Thought about putting this in General Questions but it may turn into a debate (or sink fast :D)
Reading through these threads about Walmart and minimum wage and the value of labor etc etc…brought back to me a comment a co-worker said a few years ago.
What if someone invented a pill, as cheap as aspirin, that eliminated sleep or dramtically reduced it to something like 30 min a day. Take the pill, sleep for 30 min and you wake up as rested as a full night’s sleep.
My response?
That would be cool but I wouldn’t like having to work 16-18 hours a day for the same pay I make now.
She was confused and when I explained she called me a cynic.
My logic is this:
You have essentially, for sake of argument) doubled the labor in the market. People have an extra 8 hours or so a day and will be willing to work during it eventually forcing a ‘race to the bottom’ where all or most of that extra 8 hours is done working for wages about half, per hour, than currently.
On the other hand, this would be a TREMENDOUSLY HUGE productivity boost. How could it NOT be good?! Certainly there would be benefits for all mankind not having a third of their life taken up by sleeping.
So…thought experiment with me here…what would be the short and long term effects on peoples’ lives?
I lean toward a model of people working 14-15 hours a week for the wages they make now meaning little benefit for most people. However, I am a cynic and hopefully am wrong.
P.S. excuse the spelling for I am too tired to spell correctly.
Well, there are already laws on the books that would prevent wages from dropping too low just because people had lots of free time. Likewise, employers would want to work their employees 16 hours a day just because they are awake, because they would still have to pay them overtime.
The effect on me, personally…well, I’d probably play a lot more video games and it would be awesome to have an extra 8 or 10 hours a day to fit in a workout.
As long as OT laws stay the same, I could see the extra hours not being a part of the labor market.
If it was a slow enough transition into use, the populace would adapt to the use of the pill over a decade or more, allowing enough time to firmly entrench that part of a person’s day into their downtime, before someone called for removing or replacing the current OT threshold.
On the flip side, retail businesses would probably have more people on at all hours of the day as areas start to see a larger and larger segment of the population began using it and wanting to shop at 2AM instead of 2PM.
Personally, I would spend the extra time doing stuff for me. Relaxation and enjoyment and things that need to be done.
Night time TV would become more interesting.
Certain kinds of doctors and medical manufacturers would be put out of business.
Electricity & gas usage would go up.
There’s a webcomic out there with this premise. It’s from the POV of a man who is allergic to the drug that’s completely replacing sleep. The world has adjusted to include an incredible amount of office make-work, there’s some kind of recurring overlap with some kind of nightmare dimension, and bedrooms are only for sex, now.
I read a short story based on this idea a long time ago. One thing I recall from it is the idea that many guerrilla fighters no longer had bases that could be targeted; they kept constantly on the move.
I expect that there would be Third World sweatshops that kept people working literally 24 hours a day, for years.
I disagree with the logic of the OP. Though the supply-side of the labour equation would increase, so would the demand-side because many people would have extra leisure time to fill with activities and “stuff”. The net effect would be that the value of labour per hour wouldn’t change much but that the economy would grow significantly (as the OP said).
There have been a few near-misses in terms of drugs that would do exactly what the OP is describing. Drugs that fell over only in the very last stages of human trials. I think I read in New Scientist that there’s a drug used by the military (not routinely) that allows soldiers to function well for several days with little to no sleep. It’s coming.
