running for a good while without them doing much and they aren't likely to lose their job for it, then they're more of an owner than a worker. I'm sure there are caveats on that.
Then that depends on the corporate structure. If you have personal liability, that means you net worth would be directly impacted and you are personal liable for the business debt. However, if its structured as limited, you could bankrupt the business and the debt of the business get wipe out. In this case, your loss would be limited to the initial investment.
It depends how you separate your personal wealth and the business's
Unsure if you're being deliberately obtuse, but a consultant working for a sole proprietorship is technically making money off a thing they own but they're also still clocking in every day and doing actual work, typically for a third party.
It's a pretty clear separation between those who spend 30+ hrs per week working and those that spend the majority of their waking time "networking" (attending conferences, playing golf, traveling, whatever) with the occasional board meeting or office hours type meeting as the only part of that which looks like a regular job.
Well I have enough to retire now, but either way I was just curious - the definition doesn’t seem to meet the word being used, so I just wasn’t sure if this was some new thing or an overzealous use of the word.
There was an ask HN thread the other day. In which someone notable had posted a vibe coded project.
Literally two days later, some nobody vibe coded the same thing, but slightly different and was absolutely shocked that their post wasn't getting any traction.
The stupidity is genuinely shocking at this point.
I think investors deserve a return on their investment but the system is also heavily rigged in their favor. They get bailed out for bad investments, they pay lower tax rates, they have many mechanisms to avoid taxes altogether, and systematic inflation favors investors over laborers.
I am a rentier, an investor. I haven’t worked in any conventional sense for over a decade now, and I keep getting richer.
The system is rigged. I pay less in tax than someone earning a quarter of my income through their labour. It isn’t fair. It wasn’t fair when I worked, and it isn’t fair now - and that’s why I absolutely incinerated my 20s on the pyre of 60 hour weeks, year-round, as I realised that working for a living is a fucking trap, and only by living like a hermit, working like a slave, and getting really damn lucky can you climb out of the crab bucket.
It only gets more unfair the richer you get. I only need to increase my worth by about another 30%, and then I pay no taxes at all.
I do compensate through altruism and charity, but equally, I could choose not to - and again, it is not fair that I have that luxury.
And I don't think that in itself is even bad if you see society on a road where one day no one has to perform labor anymore and some people get there earlier than others but the system is fair. The problem is that the system is not fair and routinely rigged for the investor class.
Should be? Like, it's effectively forced on people because you can't effectively fund a middle-class retirement without relying on stock-market-like gains, but there's no intrinsic reason that corporate shares should be a core part of modern life.
I think the problem, trying to be as objective about it without taking sides, is that you make more money the more money you already have. This leads to runaway wealth inequality, which leads to civil unrest and eventually violence.*
If we at least didn't have all this systemic rigging in favor of the investor class, the wealth inequality would at least be less severe and maybe low enough for a stable equilibrium.
I'm not an economist but I would guess that you need the return on capital to be closer to the return on labor, and when they're about equal you have a stable distribution of wealth.
All the effects in the parent comment favor the wealthy investors and huge companies over individual investors. Then the finishing blow is 'money makes money' with the compounding of investments and normal workers being naturally forced to spend a far higher proportion of their savings on survival and immediate expenses, which greatly reduces how much they can benefit in the first place. Sure, investing can still give you an edge compared to other people like you, but it does not right the wrongs of the system we're living in.
To some/a fairly large degree, wealth fits a log-normal distribution[1]. A log-normal process is the statistical realization of the multiplicative product of many independent random variables[2]. When we take that as returns are a product (in a multiplicative sense) of investment, the result flows naturally. The basic multiplicative nature of investment returns is a direct cause of our wealth distribution - it couldn't have been different. Want a different wealth distribution? Use a different investment process. Good luck. The political machinations required to do that are left as an exercise to the reader.
1. Upper ranges more closely match a pateto distribution. For.the purposes of this argument, I don't think that is too relevant, but willing to change my mind.
And what historically happens when a small advantaged class presses their advantage so far that the lower class is unable to sustain a reasonable standard of living?
The lower class starts borrowing from the haves to survive. My only hope is that the idea of debt bondage doesn't start making a comeback in a generation or two.
The problem is that the payout is unbounded. Yes, their initial investment was important. But most of the productivity gains after that investment was not directly their work, yet they claim all of that as well.
Bonus points if they invest some of those gains into lobbying for regulatory capture to make it difficult or impossible for some of those workers to strike out on their own and compete.
The US, where unbridled capitalism, at any cost, in all fields of endeavor, is the goal - from healthcare to education to private prisons.
The issue is the relative degree to which the worker and investor get paid, as well as the risk they take. It's not a law of nature, societies can decide this democratically.
"Investment" is just an abstraction that we've created to manage resource allocation. If people with wealth didn't "invest" in a way that's productive to society, society can choose a different method of resource allocation that doesn't involve those people having the ability to invest.
So you mean giving a little money and resources should grant you a perpetual license on being the vampire to suck the living soul out of the thing you "invested" in
Don’t forget that technology development is a spectrum. A lot of the basic research that laid the groundwork was funded through public investment. Then the VCs and BigCos come in when the technology is mature enough to be worth the risk of investing in tech transfer to take it all the way to a real product
Where do you think productivity from extending our lifetimes with advances in medicine and biology will go? Oh, you thought by extending our lives, we'll be enjoying it more? No. We'll be just working more.
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.
To me the opposite effect seems to occur: management sees one guy get a ton of a certain kind of work done with AI and then expects everyone to increase all work output by that much because they also have access to AI.
Of course "some folks say they work a lot more than they actually do" is also nothing new to AI anyways.
Would seem to come down to whether finding ways to do the work twice as fast is part of your responsibilities, rather than simply turning the crank on the job.
A sysadmin is expected to write scripts to image new machines faster, not continue to set up each one painstakingly by hand.
This seems to point to that there should be no income tax for individuals, only consumption and wealth taxes.
And there is an argument for companies to pay both a wealth and a turnover tax, appropriately scaled. This might be able to stimulate more diversity of small/medium companies, and thus negating the monoculture like markets that currently seem to arise on a per sector basis, also allowing wider ranging ideas to flourish.
The tax system in western countries generally does not seem to have kept pace with the change in what work/productivity now is, and so gives incentives to the established rather than the emerging.
A number of eastern economies seem to have worked out better regimes encouraging overall diversity of enterprise - it is a tricky balance as you don't want to remove the incentive to try, but the concentration of wealth we see is not healthy in such individualistic societies as the west has.
Tech (business in general) is a Red Queen's Race. If everyone else runs faster, you have to run faster just to stay in place.
We're very good at absorbing productivity improvements. Hell that's the whole goal of software – make things faster then eat the edge by making them faster for everyone.
The author still writes with a savior complex. The basic observation, that productivity goes up but the rich get richer, is not novel to their work. Their explanations and conclusions about this issue are also not new either - they just rehash 250-year-old classical economics.
The actually (apparently) novel part - a macro wage model described in 'Pinning the Wage to Scarcity and Technology' - is not discussed in detail. We don't know its relative merits or if its predictions are historically accurate.
IMO: if my company slows down to a healthier 30 hours, we lose to competitors and lose our livelihoods. So we have to keep up the 40 hours or disappear. Seems like so much effort is wasted in competition.
To demonstrate that this is a nonsense, you all should work 50 hour weeks for a year, thus obviously destroying your competition, and then dial back down to 30 hours weeks for the rest of time.
one thing I don’t see talked about in these articles that compare the recent past (1970s) with modern workers is the huge influx of woman and immigrant labor.
I don’t care about the political or social aspects of this everyone can and should be able to work doing what they want, but there has to be some impact on workers leverage when we go from women being ~30% of the workforce (1970) to >50% (2026). Immigrant labor has also exploded over that time.
Again I don’t give a shit about who works, just noting that huge increases in workers must have some impact?
We work this hard because there's insufficient collective drive to provide for all before the wealthy are allowed to extract.
If 2 people both need something to survive, then collectively the group needs to produce 2 of those things. But if 1 of them demands 1000 of that thing, then collectively they need to produce 1001 of that thing to satisfy the demand.
The _problem_ is that the demand for the extra 999 is given equal weight and competes for production resources vs the 2 that are actually needed instead of explicitly prioritizing the 2 and then letting the 999 come from a secondary market of post-needs-fulfillment labor. Right now if the group produces only the needed 2, then most of the time the person who only wants the 1 that they need won't get anything at all, and in many cases that means they starve and die.
When the consequence of collectively producing less than the total sum demanded by the wealthy is that some people will then starve and die, that hangs like an inverse sword of damocles over the heads of the poor and middle class, always threatening those who can't just buy their way out into laboring more than would be otherwise needed.
The very obvious to me solution is to structurally prioritize meeting everyone's common needs for food/water, shelter, and medical care first before then satisfying the desires of the rich who want more. That way rich people can still get all their private jets and fancy cars, but they'll need to pay more to convince people that the loss of their leisure time is worthwhile instead of everyone in the underclass living under constant threat for survival.
Personally I think the constant political drumbeat to have more jobs instead of literally anyone trying to maximize collective leisure time is the greatest tragedy of modern capitalism. It's always jobs jobs jobs instead of needs and rest.
Upvote from me. I am proposing something on these lines, I call it "Basic Post-Scarcity", where basic needs production and maintainance get fully automated and work becomes optional: https://lorenzopieri.com/post_scarcity/.
Not least people have gotten much more productive at some things and not at all more productive at other things. And those things become a larger fraction of what people want, see
We had a run from 1980 to 2020 or so where the price of most things stayed stable except for housing, healthcare, education and childcare. It’s only the last year that people are complaining about the price of electronics.
> There is a machine called Productivity, and on this machine there is a knob and a button. The knob increases productivity, and the button is labeled "reset."
Whenever we increase productivity, someone comes along and presses the reset button. The current level of productivity becomes the norm. In fact, if you don't produce as much you are unproductive.
That extra time we gained is not for you to rest, but it's to find ways to produce more.
We live in a money-based economy. Money comes from other people, who don't give it away unless you satisfy them somehow. Those people that want work from you, will take all the work you can perform (up to the limit of labor laws). That's why.
Every economy is "money-based" in some way, money is just an abstract representation of value. You can try to get rid of it, but it will come back in another form because "value" is still useful to quantify and resources are finite.
money comes from other people... and the money printer -- if you have access to it.
money =\= purchasing power. if they print enough (and spend it themselves first into the economy), then the purchasing power is being siphoned away towards the source of the new money.
The robber barons at the turn of last century were able to build their empires under conditions of gold-backed currency. This is not a soft-money story, and hard-money will not fix it.
I can't listen to that any more, the sound quality is terrible and the speaker is all over the place.
The whole video could of been said in one sentence!
Microsoft going faster is funny, on a number of levels - The whole company seems to be run as if it's still the 1990's :D getting anything done or changed takes years.
Seems like tragedy of the commons principle - if everyone was chilling and working 20 hour weeks, I'd do the same. But people hustle and grind to get rich so that's the culture I have to adapt to.
This is a new one. I usually see we are better off than in the Fifties because they had fewer entertainment options, or inanities like that. But you posit they didn't have plumbing?
It's something of a collective action problem even beyond power relations. My motivation to work less than 40h just isn't that high since everyone around me is working 40h too.
Also has to do with demand for savings. The US has a bunch of mostly accidental policies that juice that demand.
Whitney’s cotton gin increased the speed separating cotton fibers from the sticky seeds by 50x. I wonder if labor will experience similar outcomes with the efficiency AI creates?
A lot of people aren't working hard. They might sit at their desk from 9-5 but total effort put in is probably only around 15hrs a week of solid work.
It's hard to see this if you're a typical HN reader because we're all a pretty motivated lot who tend to enjoy what we do, and what we do is fairly concrete. But survey the typical office and you will be blown away by how little effort people are putting in. And of the "work" that is getting done a lot of it is never used, or the sort of thing whose quality can't be easily evaluated so it trends towards the min viable product.
I used to work at a company where a significant fraction of the workforce just spent all day producing "decks" (PowerPoints). They hardly sent emails or wrote documents - even things you'd expect to be a Word file were decks - and on the few occasions I gently enquired about how long they'd been working on their current "project" (a deck) I'd always regret it, because the answer would be something like several weeks. Total output from those weeks: a dozen badly made slides that said very little, and which could have been an email.
And that was in fintech! Go look at the public sector, academia or NGOs and be amazed at the endless armies of people who can spend an entire year on making a single PDF that your average hyped-up Valley engineer would produce in a week.
These people are all technically working a 40 hour week but in reality a lot of their time is spent on YouTube, napping, walking the dog, taking care of kids, listening to podcasts, researching their next vacation etc. Their managers don't hold their feet to the fire because they're doing the same things, and the company produces enough profits that nobody is really motivated to do layoffs (or they're tax funded and won't get fired even if they do no work at all).
One aspect that interests me is the relative difficulty of "part time" employment. We define "full time" as 40 hours a week (number may vary depending on location and field, but that's the stereotypical value). The wage that brings in may be, for successful people in a reasonably lucrative field, substantially more than needed for a comfortable life.
But let's say I decide that I'd be happy with my life at 50% of my current pay, and I want to do 50% less work in exchange. 20 hours per week instead of 40. If you're in the kind of job that makes enough for this to work, you probably can't do it. 20 hours per week is for crappy jobs in retail and food service. It's very unlikely that you'll find a tech job willing to employ you part time at any pay level.
So even if I, personally, am sufficiently productive and sufficiently compensated that I could afford to work a lot less than people did 50 years ago, I can't do it. At least, I can't do it on a rolling basis. The closest I can come is to retire early. Or maybe take some years off in the middle of my career, but that's extremely risky. I definitely can't cut my hours and pay in half over a week, or month, or even year.
There are a few misconceptions that come up in this discussion, which are important to understand:
a) people don't just work to make X dollars per year. They work to have a similar or higher standard of living than their peers (the famous "keeping up with the Joneses"). Sure there are dirt cheap housing in the middle of the country, but everyone wants to live in NYC. This is not about getting to a fixed point, it's a competition. So no matter how much more productive we get, we'll work as much as we reasonably can, which for most people is 40-60 hours/week
b) the issue with doing redistribution with taxes, is that the government doesn't just give the money back to the people. They waste it by proclaiming they can put it to good use, via custom benefits, non profits, etc. This is (usually) a huge waste of resources. So taking in an additional 30% of GDP as taxes won't make everyone 30% richest; it'll go in the pockets of the well connected or those willing to commit fraud and grift. And the politicians in governmetn have strong incentive to continue doing it this way because they get support and votes in return (e.g. through media corruption or special interest groups that vote as a bloc)
c) we have taken some of the productivity back - we have life saving drugs, clean water, cheap energy, all the entertainment in the world in our fingertips - things that 100 years back were reserved for royals and kings. But because of point (a) of course, nobody's happy having "just" that
d) even if the macines become super productive, it doesn't mean the price of everything is going to zero. There's still only so many apartments to rent or own in manhattan, and the price of human service will skyrocket (as it has done over the past few decades - compare the price of a TV to the minimum hourly wage for example). So it's a misconception that the value of money will go to zero, as Elon recently said
Quite surprising that the article does not mention, not even in passing, Russell's In Praise of Idleness [0]. Back in the 1930s Russell observed that a small fraction of the population had managed to sustain the British wartime economy in WWI, while the great majority of the workforce was in the trenches. Of course in peacetime you may want more prosperity, but the idea that this would require _everybody_ (well, at least every able-bodied male, this being the 1930s) to work _full time_ was already absurd back then.
When you stated "A third of the economy, in other words, already pays people for owning things, with no work asked of them." you glossed over all the risks and hazards and contingencies that come with capital, especially productive capital like machines or buildings or property. These are nontrivial and recurrent and require careful planning and continuous monitoring. This work, even if contracted out, bears upon the capital as a cost and thus is 'work' by another name that you choose to call 'price'
You also went on about "why a job that somebody is willing to do is assumed to be a job worth doing". This should have been something learned by workers early in their careers. Not sure what is happening in your hypothesis, or even what your hypothesis is in the study regarding the worker's responsibility within this system. You may want to put some bounds on that, or if unbound, be frank about that at the outset.
There were two paragraphs about consumerism that are hanging there unloved starting from "Two things happen..." and ending with "...every drop." but the worst part of those two paragraphs is that you attempt to drive them into a ridiculous conclusion: "Everything we measure about work is a record of what people did when they could not refuse." This is seems to embarrassingly stated as a polemical against human effort, which is ludicrous. Believe it or not, there are many many many many people who are energized each and every day by their careers, and get excited to have the opportunity to contribute to humanity's arrangements whether it is flipping burgers or curing cancer.
Where the paper went after this is really mindbending because it asks the reader to take a leap of faith that unseen models are replicating an entire economic system faithfully, and that hypotheticals can be believed and that the outcomes proposed can thereafter be believed. There is really not enough background or basis to make this leap and it is my assessment that economists will absolutely barbecue you if you try to make a pass. Asking readers to draw from their own anecdotal ["Do the people you know have more free time than their parents had at the same age?] is interesting but not going to move the needle in a meaningful way.
all the formulaic stuff that follows probably comes form the models and well maybe it is hopeful and maybe you could get a piece of land somewhere outside a small town in Oregon and try it all out on a government grant or something.
sorry if this seems harsh. I really want to give constructive feedback but its hard to see anything here that might gain traction.
Yeah, it only takes half the time to make the same stuff, but we aren't making the same stuff now, are we? (Or do you all want to go back to the pre-AI, pre-Internet, effectively pre-computer 70s?)
Classic communism slop. The funniest part is that what they are suggesting is the feudal system. The king gives everyone parcels of land. Those parcels get subdivided. Poor people have just enough to survive. Have too many children? Some of them have to go die in wars, because you don’t have enough land to split it or to feed them.
because we don't have organized labor, all current working conditions in the US have been provided by through organized labor — child labor laws, weekends, 8 hour workdays, breaks, you name it... employers have never given any of this freely along with productivity gains
it's strange that all these articles about how much we're working don't even peek into the history of how our current structure was formed
the current productivity gains have mostly been captured by the richest, and everyone else is competing against each other for the scraps... if you choose to work less, you are out-competed and lose your status (guess what kind of groups can help avoid this!)
The "we" in this is a missing a piece: the size of the labor force. It's shrinking. Has been for 20+ years, with a peak around 2000.
Some people are working hard. The growing demographic is the retired, the trust-funded and those NEET-ing around on various forms of subsistence income. Another few years we'll be back to post-war levels ~%58 of participation, where two-parent homes prevailed, and one stayed home.
Answer: People are reluctant to live in 2026 the way they did in 1973.
The additional compensation is a statistical artifact that accounts for air conditioning, iPhones, reliable cars that last 20 years, the Internet, etc.
but the unaffordability crisis stems from housing, food, fuel, etc. people aren't struggling because of an iphone they buy every few years, or the $20/month their AC adds to their monthly summer utility bill.
Imagine how much time people would have to be angry at our politicians about injustice, corruption, wealth disparity, the climate etc if people only had to work a few hours a week!
My god, they might even become actively engaged in politics. The horror!
EDIT: Being downvoted, cannot reply for 10 more hours.
We still work hard and will continue to do so because we are conditioned for the first 21 years of our lives to work hard at school.
21 years is a third of your productive life, a time when you body still works reliably, can repair itself rapidly, you have very little responsibilities and thus can take more risk and explore the frontiers of possibility.
The math teacher tells you to write out twenty tables of addition, so you do it.
The chemistry teacher tells you to balance out fifty chemical equations, so you do it.
The English teacher tells you to write out 500 word essays to explain why Sherlock was not a villain but just misunderstood, so you do it.
If you question why, you fail.
If you question is there's a better way to demonstrate the understanding, you fail.
If you refuse to do these assignments and start a lemonade stand, you fail.
Thankfully working hard is getting disrupted. An LLM doesn't sleep, take breaks, fall asleep after three 6 hour shifts or take sick leave. Nothing works as hard as an LLM and even basic LLMs that can run on commodity GPUs with 6GB of VRAM can write out twenty tables of addition, balance out fifty chemical equations and argue both for and against why Sherlock was a villain.
People will argue that balancing out fifty chemical equations and writing out twenty tables of addition is necessary to gain the foundation necessary to do more abstract tasks.
That to be an effective writer, you need to read two works of Shakespeare and critique in a manner that appeals to your teacher or the AI that grades your writing assignments. People who never got to do this are idiots and their writing is just garbage, unfit for human consumption.
That to be an effective Front End developer you need to code in x86 assembly.
That you need to understand quantum physics before you can design your first semiconductor circuit. I would like to save those debates for another day.
But people actually don't give a s*it if you work hard or not!
They only care if you're giving them value for either their time or money.
Those who don't realize this will keep working hard for those who will put them to work. Those teachers will keep joining unions and complaining they don't get paid enough while they will reject the truth, the reality of why them working so hard isn't translating into a situation they like.
The problem is that people who refuse to work hard most often have life trajectories that most other people dislike. Someone may enjoy the life of leisure, drinking, and strolling around that bums choose. But the downsides are real, and most people abhor those.
Jesus, they figured out that who owns the means of production is going to own everything, and somehow made it sound like some kind of grand revelation. my brother in christ, Karl Marx figured this out more than a hundred years ago.
and all they have to say is? land value tax and tax on spending??? LVT is fine but let's be honest is going to do fuck all, spending tax is literally a tax on the poor. how dumb (if not malicious) can you be? if a revolution is too unpalatable for you, at least say wealth tax. it's just two simple words, in that order, it's not that hard
One of the greatest cons in history has been to convince workers to allow companies/shareholders to capture all of the benefits of increased productivity gains
It has over time negated the gains that workers had made (through much campaigning, protests, strikes, and the threat of social upheaval during the Great Depression) to earn a greater share of the output (through higher wages, work week limits, etc.)
I was reading this and a question came up. It ultimately works under the premise that there is only one ticket — so the conclusion is that the ticket must be ownership.
But if machines produce more, couldn't the state provide free services rather than cash? In kind provision could be less dependent on wages than taxation is.
Then couldn't we divide the monetary system further — not as banknotes, but by subdividing it? Would the administrative system be too difficult after all?
In other words, if the problem is that only the "wage" earned for participating in production grants the right to consume, then shouldn't tickets to the means of production also be distributed?
Still, no matter how I think about it, in the end it comes down to the problem of distribution. The OP also gives capital ownership as an example, but...
If automation can enable substantial production without human labor, then what on earth is the reason we should keep demanding that humans do wage labor for survival? I find myself thinking about this a lot these days.
Someone who did not participate in production can consume the product because they own capital. Then what is the basis on which that right arises?
In fact, economic logic, when you think about it, seems to be mostly a kind of circular reasoning. It says "capital's share equals its marginal contribution," but that market itself is ultimately something created by power.
Sometimes I have thoughts like this. In fact, the core of capitalism is the ownership of the means of production, and such ownership will keep accumulating ever-widening disparities. If automation keeps advancing, humans will eventually become unnecessary — and then how will the market be maintained? We cannot give everyone a claim on automated production. In the end, a ruling class and a ruled class will inevitably exist, and the question becomes how the ruling class can rule entirely with the consent of the ruled. Lately, it seems this principle no longer works in capitalism.
There is hope for fully automated robotic companies that are owner-less, and undercut any profit-making entity since they have no profit sharing to do. See https://lorenzopieri.com/robotic_commons/
> In fact, the core of capitalism is the ownership of the means of production, and such ownership will keep accumulating ever-widening disparities. If automation keeps advancing, humans will eventually become unnecessary
Welcome to the Marxism 101, the basic idea when observing increasing automation while expanding the ideas of Adam Smith, and some of the more solid parts of the thought (there are both very good bangers and "let's not talk about this" in it)
If working people in industrialized society weren't artificially kept indebted and poor (relative to the wealth they should have), then it would be impossible for the rulers to control the population, and they would loose their power.
A ruler will always prefer to rule over 100 wretches, than be an equal with 100 peers. And people all over the world have been bred to submit by relentless head stomping by family, school and media.
But the current order will end without violence and be forgotten as foolishness, just like the spell of the feared Soviet terror regime ended as if people woke up from a dream. Just like the strangle grip of popes, priests and monks ended and is now the source of ridicule. Our children's children will look with nothing but disgust at how the current population worship "governments", "authorities" and so on - all of these illusions made up of some of the least admirable people alive.
Because it deliberately fudges things around to imply that getting off crisis-prone gold standard was the actual reason things changed, instead of other policy decisions
Money used to be based on a beautiful thing (positive value), and now it's based on debt (negative value). I'm no economist, but that seems self-evidently bad to me.
The greatest consumer of wealth is the eternal war (cold, hot etc) between princes. It's appetite is limitless. We will be fed exactly what we demand and not a crumb more. No matter how excellent our labor.
Because the people in charge of deciding which work should be done have decided that we should spend every waking hour making them more powerful. Next!
In theory we could just come together, start focusing on building a working society which defines what we need and what we want and just build it efficently.
We could just get rid of any inefficency.
Capitalism is driving our current economy, it doesn't has to.
There is no real reason why we couldn't decide tomorrow that every car is electric and depending on some factor you can just request a car.
Planet earth has resources x, the only question is for what we use it and how we distribute it.
But no if i want to be self sufficient (100%) i can't do this.
If i want to exit capitalism and build up a country not defined by it, i can't either.
If i kill bad leaders, i will be thrown in prison.
Short of a windfall or fanciful ideas of starting my own business (and then having to work even harder), I'm still a wage slave who needs to keep doing what the man asks of me so he will give me my monthly stipend
That may be true for the individual, but the man can be kicked to the curb at any time with ease if the workers collectively decide to. The man is only a belief.
We're still working this hard because we, as a group, want to. It is as simple as that.
The man just sets policy that maximizes prices and minimizes wages, so that the median person still works full time and lives hand-to-mouth even while the economy has achieved a level of productivity that would have been compatible with Keynes' 15 hour workweeks were the surplus not devoted exclusively to pumping assets.
> 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.
Ohhh this explains why it was kind of awkward to read. I'm not sure how to explain it, like look at this:
> Benefits look like a second source for everyone else. But 68 cents of every tax dollar in America is raised from pay for work, so a benefit is mostly a claim on somebody else’s wage. Follow the money far enough and nine households in ten are living on each other’s wages. We live off the earth and off the machines we’ve built on it. Our share of what they produce reaches us through one narrow channel, which is being paid for a job.
It's like you're reading something backwards. The content is there, but it's like I have to do a double take after every sentence.
Did you alter the quote and exclude his attribution of another human?
> How this was made. I wrote this with the help of Claude Fable 5.2, Anthropic’s AI model. ...... The model economy is joint work with Johan Båge.
Why are you misrepresenting his words?
Before accusing people, a simple search would have shown that the wording in the article was modified.
See https://web.archive.org/web/20261111200720/https://wilsonium...
It clearly says:
> How this was made. I wrote this with Claude Fable 5.2, Anthropic’s AI model.
In my experience, many Americans hate having discussions about inequality. I think to them, taxing the successful to subsidize the unsuccessful feels like punishing the winner for playing well and rewarding the loser for resting. It's a very black and white view of the world.
Sounds more or less right.
So why is it wrong, care to take a stab? We need some nuance/color here.
Americans overwhelmingly believe they are "not yet millionaires" and also victims at the same time.
This manifests as policy that harms most Americans while benefiting the rich/elite. Americans idolize the rich/celebrity while also claiming to be victimized by them. Its so weird.
"When I'm rich I want these privileges."
Americans also overwhelmingly misrepresent themselves as better as they are in regards to a variety of social stances. Animal rights, trans rights, race in general, the environment, homelessness, China/foreigners, etc. Americans say they support causes but their actions are the opposite, because "in my circumstance" excuses. There is always an excuse.
My saying this will really piss off a lot of Americans who misrepresent themselves. Thats why we hate having conversations about it, it means we have to be honest and that really upsets a lot of Americans. A lot of Americans also will take a "Okay sure but I'm a victim" stance. Call em out and see how quickly an american claims businesses, politicians, or something else is the bigger issue. No accountability for the outcome of our actions. It's just a bunch of dishonesty
EDIT: my comment makes no sense. j2kun has a great book, go read it!
Hey, just to help set the record straight, I wrote the original piece and I want to say that I edited the post to add "the help of", as I thought that was more accurate anyways after seeing the above comment. So, they didn't do anything wrong beyond perhaps being a bit too harsh on my work.
Thanks, I'm going to edit my comment. We're all entitled to our opinions on LLM usage.
Ok, so ask Fable yourself and get back to us if it produces a similar article ;-)
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”
This is why Keynes' prediction "... that technological progress and rising productivity would lead to a 15-hour workweek (about 3 hours a day) by the year 2030." was so wrong. He couldn't imaging the increase in our demand for standard of living which has becomes a hamster wheel. He just saw that we'd no longer need to grow our own food or collect water or chop wood to stay warm or hand wash clothes or any of the other huge labor needs of the previous century.
I would work fewer hours/days if I could. Employers mostly don't like this. Also, working fewer hours could affect my ability to obtain health insurance in the U.S.
I guess the point is that you cannot work less if the others don't.
If we all agreed to work less (and have less), it would actually work. But as soon as competition enters the game (some people work more and have more)...
> I guess the point is that you cannot work less if the others don't.
Ah, damn, that's the catch with everything isn't. As alway, the only winning move appears to be not to play, and to even get to state where you can drop out, you need to play well for at least a while.
He was wrong but not necessarily for this reason.
If anything, it’s many of the basics that have become more expensive. Housing and education are far more expensive today then 100 years ago (as a share of average salary). And some essentials like health care, while more effective today, definitely absorbs a much higher share of people’s wallets (and the nation’s GDP).
Totally. If business can ship more in less time. They won’t stop at 15-hour, they will keep shipping more because competition and hamster wheel. In fact, I feel like the amount of work is actually increasing too…
Keynes lived less than a century ago when people did it grow their own food, they lived in New York tenements
> people's happiness seems to be more correlated with their economic rank in a society
That may be broadly true, but it's descriptive, not prescriptive.
There are many relatively poor people (with physical needs met, but not always) who are far happier than most of the top 1%. The secret is character -- things like contentment, thankfulness, and showing faithful love to family and people in general.
My happiness is correlated with how much time I spend outside, which is inverse to the number of hours which I work.
more simply, my happiness is correlated with how few obligations i have, especially obligations im uninterested in, such as paying banks interest on loans
You could work outside and be happy. Be a lawn mower, a shepherd or a forest ranger.
Also ambition. We still want more.
The "golden billion" people almost all live in luxury, by the standards of an early industrial society like the early 19th century Europe which Marx described, and daily use a ton of amenities which even the mightiest king could not afford 1000 years ago. But we take it for granted.
I could have taken my savings and downshifted to a comfortable life in a third-world country. But instead I've put them in my wife's business, and keep working, while living in one of the most expensive cities in the Solar system. This is because I want a better education for my children, and success for the business. (The city is also enjoyable when I have the time.)
Then, some amenities are still expensive. Think about medical care, especially larger-scale like cardiac surgery. Well, think about the cost of a Claude subscription if you live otherwise happily for $25 / day in an inexpensive third-world countryside.
We work so much because there's still utility in it, in many cases. We have plenty, but not plenty enough.
> Also ambition. We still want more.
That’s not ambition, that’s desire. Ambition is wanting to do more.
Running a business is wanting to do more, in my book. If I just wanted more money to burn on consumption, I'd buy more NVDA instead, or something.
You weren’t talking about running a business, but in investing into one. The question is do you primarily care about what the business is accomplishing in the world, or do you mostly just care about the money you get out of it.
Investing in my wife's business inevitabily comes with also doing quite some work for it :) I'm just not at helm. And it's not primarily money I care about here, but money is the lifeblood of business, you can't avoid earning and spending rather noticeable amounts.
> This is because I want a better education for my children
The research strongly suggests that the most important factor in giving a child a better education is the degree of parental involvement. Do you think working and focus on business success gives you more attention capacity to be involved with your child's education than the downshifted option would have?
Above some nonzero level of parental involvement, the peer group dominates. I want my kids to be around brighter, nicer kids; many of them gravitate to schools in expensive locations.
The research does show that peers do become significant in the teenage years, but suggests that parental involvement is still most important even then. Prior to that, the peer group seems to have little-to-no effect.
So, the good news is that even if you want to give your best in that area, you only have to endure for five years, give or take. Something tells me you won't be packing your bags after that, though. It may not be your intention, but the combination of words gives the impression you're actually more interested in the appearance of giving your child a good education than giving a good education.
I was one of the dumbest among the smart kids I hung out with, the bad influence, but we did have fun. peers count for alot, parents count for alot. but what counts the most is the kid him/her self. I say this because there came a moment, and I remember it well, when I knew that I knew how to learn. before that, I didn't not know that.
I knew WHAT I wanted to learn, just not how to learn it, how to nurture and guide myself. it was a big deal and it still is
I used to live in a big city and work as a software engineer.
I realized it wasn’t making me happy. Sitting inside everyday is not how I want to spend my life. Now I live in a mountain town of 10,000. There is no traffic. We ride everywhere in town. I work 10-20 hours a week on writing and books, depending on the season. I snowboard 100 days a season. We took our 6 month old on a trip for a year (wife got 18 months maternity leave) she works 3 days a week.
I cut our firewood so we have no heating bill, have no phone, no tv. We really enjoy the simple life. We have plenty of time to host dinner gatherings, hang out with our daughter, hike, camp etc.
We did a 10 day wilderness canoe trip with friends this summer, it was unreal.
We realized More money will not make us happier. We don’t want more money. More time doing the things we love with family and friends will. The choice is there.
I live in a big city and work as a software engineer.
I love the city, the friend group, being into some communities that do not exist in small towns.
If you'd put the outdoorsy small town lifestyle on me, I'd kill myself.
I'm really happy for you it worked out, but what you suggest is not an overall solution. (And just imagine how your town would look like, if we all moved out of the cities ... we'd create new cities).
The fact that cities are big is cause by people wanting to live there, not elsewhere.
I am also very happy your choice has worked for you and you are happy.
Obviously it’s horses for courses.
That being said, would you take an extra paid week of leave if offered? What about two or three? Would you be happier? What if you had 20 weeks of paid leave? Would you be happier?
I think the very vast majority of people would work less if they could.
> (And just imagine how your town would look like, if we all moved out of the cities ... we'd create new cities).
We have plenty of room for this in many, many, many, many countries.
What do you do for health insurance? That seems to be the big thing at least when I was not a W-2, and the state marketplaces are not cheap and way worse than insurance from any employer I've had.
I immigrated to a country where everyone gets it.
Do you benefit from the fact that the others do work, then? Or would it still work if everybody was living like you do?
I work, earn money and pay taxes. So does my wife. We have a mortgage, and pay property taxes too.
Is it a requirement of society to work maxx?
If a doctor can earn $50k a year working one day a week and a Walmart worker has to work 40 hours a week to earn $50k, does the doctor have some kind of obligation to work and earn more? What if they just want the kind of life $50k a year allows for?
Should the Walmart worker do 80 hour weeks to contribute the same taxes as an engineer working 40 hour weeks?
Surely we all get to choose how much we work.
If I want to live in a 100 year old house and ride my bike with no phone and no tv, and modest lifestyle, it’s absurd I should be forced to work “full time” when I earn as much as I want to live the life I want. That is my choice.
Do you think the person to whom you replied doesn't pay taxes or something?
Do you have a family? How large? How much do other family members contribute, in income or labor, into the operation of your household?
Yep, wife and young daughter. Wife works 3 days a week.
They are the reason I choose to work less - to spend time with them doing the things we love.
> it seems like competition for housing drives up prices as wages increase
This is a significant claim. What do you base this on? Are there any studies or references?
Here is one: https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/eco...
"Research shows that average U.S. income growth is strongly related to rising house prices but is essentially unrelated to changes in the supply of housing units across metropolitan areas."
Anecdotal but many major cities in America have this issue
San Fran is a clear example, tech money is driving the price for scarce homes up substantially. Go peruse Zillow and see the insanity
On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation by David Ricardo.
This book is most famous for being misquoted by nitwits trying to argue that globalization is always good for everyone, but if you had asked David Ricardo he would have said his most important result was that of Rent (later specified as differential rent or Ricardian rent), the idea that economic productivity tends to get squeezed onto land prices. A modern update would argue that this applies to assets more generally. Assets go up by squeezing productivity out of the main economy. Whether you think this is brilliant or terrible depends largely on whether you own lots of assets.
If people wanted to do better than their neighbors, the simple solution would be to move to a poorer neighborhood.
Expats moving to a low cost of living country kind of do this?
Also gentrification in cities like NYC is this same pattern.
They did not mean it literally.
This. The last time I looked at this, worldwide (per-country*) median salary to house price ratio has stayed stuck at about 5 years for the past few decades.
Hey, hopefully some of you techbros can 'disrupt' the status quo.
Pre 2000 the U.K. ratio was about 3-4
Post 2008 it has been about 6-8
Until recently interest rates were much lower. Once you take that into account it’s much closer.
> So, people want to do better than their neighbors, not just do well.
That's not what your data shows. It just shows that people don't want to be near the bottom of the pile, because it indicates they're being mistreated (which they are).
People don't want to "do better then their neighbors," they just don't want to be left behind by society.
Framing it the way you do makes it seem like everyone desires brutal social darwinism. It's not true. People just want to be treated fairly and live in a relatively egalitarian world.
> people want
I'm not dismissing what you are saying, but do you have evidence for what "people want"? In my experience, when somebody claims to know what people want then it tends to be a mix of "I want", "the people I know want", "I hope people want", "people should want", and a few others, rarely with any evidence.
Why People Prefer Unequal Societies (Starmans, Sheskin, & Bloom, 2017)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315944588_Why_peopl...
For the interested: people prefer a 'fair' society, which means if a person puts in more effort it is fair they receive more, which creates inequality by the simple fact some work harder than others, some work less, and it is only fair they each are compensated equal to their effort.
The link [Boyce, Brown and Moore] seems consistent with the comment you're objecting to.
Therefore as people of the same economic class hang out will less and less diverse groups they compete harder locally regardless of global rank.
This creates crank where even billionaires will whip their workers to death over competition with their neighbors.
Fortunately, it also makes unwinding the situation easier because assets can fall without upsetting local ranks (relatively speaking, on all three counts).
A secret to happiness is not doing this, evaluating your well being in terms of your own goals not comparisons or externally imposed metrics.
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.
> 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.
We're not allowed to do that. Environmental regulations, crash safety, the operating environment has changed dramatically.
It's quite possible to make a safe, no frills vehicle for significantly less than standard cars.
Look at the Chinese cars we aren't allowed to buy here. But even more, look at "quotas" for Japanese cars from much earlier - these had the result that the Japanese and the Americans upped the features and price of the vehicles since how many they could sell was limited. Now, the basic situation continues with multiple means of maintaining.
And oh, look at how zoning keeps people from building small houses, etc. etc.
And there are many factors with environmental regulations sometimes being involved but a whole of the situation being tacit collusion to sell only "big" things.
Even worse when you look at things like "imputed rent" adding 10% to GDP.
the world operates a lot more like Massdrop than people think. it's just that for a lot of things they do not need to check for demand. But operationally, its still large batches of product sold at a good price while the batch lasts. this includes our own labor!
if you had to make an old car now, it would cost you way more unless you do intend to make and sell way more of them. you could make more of them now then you made then for the same inputs, but you couldnt make more of the old cars now than we make of the new cars now for those inputs. This is much more relevant to farming. they dont own the seeds because they can get much more product out of buying the new seeds than using 'old style' seeds.
but overall i like the point you bring up, and inflation and productivity are fundamentally hard to compare. we know that borrowing from the future increases the cost of money in hte future which yields inflation. but the money is the benchmark for things so its like trying to measure the expansion of the universe with rulers that are expanding with the universe
I bring up massdrop because it has helped me realize that for an individual it is best to keep an eye on what is actually being produced right now that may not have the same kind of demand in the future. A lack of demand does not necessarily mean the product isnt good, as it could mean everyone already bought what they needed and you missed the boat.
The past was able to think a lot less about it in this way because there was always large population growth happening creating demand for any good product because new people need their own copy. With that leveling off its going to pay a lot more to stay in the loop with timing buys with others, even though its not really coordinated.
> food used to take 10% of our hours, now it takes .6%, etc. etc.
on average, in the US, food consumes 13% of annual household expenses [0]
in our household it's higher than that, because in order to buy primarily healthy food, it costs a lot more than the average shopper spends, and it's more expensive than it used to be
[0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm
You are repeating an argument a lot of people make so you're not alone in this.
> But if you had to make the old car now, you might be able to make way more of them for the same inputs
All these arguments miss that inflation is a proxy for the improvement of quality of living over time.
You don't make a 1998 Camry in 2026 because the 2026 Camry is a much better car for the end user than the 1998 Camry.
The 1998 Camry is easier to maintain and lasts a long time but if the end user doesn't keep a car longer than 7 years and they have to pay a mechanic to change their oil, they dont care about "easier to maintain and lasts a long time". They care about AirPlay, Remote Start, Parking Assist and ass warmers. No 1998 Camry has any of that.
You could chop wood for heat, grow your own vegetables and meat, living off a few hundred dollars a month if you wanted but most people won't do that because it's not very entertaining and a lot of hard manual labor.
Things cost more over time because people demand more over time. More things cost more, so people demand more money to get paid.
Your argument does not apply to anything that has happened in the last 20 years.
cheap cars would sell like hotcakes. so i don't think what you say is true. especially with inflation for things like food or shelter - it's not like the same bag of chips that doubled in price has more "features", if anything it just has less volume.
> cheap cars would sell like hotcakes
they don't. If they did, the retail car market would be flooded with cars that are made specifically for Hertz, Enterprise and the like that are built to hit a specific low price.
People want a good deal but they don't want to drive a cheap car everyday. They are fine with it when they have to rent a car because then their focus is on the daily rate, perhaps because they are focused on having fun on a vacation or thinking of a business opportunity etc.
people want cheap cars so bad that the price of used cars is increasing because there literally isn't enough used cars on the market and demand exceeds supply. i think people would much rather spend $10k on a brand new low tech barebones vehicle than $10k on a 15 year old used joint with unknown issues and wear and tear. i know i would.
i doubt that it's really possible to manufacture cheap cars these days. tech is being forced into the cars by legislation.
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.
The mismanagement of inelastic labor supply into soggy labor demand in order to minimize wages is completely intentional.
We need to react to it with the same intentionality that we did a century ago when we won the 40 hour work week, which still hasn't been entirely eroded despite half a century of chipping away.
> when we won the 40 hour work week
What do you mean won? The 40 hour work week was instituted during the Great Depression (hence why you see 1938 in the link) to try and get more people back into the labour force. The idea was that, like, if those working 60 hour weeks were forced into working 40 hours then 20 hours would open up for someone else, giving them some spending money to open up the economy again.
The 40 hour work week was originally conceived of by labor, which may be what you're thinking of, but it wasn't put in place for them. That was for businesses so that they could have more customers.
The industrialists tried to coup FDR. They filled the air waves and newspapers with paid opinions about how his pro-labor policy would sink the economy. And then it didn't. Not only did it not sink the economy, it led to arguably the greatest period of middle class prosperity ever seen.
I think there was another small event that occurred around the same time that confounds things a bit. An event which VERY heavily involved industrialists.
WWII profiteering doesn't explain why the same middle class emergence happened in countries that got bombed to smithereens.
This is a labor power story, not a war profits story.
Funnily enough, there is a compelling argument that France adopting the 40 hour work week weakened its army and that is what encouraged Hitler to become aggressive. That small event might never have occurred without the 40 hour work week (albeit not the US 40 hour work week that the rest of the discussion is about).
Mmmhmm. Every little labor victory helps Hitler, dontcha know? You wouldn't want to help Hitler, would ya?
These arguments were omnipresent at the time but they suddenly faded away when Hitler got his ass kicked. I wonder why?
You might want to revisit the history books. WWII didn't help Hitler.
My point exactly: why do you think the anti-labor arguments that rhyme with yours went away when Hitler got his ass kicked?
You shot who in the what now?
What we do know is that the 40 hour workweek went by the wayside during the war. The US, for example, mandated a minimum wartime workweek of 48 hours in 1943. It would be quite reasonable to conclude that Hitler would have won if labor didn't take the loss. Presumably that is what you are expressing?
I guess what you're struggling to get out is that those sayings were true and thus became adopted as common knowledge? It is the case that people stop talking about things that are already commonly accepted. If it weren't that way we'd be sitting around talking about 1+1=2 all day, every day. It still remains unclear what you think that adds to the discussion, though.
We won the 40 hour work week. It wasn't given to us. It was hard fought, and people died for our right to have a work/life balance.
You need to read up on your history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
Your calculator must be broken? As your own link tells, the Haymarket Affair ushered in the 8 hour workday, not 40 hours per week. 8 * 6 (sometimes 7) = 48 (sometimes 56).
The 40 hour work week came in 1938. This is even echoed in the original link, as mentioned earlier.
40 hour work week isn't possible without the 8 hour workday, which was won by workers through blood.
Not sure why you insist on continuing to use that broken calculator. Four 10 hour days, for example, also allows a 40 hour work week. A 40 hour work week is in no way dependent on an 8 hour workday.
But it remains that 6 days per week was the norm prior to 1938, so 48 hours would be typical. We're talking about 40 hour weeks being typical. Stay on topic, my man. The 40 hour work week was not won, unless you think the Great Depression was caused by a labor uprising?
You're missing the forest for the trees.
Then the forest mustn't be relevant. The only reason we're here is because an earlier commenter doesn't understand basic math. If they did, they'd have realized that the discussion was talking about something else entirely.
> 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.
Is this true? It does not matter if Bob works 100 hours a week if his output is not desireable. We are in this state because we WANT more, and there's apparently people out there that are willing to work to give us that.
Also, the West is quite literally living on the backbone of other industrial economy for the past 20 years. So you "luxury" is completely unsustainable with the amount of "work" that you put in because you outsourced all of the labors out.
> A typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.
In specific bubbles like Silicon Valley startup culture or FAANG this is true.
Greater than 40 hour weeks has been the expectation at several non-FAANG, non-Silicon Valley, non-startup companies where I've worked.
But I don't think people in those jobs realize how uncommon it is. The jobs in the middle of the curve, even tech jobs, are not all that demanding. They also don't pay the high salaries that we correlate with demanding tech jobs, but that goes with the territory.
It's a weird feeling if you've only known hustle-and-grind companies and then you stumble into a more traditional company where nobody is in a rush to get anything done and few people even work for more than 2-4 hours that they're in the office. These jobs are everywhere, though.
I've seen everyone in dev or security working more than 40 since Mythos. Every day is zero day out there.
Typical? I know a bunch of tech folks, and none of them are pushing huge hours.
Work for a ramen noodle startup? Sure. Work for a typical profitable company (Atlassian/Xero, whatever) - and I just don't see it.
Especially with the leverage of good LLMs operated well - if anything I find I have less time pressures than more, and I over deliver as compared to almost every one of my peers.
> A typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.
Um. What? That can't be typical. It's not even legal.
I have never worked significantly over 40 hours.
A typical tech job in germany needs 35-40h.
Typical US tech jobs are the same.
When HN comments talk about tech jobs they often mean specific, high-compensation or highly competitive companies.
Moreover, for creative professions, including programming and engineering, the number of "worked" hours is emphasized only by incompetent managers who do not really know how to measure the productivity of the employees.
When competent programmers or engineers have a difficult problem to solve, they will think about it all the time, regardless whether they are "working" long hours in the office or they are doing any other activities, at home or on the street.
It is quite frequent to have the best ideas when you are not in the office "working". For things like programming or designing, the time required to type on a keyboard the solution is never a bottleneck.
At least for myself, the majority of the technical solutions to the problems on which I have worked have come to my mind at home, in the morning, immediately when waking up, and the "work" done in the office has always been mostly in typing whatever solution I already had in mind when arriving at the office.
Anyone who believes that a programmer or engineer who "works" e.g. a 50-hour week is more productive than one who "works" a 40-hour week is naive, to not use a more insulting word.
This is true regardless how competitive the company is believed to be. How many hours one stays in the office in the front of a computer, while being watched by a manager who believes that this is how you "work", has an extremely poor correlation with the amount of useful work that is actually completed.
> 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
Let me fix that for you.
The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society [hoard wealth beyond the wildest imagination of those in the bottom 99%.]
So much wealth they quite literally don't know what to do with it, and for a cherry on top they're not even happy. The richest man on the planet is a depressed Twitter troll.
Until the general public rightfully takes back the money they've worked generations to generate that _mostly_ flows into the pockets of these (t|b)illionaires, we will continue to see a more stressed and less happy society for all.
Right. It was great when women got the right to work as an option, but now it's a requirement.
I think we don't talk enough about this. I'm neutral on the previous distribution of work, but I think it's very unfair what the society is doing to women now. Workers have never been paid so low in a lot of countries in purchasing power of something essential which is housing, while women have never worked that much in a lot of countries. And it's a choice societies made, because work could pay more, and everything else could pay less. Rich countries don't lack of wealth, they just distribute it differently, and when women started to work, they decided they wouldn't distribute as much wealth to workers anymore.
Even if we assume that they didn't before (which is not really true to start with, for the overwhelming majority of the population), I don't see anything wrong with the fact that women now have to justify their value to society like everyone else.
The problem is the fact that any couple, of any combination of sex or gender, now cannot afford a decent life without 2 full time salaries (or more, in many cases). That's a bad result of natural market forces that should definitely be addressed.
Women absolutely did work, but it was unpaid, so it wasn't tracked.
> 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
You explained the symptom but not the root cause, which I did in my heavily downvoted comment.
Every student is conditioned from K to work hard like a robot. Those who refuse to work hard fail out of the school system.
>A typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.
To keep perspective, that is illegal in many countries. Not everyone has it so bad. You can make it better.
The simple answer is wrong obviously, because it fails to address the nuance.
The most powerful members of our society (not the hardest working ones) are the ones who set the tone for the rest of us. We only need to continue working this hard as long as we accept their dominion over our society.
That's a choice we make as a society every day, and it's probably a result of the simplistic form of thinking you offer in your comment.
Dig deeper.
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.
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJHP0VfeOrU&t=12s
"The working class is the original and fundamental economic class. . . . The function of the investing class is to serve the members of the working class by insuring them against loss and by providing them with desired goods." - Levy
". . . the justification for the existence of the investing class is the service it renders the working class, measured in terms of wages and desired goods. The contrary is not true. The working class does not exist to serve the investing class. The working class has the right to insure itself through organizations composed of its members or through government, thereby eliminating the investing class." - Levy
Jerome Levy was a committed ideological capitalist.
From that perspective the idea that workers need to be reminded to suffer is like saying insurance companies need to stop paying so many claims to remind us of the risk of house fires....
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.
You don't need investors for this. Example from a non-profit that does R&D, café and music events (and has no investors per its NPO status): no matter how much faster R&D work can be completed, the work hours will never be reduced as this would be unfair to all the other teams. If work gets completed faster it just means that more projects will come in to fill the free time.
Can you define what you mean by “investor class”? I invest in companies and am relying on it to retire one day.
People who make money based on what they own, rather than what they do. When you retire, you could arguably be there but it's not what most people mean.
https://files.epi.org/charts/img/235212-28502-body.png
That still sounds like every retired person in the US - I’m really not trying to be facetious here, I just don’t know if this is a use of the word I personally don’t see often, or if it’s really that people are somehow against the common ownership of stock.
To be clear, I do not support the disparity of wealth, I’m literally just trying to make sure I understand people…
What do you mean by "own"? Are self-employed people included? What if the business is worth negative money?
If you work and are paid by the hour you're not concerned do not worry
I think it's a bit of a continuum based on the degree to which someone is paid for work they do vs how much they are paid for their position and assets. I think if the business can keep running for a good while without them doing much and they aren't likely to lose their job for it, then they're more of an owner than a worker. I'm sure there are caveats on that.
Literally things like stocks and real estate and cryptocurrency. Imagine Realpage or Bending Spoons.
Then that depends on the corporate structure. If you have personal liability, that means you net worth would be directly impacted and you are personal liable for the business debt. However, if its structured as limited, you could bankrupt the business and the debt of the business get wipe out. In this case, your loss would be limited to the initial investment.
It depends how you separate your personal wealth and the business's
Unsure if you're being deliberately obtuse, but a consultant working for a sole proprietorship is technically making money off a thing they own but they're also still clocking in every day and doing actual work, typically for a third party.
It's a pretty clear separation between those who spend 30+ hrs per week working and those that spend the majority of their waking time "networking" (attending conferences, playing golf, traveling, whatever) with the occasional board meeting or office hours type meeting as the only part of that which looks like a regular job.
It means not you.
Clues specially being
1) you hope to RETIRE
Ie be able to not work
2) you HOPE to retire
Ie it’s not certain
Well I have enough to retire now, but either way I was just curious - the definition doesn’t seem to meet the word being used, so I just wasn’t sure if this was some new thing or an overzealous use of the word.
Is your primary income a salary? If yes, Then you are not in the investor class
So many people here are brainwashed that the next big thing will make them a billion.
There was an ask HN thread the other day. In which someone notable had posted a vibe coded project.
Literally two days later, some nobody vibe coded the same thing, but slightly different and was absolutely shocked that their post wasn't getting any traction.
The stupidity is genuinely shocking at this point.
I would define it as the class of people who make their money primarily through capital gains
If you care about what number is on your W2, then he's not talking about you.
I do suspect that more people retire and retire for longer now than 1973.
Yes, earlier or more lavish retirements are part of where the productivity is going.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie#Marxist_theory
And who invested in everything that made the productivity gains possible?
I think investors deserve a return on their investment but the system is also heavily rigged in their favor. They get bailed out for bad investments, they pay lower tax rates, they have many mechanisms to avoid taxes altogether, and systematic inflation favors investors over laborers.
I am a rentier, an investor. I haven’t worked in any conventional sense for over a decade now, and I keep getting richer.
The system is rigged. I pay less in tax than someone earning a quarter of my income through their labour. It isn’t fair. It wasn’t fair when I worked, and it isn’t fair now - and that’s why I absolutely incinerated my 20s on the pyre of 60 hour weeks, year-round, as I realised that working for a living is a fucking trap, and only by living like a hermit, working like a slave, and getting really damn lucky can you climb out of the crab bucket.
It only gets more unfair the richer you get. I only need to increase my worth by about another 30%, and then I pay no taxes at all.
I do compensate through altruism and charity, but equally, I could choose not to - and again, it is not fair that I have that luxury.
And I don't think that in itself is even bad if you see society on a road where one day no one has to perform labor anymore and some people get there earlier than others but the system is fair. The problem is that the system is not fair and routinely rigged for the investor class.
With the stock market, anybody can be an investor. It really should be a core part of modern life to own stocks.
When one person is born into life with $1 and another is born into life with $5,000,000, no amount of "you can just buy stocks too" can be fair.
Should be? Like, it's effectively forced on people because you can't effectively fund a middle-class retirement without relying on stock-market-like gains, but there's no intrinsic reason that corporate shares should be a core part of modern life.
Isn’t “external motivation” good enough of a reason to buy stocks? (Or index funds)
That by itself seems fine.
I think the problem, trying to be as objective about it without taking sides, is that you make more money the more money you already have. This leads to runaway wealth inequality, which leads to civil unrest and eventually violence.*
If we at least didn't have all this systemic rigging in favor of the investor class, the wealth inequality would at least be less severe and maybe low enough for a stable equilibrium.
I'm not an economist but I would guess that you need the return on capital to be closer to the return on labor, and when they're about equal you have a stable distribution of wealth.
All the effects in the parent comment favor the wealthy investors and huge companies over individual investors. Then the finishing blow is 'money makes money' with the compounding of investments and normal workers being naturally forced to spend a far higher proportion of their savings on survival and immediate expenses, which greatly reduces how much they can benefit in the first place. Sure, investing can still give you an edge compared to other people like you, but it does not right the wrongs of the system we're living in.
To some/a fairly large degree, wealth fits a log-normal distribution[1]. A log-normal process is the statistical realization of the multiplicative product of many independent random variables[2]. When we take that as returns are a product (in a multiplicative sense) of investment, the result flows naturally. The basic multiplicative nature of investment returns is a direct cause of our wealth distribution - it couldn't have been different. Want a different wealth distribution? Use a different investment process. Good luck. The political machinations required to do that are left as an exercise to the reader.
1. Upper ranges more closely match a pateto distribution. For.the purposes of this argument, I don't think that is too relevant, but willing to change my mind.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-normal_distribution
I agree that it should be normal for every one of us to own parts of every company, but probably not in the way you mean.
everyone would own parts of nothing since no one would take the risk to start a company just so a bunch of freeloaders can own a part of it
I know at least one person who would still start something.
You can even buy national bond to get a share of the sovereign debt, but does that mean anything?
Well, besides from it is deemed as what the bankers call it "risk free rate", but I have already started to challenge this assumption 6 years ago
Gambling should be a core part of life? Sounds unnecessarily stressful and risky. Most gamblers I know don't come out ahead.
I have like €150 in my bank account bro
But you are no doubt filled with joy that the stock market is booming and gdp is up and other metrics that we are told are what’s important.
And what historically happens when a small advantaged class presses their advantage so far that the lower class is unable to sustain a reasonable standard of living?
The lower class starts borrowing from the haves to survive. My only hope is that the idea of debt bondage doesn't start making a comeback in a generation or two.
We already have multi generation mortgages. We’re well on the way back to feudalism with wealth concentration
People in the US are getting cash advances to buy groceries with mobile apps with massive interest rates.
The problem is that the payout is unbounded. Yes, their initial investment was important. But most of the productivity gains after that investment was not directly their work, yet they claim all of that as well.
Bonus points if they invest some of those gains into lobbying for regulatory capture to make it difficult or impossible for some of those workers to strike out on their own and compete.
The US, where unbridled capitalism, at any cost, in all fields of endeavor, is the goal - from healthcare to education to private prisons.
And who did the work that made the investment returns possible?
People who got paid for their work/time?
The issue is the relative degree to which the worker and investor get paid, as well as the risk they take. It's not a law of nature, societies can decide this democratically.
Did they get paid for their work? Or did their employer keep part of their pay while engaging in wage suppression?
"But that's illegal!" Yes. It doesn't matter because wage theft is the largest class of theft in the US. If nobody stops you, is it actually illegal?
And why should investors get a perpetual part of the profit after buying in once and labour has to keep providing labour every single day to get paid?
"Investment" is just an abstraction that we've created to manage resource allocation. If people with wealth didn't "invest" in a way that's productive to society, society can choose a different method of resource allocation that doesn't involve those people having the ability to invest.
So you mean giving a little money and resources should grant you a perpetual license on being the vampire to suck the living soul out of the thing you "invested" in
Don’t forget that technology development is a spectrum. A lot of the basic research that laid the groundwork was funded through public investment. Then the VCs and BigCos come in when the technology is mature enough to be worth the risk of investing in tech transfer to take it all the way to a real product
Actually science and universities which are funded by tax payers made most possible and public money (look at space x).
History shows most innovations would have happened anyway without big dependence on individuals, which is overrated most of the time.
Humanity really doesn’t need billionaires
When I think of investor class, I think mostly of those who inherited their wealth.
It's the ability to not work a day in one's life because of inherited investment.
For example, I don't consider Jim Simons to be in the investor class.
Nothing prevents any of us from similarly figuring out how to make a money via investment.
But Simon's descendants are in the investor class.
They are not the ones who invested to make those productivity gains possible.
In fact those descendants may not even understand what "productivity gains" mean.
This glue sniffing you talk about, does one HAVE to be an investor to partake? (Asking for a friend)
Also I am going to be in the alleyway with a bag of glue if you’re keen. But I am not going to make any more money as I called in sick to work.
Where do you think productivity from extending our lifetimes with advances in medicine and biology will go? Oh, you thought by extending our lives, we'll be enjoying it more? No. We'll be just working more.
Altered Carbon already answered that question.
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.
To me the opposite effect seems to occur: management sees one guy get a ton of a certain kind of work done with AI and then expects everyone to increase all work output by that much because they also have access to AI.
Of course "some folks say they work a lot more than they actually do" is also nothing new to AI anyways.
I would generally say I have a healthy 40hr work week at my current role but multiple MANGA friends have agents doing the bulk of their work.
Have you not found that checking, editing and altering agent work is a ton of work in itself?
I have.
Based on their LoL play time they have not.
This has always bugged me... if you find a way to do a job twice as fast, do you deserve half the compensation?
Would seem to come down to whether finding ways to do the work twice as fast is part of your responsibilities, rather than simply turning the crank on the job.
A sysadmin is expected to write scripts to image new machines faster, not continue to set up each one painstakingly by hand.
No, you get more work to fill the other 50%.
But hey, it's not your employer's job to just hand out money. Demand it. Or, if you truly are a 10x dev, just go solo and work 4 hours a week.
The next step is to fire half of them and have the other half work a full 40hrs a week.
Honestly I do my entire week of work on monday and then spend 4 days trying to get everything merged and deployed.
Trying to get everything merged and deployed counts as work
And is harder than it used to be
If it's not merged and deployed then it's not done...
This seems to point to that there should be no income tax for individuals, only consumption and wealth taxes.
And there is an argument for companies to pay both a wealth and a turnover tax, appropriately scaled. This might be able to stimulate more diversity of small/medium companies, and thus negating the monoculture like markets that currently seem to arise on a per sector basis, also allowing wider ranging ideas to flourish.
The tax system in western countries generally does not seem to have kept pace with the change in what work/productivity now is, and so gives incentives to the established rather than the emerging.
A number of eastern economies seem to have worked out better regimes encouraging overall diversity of enterprise - it is a tricky balance as you don't want to remove the incentive to try, but the concentration of wealth we see is not healthy in such individualistic societies as the west has.
Tech (business in general) is a Red Queen's Race. If everyone else runs faster, you have to run faster just to stay in place.
We're very good at absorbing productivity improvements. Hell that's the whole goal of software – make things faster then eat the edge by making them faster for everyone.
Previously posted as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49603086
The author still writes with a savior complex. The basic observation, that productivity goes up but the rich get richer, is not novel to their work. Their explanations and conclusions about this issue are also not new either - they just rehash 250-year-old classical economics.
The actually (apparently) novel part - a macro wage model described in 'Pinning the Wage to Scarcity and Technology' - is not discussed in detail. We don't know its relative merits or if its predictions are historically accurate.
IMO: if my company slows down to a healthier 30 hours, we lose to competitors and lose our livelihoods. So we have to keep up the 40 hours or disappear. Seems like so much effort is wasted in competition.
Has anyone actually tried this? I only know how I work, but I do more in 15 hours than my clients staff do in 40 - every week.
Almost 13 years of data on this. The only time my productivity tanks is when I grind 40-50 hours a week for months on end.
Sounds like a sad existence of a company, or maybe the owner is just simply telling you this lie so you don't fight for actual meaningful change.
To demonstrate that this is a nonsense, you all should work 50 hour weeks for a year, thus obviously destroying your competition, and then dial back down to 30 hours weeks for the rest of time.
one thing I don’t see talked about in these articles that compare the recent past (1970s) with modern workers is the huge influx of woman and immigrant labor.
I don’t care about the political or social aspects of this everyone can and should be able to work doing what they want, but there has to be some impact on workers leverage when we go from women being ~30% of the workforce (1970) to >50% (2026). Immigrant labor has also exploded over that time.
Again I don’t give a shit about who works, just noting that huge increases in workers must have some impact?
We work this hard because there's insufficient collective drive to provide for all before the wealthy are allowed to extract.
If 2 people both need something to survive, then collectively the group needs to produce 2 of those things. But if 1 of them demands 1000 of that thing, then collectively they need to produce 1001 of that thing to satisfy the demand.
The _problem_ is that the demand for the extra 999 is given equal weight and competes for production resources vs the 2 that are actually needed instead of explicitly prioritizing the 2 and then letting the 999 come from a secondary market of post-needs-fulfillment labor. Right now if the group produces only the needed 2, then most of the time the person who only wants the 1 that they need won't get anything at all, and in many cases that means they starve and die.
When the consequence of collectively producing less than the total sum demanded by the wealthy is that some people will then starve and die, that hangs like an inverse sword of damocles over the heads of the poor and middle class, always threatening those who can't just buy their way out into laboring more than would be otherwise needed.
The very obvious to me solution is to structurally prioritize meeting everyone's common needs for food/water, shelter, and medical care first before then satisfying the desires of the rich who want more. That way rich people can still get all their private jets and fancy cars, but they'll need to pay more to convince people that the loss of their leisure time is worthwhile instead of everyone in the underclass living under constant threat for survival.
Personally I think the constant political drumbeat to have more jobs instead of literally anyone trying to maximize collective leisure time is the greatest tragedy of modern capitalism. It's always jobs jobs jobs instead of needs and rest.
Upvote from me. I am proposing something on these lines, I call it "Basic Post-Scarcity", where basic needs production and maintainance get fully automated and work becomes optional: https://lorenzopieri.com/post_scarcity/.
Not least people have gotten much more productive at some things and not at all more productive at other things. And those things become a larger fraction of what people want, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
We had a run from 1980 to 2020 or so where the price of most things stayed stable except for housing, healthcare, education and childcare. It’s only the last year that people are complaining about the price of electronics.
A couple months back I wrote [0]:
> There is a machine called Productivity, and on this machine there is a knob and a button. The knob increases productivity, and the button is labeled "reset."
Whenever we increase productivity, someone comes along and presses the reset button. The current level of productivity becomes the norm. In fact, if you don't produce as much you are unproductive.
That extra time we gained is not for you to rest, but it's to find ways to produce more.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/where-did-the-productivity-gains-go
We live in a money-based economy. Money comes from other people, who don't give it away unless you satisfy them somehow. Those people that want work from you, will take all the work you can perform (up to the limit of labor laws). That's why.
Thats not true anymore and is the issue why its unclear.
I work and do something very specific, a lot of people around me do not need what I do.
I need water, food, energy, I don't know anyone personally who is providing this for me.
Then we have A LOT of people in our society (no critisism here) who get food, housing energy etc. without satisfying anyone.
What i want to say: 1. in a highly automated society there is a real disconnect between you getting something and you doing something for it.
Every economy is "money-based" in some way, money is just an abstract representation of value. You can try to get rid of it, but it will come back in another form because "value" is still useful to quantify and resources are finite.
money comes from other people... and the money printer -- if you have access to it.
money =\= purchasing power. if they print enough (and spend it themselves first into the economy), then the purchasing power is being siphoned away towards the source of the new money.
see the cantillon effect.
Uh, fractional-reserve banking, anyone? You loan out the money you just created and ask to be paid back more than that.
The robber barons at the turn of last century were able to build their empires under conditions of gold-backed currency. This is not a soft-money story, and hard-money will not fix it.
I can't listen to that any more, the sound quality is terrible and the speaker is all over the place.
The whole video could of been said in one sentence!
Microsoft going faster is funny, on a number of levels - The whole company seems to be run as if it's still the 1990's :D getting anything done or changed takes years.
Seems like tragedy of the commons principle - if everyone was chilling and working 20 hour weeks, I'd do the same. But people hustle and grind to get rich so that's the culture I have to adapt to.
No,if you wanted to have a 1950s quality of life, you could do so on 15hrs or less today. Just give up your indoor plumbing, washer/dryer, AC, etc etc
We had indoor plumbing in 1950s. Giving up the washer saves a days salary.
This is a new one. I usually see we are better off than in the Fifties because they had fewer entertainment options, or inanities like that. But you posit they didn't have plumbing?
What washer/dryer do you propose buying so that the savings compensate for the inflation in health care, housing, and education?
Sure if I can buy real estate too at 1950s prices!
It's something of a collective action problem even beyond power relations. My motivation to work less than 40h just isn't that high since everyone around me is working 40h too.
Also has to do with demand for savings. The US has a bunch of mostly accidental policies that juice that demand.
Because capitalism is a competitive environment, and improvements in efficiency increase the opportunity cost of not working harder.
We aren't competing with workers from 1973, we're competing with other workers leveraging the same accelerated efficiency.
Whitney’s cotton gin increased the speed separating cotton fibers from the sticky seeds by 50x. I wonder if labor will experience similar outcomes with the efficiency AI creates?
A lot of people aren't working hard. They might sit at their desk from 9-5 but total effort put in is probably only around 15hrs a week of solid work.
It's hard to see this if you're a typical HN reader because we're all a pretty motivated lot who tend to enjoy what we do, and what we do is fairly concrete. But survey the typical office and you will be blown away by how little effort people are putting in. And of the "work" that is getting done a lot of it is never used, or the sort of thing whose quality can't be easily evaluated so it trends towards the min viable product.
I used to work at a company where a significant fraction of the workforce just spent all day producing "decks" (PowerPoints). They hardly sent emails or wrote documents - even things you'd expect to be a Word file were decks - and on the few occasions I gently enquired about how long they'd been working on their current "project" (a deck) I'd always regret it, because the answer would be something like several weeks. Total output from those weeks: a dozen badly made slides that said very little, and which could have been an email.
And that was in fintech! Go look at the public sector, academia or NGOs and be amazed at the endless armies of people who can spend an entire year on making a single PDF that your average hyped-up Valley engineer would produce in a week.
These people are all technically working a 40 hour week but in reality a lot of their time is spent on YouTube, napping, walking the dog, taking care of kids, listening to podcasts, researching their next vacation etc. Their managers don't hold their feet to the fire because they're doing the same things, and the company produces enough profits that nobody is really motivated to do layoffs (or they're tax funded and won't get fired even if they do no work at all).
One aspect that interests me is the relative difficulty of "part time" employment. We define "full time" as 40 hours a week (number may vary depending on location and field, but that's the stereotypical value). The wage that brings in may be, for successful people in a reasonably lucrative field, substantially more than needed for a comfortable life.
But let's say I decide that I'd be happy with my life at 50% of my current pay, and I want to do 50% less work in exchange. 20 hours per week instead of 40. If you're in the kind of job that makes enough for this to work, you probably can't do it. 20 hours per week is for crappy jobs in retail and food service. It's very unlikely that you'll find a tech job willing to employ you part time at any pay level.
So even if I, personally, am sufficiently productive and sufficiently compensated that I could afford to work a lot less than people did 50 years ago, I can't do it. At least, I can't do it on a rolling basis. The closest I can come is to retire early. Or maybe take some years off in the middle of my career, but that's extremely risky. I definitely can't cut my hours and pay in half over a week, or month, or even year.
I pointed out the same thing as this article and promptly got voted down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49601814#49603709
There are a few misconceptions that come up in this discussion, which are important to understand:
a) people don't just work to make X dollars per year. They work to have a similar or higher standard of living than their peers (the famous "keeping up with the Joneses"). Sure there are dirt cheap housing in the middle of the country, but everyone wants to live in NYC. This is not about getting to a fixed point, it's a competition. So no matter how much more productive we get, we'll work as much as we reasonably can, which for most people is 40-60 hours/week
b) the issue with doing redistribution with taxes, is that the government doesn't just give the money back to the people. They waste it by proclaiming they can put it to good use, via custom benefits, non profits, etc. This is (usually) a huge waste of resources. So taking in an additional 30% of GDP as taxes won't make everyone 30% richest; it'll go in the pockets of the well connected or those willing to commit fraud and grift. And the politicians in governmetn have strong incentive to continue doing it this way because they get support and votes in return (e.g. through media corruption or special interest groups that vote as a bloc)
c) we have taken some of the productivity back - we have life saving drugs, clean water, cheap energy, all the entertainment in the world in our fingertips - things that 100 years back were reserved for royals and kings. But because of point (a) of course, nobody's happy having "just" that
d) even if the macines become super productive, it doesn't mean the price of everything is going to zero. There's still only so many apartments to rent or own in manhattan, and the price of human service will skyrocket (as it has done over the past few decades - compare the price of a TV to the minimum hourly wage for example). So it's a misconception that the value of money will go to zero, as Elon recently said
LLMs are not for you.
Quite surprising that the article does not mention, not even in passing, Russell's In Praise of Idleness [0]. Back in the 1930s Russell observed that a small fraction of the population had managed to sustain the British wartime economy in WWI, while the great majority of the workforce was in the trenches. Of course in peacetime you may want more prosperity, but the idea that this would require _everybody_ (well, at least every able-bodied male, this being the 1930s) to work _full time_ was already absurd back then.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Idleness_and_Othe...
Because the people paying your salary are out to maximize their income, not to fill your reasonable needs.
fear
When you stated "A third of the economy, in other words, already pays people for owning things, with no work asked of them." you glossed over all the risks and hazards and contingencies that come with capital, especially productive capital like machines or buildings or property. These are nontrivial and recurrent and require careful planning and continuous monitoring. This work, even if contracted out, bears upon the capital as a cost and thus is 'work' by another name that you choose to call 'price'
You also went on about "why a job that somebody is willing to do is assumed to be a job worth doing". This should have been something learned by workers early in their careers. Not sure what is happening in your hypothesis, or even what your hypothesis is in the study regarding the worker's responsibility within this system. You may want to put some bounds on that, or if unbound, be frank about that at the outset.
There were two paragraphs about consumerism that are hanging there unloved starting from "Two things happen..." and ending with "...every drop." but the worst part of those two paragraphs is that you attempt to drive them into a ridiculous conclusion: "Everything we measure about work is a record of what people did when they could not refuse." This is seems to embarrassingly stated as a polemical against human effort, which is ludicrous. Believe it or not, there are many many many many people who are energized each and every day by their careers, and get excited to have the opportunity to contribute to humanity's arrangements whether it is flipping burgers or curing cancer.
Where the paper went after this is really mindbending because it asks the reader to take a leap of faith that unseen models are replicating an entire economic system faithfully, and that hypotheticals can be believed and that the outcomes proposed can thereafter be believed. There is really not enough background or basis to make this leap and it is my assessment that economists will absolutely barbecue you if you try to make a pass. Asking readers to draw from their own anecdotal ["Do the people you know have more free time than their parents had at the same age?] is interesting but not going to move the needle in a meaningful way.
all the formulaic stuff that follows probably comes form the models and well maybe it is hopeful and maybe you could get a piece of land somewhere outside a small town in Oregon and try it all out on a government grant or something.
sorry if this seems harsh. I really want to give constructive feedback but its hard to see anything here that might gain traction.
Yeah, it only takes half the time to make the same stuff, but we aren't making the same stuff now, are we? (Or do you all want to go back to the pre-AI, pre-Internet, effectively pre-computer 70s?)
If no one had to work that sounds awesome
so that we have money to cover our health insurance!
Classic communism slop. The funniest part is that what they are suggesting is the feudal system. The king gives everyone parcels of land. Those parcels get subdivided. Poor people have just enough to survive. Have too many children? Some of them have to go die in wars, because you don’t have enough land to split it or to feed them.
because we don't have organized labor, all current working conditions in the US have been provided by through organized labor — child labor laws, weekends, 8 hour workdays, breaks, you name it... employers have never given any of this freely along with productivity gains
it's strange that all these articles about how much we're working don't even peek into the history of how our current structure was formed
the current productivity gains have mostly been captured by the richest, and everyone else is competing against each other for the scraps... if you choose to work less, you are out-competed and lose your status (guess what kind of groups can help avoid this!)
The "we" in this is a missing a piece: the size of the labor force. It's shrinking. Has been for 20+ years, with a peak around 2000.
Some people are working hard. The growing demographic is the retired, the trust-funded and those NEET-ing around on various forms of subsistence income. Another few years we'll be back to post-war levels ~%58 of participation, where two-parent homes prevailed, and one stayed home.
That is a big deal.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
Peaked in 2000 at 67.3%. It's now around 61.8%. That's over an 8% decrease. Hadn't realized it was that significant.
I recommend everybody spend some time poking around FRED occasionally. It's a good reality check.
Answer: People are reluctant to live in 2026 the way they did in 1973.
The additional compensation is a statistical artifact that accounts for air conditioning, iPhones, reliable cars that last 20 years, the Internet, etc.
but the unaffordability crisis stems from housing, food, fuel, etc. people aren't struggling because of an iphone they buy every few years, or the $20/month their AC adds to their monthly summer utility bill.
Don't forget the avocado toast.
Do you really need a whole essay to answer that question? The answer is super obvious: supply and demand.
The fact that we can do in 16 hours what we used to in 40 doesn't suddenly mean that people are only willing to work 16 hours.
We work hard for billionaires (directly or indirectly) so that we have money to pay the billionaires and their many subsidiaries.
looks like all the temporarily embarrassed billionaires are voting this one down
Imagine how much time people would have to be angry at our politicians about injustice, corruption, wealth disparity, the climate etc if people only had to work a few hours a week!
My god, they might even become actively engaged in politics. The horror!
EDIT: Being downvoted, cannot reply for 10 more hours.
We still work hard and will continue to do so because we are conditioned for the first 21 years of our lives to work hard at school.
21 years is a third of your productive life, a time when you body still works reliably, can repair itself rapidly, you have very little responsibilities and thus can take more risk and explore the frontiers of possibility.
The math teacher tells you to write out twenty tables of addition, so you do it.
The chemistry teacher tells you to balance out fifty chemical equations, so you do it.
The English teacher tells you to write out 500 word essays to explain why Sherlock was not a villain but just misunderstood, so you do it.
If you question why, you fail.
If you question is there's a better way to demonstrate the understanding, you fail.
If you refuse to do these assignments and start a lemonade stand, you fail.
Thankfully working hard is getting disrupted. An LLM doesn't sleep, take breaks, fall asleep after three 6 hour shifts or take sick leave. Nothing works as hard as an LLM and even basic LLMs that can run on commodity GPUs with 6GB of VRAM can write out twenty tables of addition, balance out fifty chemical equations and argue both for and against why Sherlock was a villain.
People will argue that balancing out fifty chemical equations and writing out twenty tables of addition is necessary to gain the foundation necessary to do more abstract tasks.
That to be an effective writer, you need to read two works of Shakespeare and critique in a manner that appeals to your teacher or the AI that grades your writing assignments. People who never got to do this are idiots and their writing is just garbage, unfit for human consumption.
That to be an effective Front End developer you need to code in x86 assembly.
That you need to understand quantum physics before you can design your first semiconductor circuit. I would like to save those debates for another day.
But people actually don't give a s*it if you work hard or not!
They only care if you're giving them value for either their time or money.
Those who don't realize this will keep working hard for those who will put them to work. Those teachers will keep joining unions and complaining they don't get paid enough while they will reject the truth, the reality of why them working so hard isn't translating into a situation they like.
The problem is that people who refuse to work hard most often have life trajectories that most other people dislike. Someone may enjoy the life of leisure, drinking, and strolling around that bums choose. But the downsides are real, and most people abhor those.
Jesus, they figured out that who owns the means of production is going to own everything, and somehow made it sound like some kind of grand revelation. my brother in christ, Karl Marx figured this out more than a hundred years ago.
and all they have to say is? land value tax and tax on spending??? LVT is fine but let's be honest is going to do fuck all, spending tax is literally a tax on the poor. how dumb (if not malicious) can you be? if a revolution is too unpalatable for you, at least say wealth tax. it's just two simple words, in that order, it's not that hard
One of the greatest cons in history has been to convince workers to allow companies/shareholders to capture all of the benefits of increased productivity gains
It has over time negated the gains that workers had made (through much campaigning, protests, strikes, and the threat of social upheaval during the Great Depression) to earn a greater share of the output (through higher wages, work week limits, etc.)
if we didn't have insane inflation, perhaps even some deflation, we'd be working 15hr weeks because everything would be more affordable. ah well.
I was reading this and a question came up. It ultimately works under the premise that there is only one ticket — so the conclusion is that the ticket must be ownership.
But if machines produce more, couldn't the state provide free services rather than cash? In kind provision could be less dependent on wages than taxation is.
Then couldn't we divide the monetary system further — not as banknotes, but by subdividing it? Would the administrative system be too difficult after all?
In other words, if the problem is that only the "wage" earned for participating in production grants the right to consume, then shouldn't tickets to the means of production also be distributed?
Still, no matter how I think about it, in the end it comes down to the problem of distribution. The OP also gives capital ownership as an example, but...
If automation can enable substantial production without human labor, then what on earth is the reason we should keep demanding that humans do wage labor for survival? I find myself thinking about this a lot these days.
Someone who did not participate in production can consume the product because they own capital. Then what is the basis on which that right arises?
In fact, economic logic, when you think about it, seems to be mostly a kind of circular reasoning. It says "capital's share equals its marginal contribution," but that market itself is ultimately something created by power.
Sometimes I have thoughts like this. In fact, the core of capitalism is the ownership of the means of production, and such ownership will keep accumulating ever-widening disparities. If automation keeps advancing, humans will eventually become unnecessary — and then how will the market be maintained? We cannot give everyone a claim on automated production. In the end, a ruling class and a ruled class will inevitably exist, and the question becomes how the ruling class can rule entirely with the consent of the ruled. Lately, it seems this principle no longer works in capitalism.
There is hope for fully automated robotic companies that are owner-less, and undercut any profit-making entity since they have no profit sharing to do. See https://lorenzopieri.com/robotic_commons/
> In fact, the core of capitalism is the ownership of the means of production, and such ownership will keep accumulating ever-widening disparities. If automation keeps advancing, humans will eventually become unnecessary
Welcome to the Marxism 101, the basic idea when observing increasing automation while expanding the ideas of Adam Smith, and some of the more solid parts of the thought (there are both very good bangers and "let's not talk about this" in it)
If working people in industrialized society weren't artificially kept indebted and poor (relative to the wealth they should have), then it would be impossible for the rulers to control the population, and they would loose their power.
A ruler will always prefer to rule over 100 wretches, than be an equal with 100 peers. And people all over the world have been bred to submit by relentless head stomping by family, school and media.
But the current order will end without violence and be forgotten as foolishness, just like the spell of the feared Soviet terror regime ended as if people woke up from a dream. Just like the strangle grip of popes, priests and monks ended and is now the source of ridicule. Our children's children will look with nothing but disgust at how the current population worship "governments", "authorities" and so on - all of these illusions made up of some of the least admirable people alive.
The stagnant wage graph reminded me of this compilation of graphs:
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Someone from the shadow wizard money gang will have to chime in and explain how this is all actually a good thing ;)
Because it deliberately fudges things around to imply that getting off crisis-prone gold standard was the actual reason things changed, instead of other policy decisions
Money used to be based on a beautiful thing (positive value), and now it's based on debt (negative value). I'm no economist, but that seems self-evidently bad to me.
These yachts don't build themselves, you lazy sluggards!
There is no point in working hard at all. It gets you nowhere.
Because we are free range tax and labor slaves.
The greatest consumer of wealth is the eternal war (cold, hot etc) between princes. It's appetite is limitless. We will be fed exactly what we demand and not a crumb more. No matter how excellent our labor.
Because the people in charge of deciding which work should be done have decided that we should spend every waking hour making them more powerful. Next!
You have agency. The man doesn’t get to decide what you do.
In theory we could just come together, start focusing on building a working society which defines what we need and what we want and just build it efficently.
We could just get rid of any inefficency.
Capitalism is driving our current economy, it doesn't has to.
There is no real reason why we couldn't decide tomorrow that every car is electric and depending on some factor you can just request a car.
Planet earth has resources x, the only question is for what we use it and how we distribute it.
But no if i want to be self sufficient (100%) i can't do this.
If i want to exit capitalism and build up a country not defined by it, i can't either.
If i kill bad leaders, i will be thrown in prison.
"The man" dictates the consequences of doing or not doing what is expected, and especially when you do something unwanted.
I don't at least. I have to pay rent, afford food and clothing, fund my personal projects, etc.
You work for the man, no matter where you go. Trace the money.
Short of a windfall or fanciful ideas of starting my own business (and then having to work even harder), I'm still a wage slave who needs to keep doing what the man asks of me so he will give me my monthly stipend
That may be true for the individual, but the man can be kicked to the curb at any time with ease if the workers collectively decide to. The man is only a belief.
We're still working this hard because we, as a group, want to. It is as simple as that.
True but pointless. The group can want things none of its constituents want.
True but pointless. The wants of the constituents is outside of the discussion. Explicitly so.
The man just sets policy that maximizes prices and minimizes wages, so that the median person still works full time and lives hand-to-mouth even while the economy has achieved a level of productivity that would have been compatible with Keynes' 15 hour workweeks were the surplus not devoted exclusively to pumping assets.
Next!