New Zealand PM Flags Four-Day Workweek To Boost Its Shuttered Economy After COVID-19 (cbsnews.com) 144
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says a four-day workweek could help rebuild the nation's economy in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. Ardern floated the idea during a Facebook Live earlier this week. Speaking Tuesday from Rotorua, a tourist hub in New Zealand, Ardern brought up a flurry of suggestions that could help jumpstart the country's vital tourism industry, including the shorter workweek, which could encourage citizens to travel more.
"I hear lots of people suggesting we should have a four-day week," Ardern said. "Ultimately that really sits between employers and employees. But as I've said there's just so much we've learnt about COVID and that flexibility of people working from home, the productivity that can be driven out of that." "I'd really encourage people to think about that if you're an employer and in a position to do so to think about whether or not that is something that would work for your workplace because it certainly would help tourism all around the country," she added. Arden said domestic tourism makes up about 60% of the industry, but New Zealanders spend about $9 billion (NZD) on tourism internationally. "Think about exploring your backyard," she said. Before the coronavirus pandemic, Microsoft tried a four-day workweek experiment with promising results. Not only were workers happier, but productivity went up 39.9% as fewer and shorter meetings were held, often virtually rather than in person.
"I hear lots of people suggesting we should have a four-day week," Ardern said. "Ultimately that really sits between employers and employees. But as I've said there's just so much we've learnt about COVID and that flexibility of people working from home, the productivity that can be driven out of that." "I'd really encourage people to think about that if you're an employer and in a position to do so to think about whether or not that is something that would work for your workplace because it certainly would help tourism all around the country," she added. Arden said domestic tourism makes up about 60% of the industry, but New Zealanders spend about $9 billion (NZD) on tourism internationally. "Think about exploring your backyard," she said. Before the coronavirus pandemic, Microsoft tried a four-day workweek experiment with promising results. Not only were workers happier, but productivity went up 39.9% as fewer and shorter meetings were held, often virtually rather than in person.
Insanity (Score:1, Troll)
People need to be taking this virus seriously and sheltering at home at least until a vaccine is ready (18-24 months) and Governmental Google/Apple tracking up and running. Only leave your homes for necessities. It only takes a single virus particle to enter your system in order for you to contract the deadly COVID-19. It doesn't matter how safe you think your country is, COVID is everywhere. NZ has already 21 deaths due to COVID-19, and we all know the death rate is undercounted because people are dying in
Re:Insanity (Score:4, Informative)
NZ has already 21 deaths due to COVID-19, and we all know the death rate is undercounted because people are dying in elder care homes,
Those deaths count in NZ. Of the 21 deaths in the entire country, 10 were from just one rest home, and several others from another.
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Yeah, I thought it was ironic that I was the one getting the troll mods.
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It is more of a sad commentary on the state of Slashdot.
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Your sarcastic comments would make more sense if you had any credibility. As it is you predicted this would be over by the start of April [slashdot.org] and you have made fun of people for thinking this might be as bad as flu [slashdot.org]. Your comment about New Zealand having 21 deaths is particularly ironic since you yourself stressed that 22 deaths would be meaningless [slashdot.org]. Compare that with the actual death toll in the USA which is just about to go over 100k [worldometers.info] (officially - probably more like 150k given the misleading counting out of
Re: Insanity (Score:1)
Whoooosh!
No self awareness whatsoever.
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Meta Whooosh - I'm guessing that the word "sarcasm" is a new one for you? It seems I got 110010001000 too. I understand that 110010001000 is a joke, my problem is that they (it?) aren't funny any more. It's got stale and boring. You can only take the piss out of people for misunderstanding stuff if you show some level of understanding yourself. Failing to understand that the aim of the track and trace strategy is to eliminate the virus in the community so that the economies can recover more quickly just l
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Anyhow, I am modded as +5 informative so I CLEARLY know more than you.
Ah yes. The standard measure of scientific success. "You may have 20 citations, but I got modded +5 on Slashdot". (By my troll buddies from 4chan.. one day they promised that if I got enough +5 posts, they'd declare me a "redpilled chad", then I won't need to hang around with Train0987 on Slashdot any more).
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It was over by April where I live. It should be over where YOU live too. 400% more people will die of smoking than Coronavirus this year (including from secondhand smoke). 300% more will die of heart disease. I always said 80,000 - 360,000 people will die in the US of Coronavirus. You cannot prevent it, that is what viruses do. You do realize that your (supposedly shocking) 100k is 0.02% of the population, right? IT IS YOUR IGNORANCE OF SIMPLE STATISTICS THAT MAKES 100K RELEVANT TO YOU. I know you think tha
Re:Insanity (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's quite likely that you have personally, through your ignorance and misinformed comments, killed as many people in the USA as have died in New Zealand in total.
Not so fast! TRUMP is the cause of ALL the COVID deaths in America! 110010001000 doesn't get to claim any of the credit. The fact is that if it weren't for Trump, NO CORONA VIRUS WOULD HAVE GOTTEN INTO THE US POPULATION!!! We'd all be sitting around laughing about how bad Taiwan fucked everything up if it weren't for Trump - who was responsible for 100,000 COVID deaths as of May 3rd! Who knows how many he's killed by now...probably something like 7 Vietnams, AMIRITE!?
You want citations? I got yer st
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And, seriously, what is the deal with your Random capitalization? Where did you learn that???
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Oh yeah, I forgot about exponential growth. As was proven by Slashdotters, eventually 67,000,283,3992 people will die of Coronavirus
Maybe you didn't forget about it, but your head seems to have fallen off. Seriously turn your emotions off for a second and think rationally.
The entire point is to prevent people from dying. You don't wait until a million people die to implement a lockdown, the entire point is to prevent people from dying.
And yes, without mitigation, a million people would die from Coronavirus in the US alone (fewer in NZ). Learn some science, you scrub.
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Seriously, lockdowns saved lives.
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The TSA saves lives too. So stop complaining about being groped at the airport.
The evidence for that is much weaker.
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I'm not sure why you are arguning with me anyway. I am +5 Informative and you are only at 1.
You got modded down to zero [slashdot.org], and I'm not arguing with you, I'm explaining that you are wrong, because you don't understand how exponentials work.
Also, you think slashdot moderations mean something, so you must are really confused.
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Because things that increase exponentially continue to increase exponentially forever.
You already demonstrated you don't know what exponentials are, but here you are demonstrating you don't understand what strawman arguments are. Who are you talking about that said COVID infection would exponentially continue to increase forever? That's a strawman. I'm sure you'll reply with another logical fallacy, because rational analysis shows the lockdown worked.
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Even if it takes years to develop a vaccine, you should stay home until then! If we have to stay in lockdown forever, we need to do it! This is nothing like the flu!
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Governments should give everyone 250K dollars to buy their own bunkers to hide underground until this whole COVID-19 thing blows over.
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Just a bit on your last point: In regards to "people losing their jobs causes suicides" that is certainly the case in some areas, but definitely not in all places. In some places, people have discovered that not going to work and instead spending time with their family doing family things has led to a massive drop in stress and related medical problems.
A case in point, Japan. April this year had a 20% *DROP* in suicides compared to April last year. Basically, the COVID-19 epidemic shutdown has had a direct
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Also, if you don't care about yourself, think of others. Why do you want to spread the virus by going outside???
I think a lot of the social contention we have right now is in conflating rights with decisions.
Personally, I will stay inside to the maximum degree possible, and simultaneously will not tolerate being told I -cannot- go outside.
The government convincing people they should stay outside by laying out the potential consequences and scientific arguments, is entirely different from preventing it by force. The latter is ultimately an on-ramp to totalitarianism.
It's rather like the adage "I disagree with what yo
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You call it "trolling" but I am currently modded +3 Informative, so I call it being "informative".
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And it was, ultimately.
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I wouldn't go throwing around the word stupid so casually. So that passage in the Bible is referring to national flags? Boy - that is really revisionist. NO ONE was using cloth flags at that point in history. They date from the Middle Ages.
So words written 1500 years before cloth national flags were in use were written specifically to be that "symbolic representation"? Yeah. Right. And you are calling someone else stupid?
Specifically (this took 30 seconds to find on Google):
"Thousands of years befo
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NZ got on top of the problem early, put checks in place for people coming in and out and already has a contact tracing app in place: https://www.health.govt.nz/our... [health.govt.nz]
They can afford to be looking at getting their economy moving again.
It takes about 1000 virus particles (Score:1)
The leader doesn't seem to be suggesting more folks go outside, he's still pushing Work From Home, social distancing and the like. He's discussing a world after the Corona Virus. Like all things this too, shall pass.
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I think that's the key to this whole thing. Think of the others. We often take risks with our own lives, so that's a hard sell. But everyone else? It looks like a variation on "think of the children".
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I'm strongly suspecting sarcasm here. No one can be this stupid.
But in case you're serious... Do you really want to create a two tier sociey where the Eloi stay inside, watch Netflix, and punch up foodie orders on their phone while the Morlocks go outside to do the actual work of growing and delivering your food and generally providing for your lifestyle? You've possibly been watching too much Downton Abbey.
Old Soviet joke apropos (Score:3, Funny)
Early Soviet days. A lecturer at a factory is telling the workers about the Communist future.
"First we'll have a 5 day work week, with 2 weekend days. As Communism era approaches, we'll shorten the work week to 4 working days, and 3 days off. Then 3 work days, 2 work days and, eventually, just 1 work day and 6 days off. Any questions?"
An older gentleman meekly raises his hand and asks: "On that 1 work day before the 6 day weekend - can we get off work early?"
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Stalinist Russia had a system with no weekends, and just a few state holidays. People would be given certain days of the week off, and this was spread relatively evenly across the week. If you were off on Tuesday, chances are the rest of your family and friends were working. They even went as far as to change the calendar with 5 day weeks, and 6 "week" months.
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In Soviet Russia, the week works you.
A small flaw... (Score:2)
How are you supposed to pay for that travel and enjoy that extra day off if your income is slashed by 20% in the process?
Many NZers barely make enough to pay the bills as it is (you'd be surprised how low the standard of living is here for most people) so taking a 20% pay cut will defintely leave most folk unable to travel, let alone afford the basics. Gasoline is around $1.80-$2.20 a liter here (goes up and down), milk costs $2.80 a liter, a 1Kg block of cheese can cost $17 etc.
Most motels cost around $15
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I think the suggestion is that employers pay 100% of salaries even though employees work 4 days instead of 5.
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Nobody said anything about earning 20% less. The 20% less "days" can be made up for in longer working hours for physical jobs, and just more productivity in non-physical work.
Yeah, kinda different proposals though. The fine PM needs to be more specific: 20% pay cut, 10-hour days, and "work harder and smarter" are pretty different proposals.
If it's a pay cut, I don't see the point. As others have mentioned, I'm not going to travel and spend more if I have less cash in pocket.
If it's 10-hour days, sure, I guess I could get used to that. I thought there was research showing people get less productive as the day wears on so that ninth hour isn't going to get a lot done. I personally
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One reason why we're not doing it - politics.
My last employer was a medium-sized local govt council. Our employment was a 72.5-hour fortnight, with the flexibility of TOIL, aka Time Off In Lieu. You worked your 72.5 hours over nine days in the fortnight, giving you one day off. You could have a three-day weekend, or any other day, as long as your entire section didn't have the same day off - so we were encouraged to schedule it amongst ourselves. You could even bank it up to a certain point.
Now, some of the
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The managers liked it, the field crews liked it - but the councillors didn't like it,
You surprised me at the end there. I thought you were going to say the field crews didn't like having a larger productive/driving ratio (which is uncharitable of me). I was assuming they'd think setup was easier than digging. Personally, I'd much prefer to be working than all the prep and cleanup work so I guess I'm with them.
I agree there's a perception issue. Someone needs to go first and it's risky going first: just ask the penguins on the edge of an ice floe. First one in the water might get eaten by a
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The crews were already used to starting at 6am, and the extra hour was to go at the end of the day, so it wasn't much of a stretch. They were all for it, they were going to get a 4-day work week and 3-day weekends forever.
The manager who came up with the plan was a pretty smart guy - an engineer promoted to management. I always had time to listen to him, and one or two of his ideas I adapted for the IT section. Lord knows we needed efficiencies - that bloody council had IT staffing ratios much worse than th
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Absolutely fascinating. Thanks for sharing it.
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Many NZers barely make enough to pay the bills as it is (you'd be surprised how low the standard of living is here for most people)
It doesn't matter, most people's bills expand to fill their income.
Fixed Operating Costs (Score:2)
Re: Fixed Operating Costs (Score:2)
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School districts are on four day weeks in the summer. Strict. Many government jobs are not offices at all. Costs too much.
The new efficiency will be real estate. The new casualty of the new world will be the estate agent and management company. It is not a coincidence that Sears reached it peak when it essential became a compan
A 4-day work week does NOT mean... (Score:2)
... "working the same number of hours in less days". It means the working week goes from 40 hours to 32 hours for those on 8-hour days, whilst pay remains the same.
This is something that is often mis-understood.
So just to say it another way: a 4 day work week means that all employees work 20% less hours than their current week, and for the same pay.
Productivity has been shown to be the same, with less burn out, better work/life balance, and happier employees.
Why buy the milk if the cow is free (Score:2)
Corporations are never going to go for a 4x10 work week when they already get a 5x12 week out of their wage slaves.
"By having solid gold faucets on my yacht saves money because I would have to hire two more people to polish them if they were brass." - Forbes
"Standard" work hours should be a tuneable var. (Score:2)
As the available work pool reduces (or increases) the "standard" week hours variable should be adjusted to suit. This variable could be adjusted after every census.
Same thing goes for retirement age... in fact retirement age should get this applied first as in the developed world we generally live beyond 70 years. It was originally designed to ease the average last 4-5 years of life.
Setting hard and fast constants against the human condition was just bas programming practice.
four days work (Score:2)
I'm speaking from experience - I've had a four day work week for a few years, and it is among my plans for the near future to return to it.
It is a massive boost to work-life balance, happiness and productivity (both private and professional). I can only recommend it strongly. If you can afford it and have the opportunity - there are few better things you can do to yourself.
Work Less for More Productivity (Score:2)
Sorry, but this sounds like a social science class project to me. I am sure workers are happier working fewer hours, but they are probably not more productive overall. National economies all over the world are going to be in trouble in the near future and only hard work will restore them, just as Japan rose from the ashes after World War II.
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Which would be more productive someone working 5*8 or someone working 7*12?
I bet it would be the 5*8 one as the 7*12 person is making a lot more mistakes at the end of the shift.
Now if someone can be working less hours but be more productive then their is obviously a sweet point between hours works and productivity. Why does it have to be 5*8 and not 4*8 where the sweet spot is?
Also their are a lot of effects outside the workplace affecting productivity.
If you have 20% less traffic (due to 20% having the da
Re:Spare us.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with leaving it to the market is the market is afraid of risk, and changing anything is risk.
The market for menial office work also doesn't care one bit about the market for tourism. If only there was some umbrella organization that could balance the needs of different parts of the "market" and come up with solutions that benefit society overall. But we can't let the government do it, because that might be socialism.
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The market is actually amazingly good at managing risk, even though most individual in it are not. It takes advantage of one of the big evolutionary wins of an enormous brain: behavioral diversity. We can't always know in advance what the right thing to do is -- not on valid epistemological grounds. But in a large market economy somebody's going to do the right thing, even if it's for the wrong reason.
The problem isn't risk per se. It's externalization of costs. The market does not respond to costs that
Re:Spare us.. (Score:4, Interesting)
It is good at managing its own risk, not others risk.
Back in the early 2000's I worked for a company that sold printers that offered Free Black ink for the life of the printer. But charged a good amount for the color ink.
We were trying to sell these printers to a financial firm.
They didn't want the printer, because if they started printing in color, then their competitors would too. We said, then just don't print in color, and use the free black ink. However they were worried if one person prints in color then it is all over.
They were risk adverse to a point where they are going to spend more money, to avoid that risk for them. Established businesses, are afraid to go out of their comfort zone and do something new. The new companies try that, however they often lack the resources to succeed.
Re:Spare us.. (Score:5, Informative)
The market is actually amazingly good at managing risk
Two things:
One: As the Cambridge University economist Ha-Joon Chang [wikipedia.org] points out in his book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism [wikipedia.org], there is no such thing as the "free market". All markets have rules; it just depends which set you are playing with and who sets them. And the rule setters tend to rig the market in their own favour.
Two: The economist Adam Smith [wikipedia.org] (the author of "The Wealth of Nations") has been adopted as a poster boy by neo-liberals, mainly because he advocated small government/"laissez faire" economics. But they somehow forget that he also advocated strongly against the concept of limited liability [johnkay.com]; he argued that, if you wanted to reap all of the profits from success, you must also be prepared to accept all of the losses resulting from failure. Otherwise people would inevitably take unwarranted risks in the pursuit of profit, knowing that they were largely shielded from the consequences of failure. The financial crisis in 2008, triggered by so-called subprime lending [wikipedia.org] is classic example of this.
Re:Spare us.. (Score:4, Informative)
there is no such thing as the "free market". All markets have rules
"Free market" doesn't mean "no rules". It means free of barriers to competition.
Rules against cartels, price-fixing, and trusts make a market more free, not less.
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Technically the minimum requirement are that the participants decide on prices and quantities purchased/produced.
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The market has figured out risk - do risky stuff with other people's money and if you fail then the government will bail you out. It's like Asimov's robots if they didn't have the three laws.
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The market is actually amazingly good at managing risk
"The market" as an abstract entity isn't good at anthing - it is the playing field on which things happen, not a player itself.
That's an important difference, because it means that risk management on that level is an emergent property. It doesn't mean anyone is good at anything. It just means those who aren't die off. It's similar to evolution, in some aspects.
The problem is that the consequences of bad risk management are not restricted to "the market". There is more than transactions affected when a compa
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The problem with leaving it to the market is the market is afraid of risk, and changing anything is risk.
That might be true of some players within the market, but it's certainly untrue of the market as a whole. If that were the case you'd rarely see new businesses succeed or completely turn an industry upside down. How could Amazon be in the place it exists in now if they weren't willing to risk doing things differently than the established players?
If only there was some umbrella organization that could balance the needs of different parts of the "market" and come up with solutions that benefit society overall. But we can't let the government do it, because that might be socialism.
You phrase your desire in such a way that the only possible way to satisfy it is a government or a corporation that has become so large it can essentially wield the
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That might be true of some players within the market, but it's certainly untrue of the market as a whole. If that were the case you'd rarely see new businesses succeed or completely turn an industry upside down.
There's a reason wildly successful startups are known to VCs as "unicorns".
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C19 has forced a lot of companies to experiment with working from home and they have found it's actually not just possible but even better in some ways. Quite a few big companies are looking at permanently having people work from home as much as they like now.
The other issue is that to maintain social distancing they can't have so many people in the office. A 4 day week means on any given day 1/5th of the workforce can be off, and maybe anther 1/5th or 2/5th can be working from home so the office isn't too
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One thing about working from home, you don't just mitigate this disease, you mitigate all sorts of little sickness that knock people out of commission. All those 'little' flus and colds that cause people to randomly drop out particularly in winter are mitigated.
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The problem with leaving it to the market is the market is afraid of risk, and changing anything is risk.
Politicians are extremely risk averse. Though they can be surprisingly enthusiastic about change when they fail to understand the risks.
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The risk is "will this come back to bite me before the election or after?"
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> The problem with leaving it to the market is the market is afraid of risk, and changing anything is risk.
No, it seeks to control and hedge risks, that's different from being "afraid." Here, the idea that a 4-day work week will "boost" the economy is generally ridiculous. I suppose it's supposed to lower unemployment by forcing employers to employ more people to do the same work, which generally raises costs and lowers efficiency and which only helps create shortages for any skilled labor. You don't
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I've been on /. long enough to know not to read the article, but the impression I got from the summary was that it's supposed to lower unemployment by giving people in sectors which aren't badly hit the opportunity to spend their money in sectors which are badly hit.
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You also give everyone 3 days off a week, which means more time spent doing other things, like spending money, going to the movies, going on vacations, etc. I'm not necessarily saying it will or won't work, just that this isn't a brand new idea that's never been tried, other countries have tried this, and other radical things like a 40 hour work week.
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The problem with so many of these proposals is that they try to boost demand in a world were supply has been hit due to people not working and producing stuff.
To hear Reddit tankies talk, this "proves" that billionaires are sitting on a pile of "resources" instead of that there are shortages of goods because nobody's at work producing them.
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Rested people are more productive. There were many studies that showed a 40 hour week would actually boost productivity and it did. There's also been studies/experiments that show a 4 day week actually boosts productivity.
I know myself when over worked, I make mistakes. Work a couple of extra hours, do shitty work, spend a couple of hours later fixing the mistakes. The only ones who benefit are the control freaks who have become managers
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Yea, there's all kinds of jobs. Sometimes that tractor doesn't need to always go in an exact straight line and some packing lines don't include quality control at some point on the line. But when they do, mistakes are more likely with tired people.
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How so? Most economists now agree that FDR dragged out the Great Depression for at least 8 years longer than necessary.
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How so? Most economists now agree that FDR dragged out the Great Depression for at least 8 years longer than necessary.
Only if by "most economists", you mean the ones at mises, cato, etc. And your economists seem to fail at simple math. FDR took office in 1933, four years into the Great Depression, which most people agree ended in 1939. Does that sound like "at least 8 years" to you? I sure hope not.
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The problem with leaving it to the market is the market is afraid of risk, and changing anything is risk.
This may seem an obvious point but "the market" isn't a monolithic thing with agency. People have agency. People manage risk. "The market" is shorthand for the aggregated behavior of millions of decisions people make and not everyone will make the same decision.
That being said, we do get into local maxima and there may be other maxima we can't easily get to. For example, there is a higher maxima if the entire world drove on the left (or right) side of roads. Problem is, you can't leave that up to individual
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In problem solving there's a technique to avoid local maximums with simulated annealing. That is you start with lots of randomness with searching for better solutions further from where you are and gradually lower it bit by bit so that you only search nearby, and eventually you've found what is hopefull a more global maximum. With a real world economy though there is immense pressure to not spend money that doesn't need to spend (that is, pressure to not spend your own money foolishlly, while encouraging
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An unregulated market is how you end capitalism.
Every company "naturally" tries to become a monopoly. Monopolies break capitalism, since a fundamental element of capitalism is competitition.
Companies have incentive to lower labour costs, either through salary reduction, workforce reduction, or getting more hours for the same salary (unpaid overtime). All this activities decrease the overall purchasing power of consumers. Capitalism depends on people buying stuff.
Globalism results in countries of very differ
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Did FDR really prolong the depression worldwide? Guess he was responsible for the rise of fascism in Europe by prolonging the depression there.
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From idiot politicians who want to "manage the economy". This is not something for government to decide. Leave it to the market.
-jcr
The market I work in already decided to switch to 4 day work weeks due to covid19.
Of course, it also came with a 25% pay cut and no reduction in work load, so productivity is definitely up, but you aren't going to see any economic rebound effect from my coworkers or I.
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Of course, it also came with a 25% pay cut and no reduction in work load, so productivity is definitely up, but you aren't going to see any economic rebound effect from my coworkers or I.
So they reduced your wages at the same time they reduced your hours 20%?
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Of course, it also came with a 25% pay cut and no reduction in work load, so productivity is definitely up, but you aren't going to see any economic rebound effect from my coworkers or I.
So they reduced your wages at the same time they reduced your hours 20%?
Yes, which is what the push to 4 day work weeks isn't about. Also, if you do the math, it's a 20% working hour reduction with 25% pay cut.
Re:Spare us.. (Score:5, Insightful)
From idiot politicians who want to "manage the economy". This is not something for government to decide. Leave it to the market.
Oh yeah, that went really smashing before unions got the 40 hour work week codified we now enjoy. Like seriously, is anyone here reading history books? Like does anyone seriously give a fuck about things that happened longer than three weeks ago? Because there's a lot of troll here that anything that happened before that magical mark three weeks ago just is completely ignored.
That market isn't going to decide that. And also, if we're going to uphold this mantra of leave it to the market. I want all that money that was handed out to every company from ma and pa to multi-million dollar airline company to be turned back in and allow all those companies to go bankrupt. If we're going to say "let the market decide" we're going to fucking stick to it. Me? It's either way really. I just want a consistent answer every time. Not this, "Oh it's okay to bailout airlines but not okay to change the 40-hour work week".
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From idiot politicians who want to "manage the economy". This is not something for government to decide. Leave it to the market.
Education. Infrastructure. Courts and the rule of law. Banking and monetary policy. Transportation regulation. These, and many more, are all examples of the politicians creating an environment where capitalism can flourish.
You only need to look at states like Somalia to see that Libertarian paradises don't work.
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Education. Infrastructure. Courts and the rule of law. Banking and monetary policy. Transportation regulation. These, and many more, are all examples of the politicians creating an environment where capitalism can flourish.
Careful with your examples there. I'm not at all convinced government monopolies on education and infrastructure are working out so well. Specifically, I strongly suspect privatizing them may work our much, much better than government provision. Again, not that government can't provide them, just that private actors can and might do much better.
You might want to avoid strawmen too. Very few people suggest privatizing courts and law enforcement. Those too are rife with inefficiency, abuse, and poor service (
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Privatising means rich you have to pay, which means rich people get better education for their kids than poor people. Maybe the rich people are happy with that they don't care that the servant class can't read. So part of the purpose of governments is to assist in providing everyone with equal opportunities to gain important things - life, liberty, health, education, and so forth. The market doesn't care, it is amoral and apathetic. The market should be serving mankind, not the other way around.
Remember
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Privatising means rich you have to pay, which means rich people get better education for their kids than poor people. Maybe the rich people are happy with that they don't care that the servant class can't read.
Remember that admonition about strawmen? Have you actually met a rich person who would prefer hiring an uneducated person versus an educated one? For that matter, have you ever met anyone who actually believed person X was better off uneducated? I haven't. So at most, I agree that rich person X just might not care very much one way or the other. I'm good with that in some ways because there are only so many things one can care about and someone else's education might not be in that list.
So part of the purpose of governments is to assist in providing everyone with equal opportunities to gain important things - life, liberty, health, education, and so forth.
Sure that's fine. It
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The problem with the bashing of public schools is that it actively prevents the improvement of the schools. Someone in government wants to give higher teacher salaries, and then there's a backlash that it's a waste of money to pay unqualified teachers more money. Someone in government wants to fix up the decaying building, and then there's a backlash from people who don't want an extra 1/3% sales tax because they don't have any kids anyway. Someone wants to allocate the better school books to the poorer pe
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Sweden where 40% of businesses are facing bankruptcy?
https://nationalpost.com/news/... [nationalpost.com]
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The "Invisible Hand of Capitalism" isn't kind.
The markets will correct itself only when things get really bad, and when things are good they will not invest into when it can get bad.
The economy will normally rise at a rate of 3-5% annually, with or without supervision. However without supervision some years it might spike up 15% and then the next year drop 20% then go up 10%. A lot of volatility, where cases individuals may make a lot more money then they know what to do with it, then loose it all and go
Re:Spare us.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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You are the idiot. The 8 hour day came about because studies show workers would be more productive. When people were working 16 hour days in factories, they had just come out of subsistence farm fields where they worked 16 hours days. Maybe you should visit your local library and find out how illiterate you actually are.
Re:We found the solution and we don't even know it (Score:4, Informative)
The sweet spot might be between 3 and 4 days per week according to https://people.com/human-inter... [people.com], at least for people over 40.
It is purely anecdotal, but I worked 4 days, 33.6 hours per week for 17 years between 2002 and 2019. My productivity felt higher compared to when I was working 5 days, 42 hours per week (2001-2002) or even 40 hours per week (2019-2020).
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I think that's probably the point. And I agree, if I didn't have to work my productivity would go up by 200%; my productivity just wouldn't be at work any more. Instead, I'd probably get a whole lot more done around the house.
There is certainly going to be a sweet spot for this arrangement though. Workers can't get anything done if they aren't working, but well rested workers make much better use of their time. But in the case with Microsoft, they were probably dealing with employees on salary.
I wonder
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If you get the same amount of work done in the 1 day as you would normally get done in the 5 day why should you not get paid the same?