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coffeespoons comments on Politics Discussion Thread September 2012 - Less Wrong
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Here's a few left-wing, subversive provocations to get you started:
It's the 21st century – why are we working so much? - again, everything by Owen Hatherley is worth reading.
The boring, bourgeois but fairly diligent Mother Jones magazine has a nice report from last year on American companies driving their sl.. employees to greater and greater feats of Productivity. Don't you want to be Productive? No?! What kind of a parasite are you?!
(Observe how the top comment on MoJo and the first comment on the Guardian both mention that crazy bearded German with his theories about how employers will collectively find a way to wring more and more out of the workers as the technology allows them more reach, while the pay stays more or less the same. He sounds a bit less crazy now, eh?)
While you're at it, please take time to read Oscar Wilde's wonderful utopian essay that Hatherley quotes. I do not entirely share his hopes of better social interaction and a more decent status assignment in the absense of material need, but hell, there's definitely something to his words.
Related, a roundup of a heated exchange on workers' rights between Crooked Timber and Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
Keynes, who is having a come back these days, was also in favour of a reduced week, based on the assumption that the prosperity societies have would lead to less work.
We can certainly afford it, but if 40 hours is more efficient than 30 hours, in a competitive framework the former will triumph. Of course, theres a reasonable amount of evidence (as I understand it) that beyond short pushes to get stuff done, stretching the working day reduces productivity: this is one of the reasons companies excepted union demands for an 8 hour day.
It is kind of weird that we have a 5 day working week and not a 6 day or 4 day week if you think about it. One suspects that thats a cultural creation rather than an inevitable one.
"...stretching the working day reduces productivity"
AFAIK, it reduces productivity per hour; I'm not sure at what point it reduces overall productivity.
ETA: will look this up later, if no one else gets there first.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/work-hour-skepticism.html comes to mind. (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/why-work-hour-limits.html also includes some interesting links.)
Thanks!
You're welcome. It's an interesting topic for considering how ems might evolve: can a roughly human architecture work nonstop? Or will ems have to make tradeoffs between reloading a 'clean' brain every X seconds and being able to learn from work?