I would love to have more time to spend with my kids, do more volunteer work and get an exercise regimen going again. It would be wonderful to have a shorter workweek. I would settle for a short commute at this point.
I occasionally thin we have this all wrong. We work hard to get a nice house in a good town with great schools to make life better for our kids, but then we both work fulltime and I have a 45-55 minute commute. Our Kids are away from home from 8am to 5:30pm. I am not sure this is really for the best.
Well, this is where downshifting and voluntary simplicity and all that come into play. Some people have decided that xy hours of work per week would fulfill their need for meaningful employment, rather than the 40+ they would normally do. So they work out how to live on the earnings from xy hours instead of 40+ hours, doing without the second car or game console or what have you. They gradually change their lifestyle until they can cut back on the work.
It’s a trade-off: time doing work vs money earned. And I can’t imagine it’s an easy shift to make, but probably one that is very worthwhile for those who make the effort.
That’s some spectacularly bad reading comprehension. Note the phrase “some corners of the bureacracy”
Jones’s Law. The need for any resource expands to 100% of the available resource.
Please re-read my comments. They specifically note that they do not apply to the bureaucracy as a whole. Your invocation of mom and dad is irrelevant, becaue I did not specifically note your mom and dad as beloning to this group. Aside from that, I made no moral judgement of that group either; in my knowledge, they are unhappy with their post and want more and more useful work. It’s unfortunate, but it happens in all bureaucracies by nature. Some groups or people tend to get left behind.
I remember you talking about Jones law of shelf space once and how it got you through military training. At least I think it was you. It was a very wise bit of information.
However it isn’t actually called Jones law of shelf space. It is called Parkinson’s law, after the economist who coined it.
“work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”
That makes it sound like a disease, but I’ll go along with it. 
Yes, that was me relating it back to my Combat Leadership Course. Geez, you have a hell of a memory.
I think if politician running for president ran on this plank he/she might win: “We’re all going to cut back and work only 20 hours a week; we’ll let the Chinese get their standard of living up and we’ll kick back and enjoy all their inexpensive products, enough of this working like dogs until you drop stuff!”
The main reason seems to be that how “happy” we are with our standard of living is not largely dependant on absolute measures (how many calories you eat, how big your house is, how many holidays you take etc.) once you reach a certain standard of living. Rather, it depends much more on your relative standard of living compared to your community. This means that even though we are objectively far wealthier than we were in the 50’s (our houses are bigger, we spend more on toys, our children are more likely to go to college etc.), we haven’t become all that much happier because everyone else is also at this new standard. This means we lock into a sort of income arms race with our neighbours in which nobody can ever win.
Agreed. Sounds like Alain de Botton’s book/doco Status Anxiety might be relevant here. From memory, his solutions were in chapters titled Philosophy (surrendering rather than winning the income arms race), Religion (blessed are the poor), Art (to subvert the status quo), Bohemia (oh, possesions are so middle-class, there’s more important things in life) and Politics (changing the basis of society, IIRC).
Well the fact is, you don’t have to work as much as you do. I know lots of people who hardly do any work at all, who play all day and do fine, some are supported by their parents, some are not. I know plenty of nomadic hippy types that do alright. I know people who pay for their modest expenses by making jewelry or T-shirts to sell, and don’t do all that much work at all. I’ve spent a good portion of my life partying, I never stopped, I don’t intend to ever stop, and I am well on my way to being quite monetarily successful. At this point in my life I do work a fair bit, but it’s doing things that I kind of consider play as much as work, so it’s cool.
Flying cars do exist: http://www.moller.com/skycar/
One of the reasons we do so much work is because we waste so much effort trying to force other people into behaving a certain way. The Drug War and The War on Terror come to mind. We’ve got tanks rolling through Iraq and Afghanistan with planes bombing them. It makes me wonder what kind of mileage an M1A1 or an F-16 gets? That sort of conspicuous consumption is then passed on to you in the form of taxes. You are paying for police to go out and stop people from smoking pot. You are paying for the military to traipse around the middle east, and you are paying Halliburton employees triple and quadruple wages. All of this translates into more effort for you. If all the will focused on forcing other people to behave in certain ways were focused purely on maintaining the logistical supply line of food and housing in the US, then we’d all be well fed, have a nice modest home and a very good standard of living.
Redundancy is also a factor. Each of us owns multiple, TVs, VCRs, Computers and the newest game system that comes out. If we lived more communally we’d have more stuff than we have currently, yet it would require less work to acquire because we’d be sharing certain things with others. It’s how the aristocracy does it. That’s why people like David Rockefeller or European Nobility can have so much, because of the economies of scale being applied to their social life.
My wife and I figured out what our income is the other day, and we make about 50,000 a year together, yet we go on trips all over, party constantly, go out to eat regularly for sushi dinners, have an apartment in Brooklyn that is bigger than the house I grew up in, in New Mexico, yet the New York Times will tell you that to live comfortably in New York City you need at least 500k per year. My current standard of living is far and away beyond what it was with my ex-wife when we were collectively making $ 60,000 per year, because of certain lifestyle changes. We are also able to share what we have with our friends, and they share what they have with us.
Most of my effort at this point is spent trying to modify other people’s behavior. I work to try and stop things like the drug war which tax our nation’s resources for no good reason. I do work in independent media, art and political activism, trying to make a world that is easier to live in, where I can walk down the street in a black neighborhood and not be hated because inequities such as are caused by the drug war no longer exist. However, I know that I do not have to do this, I can go off and live a nomadic lifestyle and be just fine, I could be living on a hippy commune growing my own food and making a piece of furniture now and then to pay the low maintenance costs on the property, but I don’t because those hippy communes get raided once in a while so that we can stop them from GASP growing pot. That and I really like the high energy of New York and the constant doing of things, I like working apparently.
Oh yeah, Mind Machine interfaces exist too.
http://www.pocket-neurobics.com/
http://www.cyberevolution.com/
My friend got this stuff in the form of an EEG helmet to help get rid of ADD. He has been doing experiments using it as a midi controller. He hardly works at all, he lives in Calgary Canada, lives in a house communally, and owns a mind-machine interface.
Erek
Indeed, it’s also a matter of choice. Being french, I’m supposed to work 35 hours/week (and in my case, it’s actually how long we’re supposed to work…well…actually I’m not working currently, but it’s temporary and irrelevant). I suppose I get less money than I would for an equivalent full time job in the US. However, after a couple years spent studying making way less money than I used to, and having way more free time (Yes, I didn’t study that hard…), I discovered that 1) I didn’t need as much as I thought 2) the less I work, the happier I am.
So, when I resumed working, I decided to take a pay cut and work only part-time (80%, one day off/week. Friday. By the way, I would mention that it makes an enormous difference. Before, I felt like the week-end was nearly over by saturday evening. After, I felt like the work week was nearly over by wednesday evening. Instead of having 1 day/week feeling mentally free, I had 4 days/week. It’s been a big pleasant surprise).
Something else : I cut on commute time by livng in a shitty (but very cheap) appartment in downtown Paris. Some coworkers had up to 2-3 hours commute time/day. Make the maths and estimate how much time it means over a whole year. And, including the time you need to sleep, eat, buy groceries, etc…, how much free time is left every day. Also, I don’t have nor need a car. Big saving.
Of course, not everybody has this option. And if you’re highly ambitious, it’s not exactly recommanded. But the net result is : I live in a crappy place. I spent less on stuff. But I worked/will work 28 hours/week. 32 hours/week if you add home/workplace transportation. Plus french-style vacation times (five weeks + holydays + some days here and there). And honestly, you’ll have a hard time convincing me I should work instead 50 hours/ week, waste two hours commuting every day in exchange for a big subburbian house to live in and more stuff.
And all in all, I still own much more pleasant stuff, go out way more, etc…than our parents did in the 50s.
Once again, I know that not everybody can make similar choices. But at least for part of us, it’s a choice. A number of us could live quite well (and better than our parents) while working much less. If you ( generic “you”) could and opted not to, then you shouldn’t tell that 50 years later, you’re still at the same point as your parents/grand-parents were. You should say that you traded more luxury for less time to enjoy it. An ption that people in the 50s didn’t have. They got both a lot of work and not that much in the way of luxuries.
Actually, they don’t. They work longer.
When you check productivity statistics, you notice that the USA is in the top of the list if you take into account the productivity/year. But they fall to something like 20th-30th if you take into account the productivity/hour (the reverse is true for France, more or less).
So, it’s not that american workers are particularily efficient/hard working, it’s that they spend long enough time in their offices for more work to be done (but still less work proportionnally to their working hours. Maybe they spend more time chit-chatting or just are too tired to be efficient).
I’m unconvinced it’s a good thing.
Some of us work on salary, so the hours we work are not directly related to our pay.
Why are we working longer? There are fewer of us. When I started working, there was a secretary for every two groups, of about eight people each. Today where I work there is one admin per vice president with well over 100 people. We do all the paperwork ourselves.
And don’t forget that a lot of work is portable. When I started I stopped working when I left work. Now those with laptops usually work at home. I get (and send) emails at midnight all the time. Technology has increased our hours.
I’m not complaining, but to get ahead in my industry you don’t work 9 - 5.
I’ve a 40 hour gig that pays for all my living expenses and allows me to do some fun stuff. I’m also working part time at a friends shop to make silly toy money. I’m 3/4 of the way to paying cash for a 52" plasma HDTV.
I work more than 40 hours because I want to.
I’m contracted to work for 37.5 hours a week (standard for Australia, although 40 is common too), but usually work an amount closer to 40. I like my job - it’s satisfying to me, and I believe it’s useful to other people. Soon, there’ll be an opportunity for me to apply for a position on the next rung up on the ladder of command, and the people I work with reckon I should apply for it. I’ve got the skills, and would be good at it.
But the position would mean more hours, and more stress. When I point this out to my workmates, they counter me with “but it’s $10,000 more a year!”
I don’t think I’ll apply for the job. I currently earn enough money to buy a house, get married, then buy a new car (planning on getting a Prius!) within the next few years. Even $10,000 isn’t enough to repay me for the loss of my time and the increased stress that the new job would mean. People at work think I’m mad not to take the opportunity to make more money, but it won’t make me any happier than I already am.
I think people have to weigh up how much their job really costs them, and what the extra money could buy them, before they make any decisions about what hours will suit them. There’ll always be some variation in situation, but the assumption that more=better has just got to be examined.
I think the OP has cherry picked the predictions that were being made back in the 50’s. I remember one that said that we would no longer be eating the traditional meals. Instead our nutrition would be supplied by taking pills two or three times a day. The pills would be manufactured in huge vats containing biomaterial. Farmers just could not keep up with the demand and besides the land would be needed to house the increased population.
Another prediction that the OP should have mentioned was the paperless office. The theory here was that computers would cut down on the use of paper. 
[sup]Then some bright guy invented the printer.[/sup]
the heck with work schedules and more leisure time
what I want to know is Where Are the Flying Cars they promised us???
Do you have any data whatsoever to base this claim on? I work along side many government workers, and they work as many hours and as hard as the rest of us. Additionally, I’ve seen their Office staff cut in recent years as the result of efficiency studies etc.