Technological advances can’t shorten the work hours because even in a society wealthy and technologically advanced enough that basic subsistence is available for free, people still struggle for zero-sum things, most notably land and status. Once a society is wealthy enough that basic subsistence is a non-issue, people probably won’t work as much as they would in a Malthusian trap where constant toil is required just to avoid starvation, but they will still work a lot because they’re locked in these zero-sum competitions.
That is the clearest explanation I’ve seen so far for this. (I’ve read a lot of SF, and asked myself the question.)
I don’t think that’s a complete explanation. I would say it’s more along the lines of “If you start with somebody working a three-day week, it’s much easier to employ them for another two days, than to hire a new person to work two days because that requires creating a whole new business relationship.” Then both corporations and governments, I think, tend to be as inefficient as they can possibly get away with without dying, or maybe a little more inefficient than that. Work expands to fill the time available...
I would have to sit down and write this out if I really wanted to think it through, but roughly I think that there are forces which tend to make people employed for a full workweek, everyone want to be employed, and society to become as inefficient as it can get away with. Combine these factors and it’s why increasing productivity doesn’t increase leisure.
The full work week makes sense, depending on what sort of job you’re talking about. Is it a job where a certain number of staff have to be working at a given time but it doesn’t really matter who, i.e. my job at the pool, etc, or is it a job where a certain amount of work has to get done and it’s simpler for one person to do a set of tasks because sharing the tasks between brains is complicated, i.e. my job at the research institute? For the former, it doesn’t really matter whether you have 20 staff working 40 hours a week or 40 staff working 20 hours a week. (In fact, at the pool we tend to flip between the two: in winter, when most employees are in school, there are a lot more staff and many of them have only 1 or 2 shifts a week. In summer, the number of staff drops and nearly everyone is full-time.) It doesn’t matter whether a given staffperson is there on a certain day; lifeguards and waitresses and grocery store cashiers (and nurses, to a lesser degree) are essentially interchangeable. For the latter, it makes a lot of sense for any one employee to be there every day, but why 8 hours a day? Why not 5? If the full-time employees at the research institute were each in charge of a single study, instead of 2 or 3, they could do all the required work in 5 hours a day plus occasionally overtime or on-call work.
I’m guessing that most work for corporations and governments is in the latter category. Most work in the former category is relatively low-paying, so adults in this jobs have to work full-time or more to make ends meet. I can see why right now, neither corporations nor the government are endorsing shorter work-days or work-weeks: they would have to hire more staff, spend more time on finding and interviewing qualified people, and providing these extra staff with the expected benefits (i.e. health insurance, vacation time) would be more complicated. The current state is stable and locked in place, because any business or organization that tried to change would be at a disadvantage. But in theory, if every workplace transitioned to more employees working fewer hours, I can’t see why that state wouldn’t be stable as well.
Yes but as Eliezer said the work expands to fill the time. So if you cut the time correctly, you just cut out the useless work and don’t give up any competitive advantage. This is how large corporations can lay-off 50,000 people without falling apart. Sometimes that means giving up products or markets, but more often it means a haircut across the organization—e.g. trimming the fat. At first the people left are paniced about how they will get everything done without all these resources, but what really happens is priorities get clarified and some people have to do more work during the day instead of reading Less Wrong. The same thing would happen if the work week were reduced, although management’s job would get harder as Eliezer points out.
If we accept the premise that most of this work is being spent on a zero-sum game of competing for status and land, then it’s a prisoner’s-dilemma situation like doping in competitive sports, and a reasonable solution is some kind of regulation limiting that competition. Mandatory six-week vacations, requirements to close shops during certain hours, and hefty overtime multipliers coupled with generous minimum wages are three examples that occur in the real world.
A market fundamentalist might seek to use tradable caps, as with sulfur dioxide emissions, instead of inflexible regulations. Maybe you’re born with the right to work 1000 hours per year, for example, but you have the right to sell those hours to someone else who wants to work more hours. Retirees and students could support themselves by getting paid for being unemployed, by some coal miner, soldier, or sailor. (Or their employer.) This would allow the (stipulated) zero-sum competition to go on and even allow people to compete by being willing to work more hours, but without increasing the average number of hours worked per person.
Ouch! “The more I find out, the less that I know”. This site gives extensive statistics, broken out nationally and by year from 2000-2010. According to their numbers, for 2010, Korea had the largest numbers of hours worked, with the U.S. 12th on the list and Japan 15th. It looks like the shifts across this decade are considerable (10%-20%, for many of the nations). Looking at a bunch of sites, there seems to be considerable differences in reported numbers as well—the definitions of what hours they include and who they include may differ...
That is the clearest explanation I’ve seen so far for this. (I’ve read a lot of SF, and asked myself the question.)
I don’t think that’s a complete explanation. I would say it’s more along the lines of “If you start with somebody working a three-day week, it’s much easier to employ them for another two days, than to hire a new person to work two days because that requires creating a whole new business relationship.” Then both corporations and governments, I think, tend to be as inefficient as they can possibly get away with without dying, or maybe a little more inefficient than that. Work expands to fill the time available...
I would have to sit down and write this out if I really wanted to think it through, but roughly I think that there are forces which tend to make people employed for a full workweek, everyone want to be employed, and society to become as inefficient as it can get away with. Combine these factors and it’s why increasing productivity doesn’t increase leisure.
The full work week makes sense, depending on what sort of job you’re talking about. Is it a job where a certain number of staff have to be working at a given time but it doesn’t really matter who, i.e. my job at the pool, etc, or is it a job where a certain amount of work has to get done and it’s simpler for one person to do a set of tasks because sharing the tasks between brains is complicated, i.e. my job at the research institute? For the former, it doesn’t really matter whether you have 20 staff working 40 hours a week or 40 staff working 20 hours a week. (In fact, at the pool we tend to flip between the two: in winter, when most employees are in school, there are a lot more staff and many of them have only 1 or 2 shifts a week. In summer, the number of staff drops and nearly everyone is full-time.) It doesn’t matter whether a given staffperson is there on a certain day; lifeguards and waitresses and grocery store cashiers (and nurses, to a lesser degree) are essentially interchangeable. For the latter, it makes a lot of sense for any one employee to be there every day, but why 8 hours a day? Why not 5? If the full-time employees at the research institute were each in charge of a single study, instead of 2 or 3, they could do all the required work in 5 hours a day plus occasionally overtime or on-call work.
I’m guessing that most work for corporations and governments is in the latter category. Most work in the former category is relatively low-paying, so adults in this jobs have to work full-time or more to make ends meet. I can see why right now, neither corporations nor the government are endorsing shorter work-days or work-weeks: they would have to hire more staff, spend more time on finding and interviewing qualified people, and providing these extra staff with the expected benefits (i.e. health insurance, vacation time) would be more complicated. The current state is stable and locked in place, because any business or organization that tried to change would be at a disadvantage. But in theory, if every workplace transitioned to more employees working fewer hours, I can’t see why that state wouldn’t be stable as well.
Yes but as Eliezer said the work expands to fill the time. So if you cut the time correctly, you just cut out the useless work and don’t give up any competitive advantage. This is how large corporations can lay-off 50,000 people without falling apart. Sometimes that means giving up products or markets, but more often it means a haircut across the organization—e.g. trimming the fat. At first the people left are paniced about how they will get everything done without all these resources, but what really happens is priorities get clarified and some people have to do more work during the day instead of reading Less Wrong. The same thing would happen if the work week were reduced, although management’s job would get harder as Eliezer points out.
It is a plausible argument, but it seems at least partially incompatible with known international differences within the wealthy industrialized world. “Using the most recently available data, the ILO has determined that the average Australian, Canadian, Japanese or Mexican worker was on the job roughly 100 hours less than the average American in a year—that’s almost two-and-a-half weeks less. Brazilians and British employees worked some 250 hours, or more than five weeks, less than Americans.”. I’d expect very similar zero sum competitions to exist in all of these nations, yet the work hours have substantial differences.
If we accept the premise that most of this work is being spent on a zero-sum game of competing for status and land, then it’s a prisoner’s-dilemma situation like doping in competitive sports, and a reasonable solution is some kind of regulation limiting that competition. Mandatory six-week vacations, requirements to close shops during certain hours, and hefty overtime multipliers coupled with generous minimum wages are three examples that occur in the real world.
A market fundamentalist might seek to use tradable caps, as with sulfur dioxide emissions, instead of inflexible regulations. Maybe you’re born with the right to work 1000 hours per year, for example, but you have the right to sell those hours to someone else who wants to work more hours. Retirees and students could support themselves by getting paid for being unemployed, by some coal miner, soldier, or sailor. (Or their employer.) This would allow the (stipulated) zero-sum competition to go on and even allow people to compete by being willing to work more hours, but without increasing the average number of hours worked per person.
Japan‽ That can’t be right. This study says indeed it isn’t. What’s going on?
Edit: What’s going on is that it’s a recent change. Thanks, soreff.
Ouch! “The more I find out, the less that I know”. This site gives extensive statistics, broken out nationally and by year from 2000-2010. According to their numbers, for 2010, Korea had the largest numbers of hours worked, with the U.S. 12th on the list and Japan 15th. It looks like the shifts across this decade are considerable (10%-20%, for many of the nations). Looking at a bunch of sites, there seems to be considerable differences in reported numbers as well—the definitions of what hours they include and who they include may differ...