Giving a level of scarcity doesn’t mean it is scarce. Plenty is one such level.
Chicken is a good example over the past 50 or 60 years. You need to compare the prices of comparable items. That any family in the Northeast could afford lobster 75 years ago, while it is expensive today, does not mean they were better off.
That is why CPI is computed on a basket of items, not just one. Anyone can pick and choose an item to make us seem either richer or poorer than people in the past, but that is meaningless.
Another example of price decreases through technological progress, with no relation to base purchasing power. I used lobster as a bad example of things to compare, and you gave yet another reason it is.
One of the reasons you don’t see people working shorter work weeks is that it’s less efficient to have two employees work 20-hour weeks (or 4 work 10-hour weeks), due to switching and communication costs.
In software (my field) there’s a book that explains this called The Mythical Man-Month. Basically, you can’t take a project that would take one guy a month to complete and have it completed in a week by putting 4 people to work on it. In fact, you might make it take even longer than originally because all those people have to coordinate and understand the vision for the project, etc.
This is true (although less-so) even for relatively unskilled labor. You have to coordinate shift-changes and schedules. You have more employees to keep track of for a given job. More training to bring new employees up to speed. And there are lots of overhead costs, like health insurance and work space and business cards and whatever, that are per-employee rather than per hour. Increase the number of employees you have, and you increase those costs proportionally.
All of this provides incentives to have fewer employees who work more.
Related, one of the reasons Labor won the battle for a forty hour work week was that the great God Science was telling employers that productivity dropped after forty hours - they were better off having three people work forty hours than two people work sixty - employees made fewer mistakes and simply churned out more.
Employees wanted a shorter work week, and employers had a good reason to give it to them.
Except that many of my daughter’s friends have been stuck in retail jobs for 30 hours a week - just enough to avoid the company giving them benefits. Places open more than 8 hours a day 5 days a week are going to have to handle shift changes anyway, so no negative there. So that is an example of a shorter work week, but not one that benefits labor.
I agree about jobs requiring long term focus. In fact the optimal hours per week seems to be a bit over 40, which is why so many salaried people work free overtime. There is a paper, which I’ve written about before, showing that as you approach 50 hours of work a week you make so many mistakes that you are effectively getting 40 hours of productive work. It is not available on the web, so I can’t give a link.
That’s because there’s a major externality provided by laws that require certain sorts of benefits for employees who work a certain number of hours.
If there weren’t such laws, you’d likely see them working closer to 40 hour weeks. You already do see them working close to the soft-limit (I believe 32 hours a week is considered “full time” and deserving of benefits in most places), so the incentives to work more hours are clearly present, they’re just not sufficient to overcome the additional costs that benefits would require.
Of course, we could mandate better benefits for people who work 20 hours or more, but that would probably still be more than the cost of having extra workers, and people without many competitive skills would just have to find 2 18-hour jobs. In fact, that might well make people even worse off. You can usually survive on a 30-hour retail job, at least if you’re young and single), but you probably can’t on an 18-hour one, which means that young relatively unskilled workers would have to deal with two work schedules, two work locations, etc. It’d probably be more extra work for them than wasted wages for their employers.
Good point. So we’re likely going to stay with a 40-hour work week, plus or minus a bit, because that’s where the sweet point is efficiency-wise.
And the “keep you under the benefits ceiling” isn’t because employers are mean - its because they have to stay competitive. Labor is a huge cost in a large retail organization, and if WalMart can sell it cheaper, people buy it at WalMart. So most low cost retailers keep their low skilled help at a level of hours where they don’t get benefits - keeping that cost down.
health care benefits are the issue here, if you decoupled health care from employment you’d seen a lot more 40 hour work weeks for low level staff. I’m all for it, personally.
Bingo. Of course, it’s not a 50’s lifestyle, but a modern approximation, with dramatically lower status – and status is extremely important to most people.
On a completely different tack, it’s difficult to get high paying part-time jobs, for the reasons mentioned above: a company can’t afford to hire 4 people part-time to replace one full-time worker. It’s not feasible in the modern economy where the concomitant increase in price would price you out of the market. Just try manufacturing something for WalMart and let me know how it works out if you do that!
Do we get four times the value out of the stuff we can buy with our wages, than what we could buy in the 50’s? Well … that’s hard to answer. But we certainly do get a heck of a lot more: cars are safer and more reliable, and we can have discussions like this on the internet.
Are we happier as a result of the higher value? Well … a bit … maybe … but maybe not! Certainly not four times happier.
The original point is interesting for argument’s sake, but there is no reason to expect an increase in productivity to translate directly into more leisure time. On the other hand, they should translate into more leisure time. Unless you count the amount of time we spend on the job posting of forums like this (which of course none of us do), then that doesn’t seem to have happened, and IMHO that question is worth a closer look.