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 We are suffering from outdated standards for work weeks and retirement age, and un-sticking our assumptions is likely to benefit the situation.
More years at fewer hours per week is an interesting idea. Managing burnout could be one way to make it reasonable for people to work into older age, and having norms with fewer hours a week could be one part of that. You see a lot of burnout in tech currently even by middle-age, but I'm not sure the subject matter fundamentally requires it.
I'm fairly sure the 40 hour week is far from arbitrary. There's someone on HN who has a long post about working hours and the wide variety of studies that were done demonstrating that 40 hours resulted in higher efficiency than 50 or more as far back as the 1930s, and that peak efficiency for white collar work is even less (6 hour days). I'll have to see if I can find it.
The thing is, 40 hours less my hour lunch a day ends up at 35 hours, which over 7 days is only 5 hours. To me personally I would prefer to work 5 hours a day every day than be getting up at 6am to get home for 6pm, and forget it if I want to do groceries on a night, I'll be getting home in time to have a shower, read a chapter of a book and fall asleep.
My weekend work usually averages around 4-5 hours a day, I get to relax, I get to run out and do groceries and don't even notice having worked.
That is if you are waged. If salaried your lunch break is supposed to be built into your renumeration. But I know plenty of people taking 15-30 minute unpaid lunches verses an hour unpaid lunches just so they can leave the office in a reasonable amount of time.
> Few jobs are now so arduous that 70 year olds cannot perform well.
I think it's mostly physical jobs that 70 year olds cannot perform well. And that kind of job can be automated by robots anyway. For job like programming or CEO, I kind of think that 70 year olds can do better than say 20 year olds.
Mental acuity is very much a physical quality. Yes, there are 70 year olds who can think and mentally adapt exceptionally well, just as there are 70 year olds who can do one arm push-ups and live till 100. But it doesn't mean that 70 year old are just like 30 year olds, but with more experience.
Most of the studies that showed rapid mental decline in old age have been debunked. A 70 year old with no actual problems (e.g., Alzheimer's) is very likely to function perfectly fine mentally.
A 2002 study (published in the Alzheimer's and Dementia Journal) found that ~91% of people 70 and older were capable of normal mental function.
Seriously? How many 70 year old people do you know? Let say you need to urgently take your child to a doctor and can choose between a 30 yo and a 70 yo. What would you do?
Parent cited an experiment that found 70 year-olds to have mental functioning on par with young people. Would you like to argue against the study's conclusion in a meaningful way? Or are you just pointing out that regardless of what is true, humans tend to act in a biased and ineffective manner?
That's a straw man right there. Why would it matter? In terms of the decision making, the one with more knowledge is better. In terms of driving, it depends on if the 70 year old still has the PHYSICAL ability and acuity to drive a car, which is exactly what we weren't talking about.
If you look at a site/product like Lumosity.com, you can compare your results to other age groups. If you accept that the tests on Lumosity do test particular brain functions/areas then its clear to see that from the millions of user that take part, the performance average does decline with age. It's actually quite dramatic to see that a 40 year old that scores in the 90% in a test category, fits in at 50% among the 20 year olds.
You can't really get any meaningful results from a self selected sample.
Since there is no other evidence that a 40 year old in the 90th percentile for mental performance is equal to a 20 year old in the 50th percentile, it seems more than likely that the data is skewed.
Perhaps Lumosity.com attracts above average young people and below average older people (given those results, some variation on that theme is the likely explanation).
An otherwise almost imperceptible decline in mental function could have have a huge impact on ranking among top chess players simply because at the top levels the margins between players are so small.
If chess Grandmasters dropped in mental acuity as fast as those Luminosity results suggested, a 60 year old Grandmaster could be beaten by any young novice.
Also worth mentioning is that competitive chess is favors very quick thinking and action in a way that most careers don't.
>>For job like programming or CEO, I kind of think that 70 year olds can do better than say 20 year olds.
Maybe in 50 years, but currently I'd say a 20-30 years old is the prime programmer age. Young people tend to learn new tech quicker, and be faster/more efficient at typing and using computers.
A 53 year old who has been programming for 30+ years is likely to be a good programmer because they managed to keep programming for all those years. How many of the less-talented people you started out with are still programming?
But I do agree that it without hard evidence, it's unfair to assume older programmers are slower or less capable. I have personally worked with some exceptional older programmers.
...typing and using computers? So you're comparing 20-30 year old programmers with 40 year old people who aren't even comfortable with computers? Yeah, I'd say apples are way better than oranges.
I don't see how a shorter work week prevents anyone from working longer, or even less than the minimum. There are plenty of people working more than 40 hours, and plenty working fewer.
The only that the 40 sets is the threshold at which workers attain specific rights regarding overtime, benefits, and other things.
Says who ? This preposterous way of thinking has been around for x years already. "when the world population will reach 4 billions people, there will be no jobs for everyone", yet the population is still increasing beyond 6 billions and most people still work to live/survive. There is no hint we are moving to a post-labor world.
You will see that there is a strong relationship between reduced employment/working hours, welfare benefits when not working, and government spending. And somehow most of the countries which went down that way have now humongous public debt problems to solve. Their model is not sustainable in the long term.
Well one, getting to post-labor has nothing to do with raw population figures. No matter how many people you have, they want to eat, probably want comfortable living (housing + climate control), and in a modern context want Internet access and electricity.
You could have a hundred billion people and everyone would still want that. The difference is post-labor comes when you don't need human capital (or at the worst, a negligible amount) to produce the necessities for people to survive. We are approaching that, look at how manufacturing is returning to the US in 99% automated facilities. Once you can grow food (or fabricate it with molecular engineering) without requiring human labor to produce it, you can already distribute it with automated vehicles, and you can produce electricity via solar, hydro, or nuclear wtih very little human capital involvement after you set the system up.
The idea is you put systems in place that the fruits of them are effectively infinite without human engagement. Once you can do that, you have post-scarcity bounded on the limits of the planet and our ability to deploy infrastructure, not in how much labor we can produce. We are getting there, but the fundamental problem is we try to squeeze these no labor return systems into classic market capitalism and it isn't working (a concentrated wealthy class ends up owning these means of production, and power and wealth are concentrated as a result).
You seem to be misunderstanding something. A post-labor has nothing to do with population and everything to do with automation. As it becomes more efficient to have robots and computers to do what was previously human work, we will eventually reach a point where just about every conceivable job that we currently employ people for could be automated.
Most likely, a post-labor world should be capable of arriving well before that. Once we can automate the production of basic necessities, working should become largely optional.
Even if you have robots you will still need a massive workforce to produce them, to get the resources to produce them, to check them, to maintain them, to repair them, to program them, to update them and so on. Or maybe you believe in a state of singularity in which all of this will happen at the same time? :)
Automation has already been happening in many industries, in case you have not noticed, and that did not result in lost job opportunities on the whole of the economy. Agriculture is also largely mechanized all around the world and you have only a very little portion of the population (5% or so) in developed countries to produce far enough for everyone.
Most jobs in developed countries are service related. These jobs will not disappear even if you automate the production part of the economy.
Exactly, nowadays the majority of people in the developed world are "working" in marketing, finance and other useless areas. It would be far better if they just stay home.
So what, then, do you think the purpose of technological advancement is? Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is way, way up. We are producing heaps more wealth per person than at any point in history, and yet we don't have much to show for it. Nowhere near proportional to the productivity increases, that's for certain.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not a Luddite by any stretch and I'm not suggesting we should go back to an agrarian society, but we have a serious economic and political problem where the benefits of technological advancement are going in overwhelming proportion to a very small subset of the population. If something isn't done about that, and soon, the resulting upheaval may force us back to pre-industrial living anyway (or more likely, much worse).
> GNI is just a grand total divided by population;
Right, per capita, as I stated, but really just GNI is fine too.
> people would be making more if the money was divided up evenly but it's not, particularly in the U.S
Unfortunately the google public data didn't have enough US data but take a look at these two charts for India.
First is just India's per capita GNI the second is India's income distribution over the same time frame. Notice how the income distribution is relatively flat and how the GNI is growing.
Actually, the wealth has accrued quite nicely to the top 1%, even more so to the top 0.01%. Whereas the rest of the population has seen real pay flatline as you say. That is the real problem.
Would you care to share your measuring system for how do decide if it is 1:1 or not? It seems complex to measure health, "wealth", happiness, and security. I sure haven't found any actionable or reasonably complete metrics in my readings, maybe I am bad at searching.
Not just ideology, the size of government in Scandinavia is way smaller than in other developed countries. See the economist article last week about this subject.
It's true that regulations are relatively low, in terms of invasive bureaucracy in the economy. Yet in Denmark we have a 37-hour maximum workweek, 8 weeks of vacation, and strong unemployment benefits, and all that doesn't seem to be ruining the country. Perhaps that can't be replicated elsewhere, but I don't see a solidly established relationship between working hours, unemployment benefits, and economic prosperity.
Out of interest, can you find out where the budget of the government in Denmark is spent in, and in what proportions ? On top of that, how much of welfare system relies on private actors instead of governmental/public ones?
You can see transition to post-labor world in observing growth of the labor force paid with tax money (lots of them doing unnecessary or things harmful to others), growth of prison population (these are the people who are provided for because they couldn't get jobs), increase in percentage of people working in services, increase in number of lawyers...
We are moving away from doing anything useful and we are now even running out of excuses that could entitle us to getting some money to provide for ourselves.
