Towards a 21-hour working week?

Your key concerns in this seem to amount to a combination of ‘just not quite rich enough yet’ or ‘some key goods are just a bit too expensive’ to work fewer hours. That seems to suggest that what is fundamentally holding back such a project is still the familiar problems of growth and supply-side problems in some goods, especially property in the uk which is far too expensive and credit driven. Given that we have got richer, its not too surprising that we have reduced working hours on average and i can see a good argument for a more managed transition that allows those hour reductions to be spread more equally.

The other problem is that you cant tax non-consumption leisure. So encouraging high productivty people to do less might be better for them and those around them, but not so good for those reliant on tax funded services.

“The problem is that I, and just about everyone else, has taken out huge mortgages and bank loans to pay (in part) for the consumption we’ve already had. Hard to reduce the hours unless (or until) the debt goes away.”

And, I’m guessing, that you’re not badly off, Chris.

I, too, am very sympathetic to the idea, but I think that one problem with these discussions is that they are almost always conducted from the perspective of the relatively well-off. If you’re poor, maybe running 2 or 3 poorly paid jobs just to make ends meet, cutting hours is just not an option. The idea implies a massive increase in the minimum or social wage – and they don’t even exist in a lot of countries.

“Schor explained that labour-time reduction had been an issue twenty years ago (I guess she was thinking of people like André Gorz)….” And of people like Juliet Schor: The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (Basic Books, 1993).
One note re academics: I think it’s impossible to calculate how the kind of society being imagined by Schor would affect academic competitiveness, since everyone’s values would be transformed in a world like this. In any case: productive scholars don’t consider most of their activity to be “work” they’d like to do less of, just because they love it — it’s more like “play.” But in the world Schor is imagining, that would be fine. Such people, though probably paid less than they are now, might thrive even more.

There’s a belling the cat problem here. Lots of people would be satisfied by a life of more modest material possessions coupled with security and abundant free time. The people who are in charge, however, will never go along; and the oligarchs apparently have the ability to stay in charge at least for the time being.

To paraphrase Woody Allen, capitalism is like a shark. It either moves forward or it dies. Capital simply has to grow since there is no other strictly capitalistic motive for investment than capital accumulation. Of course this imperative does not imply that the entire economy must grow. Increasing inequality is another option, albeit one that can be unattractive and certainly dangerous even for the capitalists themselves. Neither the progressive option, i.e. restoring growth by stimulus programs and other measures, or the regressive option, i.e. entrenching inequality by force and propaganda, leave much room for 21-hour work weeks.

As I recall, one of Schor’s explanations in The Overworked American for the increase in hours worked concerned benefits, e.g. health care. If you’re an employer and give health care or whatever as a benefit to your employees , it’s a fixed cost per employee regardless of how many hours he or she works. So it can be and often is cheaper to pay a smaller group of workers time and a half for extra hours than to hire additional workers — in the first case there are no extra costs for extra benefits. (Also, if you’re paying overtime it’s easier to cut costs if production needs to slow for a period — rather than having to lay anyone off, you just cancel overtime.)

Isn’t that an issue about the current proposal? If instead of one person working 5 days a week there are two people working 2.5 days AND each gets full health care or other benefits, don’t the productivity gains have to be pretty large to cover the doubling of benefit costs?

As I remember the Schor book, its line was partly that unions had bargained over the years for increased benefits, and that this had given employers an incentive to extend working hours rather than hire additional workers. Another case of unforeseen consequences?

The plan might be more feasible here in Germany where mortgages are a relative rarity and a minority of the population buy their home.

How does that work? The rule of thumb in the US is that your mortgage (house price) is 3x your income. How long does it take to save that much? I’m guessing housing prices are very different?

Starting to think the hippies were onto something 40+ years ago, with their warnings about the rat race and the risks of consumer society. I appreciate the shark analogy above but there’s a web aspect to it as well: it’s hard to get out. Maybe a solution would be a different kind of working arrangement when you know going in that you are foregoing advancement and a career but you can still contribute. A parent with young children might welcome the chance to participate in the the work force as something other than the usual part-time opportunities (I know I would have).

I wonder about an artificial floor under the modern lifestyle, that houses cost a multiple of your income, urban planning (or the lack of it) means car ownership or a recurring transportation expense, utilities (including electricity/gas, water, and increasingly high-speed internet) that are provided by local monopolies that ensure we pay more for less than anywhere else in the developed world, etc. Unlike the agrarian days of the Founders, we can’t opt out, quit our city jobs, and go home to raise chickens. Someone once totted up the expenses of just entering the work force today, with the expectation of a degree, professional wardrobe, as well as computer/cell phone and assorted expenses, vs the job seeker of 30/40 years ago. And how much of that stuff has to acquired with credit/a credit history that a 21 year old may not have or can only get at high interest rates?

The Industrial Revolution has a lot to answer for here, I think. That and the misunderstanding that we work for the economy’s benefit rather than the other way around. Economics and markets are good servants but poor masters.

In terms of the work-sharing effect, I thought economic literature on the subject had concluded that reducing the workweek didn’t boost employment measurably because skill/experience requirements meant that workers weren’t substitutable in many cases?

In terms of the sustainability argument, I don’t have a problem with it on a philosophical level, but I really do wonder whether the panel has thought through all of the moving parts that would be necessary to make this work:
1. You absolutely need to do something about unemployment (since work-sharing won’t actually do it on its own) and poverty (given that in the U.S, 50% of workers earn less than $26k a year, a drop in the median workweek from 33 hours to 21 would mean a reduction in pay to $16.5k a year, which would put them below the poverty line for 3 people and perilously close to the poverty line for 2). This means doing something really substantial in the way of wages or other forms of redistribution, but unfortunately, Jackson especially comes off really cavalier and hazy about how that would actually work politically. A universal basic income might look good on paper, but it’s political arsenic – even poor people don’t like it. A guaranteed living wage might work, but that too would take a lot of political work.
2. Unless you’re going to have significant decreases in standards of living – which Jackson especially really dances around in his book – you probably need to remove significant costs of living from the individual balance sheet to society. With universal health care, free higher education, and social housing, for example, you could drop middle class incomes dramatically without harming living standards. But again, I find a lack of specificity about how restrictions on consumption interact with the distribution of wealth and income – will poor people, who consume most if not all (or more than all) of their income get shut out of the socioeconomic mainstream without ever having achieved it, and will the rich avoid real restrictions by paying a premium?

even if my employer were sympathetic (unlikely) I feel very hard pressed now to produce the level of research output necessary for me to stay competitive with other academics (not just in the UK, but elsewhere). I suspect this generalizes to many people in professional jobs:

I wonder whether people who talk about shorter hours really have professionals in mind–especially academics. I’ve known more than one academic who emphasized that their work wasn’t something distinct from their whole life, that it was important that they didn’t dread having the workweek start on Monday morning, etc. In the same way, being fortunate enough to have a professional degree that permits a more rewarding kind of work (not just financially but emotionally rewarding, permitting a full, integrated life, and avoidance of the alienation prevalent in the corporate and industrial worlds), is available to a select few with elite university educations. The focus on shorter workweeks for the rest, though from this perspective seems to involve some condescension to “the rest” that I don’t endorse myself, at least acknowledges that for a lot of people who work to earn a living rather than as a deep vocation, the same kind of fulfillment and “wholeness” might not be available.

My thread summary: Russel Arben Fox asks the right questions; Gaspard’s second paragraph provides the (sadly) correct answers.

Andrew Fisher: Work a 50 hour week until age 50-55, or a 20 hour week to 70-75. Which form of life is more sustainable/rewarding?

Surely no one can prevent you from working as many hours as you want, to stay competitive or simply because you enjoy doing it. This is not really about the hours (or shouldn’t be anyway), but about the distribution of income (and wealth, hopefully).

Distributing the unpleasant work that remains to be shared around is a part of it, but it seems like a secondary issue.

Hard to reduce the hours unless (or until) the debt goes away.

Well, wages would have to increase reciprocally to the decrease in hours worked (I assume gradually over a long period of time), otherwise everyone’s standard of living and consumer spending would plummet when they shortened their hours and it would be economic disaster.

This would require workers to capture the gains of increased productivity, which is the reason it won’t happen in places like the USA — our entire economic and political system is set up to prevent that.

Even if the economic and political system aren’t actively conspiring against the workers, though, how do they capture the gains of productivity while the labor market is slack? And a labor market where most people work 21 hours is very slack indeed — there’s sure to be plenty of people who would think like Watson Ladd @13, that two such full-time jobs are no hardship at all. The reserve army of the half-employed would undermine the wage gains needed to allow the 21-hour workers to survive at all.

I’m interested in the apparent conflation between ‘the amount of work I need to do to stay competitive’ and ‘the amount of work I need to do to achieve what I want’. I can understand (and I share to some extent) the desire to do enough work to achieve certain ends – to properly think through an idea, to get that paper written up, and so on. It wouldn’t be so attractive to have to put one’s brain away until next week, when you’re right in the middle of thinking through something interesting and important.

But the ‘need to stay competitive’, to me, is something that reduces the ability to ‘do the work you want’. It increases the quantity of work you do while decreasing the ability to enjoy that work. It is very difficult to experience the rewards of properly thinking through an idea, or solving a difficult problem, when you’re constantly aware of the need to get more papers out in order to ‘compete’. The constant pressure of having to be more! better! faster! results in precisely the Monday-dread and sense of alienation bianca steele alludes to above.

And isn’t ‘staying competitive’ precisely the sort of thing that keeps pushing work hours up? If everyone in my department publishes at a higher rate than our annual quota (yes, we have a quota), then the quota will rise and we’ll have to do more. Wouldn’t it be better to base our working hours on the intrinsic rewardingness of doing the work we do, rather than trying to create more output than everyone else? If the amount of work needed to ‘stay competitive’ was less, this wouldn’t stop people from achieving their work goals – in my case, at least, it would help immensely.

I must admit that I’d never considered the possibility that ‘producing enough work to compete with my colleagues’ could be something people wanted to do for its own sake, and experienced as rewarding. Maybe this is just an indication that academia isn’t the right place for me…

Did any of the panelists talk about the French 35-hour law? What did they have to say about the pros and cons?

My own anecdata suggests, following on gastro george (#4), that the 35-hour week was quite popular among salaried professionals who were best situated to make use of their RTT’s for personal/family/leisure purposes. Where it ran into trouble was among employers and hourly wage-earners, for whom the cut in hours meant, respectively, taking on new workers (as the law intended) and a cut in total take-home pay. I’m not sure how Schor’s qualifier solves this problem, especially in r.e. hourly workers–would hourly wages go up to compensate for the decline in numbers of hours worked?

On the productivity side, I also hear lots of complaints from French professionals about how incredibly inefficient their American colleagues are, how it takes the U.S. office to get anything done, leaving the French folks twiddling their thumbs until the requisite meetings, consultations, approvals, etc. have been completed State-side.

What C.C.Fuss (for instance) said.
But still, although I can imagine that many problems raised in comments here could well find means of address, I wonder about the larger problem of training and expertise. As SteveAttewell@16 observes: “In terms of the work-sharing effect, I thought economic literature on the subject had concluded that reducing the workweek didn’t boost employment measurably because skill/experience requirements meant that workers weren’t substitutable in many cases?” This observation could apply to the terrific administrative assistant in my department or to the wonderful carpenter/contractor who recently redid our decrepit bathroom, or to my doctor. Take the doctor. How many years of education are invested in a doctor’s training (education, “apprenticeship”) — at many more than 21 hours/week! Finally, at age 30, say (a precocious minimum), she’s ready to go to work as a fully-fledged, board-certified physician — for 21 hours/week? She may be happy to do that, or to do that as soon as she’s paid off her med school loans (let’s say they’re minimal, in this sane world we’re imagining): is that the best social use of all that training (which is way too expensive to offer widely)?
The doctor, the nurse, the lawyer, the serious business person, the scholar, the teacher (and, boy, will we need a LOT of teachers in this world): many vital jobs/careers/ professions require far too much education (in the broadest sense) — the intensity of which education is also part of its effectiveness — for that education to be accomplished through 21-hour work-weeks. Even if people accustomed to working 50 or 60 hours a week for many years in “learning their craft” could suddenly flip a switch and happily apply or enact or share what they’ve learned for just 21 hours/week, could any society afford to get so little out of the investment it’s previously made?
So then I think, okay, the 21-hour work-week is some kind of goal or, better, a challenge to rethink the values organizing our personal and social lives. That’s the attraction for me. But then I worry about the doctors and others who couldn’t possibly be constrained by 21-hour work-weeks, and then I see a society with a chasm between “professionals” (including business and finance) and everyone else, a chasm measured by time more than wealth. Big problems there, too. (Kind of third-world-ish.)

As Ingrid points out, historically, reducing working hours was accompanied by a demand for the hourly wage rate to increase to prevent a fall-off in income. But that’s not what this panel seems to be calling for – except on the margins through productivity gains.

But that doesn’t seem to deal with the issue of low-wage labor; these jobs tend to be low-productivity and stay that way. Likewise, these jobs tend to be ones in which regular hours are difficult to get and keep, in part of a desire on the part of the employer to keep their workforce casual and unable to claim benefits.

So what we’re dealing with is a situation in which some people are working more than they want to, some people are working a lot because they get intrinsic satisfaction from their job (in which case, you could probably limit them to 40 hours of paid work and they’d work anyway), some people (working mothers, students, etc.) are working 20 hours a week because that fits their needs (even if it doesn’t pay well enough), and other people are working 20 hours a week but want to work more.

A 21 hour working week isn’t really suited to that complex a situation.

FYI – yes you can be a scholar and work for pay only 20 hours a week; most graduate students work part time and do their research on their own (unpaid) time, after all.

I’m with Bruce and others above thinking that we “can’t {easily} get there from here”.
Also as a “feast or famine” kind of guy, I’ve done plenty of zero hour weeks and 120 hour weeks.

Mortgages and student loans were mentioned, business loans come to mind, and I’m sure there are other time pressure mechanisms that would need to be deal with simultaneously if a limit on working hours was imposed.

I think for a sustainable society we need to build “rate limitation” mechanisms into things we do – think perhaps of a share market where you can only sell so many shares per day… even then, what traps would we unwittingly build for ourselves…?

Robert’s comment about advertising is pertinent, because those folks really understand psychology; more shiny things make you an attractive mate – perhaps we need to encourage the idea that ‘shiny’ includes stuff you make in your leisure time?

Maybe we need to start encouraging people in general to multi-skill and have more than one job (no hour limit) – it would certainly make for an easier place to transition from?

A couple of points:

First, if the UK is anything to go by, we could cut our working hours and maintain exactly the same level of consumption if housing was cheaper. And since nearly all of our current and future housing is already built, what we are all working like mules to achieve is simply the right to live in marginally better bits of the existing housing stock (and of course we cancel out each other’s efforts). Good news for banks, bad news for everyone who doesn’t inherit.

Alongside a mortgage, most people in Britain also spend a large chunk of their income maintaining a metallic container in which to queue up at traffic lights for hours on end on their way to and from work. Better urban design and cycle-friendly policies would remove the need for this spending.

And let’s not get started on other idiotic ways we consume resources (housing that acts like a wind tunnel, foreign wars, paying Wayne Rooney 200 grand a week when he would do the same job for free). I’m not saying that these problems are easy to solve, but we currently have to work so hard mainly because we live so wastefully.

I can’t see the feasibility of a 21 hour working week without a fundamental reform of our monetary systems. While our addiction to economic growth continues, necessitated via fractional reserve banking and interest bearing debt, we’ll surely need to keep the treadmill going until it all breaks down…

If we can find a way to achieve a more sustainable steady state economic system, or at least a system where economic growth isn’t a built in imperative then we might see a host of social benefits as a result, including a shorter working week…

In the early 70s, I participated in reaseach at an auto parts plant in Bolivar, Tennessee, known as the Bolivar Project. The project, which lasted four years, was designed to explore how organized labor and management could collaborate, while accepting that there were some areas in which their wants and needs conflicted. We conducted three hour in-depth interviews with nearly half the six hundred employees.

We found that there were considerable differences in what motivated people at work. Ambitious Craftsmen wanted to get ahead, either rising in the organization or improving their income, or both. They were quite willing to work overtime, because it increased their income. A number of these were in management, some having moved there from the shop floor.

Farmer Workers were often people who needed to supplement their income from farming, but the latter was their true love. When we experimented with opportunities to “earn idle time,” they embraced this eagerly. This gave them more time on the family farm, away from the factory.

Traditional Craftsmen were workers who tended to like work in which they were provided the specs, the material, the tools, and the equipment, and left alone. They were less inclined to interact with others and had little patience for meetings on such things as improving work and problem solving. The work itself was engaging and rewarding.

Without exhausting the variety of diversity that we found among the workers, these examples show that working people would react very differently to a shortened work week, from appreciating the freedom to do what they truly enjoyed, to missing what work provided them. There was even a case of one woman whom payroll had to beg that she deposit here checks. She was a widow, left well-off through life insurance. She came to work because she enjoyed the time she spent with the people with whom she worked.

We sometimes think our own motivations are those of most others, or it depends on which economic class we are in. In fact, there is a rich variety of motivations at the workplace, even in cases where work does not strike us academics as play.

@41: Yes, but you really have to refer to Bob Duckles point. Most of the career professionals I know outsource quite a lot of household labor by choice, not just by time constraint. I’m not just talking about cleaning the house, but yard work, maintenance, repairs and any housing upgrades as well. They have hobbies, yes, but they are usually entertainment and intellectual stimulation based, not, let’s grow some vegetables! But my colleagues are different than yours. It would be foolish to draw conclusions based on what people really want by just looking at anecdotal evidence.

A huge problem I have with this whole movement is that it has the ‘lump of labor’ fallacy deeply embedded into it. It’s not a required belief in order to support reduced working hours, but it appears to be an assumption for many in their arguments in favor. There is also a bait-and-switch going on if you want to simultaneously claim that this is ecologically beneficial and that it won’t lead to a reduction in living standards. Unless you gain actual pleasure from your own gardening or home electrical repairs, you have to make some pretty strong claims about productivity and waste in our current system.

“real well-being”

Slightly difficult to quantify that really.

“As for digging veggie patches, it isn’t really my thing. But I have lots of friends who would, if they could, spend more time on their allotment and less time in the office.”

For that reason. Preferences differ.

However, on this:

“The real contrast is, very often, one between a person having additional time in which they prepare a tasty and nutritious meal from fresh ingredients and then consume it around the table with family and one where they are so time-stressed from their intrinsically unrewarding job that they reheat a ready meal in the microwave and guzzle it in front of the tv. Household labour is indeed being substituted for market labour in this example, but is would be a mistake to think of the person enabled to do the substitution as being anything other than better off.”

They may well be better off. Depends upon their preferences. But this is still missing the point that quite a large number of women have been trying to din into our male heads for some decades now. Pottering about to occasionally make a nice meal for everyone can indeed be fun, leisure even. Cranking out three home cooked meals a day from fresh ingredients is very definitely work, not a leisure activity.

Yes, agreed, the food will be better, health may well improve, family might be a little closer and all sorts of other good things. But it is very definitely an increase in labour expended.

Which brings me back to the nef proposal. They are not, in fact, suggesting a reduction in labour hours. They are trapped in some odd time warp where market labour hours are bad, household production hours good and they are thus suggesting a decrease in market labour hours and a large increase in household production hours.

“Watson, as Robert Skidlelsky was very good at setting out in the seminar, it is in fact false of very many people that they are free to set their hours of work and hence their income/leisure tradeoff as they like. Usually, set working hours are specified in their contract.”

The choice, the setting of the trade off, tends to come when considering what to do for a living. The City is not a good choice if you desire a social life, academia not a good one if filthy lucre attracts. No, it isn’t true that only the professional classes have these sorts of choices either.

Looking down from thirtythousand feet, this becomes a problem of physical or biophysical economics. The total amount of “work” required to maintain an organism in a steady state, is lower than that required to maintain it in a nontrivial rate of growth. So if we were able to transition towards something which resembles in important ways a steadystate economy, with roughly constant levels of production and population, we no longer have to expend effort to create new stuff, but rather just to maintain or replace old stuff. So for instance the global society expenditure on housing, becomes on of maintenence, the capital cost having been amortized away long ago. The more durable and low maintenence we build things, the less future effort will be required. This surely should provide some level of motivation towards solving the many problems of both managing a transition to, and managing such a thing.
This even applies to training/skill acquisition. Consider say scientific research. Today acquiring the knowledge/skills is more than a full time job. We expect the next generation to advance far beyond the previous. Yet if we were able to hold the challenge fixed (i.e. rather than trying to discover new yet more subtle things, we were just trying to repeat the discoveries of the past), we wouldn’t have to work nearly as hard as those past generations, we could simply use our vastly better toolset). So I think even in the training intensive parts of the economy, there exists an opportunity to tradeoff rate of progres, and/or the degree to which our skillsets have been developed versus worktime.

Looking at this from the standpoint of individual work-life balance, the optimum doesn’t just vary from person to person, within a given person it varies with time and age. When I was in my twenties and thirties I had plenty of other pursuits both athletic and artistic that were more important for me than my technical career. However the economic system only allowed two choices, full time career, or part time minimum wage jobs. So, obviously in the current system people aren’t allowed to select their own work-life balance – at least not from a continuous spectrum anyway, we are usually only offered choices from the extremes. In any case, to return to the work-life balance thing as a function of age, at age 60 now, I’d choose more work and less leisure than I would have at 30, simply because I cannot physically pursue the things that were so important during my youth.

Not emphasized so far in the thread is that we can’t have a robust democracy without reduced working hours. Remember Oscar: “The problem with socialism is that it would take too many meetings”? It’s actually a problem with capitalism, not socialism. Because employers, as a class, decide on the terms of employment (notwithstanding Tim W’s frivolous reference to “changing jobs”), and because it’s generally in their interest (because of benefits, training costs, administrative costs, etc.) to have as few workers as possible, the workweek is 40 hours (and would be more if not for past workingclass struggle). Another reason this in employers’ interests is that it leaves most people without the time and energy to go to meetings (of all kinds, including the indispensable — but currently almost nonexistent — ones where elected representatives are given their instructions and held accountable by small constituent groups), do research, write, receive, and discuss letters and reports, travel to other places and see what they think and how they do it, and all the other things a sovereign public would do in a democracy and does not do in the plutocratic oligarchies that are the US and the UK.

One more reason why, as libertarians like Tim will never understand, you can have either minimally regulated capitalism or democracy, but not both.

If economic growth were unavoidably linked to growth of total ecological footprint we would be doomed. Luckily it isn’t. Population growth is another matter, we need to find a way (through education and minimum living standard) to quickly reverse that trend.

Progress can be measured in the reduction of hours of work necessary to achieve the same level of consumption.

@47
They are not necessarily suggesting a return of women to the kitchen. I think it is possible to prepare three home-cooked meals from scratch as a “hobby.” What isn’t possible, I think, is to do this every day, fitting the activity, including things like trips to the specialist greengrocer or farmer’s market, into a schedule that is already full, whether with an eight-hour workday or cleaning, community, and childcare responsibilities. There is work-sharing, say, having a few people on the block prepare the home-cooked meals for everyone on the block, in return for having a few other people do the dusting and scrubbing. But each of these loses some of the benefits that are fairly often claimed for the change. And I think the criticism of society’s present way of life will continue unless none of the desirable benefits is lost, and that the goal for many people is to get to the point where criticism of their way of life can no longer be made (or at least to the point where they can accept, healthily, the fact that they haven’t been able to attain a certain degree of “perfection”).

But that is about personal decisions and idealistic hopes for a pretty far-off future that may never be attained, not about what people with power and responsibility for changing real things are actually thinking about trying to do, which I think involves more of a willingness to make tradeoffs among all considerations and to consider what is practical in the short term.

Chris, Tim and I share a similar issue with your argument. You argue the problem is that we work to much because of inflexibility in deciding how much labor to sell. I’m arguing that that’s not the problem: given the flexibility some of us might sell more, others less. But the issue comes into being when we see policies like Guido Nius’s that don’t improve flexibility but aim at a desired outcome that could be suboptimal for many people. Social progress is the ability of people to live their desired lives, not the ability of people to live the life you desire for them.

I find it curious how many commenters simply reify current standards-of-living/”life-styles” together with the cost-prices structures and thus the corresponding distributions of income in their present form, (no doubt as if these were simply the result of individual volitional choices, which is the only criteria for collective decision-making anyway). But significantly altering the structure and distribution of work time and work quality, i.e. de-commodifying labor, would involve transforming productive infra-structure through socialized and publicly decided investment programs rather than relying on investment guided by the need to maintain the valorization of capital at the behest of its private owners. Capitalism has proven relatively successful at increasing the technical efficiency of production, (and thus driving over-production crises), but increasing the efficiency of consumption and restructuring and redistributing productive resources to do so, is anathema to it. But is 2+ autos per household an efficient transport system? Suburban housing tracts separated from urban cores as places of work, culture and socializing an economical system of habitation? A credit system dependent on the capitalization of arbitrary land rents for collateral effective for the allocation of investments in real productive surpluses? Does the maintenance of the value of capital through the rate-of-profit at the expense of distributions to wages really represent the socially optimal and proficient use of resources? Or isn’t the claim for pareto efficiency as optimalizing aggregate social welfare in the name of that weird oxymoron “consumer sovereignty” really just a rationalization and disguise for how the system actually operates?

Of course, the problem is that attempting to directly reduce working time amounts to a withdrawal from the prevailing system of economic value and thus a weakening of the role of labor-capacity against capital, whereas it could only realistically be brought about through the organization of labor-capacity overwhelming the reigning power of capital. But still there is no good reason to presuppose the prevailing system of relative prices and economic value relations in a system that is fundamentally structured much differently than currently prevails. Only because bourgeois professionals, who are the relatively privileged beneficiaries of the current system, can see no immanent alternative to it and content themselves with the prevailing system that they serve, is the assumption of current cost-prices, investments, values and distributions regarded as warranted.

After all, even within historical capitalism, relative prices, values and their corresponding distributions did at times function much differently than currently prevails:

http://www.angrybearblog.com/2012/01/define-rich-v-looking-at-historical.html

I suppose it’s obvious, but it’s sufficeintly importnat to the discussion that it’s worth stating again:

The nature of positional goods is that it’s individually rational to choose to consume them, but that we would all be better off if we could make a binding commitment that none of us would consume them.

The cliche case is the stadium, where one person individually can improve their view by standing up; I have to say, rather a large number of comments here seem to be equivalent to responding to that case with “But I really want to see the field!”

Thank goodness all those happy to work abusive self-destructive hours and set that as a norm for everyone else have such brave vocal defenders.

On the less sarcastic hand, I really like John C Halasz’s 66, and feel it’s very much in sync with the stuff I find intriguing and worth hoping about in the original post – that this is about changing a whole bunch of life, not optimizing one part so as to let the rest of the system shudder on.

70:I really like John C Halasz’s 66

JCH does have a way with words. I have been thinking all day how to say what he manages in the 2nd paragraph of 66 without getting myself banned.

So if you make it illegal, they’ll just continue off the books

You could say this about the minimum wage too. People do say it: There Is No Alternative. And it would be simpler if we, collectively, had no choice about economic arrangements. But as it turns out, there’s a wide space between regulations that are perfectly ineffective, and regulations that are completely ineffective.

Chris, I recognize the very wide range of considerations that can leave people feeling they don’t have any good options other than working more than they want to, than is healthy for them, or that is actually compatible with greatest quality and reliability [1]. But we’ve got a few folks here, and lots more in the world out at large, talking about the pleasures of overwork and the vile totalitarian badness of not wanting to cater to their fetish.

1: This bears emphasizing. There’s a solid, growing literature on the conditions that lead to fewest errors, most reliable and consistent quality, and so on. American norms for work are well beyond them, deep into territory demonstrably leading to more flaws and less reliability. The fetishists are putting the desire for more more more work ahead of any desire to do the job as best they can.

The 1% will see to it that wages will always be low enough that they can afford to hire the 99% for enough hours to keep them tired. Besides, the devil makes work for idle hands and laborare est orare.

@73:

“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

Umm…yes, there is; it’s called “economic rent”.

geo @71:

I’d assume you already know most of this territory. “Consumer sovereignty” is just the price-taking assumption involved in the inverted logical idealization of perfectly competitive markets as the explanatory base or fulcrum. (But, of course, no one is “sovereign”, except for inbred idiots or states). And, of course, perfectly competitive markets, with all the other assumptions formally specified in the basic “explanatory” model don’t actually exist, though some markets, such as agricultural commodities, (if one ignores subsidies), or retail sales, (if one ignores Walmart), approximate such conditions. Pareto optimality is an odd attempt to define economic efficiency based on entirely subjective or psychological, if “revealed”, utility preference functions, (at once positivistic and idealist, “esse est percipi”), which then underwrites an identification of efficiency with aggregate social welfare, despite the prohibition on “interpersonal comparisons of utility” to make the math work and despite the impossibility of aggregating individual curves into aggregate curves. Some problems with that are obvious. If one starts with a highly inefficient distribution of resources, then it isn’t hard to come up with a series of trades that increase both efficiency and welfare, but once such a system of exchanges is in place, it runs against diminishing returns, and market exchanges can’t be the source of increased economic growth or increases in the real distributable surplus-product. (Besides which it makes effective demand dependent on income, since it’s basically just a rationalizing figure for an auction-like account of nominal price formation. So it prolongs into accounts such as the life-time income hypothesis with income smoothing, which actually depend on the availability of credit, which is to say the distribution of wealth and income, as opposed to “interpersonal comparisons of utility” being realistically how people discover their needs and desires and consumption behavior significantly deriving, with a given distribution of wealth and income, from “keeping up with the Jones”). But it turns out that increases in productive surpluses don’t stem from market exchanges directly, which might only stimulate and promulgate them, but rather from technical improvements in the means of production, in processes and products, that raise the productivity of labor and lower unit output costs and thus actual and potential output, (which runs against the relative elasticities of demand). And technical improvements in capital stock tend toward the concentration of capital, with increasing returns to scale, scope and networks, with high capital intensities and thus high upfront fixed capital costs, which result in the economy being dominated by corporate oligopolies and their rent-seeking strategies to sustain their cost-structures, including the need to constantly expand production to lower costs, (far beyond what would be achievable by competition between smaller firms), which renders the idea that the system functions on behalf of aggregate consumer welfare nugatory. And, of course, behind the supposed law of supply and demand, of which marginal analysis is just the analytic unfolding under the assumptions of omnipresent equilibria, lies the cost-prices of production and the distribution of production incomes, wages and profits, in inverse proportion, derived therefrom, which is to say that actual productive surpluses and their potential contributions to aggregate social welfare can’t be measured on the basis of the rate-of-profit alone or in accordance with the claim that the marginal returns to the factors-of-production are identical to their marginal products, (since it turns out a consistent unit of capital can’t be derived, hence its marginal product, so the marginal product of labor likewise can’t be so determined). So the upshot is that there really isn’t much to the claim for “consumer sovereignty”, (as opposed to the dubious claim for citizen sovereignty), other than its class basis.

An alternative account would be to focus on the trade-off between use-value and labor-capacity. Use-value is determined by a) the properties and suitabilities that “things” actually have and b) by the shared social context of their uses. So they are reasonably “objective” and not based on arbitrary subjective appraisals (or tautologies). And labor-capacity is not measured by the consumption it procures, but by the more-or-less skilled effort it expends, such that the “value” of consumption is to be derived from how much it contributes to the exercise and development of such capacities and the proficient use of resources to sustain them. Based on the underlying basically Aristotelian notion that productive or fruitful self-activity in community with others is the hallmark of the good life and that labor, rather than being an onerous and alienated burden that reduces workers to mere things among things at the behest of others, can become life’s prime need, the free development of the capacities of each and all. (Which would eliminate as well the notion of leisure as simply the absence of labor, as passive consumption, rather than active engagement with the world). Needless to say, there would have to be alternate measures developed for the real productive efficiencies of technical means and natural resource utilization. But at least they wouldn’t be bound up in the compulsion to over-produce for the sake of the maintenance of private profits, (which would open up the selection criteria for the development of available technical means and knowledge), and thus to over-consume to compensate for the alienation of social relations and activities thereby induced. (And there is no good reason to associate technological advances with human progress in civilization. Indeed, given the value-neutral status of technological possibilities and the prevailing selection criteria, the confusion amounts not just to civilized barbarism, but often enough outright barbarism).

In the modern attempt to reconstruct Marxian LTV with up-to-date formal rational means, there is an interesting result among others. The overall theory is, indeed, consistent and coherent: if one chooses labor as the numaire of the system, then labor output far exceeds labor input. But if one chooses another numaire, say, grain, then grain output far exceeds grain input. So there must be, at best, some other criterion for choosing labor-value as the numaire. Perhaps it’s just that, at least until our robot overlords fully take over, labor is the only factor-of-production that has the properties of intentionality and cognizant sentience. Hence it doesn’t behave merely in response to its environment in accordance with the mechanistic antithesis of pain and pleasure, but can combine its experiences and activities into a generalized standard of value, transforming its pains and varying its pleasures, to attain a more genuine, public and responsible knowledge of the world than the pseudo-determinism of prevailing economics allows.

The 1% will see to it that wages will always be low enough that they can afford to hire the 99% for enough hours to keep them tired.

The problem with a statement like this is that worktime has diminished historically, especially in periods when working people have been effectively organized. Was the eight hour day movement all a ruse, or a delusion? Marx didn’t think so. Of course any time we in the 99% start talking about ways we could collectively choose a better life, there will be people saying “You can’t fight city hall.” But I don’t see why we should listen.

It’s more helpful in my view to think about hours per year rather than hours per week. Particularly for parents of school-age children, there would be a huge benefit in having six or eight weeks a year of annual holidays, instead of the four we get in Oz (two weeks is standard in the US, I believe, but feel free to correct me). Each extra week of leave is roughly equivalent to one hour off the average working week.

Thinking about the public service job I had before I became an academic, I would rather have put in 44 weeks at 35 hours a week (1540 hours a year) than 48 weeks at 32 hours (1536 hours) even if the latter would have allowed for a four-day week. Of course, that depends a lot on situation, and might be quite different for parents of young children.

Two weeks is standard in the US

If only. Almost one quarter of private sector workers in the US get no paid vacation at all. Of course, many of the participants in this thread will be quick to assure me that if people have no vacations it must be because they’ve freely chosen that, and the problem is with all the other rich countries, where workers lack our glorious freedom to work ourselves to death.

I see JQ was writing something with a similar flavour to what I was saying (although with differences). Personally, John I think the school holiday should be solved at the school end – because parents (when the rest of their lives is maximally strained financially, emotionally and physically also have to cope with having their holidays only when recreation facilities are expensive and full to capacity.) This is good neither for parents or for recreation facilities.

“I’ve emphasised your “should” and their “coulds” to illustrate your dishonesty. Since they also give many examples (beyond the ones included in this passage) of pure leisure activities, the claim that they simply favour substituting household work for paid work is demonstrably false.”

You’re not quite reading the code correctly.

“and encouraging more uncommodified activity and consumption.”

“uncommodified” is indeed meaning a move from paid market to unpaid household. Activity meaning production of course.

“As we explain later, distributing paid and unpaid time more equally across the adult population makes it possible to supplement scarce public funds with abundant and uncommodified human assets.”

Same meaning. Lots of lovely unpaid household labour = uncommodified human assets.

“Secondly, spending less time working to feed our consumer habits (which fail to deliver happier lives), means we will find it much easier to do the things we value but haven’t enough time for: looking after children and other family members and friends; spending time with each other; volunteering; getting out and about; reading; or learning that skill or language that we always said we would.”

Looking after children may well be delightful but it is also work. As is caring for other family members. Volunteering is simply replacing paid labour with unpaid.

Andf the full quote which you provide an excerpt from is:

“Many of the ‘consumer choices’ we make are in the name of convenience. We buy processed food, ready-meals, pre-prepared and packaged vegetables, motorised vehicles, airline tickets, and a range of electric appliances because they are supposed to save us time. Most of these purchases involve a lot of energy, carbon, and waste. If we spent much less time earning money, we would have more time to live differently, and less need to purchase for the sake of convenience. We could grow, prepare, and cook more of our own food; repair things more often rather than replace them; travel more slowly on foot, bicycles, buses, or trains. We could learn more practical skills, make more things ourselves and generally become less dependent on energy-intensive technologies. This is neither a sentimental longing for a ‘News from Nowhere’ idyll, nor nostalgia for the days of hippie communes. It is rational anticipation of essential low-carbon living, which can only be achieved by slowing down the pace and using time more than money and consumer goods to deliver what we need to live a good life.”

They’re very clearly moving from that “could” to “should”. As the next para says:

“The average carbon dioxide footprint of an adult in the UK is 11 tonnes a year. This must drop to less than four tonnes to meet essential targets. Low-carbon living depends on consuming differently, and certainly buying less energy-intensive stuff. Shorter hours in paid employment, less spending power for higher earners, more time to live sustainably, and a shift towards non-materialist values will all help to reduce carbon emissions and safeguard natural resources.”

If we’re going to abandon (or strain away from) the notion that a person’s compensation from society ought to be tied to the extent to which they’re hard to replace as a job-doer, can’t we skip the `21 hour work week’ half-measures and go straight to putting productivity gains toward universal basic income? Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take any damn scrap of egalitarian redistribution we can somehow happen to opportunistically lay our hands on, but that desperation should be regarded as philosophically incoherent.

People working fewer hours at a job means people are less valuable as job-workers, even if we partial-basic-income society’s productivity gains to those job-workers (half the hours and twice the workforce, means job-doers lost half their social value, not to mention half their job security).

As soon as we gain (or allow ourselves for philosophical purposes to suppose we have) some control over the means of compensation, the ‘you get paid to do your job because the people with the money prefer forking over that pittance to having to train somebody up to your level of experience’ model collapses. As well it should. Sure, in a society in which material resources are mostly controlled by an elite, society compensates us job-doers for doing stuff that it would be hard to get a different person to do. In such an environment, unskilled work is always effectively bare-sustenance labor, and we don’t have any control over where the gains in productivity flow.

If we *do* take control over where gains in productivity flow, then let’s set aside the notion of a ‘job’ for at least five minutes, please? Then one’s time divides neatly into: [1] activity for which society compensates you; [2] activity which society ignores; [3] activity for which society penalizes you. Is there any intrinsic reason we should prefer that the stuff people do be put into the second category rather than the first?

Can I put in, as usual, a plug for Ruth Cowan More Work for Mother
http://ruthschwartzcowan.com/selected-publications/moreworkformother/

“underlying trend is toward a share of productivity gains being taken in the form of increased leisure unemployment.”

Fixed that for you.

“Note: it may indeed be (Worstall-style point alert) that, taking account of release from household drudgery, the move of women into the workforce still represents a net increase in leisure.”

That is indeed the usual finding.

http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/wp/wp2006/wp0602.htm

“In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time. We document that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked (per working-age adult) between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, we document that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours).”

You know, Watson, where I work it’s 5 of 6 layers of management between me and the guy on top of the pyramid. And I’m not even one of the guys in the boiler room. The HR, lawyers, finance, PR, useless trainers (“unified communications skills”), admins of all kinds probably constitute at least a half of the staff, if not more. Surely that can’t be right.

In fact, the famous Pyramid of Capitalist System now appears to be wider in the middle than down the bottom. At least in the west; I’m sure it’s still a traditional pyramid in places like China and India.

OK, ajay, my overstatement in response to Tim’s overstatement.

He was positing that everybody who wanted such reduced hours would necessarily be exchanging that for having to cook three meals a day from scratch. That is self-evidently ludicrous.

108: that very similar “work” may have a quite different subjective meaning and be unpleasant or pleasant

Modernism = the aestheticization of the structures of domination

Watson Ladd@111: “We are all capable of spending less time cleaning and more time cooking. Clearly people don’t actually agree with you.” Oh, I hadn’t noticed that (though it was the premise of everything I said). I guess I overlooked the way “marketers alert people to items they might not know about. Managers ensure we can worry about our jobs and not the one of the guy next to us. Accountants make sure we know where our products are getting wasted on the line, and that no one is stealing. Bureaucracies administer rules fairly.” Simple as that. All done a bit imperfectly at this point, but history’s progress marches on inevitably. I should have realized.

“Tim, what I find peculiarly boneheaded about your way of thinking here is your neglect of the fact that very similar “work” may have a quite different subjective meaning and be unpleasant or pleasant depending on whether it is paid or not, how it fits into a person’s life, etc. ”

This isn’t the “Worstall way of thinking”. It’s the standard method in the part of economics that looks at time use. It’s the way the EU produces standardised statistics for the 27 countries (OK, rather, the 27 produce to the EU standard but….), the way the US reports the numbers, just the general method by which the whole subject is approached.

There are four parts, four uses of time. Personal time, the things that no one else can do for you. Sleeping, eating, washing yourself etc. Leisure time and then paid market and unpaid household work. Sure, the lines between different of them are slightly blurry. Unpaid household work is loosely defined as things you could pay someone else to do, turn into a market job, but which you do yourself. Cook (takeaways), grow food (buy it), clean (visiting cleaner) laundry (service wash).

And sure, some of the things which some would count as unpaid household labour would count, sometimes, for some other people, as leisure. Cooking a lovely meal for one’s inamorata for example.

Neither I nor anyone else insists that there are not these blurry lines, that whether something is work or not is subjective. To do so would indeed be boneheaded. But it would be worse, even more boneheaded, to try to claim that just because something is not paid market work then it is not work. That unpaid household labour is not in fact labour.

And that is unfortunately something which is just all too common: which brings us back to nef. With their we “could” all go and grow our own food with this new found “leisure” time. But it’s not really leisure if you have to go out and dig the field in order to get sufficient calories really, is it? It’s work. Which is and was my point.

Whatever boneheadedness there is in the division into leisure and household work pales in comparison to the idea that household work just isn’t work.

Tim, if your objective was to derail this discussion such that it was about you, your work has paid off.

I think it was Arlie Hochschild who claimed there was a problem with the leisure numbers because in surveys women who spend eight hours with a child were calling it unpaid household production, and men who spend one hour playing soccer with their kid called it leisure, even though it’s replacing “unpaid household labor” by the child’s mother. Bribing men to do cooking, say, by calling it a hobby, presumably shouldn’t be weighed in the scale as “leisure” that has no objective social value.

Not to mention unpaid work learning HTML 3.0.

Apologies for posting late to this thread but I’ve been in transit, having attended the New Economics Foundations event in London and then trolled various archives in the UK for a week. Thanks for the great discussion thread.

With regard to Tim Worstall’s cherished Time Use survey, I have one word: JACKSON. Approximately 3/8 of the respondents the 1965 baseline survey were from Jackson, Michigan. That’s all you need to know about the generalizability of the survey results (see http://worklessparty.org/wlitblog/archives/000994.html).

With regard to not being able to afford housing with less work the word is TREADMILL. As long as people are competing for scarce housing resources, the longer each one works, the higher will be the housing cost bar in terms of hours. This is also expressed in terms of the stadium effect. If one person stands that person gets a better view; if everyone stands, there may be some winners and losers but, on average, there is no improvement.

john c. halasz @66 nails it. Changing the distribution of hours doesn’t leave the current cost/price structure and distribution intact. It changes everything. That is precisely why it is so passionately opposed by arch-reactionaries.

And don’t take my word for it that opponents of collectively-enforced work time reduction are indeed arch-reactionaries. Read E. C. Tufnell’s seminal anti-union tract, Character, Object and Effects of Trades Unions (1834). Read David M. Parry’s 1903 inaugural address as president of the National Association of Manufacturers. The folks who invented the core arguments against shorter working time didn’t mince words to conceal their loathing of unions and the aspirations of working people.

reducing work-time requires thinking through a lot of related policies

No shit, Sherlock? I love it. The nef organizes an event with two components: a public lecture to raise the profile of the issue and an expert colloquium the next day precisely to “think through a lot of related policies.” But the avowed non-reactionary is critical because the nef “doesn’t seem to be addressing” the complex issues they explicitly are addressing. Or, wait a minute, “not because I’m a reactionary” is ambiguous. Maybe what Steven meant is that although he is a reactionary, his criticism is based not on his political prejudices but simply on his refusal to acknowledge that the nef is endeavoring to do precisely what it” seems” to him they should be doing but are not.

Well, look, Steven. My definition of a “reactionary” is someone who simply reacts to ideas they find unfamiliar rather than paying attention to and responding to what has actually been proposed.

* climate change legislation.