alt Hacker NewsEffective working hours are not set by absolute productivity - they are set by an equilibrium between two forces:
1. Competitive market dynamics. If you only work four days a week, other employees and companies who are willing to work five days a week will do so and get ahead of you, and you are more likely to get fired or to go out of business. This force pushes us all to work longer (and harder) so we have more money to enjoy in our leisure time.
2. A society's willingness to sacrifice days of leisure for days of work. There are only seven days in a week. The tradeoff between work and leisure - production and consumption - is ultimately what determines how hard we all work. This force pushes us all to work less so we have more time to spend our money.
Economists think on the margin. It's easy to demonstrate these two principles to yourself by thinking through worked examples from different starting points.
Whether the equilibrium lands at 2 days of work to 5 days of leisure, or 5 days of work to 2 days of leisure, depends on our collective preferences, which vary between countries and cultures but have tended to be relatively durable over time.
No technology so far has shifted this balance much - not the steam engine, the industrial revolution, the invention of the personal computer, the internet - and there's no reason to believe "AI" will be any different.
The logical conclusion of this is that - assuming we're all 10x more productive - we'll still be working 5 days and enjoying 2 days a week, but we'll consume 10x more, or everything we consume will be 10x higher quality. Hardly a bad thing.
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Attraction towards equilibrium is real, but that equilibrium is not a given. It comes from intrinsic biological constraints, individual preferences, cultural norms, ideology, habits and expectations. Even fixing individual preference, the aggregate preferences is structurally mediated (collective or individual bargaining, labour laws). Through all those factors there's path dependency and friction towards equilibrium.
The point is: "a society's willingness" is doing a _huge_ amount of work in that framing. This willingness is precisely what is up for debate when we discuss work days.
The whole of humanity is one big system of self-feedbacks. Equilibria are only reached with respect to constraints (otherwise there is only one equilibrium, which is heat death!). The more you zoom out, the more "givens" come up for their own analysis.
First sensible take I've seen in this thread. People especially seem to forget the consequences of #1: The company where everyone is working 0.5 days a week will almost certainly get outcompeted, very quickly, by the company where everyone is working 5 days a week. In fact company #2 can probably precompute company #1 even if they have much lower quality staff on average.
> assuming we're all 10x more productive - we'll still be working 5 days and enjoying 2 days a week, but we'll consume 10x more, or everything we consume will be 10x higher quality
Who is "we all"? To me, it sounds like the relative few who happen to have those jobs that have the 10x productivity boost but also receive the monetary upside (via ownership).
The rest of the hard-to-automate jobs will likely see their wages crater as the workers whose jobs got automated flood those labor markets - i.e. office worker turned skilled physical laborer.
This will further enrich the previous small group relative to the masses, as they will pay lower prices and receive higher quality goods and services due to competition between everyone else. Prices will fall not by miraculous AI robots but by squeezing labor.
This is the scenario - neofeudalism - that may await us absent strong mechanisms to replace the broad productivity redistribution the social technology known as "jobs" provided. Hardly a good thing.