In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more consumption. The cost of living hasn't meaningfully increased, we've just continually redefined luxuries as necessities.<p>My grandparents are perfectly typical working-class people. They grew up in cramped, damp houses with no central heating or indoor plumbing. They ate mainly seasonal vegetables, considered a chicken or roast of meat a rare treat and often went to bed hungry. They bought new clothes or furniture only when their old ones were beyond repair. They aspired to owning a bicycle, not a car. The only people they knew who had been abroad had done so while in uniform. They didn't regard themselves as materially deprived, because that was the only lifestyle they knew.<p>As much as we might deny being materialistic, the naked truth is that what we consider to be a basic comfortable lifestyle today was, within living memory, unattainable luxury. We continue to work 40 hour weeks because we have adjusted our expectations to our income. We overwhelmingly choose to work the greatest number of hours we can sustainably tolerate (somewhere between 40 and 60 hours for most people), in order to maximise our spending power.<p>The recent kerfuffle over "The 1%" is illustrative of this phenomenon. There was widespread mockery of people earning 500k who regarded themselves as just making ends meet. In a very real sense, we are all a part of that laughably oblivious 1%. The lifestyles we consider just about tolerable are, by any historical or global standard, utter luxury. Almost everyone who has ever lived (and almost everyone living today) would consider themselves lucky to have the spending power of an American on minimum wage.
I left my job a year ago, and started doing remote work for a small company. Since then, I've worked between 15 to 25 hours a week. As a result:<p>- I'm more rested and stress free<p>- I get a lot more exercise and I eat healthier<p>- I'm much more efficient and motivated in my work<p>- My creativity and exploration into new fields has bloomed<p>I used to put almost all of my effort into my work, with not enough time devoted to maintaining and improving myself.
Until we come to grips with what will likely be a post-labor world, this is a good transitional approach. The 40 hour week is an arbitrary standard, and it may now be rational to reduce that number. Few jobs are now so arduous that 70 year olds cannot perform well. We are suffering from outdated standards for work weeks and retirement age, and un-sticking our assumptions is likely to benefit the situation.
This guy might be on to something, but I have an even better idea, and it required 0 scientific research to synthesize.<p>We should all do whatever the fuck we want, until we die.
This is interesting. I live in Indonesia, where except on our capital (Jakarta and most Java), working 60 hours a week is the norm. I have noticed (and I think this has been proved over and over again) that people who works 60 hours a week is actually less productive and less happy than those who have a free weekends and work only 8 hours a day.<p>I wonder how much working time can we cut until the benefits disappear.
Well, 25 hours a week is for how long your average worker is productive throughout the typical work-week anyway. The rest is spent dicking around on the Internet and socializing with coworkers.<p>I feel like if we cut down the "official" work to 25 hours, people would suddenly realize that they need to be a lot more productive to get the same amount of work done. No more pointless interruptions. No more bullshit meetings. Everyone would try to get shit done, and enjoy the extra three hours they get everyday and be a lot happier.
As a 26 year old, I can agree with his conclusion (or at least want his conclusion to be true). With 40-60 hour work weeks for both my girlfriend and I, it can be difficult sometimes. Similarly, new friendships can be hard to come by. With current job dynamics, moving can be an almost certainty, increasing the difficulty of maintaining friendships.<p>However, I have to wonder, would 25 hour work weeks actually increase the length of our employ-ability, allowing us to work until the age of 80? I thought part of today's current long term unemployment problem (in the US), is that finding employment for older, more skilled, adults was difficult, due to perceived overqualifications or lack of training in newer technologies. I thought part of the point of work hard while you're young, was to save enough money to allow you to survive the possibility of permanent unemployment in old age (either due to health or over qualification in unused technologies).
25 hours to earn less? What's the point of having more free time if you have no money to do anything with it ?<p>There's a reason why we have a current optimal 40-60 hours kind of range for working hours in most countries. That's an equilibrium point between how much people are willing to work vs how much they are willing to earn. Everyone still wants to have free time, but not at the expense of their well-being or the future of their family (education, etc.).<p>Working 25 hours and earning the same amount as working 40 would not sit well with companies (if this was made mandatory by state regulation, for example). Local companies would lose their competitive edge vs other companies elsewhere and this would end up in increased unemployment.<p>Let people work how long they want. That's their choice.
The idea is obviously appealing, but is a pipe dream to which employers will never agree. Employers don't care about one's utility over a lifetime, because they only have access to laborers for a finite period of time. (In most cases 3-6 years.) Employers thus want to maximize utility in the short term. Fewer hours means less work and thus companies have to lower salaries, which may make this untenable for workers, and hire more people to compensate for these reduced workweeks, adding to fixed-costs like healthcare and making this untenable for employers.<p>Would it be great to spend more time with friends, sleeping or otherwise pursuing leisure? Obviously. But the labor market doesn't care about one's happiness (and the companies that do institute "leisure cultures" usually explicitly state that they do so simply because it increases productivity. In this case, companies don't care about you for your sake, they care about you for their own sake) and pursuing it comes at a loss of compensation.
One problem I've come to appreciate in Britain is that we are all in direct competition with each other for access to good housing. As disposable incomes go up, property prices rocket as the middle class use their new wealth to bid up the price of houses in an attempt to trade that wealth for a nicer place to live. I'm keenly aware of this because that's exactly what my wife and I have been doing. A big chunk of our income goes into our mortgage.<p>The dynamic my well be very different in other countries. In the USA for example there's much more scope for increasing the supply of housing, something that's harder to do in a more densely populated country like the UK. I think this is why the US had a property crash while we didn't - the housing market here is a lot less elastic.<p>Still, my point is that if incomes generally go up, a proportion of that will be expended in price wars over scarce local resources, property being the most obvious example.
I am sure that I get 25 hours of real work done per week, if that. Once I factor in the meetings and phone calls that knock me out of the "zone", it is certainly less than 40.
If I didn't have to answer email or deal with any middle management, this could work. But the paradox is that the only scenario in which legitimate optimal efficiency can be attained is in a small-group, highly-communicative environment (like a startup); in that kind of environment, you're putting in 80-hour weeks so you can get profitable as quickly as possible, so there's no way anyone is saying "I've put in my 25 hours, see you guys next week!"
The New Economics Foundation (nef) proposes 21 hours:<p><a href="http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/21-hours" rel="nofollow">http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/21-hours</a><p><i>A ‘normal’ working week of 21 hours could help to address a range of urgent, interlinked problems: overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life.</i>
Twenty-five hours a week at what rate of pay? There are people working at Walmart and such who make in a week what I would make in a day or two in past years. I also did 60-80 hour weeks in my life (eejit that I was). With all the opposition towards a living wage (read: serf wages), I'll file this under the category that includes jetpacks and flying cars -- and I'd bet on those appearing first.
I do this but in a different way. I work 40 hours a week for most of the year and then take off a few months at a time. This allows me to travel with my family before I'm retired and too old to climb mountains etc. You have your whole life to live, it doesn't begin when you retire. I'm fully prepared to work past the standard retirement age.
Great idea in theory, but there's a reason young people work such long hours: money. If a 22 year old graduates from college and works 25 hours a week, they won't have enough money to pay off their (almost certain) debt and live comfortably, much less have excess money to spend traveling and doing fun things. Young people work so hard so they can have the money to buy and do the things they want. Most just never stop working that hard in order to enjoy those things.
Working 25 hours/week would basically push "life" back a few years, meaning maybe you rent a small apartment and drive a old car until you're 35-40.
As they saying goes, young people have lots of time and no money, but older people have lots of money and no time.
But ....what about college students???? People rarely talk about the fact that college students can be as stressful if not more stressful. In graduate school, students are expected to work/study almost all the time... Should we also have a reduce in our work/study load?
The true sign of progress will be that everyone has a bit more freedom to decide how many hours per week they work. In order for that to happen, the job market needs to become a lot more liquid. That will happen when needed benefits like health insurance and basic income are met by the government, and most people are able to work on a freelance or contract basis, and are able to take time off in between jobs without so much risk, because they are not dependent on a specific employer. I don't think 25 hours will necessarily be the standard, so much as I think that there won't really be a standard that everyone is expected to adhere to anymore. 40 hours is totally arbitrary in a way that smacks of Communism.
I don't get it. Why we have fixed number of working hours when we have deadlines for our tasks?<p>You want me to solve that problem for you by Friday? Why should I come to office and stare at monitor four days if I figured it out right in Monday?
Spending more time with kids is good, still . .<p>I want a beautiful and open network all across the planet. I want to see North Korea become free, and sit drinking coffee in a café in Pyongyang. I want Africa to become a garden stretching from Cape Town to Khartoum. I want to visit the Silicon Valley of the Congo, and take the suborbital to Tokyo if I'm in the mood for sushi that night. I want cold sleep and ramships and I want to see sunrise on Alpha Centaur Bb (after moving its orbit out a bit:)<p>No matter how good leisure is in the short term, if it slows those goals down I'm against it.<p>There PG, call that middlebrow criticism!
A counter philosophy to this is that we should be striving to find jobs that we enjoy and find so fulfilling that we don't mind working 40+ hours per week... until we're 80...<p>I say that wondering how realistic that is and whether that's a yet another imaginary carrot dangling over our heads to make us work harder. I like my job a lot (software developer making medical software for clinics in Kenya) but flip I'd love a 4 day week because there's always something more enjoyable than work. And I'm not sure if every single job we need people to do can be that fulfilling raison d'être for someone.
The reality of what will happen in the U.S. is the exact opposite. If anyone watched the recent Davos Economic Summitt - U.S. companies can no longer easily grow using debt instruments, which just leaves productivity and competitiveness.<p>Translation: Employees will be working more hours for easily the next 5 years.
It would be interesting if people were paid on some measure of productivity rather than just raw hours. Then we could get paid based on our contribution to economic output. Of course, the problem with that is how to do you measure productivity?
For those who are interested in more than the cursory description offered in the article, I also came across this:<p><a href="http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13339-the-25-hour-work-" rel="nofollow">http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13339-the-25-hour-work-</a>
I wonder if this could be where we're headed:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine_(1960_film)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine_(1960_film)</a>
Of the 40 hour week, from 10 to 30 hours are spent working for the government. Your tax rate is dependent on where you live and how much you earn, of course.
25 hours is a good number for average people. I'd say 15-20, even.<p>Ambitious or highly dedicated people will always work more than that, and that's a good thing. What they should have is a lot more freedom in how they spend that time-- working two jobs, one job and school, side projects.<p>The problem is this bullshit conformist fiction in which everyone has to pretend to be ambitious (but only internally) and dedicated (despite mediocre social status and compensation, that fail to justify such dedication). I don't think that such a problem can be legislated away. The best that the law/government can do is to break up the collusions (e.g. among VCs) that keep talent trading at such a dog-low rate against property.<p>The other problem, and one of the main reasons why the 40-60 hour anachronism lives on, is that companies aren't really buying (as they see it) 40 hours of time. They're also buying (in their entitled view of the world) single-minded loyalty. That's why they demand hours at such a level that a person can't possibly hold two jobs, even if she is easily capable of the work. The goal isn't just to get some quantity of the person's work, but to take that person off the market so no one else can hire her.
Why just extend work in the direction of the aged? I think that instead of going to school, children over the age of 12 should have the option of working 25 hours a week as apprentices.