Four-day Week 'an Overwhelming Success' in Iceland (bbc.com) 145
Trials of a four-day week in Iceland were an "overwhelming success" and led to many workers moving to shorter hours, researchers have said. AmiMoJo writes: The trials, in which workers were paid the same amount for shorter hours, took place between 2015 and 2019. Productivity remained the same or improved in the majority of workplaces, researchers said. A number of other trials are now being run across the world, including in Spain and by Unilever in New Zealand. In Iceland, the trials run by Reykjavik City Council and the national government eventually included more than 2,500 workers, which amounts to about 1% of Iceland's working population. A range of workplaces took part, including preschools, offices, social service providers, and hospitals. Many of them moved from a 40 hour week to a 35 or 36 hour week, researchers from UK think tank Autonomy and the Association for Sustainable Democracy (Alda) in Iceland said.
The trials led unions to renegotiate working patterns, and now 86% of Iceland's workforce have either moved to shorter hours for the same pay, or will gain the right to, the researchers said. Workers reported feeling less stressed and at risk of burnout, and said their health and work-life balance had improved. They also reported having more time to spend with their families, do hobbies and complete household chores.Will Stronge, director of research at Autonomy, said: "This study shows that the world's largest ever trial of a shorter working week in the public sector was by all measures an overwhelming success.
The trials led unions to renegotiate working patterns, and now 86% of Iceland's workforce have either moved to shorter hours for the same pay, or will gain the right to, the researchers said. Workers reported feeling less stressed and at risk of burnout, and said their health and work-life balance had improved. They also reported having more time to spend with their families, do hobbies and complete household chores.Will Stronge, director of research at Autonomy, said: "This study shows that the world's largest ever trial of a shorter working week in the public sector was by all measures an overwhelming success.
I can't wait (Score:2)
(I, for one, would love a 4 day work week, but know it will never happen.)
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It could mean more people employed to cover those round-the-clock businesses. e.g. hospital, etc. For those that have a smaller work-week it could translate into less of a commute, and hence less demand on the transportation network.
Not in the USA (Score:2, Insightful)
It took strong unions, people DYING, women voting, a free-market created great depression & dust bowl (formerly the largest environmental disaster,) a surge in (actual real) communism (as a contrast,) the functional death of the Republicans, 2 weekly religious activities, and world-saving super-man, FDR, to finally create the 5 day work week only began 100 years ago and formalized during the start of WW2 of all times.
We do not have a religious holiday on any other day of the week for a major religion.
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It took strong unions, people DYING, women voting, a free-market created great depression & dust bowl (formerly the largest environmental disaster,) a surge in (actual real) communism (as a contrast,) the functional death of the Republicans, 2 weekly religious activities, and world-saving super-man, FDR, to finally create the 5 day work week only began 100 years ago and formalized during the start of WW2 of all times.
Unless you're talking about the FLSA, specifically, you're off by about fifteen years [history.com]... I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Henry Ford's action in 1926 had little, if anything, to do with unions or communism, and nothing at all to do with Franklin Roosevelt, world war 2, or the dust bowl.
On May 1, 1926, Ford Motor Company becomes one of the first companies in America to adopt a five-day, 40-hour week for workers in its automotive factories. The policy would be extended to Ford’s office workers the following August.
Henry Ford’s Detroit-based automobile company had broken ground in its labor policies before. In early 1914, against a backdrop of widespread unemployment and increasing labor unrest, Ford announced that it would pay its male factory workers a minimum wage of $5 per eight-hour day, upped from a previous rate of $2.34 for nine hours (the policy was adopted for female workers in 1916). The news shocked many in the industry—at the time, $5 per day was nearly double what the average auto worker made—but turned out to be a stroke of brilliance, immediately boosting productivity along the assembly line and building a sense of company loyalty and pride among Ford’s workers.
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So what alternative would you propose?
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The right answer that solves both concerns is that governments should not set work hours, but employers and employees should work together to find the right balance between time and productivity. It is in both their interests, but there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution in every case.
I would be most productive if I could scale my hours up or down as needed to fit the actual work I'm given. I suspect that is true of most knowledge workers. But, instead, I'm asked to sit in a chair until a certain time wh
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I get where you are coming from - I'm going to guess it is similar to many people that post on slashdot - knowledge workers who due to skills and corporate knowledge do h
Probably much gain from decoupling worker times (Score:2)
This is just theory, but I think shortening the work-week probably is boosted by the fact that people are more productive if at least some of the time they spend working is not overlapped by other people.
The reason for this would be, with fewer people working the same times or days you are, there are less interruptions and you can focus more on work.
There exists the potential for delays if someone knows something crucial, but in reality anything truly important you could get a response from someone quickly
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Re: Probably much gain from decoupling worker time (Score:2)
Same here. Most productive on 20-25 hra a week, on 3-4 days. If I have to, I'll grudgingly stretch that same 10 productivity points to 30 hours.
Anything beyond that and I'll actually drop long term productivity to 7-8 points, or even 5 if I have to go above 40.
Reasons vary, but for one, my life also needs some degree of mangement and energy. If I don't have enough of that, I'll fall behind on that front and/or invest more than I'd like, and I'll be less rested. I'll also start hating my job for the fact tha
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This is one of several reasons why many workers would produce more, not less, if they were allowed to regulate their own hours within reason.
Additional reasons just off the top of my head: being able to adjust commutes based on when they'd be the quickest; being able to be a genuine part of their families' lives; being able to do non-work things during slow times so they could focus more on work during busier ones; being free to learn and update their skills; being able to do continuous improvement; not bei
wait (Score:3)
so they're throwing thursday through saturday out?
oh, 4 day work week.
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My first thought was almost exactly the same!
"4 day week... so that's 91 weeks a year plus one leap day?"
Get workers to work (Score:4, Interesting)
Four 7 hour days or five 6 hour days will encourage many people to work. It will return some benefits of automation to the worker. Just in time scheduling of employees clearly indicates that this will cause no burden to employers.
This makes sense to me too, but ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd also say any determinations of postive vs. negative productivity impact really need more time....
I can see how initially, workers would be happy enough about this change so they'd be motivated to put forth more effort to try to help validate it as a successful concept. (You wouldn't want it to be taken away from you again if they conclude it caused reduced productivity.) I can also imagine some bosses out there "reminding" their employees of that need to look as productive as possible to ensure the idea is kept.
Real proof it worked probably needs more time to re-visit, after people become comfortable with it as a new norm.
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The big missing piece from this is, of course, how the customers/public impacted by the change feel.
These were government employees in the trial. I know that personally, it's already extremely difficult to get in touch with members of the local government and any kind of interaction (permit, etc) can take weeks or months to resolve. Many offices already only have 9-4 or 10-4 office hours. If they were able to work even less than they already do I can't imagine how much slower they would be.
Re:This makes sense to me too, but ... (Score:5, Informative)
There's more that you can read on the wiki (including a negative version, when the workers became convinced the study was going to be used to justify lowering their pay, so productivity dropped). To really pull off a study like this you need to do it as a double-blind experiment, where the subjects don't know they're being treated differently. Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to hide a shorter workweek from test subjects. You'd have to do something like make them live in a cave cut off from the outside world with no clocks, and test productivity while varying number of hours worked per week. Or trick the workers by saying the experiment succeeded and switch the company to a shorter workweek, operate that way for a year or so, then compare to another similar company where you told the workers the experiment failed and they stayed at a 5 day workweek.
Personally, I suspect this is something which is different for each person. That is, everyone has a different number of hours worked in a week which results in maximizing their productivity. And trying to make everyone work the same number of hours in itself creates an inefficiency.
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Personally, I suspect this is something which is different for each person. That is, everyone has a different number of hours worked in a week which results in maximizing their productivity. And trying to make everyone work the same number of hours in itself creates an inefficiency.
I agree with this completely. However, I know that, in my case, the number of hours I want to work, and the number of hours that would make me most productive are very different values.
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I'd also say any determinations of postive vs. negative productivity impact really need more time....
I can see how initially, workers would be happy enough about this change so they'd be motivated to put forth more effort to try to help validate it as a successful concept. (You wouldn't want it to be taken away from you again if they conclude it caused reduced productivity.) I can also imagine some bosses out there "reminding" their employees of that need to look as productive as possible to ensure the idea is kept.
Real proof it worked probably needs more time to re-visit, after people become comfortable with it as a new norm.
Agreed, the initial results look to be about as promising as one could expect, but initial results don't always hold in the long term.
I still remember managers saying (Score:5, Funny)
We expect 50+ hours from our salaried employees, which meant basically we were going to be paying 4 people to do 5 peoples work.
After enough layoffs, and "downsizing" I was doing about three or more peoples work. I did it smart, not hard.
The more joy I felt was a daily crap during which I would read ebooks in the toilet, until my legs would go numb (and the sensors for the lights would cut out a time or two)
TLDR: getting paid to take a dump is one of the joys of employment.
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Not sure why this is modded "funny." I'm having a similar experience here. I've replaced close to a dozen people who've left over time, generally by automating what they used to do by hand. (A lot of them, not all but a lot, did just the minimum to keep their jobs. I believe in doing the best job I can, and adding the most value for my employer that I can. I only wish that were rewarded by more than my own satisfaction over a job well done....) And while I rarely have time to read e-books, our bathroom lights also shut off after a few minutes of trying to sit on the commode. I wonder if we work in the same place.
Probably not, I was laid off after 24 years of repeated layoffs and downsizing almost every year, and retired at 52.
I actually thanked the clueless guy who told me I didn't have a job anymore. I don't think he understood what I meant.
One of the people I worked with did a tightrope between doing "nothing" and doing "just enough" to not get fired, and was dancing in joy at being laid off with all kinds of benefits.
Yay for them. Not sure I'd like it. (Score:2)
If people want to work four 9-hour days, more power to 'em. So long as they and their bosses are happy with the results, knock yer socks off.
Today, hourly workers in California must get paid overtime if they work over eight hours in a day. I'd love to see that relaxed. Given how little California legislators seem to value work schedule flexibility, I don't expect that to happen.
Personally, I'm pretty burned after eight hours. I don't think I'd like it.
Re:Yay for them. Not sure I'd like it. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it depends on what you're doing. If you're doing anything that requires an intense amount of continual mental focus or physical labor most of the time the longer shifts probably wouldn't be very productive. I think the work most people do isn't that intense though and the decompression one gets from a three day weekend might make up for the longer days.
I know based off my own experience I am far more refreshed after a 3 day weekend compared to a 2 day one and I even know a couple of folks who work four 10s a week right now and they all say they love it and that's still doing 40 hours a week. Of course who knows how productive they really are after 8 hours but often a happy worker is a productive worker.
What? (Score:2)
Aren't weeks in Icleand 7 days any more?
The point of longer hours (Score:5, Interesting)
Supply and demand cuts both ways. In the world of smaller shop keeps Adam Smith envisioned, where you didn't have a handful of CEOs who all sit on each other's Board of Directors this wasn't an issue. But thanks to wealth inequality, market consolidation, Dark Money and anti-democratic laws and structures we have what is effectively a centrally planned economy now. It's Communism without the pretense of caring about the workers.
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It's worth taking a 20% pay cut for 20 percent fewer hours, because after taxes it's only a 12% pay cut.
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Uh, that's not how percentages work.
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Where did I go wrong?
Re: The point of longer hours (Score:2)
No, it's still a 20% cut assuming that your tax rate stays the same.
If you're progressing/degressing, then it depends on the exact amount, but be generally it will be little difference.
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No, it's still a 20% cut assuming that your tax rate stays the same.
It doesn't, the 20% comes off the top tax bracket.
Re: The point of longer hours (Score:2)
I'm going to assume you mean US tax brackets: https://www.bankrate.com/finan... [bankrate.com]
If yes, then calculate again.
In most cases 20% cut won't change your bracket. And in many cases where it will, the net difference is something around 3-5%.
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Calculate it. The reason is because you don't pay taxes at all on the lower portions of your earnings. So when you get a pay cut, it's from the higher tax bracket.
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Fine. For 2021, take a single person making $50,656 per year. They pay $9,950 * 0.10 + $30,575 * 0.12 + $10131 * 0.22 = $7893 in taxes.
Now they take a 20% pay cut. Now they make $40,525 per year, and pay $9,950 * 0.10 + $30,575 * 0.12 = $4664 in taxes.
So they took a $10131 pay cut in salary (20%), but actual take home pay decreased from $42,763 to $35861, or $6902 (16%). And this is right at the cutoff between the 12% and 22% tax brackets which would give the most favorable for the employee getting the
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I negotiated a 4 day work week once. It was totally worth it.
xxx (Score:2)
This report includes input from 4 of the 6 relevant stakeholders.
- Workers
- Unions
- The public sector
- A think tank
- Private employers
- Customers of the affected enterprises
A representative 1%? (Score:2, Informative)
amounts to about 1% of Iceland's working population
So a tiny proportion of the working population. One that consists entirely of government officials.
Even though it was a success - demonstrating that those employees don't have enough productive work to keep them busy - I doubt that it scales well. A brief look reveals that Iceland's main industries (the ones that earn the money that pays for government employees) are as follows:
aluminium smelting
fish processing
geothermal power
hydropower
medical/pharmaceutical products
tourism.
Le
Evidence? (Score:3, Informative)
They backed their claims with evidence.
You've just made empty assertions without evidence, and largely the same tired old right wing rhetoric we been hearing for years without evidence.
You are practicing textbook big lie propaganda [wikipedia.org].
Yes, evidence!!!! (Score:2)
It will be interesting to see how the rest of Iceland's population views the success of this trial, when medical staff only work 80% of their hours. Police, too, teachers also. All for the same pay so the cost of all these vital services rises by 25% to the icelandic taxpayers.
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A range of workplaces took part, including preschools, offices, social service providers, and hospitals.
Meanwhile
since completion 86% of the country’s workforce are now working shorter hours or gaining the right to shorten their hours.
To me the interesting thing is the length of the trial. Similar tests have been featured on /. before, and usually one comment was that a reduction might work short term, but what about after people used to working 40+ hours get used to it? Will more slacking off work its way into the new schedule? And what about new entries to the labor force, who never had to work 40+ hours, will they still show the same sort of productivity?
How about 2 - 20 hour days? (Score:2)
So, three days off ... (Score:2)
Better to try this policy in Hawaii [etsystatic.com].
full time should be cutdown / add an X2 OT level (Score:2)
full time should be cutdown / add an X2 OT level.
Maybe make Exempt level 40K + COL?
leisure boost (Score:2)
Similar to a 9/80 schedule (Score:2)
Not happening here (Score:2)
Funny.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Women in the Work Force (Score:2)
The work week should've halved around the time women joined the workforce.
Objoke (Score:2)
A man goes to an Icelandic friend’s funeral and asks the widow:
"Do you mind if I say a word?"
She says: "Please do."
The man clears his throat, gazes at the crowd, and says: "Heimurinn”
The widow smiles and says: "Thanks, that means the world to me.”
Comparing apples to road apples (Score:2)
Iceland's GDP doesn't break the world's top ten, or top 20, or top 50, or even top 100. How much you want to bet that their GDP drops over the next few years?
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Re:Load of BS (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to work for a small engineering firm where I not only did what I was hired to do but many other things like purchasing, review, assembly, etc.
Now I have a job in a large firm, I do maybe 1 hour's worth of real work, the rest of the time I just look busy. And so does everyone else.
Of course with technology and resources we don't need to work 40 hours a week anymore.
But we need to pretend so that people who actually work (garbagemen, farmers, municipal water treatment workers, etc) don't kill us.
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But we need to pretend so that people who actually work (garbagemen, farmers, municipal water treatment workers, etc) don't kill us.
Municipal water treatment workers hardly work at all, most of the time. Until they suddenly have to work frantically hard because the shit has stopped hitting the rotating impeller.
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You're way too optimistic about the future of work. Every place I've worked at so far has always had the Dilbert Principle in full effect, where the incompetent employees get promoted to middle management where they can "do less" damage.
Re:Load of BS (Score:4, Informative)
If you are rested and happy, you can generally be way more productive. If you can do the same workload in 4 days instead of 5, why not ? :)
You feel like you need to work until you drop ? Move to Texas then. Where an employer can legally demand you to work unlimited hours per week yet if you do anything that requires touching any computing device you're overtime exempt and you will only get paid the negotiated salary.
All those California folks moving to Texas are in for some nasty surprises
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Re: Load of BS (Score:3)
All those Californians with tech jobs moving to Texas are already overtime exempt.
California is also an at-will state.
Re:Load of BS (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, that was a federal change quite a long number of years ago, that made pretty much any IT or electronics work exempt.
That's why contracting is the way to go...get paid for every hour worked.
It really makes them think twice if they really need you on this or not.
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I work 40 hours a week. You want more, you pay more. You don't agree, I go elsewhere.
That's the nice thing of having a rare skill set that is in very high demand.
Re:Load of BS (Score:5, Insightful)
This doesn't pass the smell test. Why don't we all work 1 hour per week, and productivity will go through the stratosphere? Maybe if we don't work at all, we'll reach infinite productivity!
I don't even know where to begin with this nonsense. It is like arguing against going on a diet to reduce your calorie intake by 200 calories per day by comparing the recommendation to someone trying to live on 200 calories per day.
There is plenty of research suggesting workers are not productive for 40+ hours per week, and that they could be just as productive with less work hours and more dedicated leisure time. It isn't surprising that companies found their workers were just as productive working 4 days per week as they were working 5.
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Wanna really have some fun, try applying that guy's ideas to automation. See where that goes. I'm old enough to remember when "yankee ingenuity" was going to make work obsolete and we would have the happiest, most prosperous nation on Earth.
They didn't tell you that this only applies to the owners of the robots.... everyone else got to disappear in a mass die-off of the unworthy, because they couldn't prosper from owning robots.
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There's a middle ground. If more hours per week is best, then why aren't we all following China's 996 style (which is common yet technically illegal under Chinese laws)? Why is 40 hours magically the best number, when we've done nothing to actually measure what amount is best?
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You are exhibiting one dimensional linear thinking. I.e.:
productivity = workedHours
where changing workedHours changes productivity. As you might imagine, the actual equation has more factors involved. Some of those factors interact with each other (i.e. they multiply together). When terms multiply, the graph is curved, and linear extrapolations, particular to extremes such as yours, no longer apply.
Re: Load of BS (Score:3)
The optimal hours per week is obviously somewhere between 1 and infinity. Iceland is finding it's less than 40 hours per week. How is this difficult for Americans to understand?
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This and the much-maligned Laffer Curve are simply real-world applications of the Mean Value Theorem.
The latter posits that tax rates of zero or 100% both produce zero tax revenue, but some rate in between produces nonzero revenue, and hence per the MVT, there is a rate between these two extremes that maximizes tax revenue, and by direct corollary, increasing tax rates beyond that point produces less revenue rather than more. It makes both the government and everyone else (in the aggregate) worse off.
Simil
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The optimal hours per week is obviously somewhere between 1 and infinity.
The optimal hours per week can only be somewhere between 0 and 168. It may be more in the presence of a black hole, though only from the point of view of an outside observer.
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"My money DOES work for me 24/7 - the 0.1% ... suck on that."
Can't find it, must be too small.
You are a Load of BS (Score:3)
If you eat too much and get too fat, you will die sooner. The solution isn't to not eat at all to prevent death. Because real life has multiple factors involved where we can't obtain perfection, but an optimal balance. You need food to survive, too much food, you you die, to little food you die.
That nature of work has changed in the past 100 years, which was much different than a 100 years before that.
200 years ago, It was mostly agricultural farming, so the worker needed to be working 16 hour days 6 da
Re:Load of BS (Score:5, Insightful)
There is some middle ground between the extremes. 9 9 6 (9am-9pm, 6 days a week) is not that unusual in Asia, and probably pretty harmful to staff morale and productivity. Some hippie 1 hour a week is unlikely to be practical either, unless someone can pay me $1000 an hour, I'm not sure how I wouldn't need a few dozen 1 hour jobs to pay my bills. Now that the hyperbolic rhetoric is settled. Where is the middle ground? 40 hour week? Should it be five and eight, or four tens? Why 40 and why not 36 or 32? I think a fair bit of research is required, and the productivity differences is likely to differ between individuals and the sort of work being performed.
If I'm doing mostly creative or intellectual work, the hours I put in might not matter beyond some base minimum. If I'm shoveling for a road crew, then I probably am most productive if I worked 6 or 7 days a week but fewer hours per day. Trying to cram the same amount of physical work into a few longer days there is going to be fatigue and perhaps daylight that will severely impact my efficiency.
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If I'm doing mostly creative or intellectual work, the hours I put in might not matter beyond some base minimum. If I'm shoveling for a road crew, then I probably am most productive if I worked 6 or 7 days a week but fewer hours per day.
Except that for physical laborers, from management’s POV, they can work you longer days and for a while, you’ll get more work done. Then, when you become physically unable to keep up, they can just replace you. At least for creative work, there’s immediately a point of diminishing returns beyond which the extra hours result in noticeably less work getting done. We call those extra hours “meetings”.
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Management is stupid and are unqualified to make judgements on the best way to use labor. Of course the workforce and economy are changing and physical labor will be replaced by automation over time. And the bar for what it means to be unskilled labor will be raised considerably as technology more complex than a shovel and pick must be learned by so-called unskilled labor.
Re:Load of BS (Score:5, Informative)
Well, by that logic, why don't we work 80 hours a week? I've certainly known people who routinely worked 60+ hour weeks, and they were not any more productive than someone who got their work done in 40, they were less organized and worked at a slower pace.
It's worse than a case of diminishing returns; at some point adding hours to your routine work week doesn't just get you nothing in addition, it undermines the quality of your effort for the *entire* work week.
I don't think there's a universal ideal work week that works for every job and every person. Nor is a work week that's right this week necessarily right every week; if you're an accountant, you're going to put in long hours in tax season because your clients have a deadline and you don't have the data you need until the last minute. Software developers sometimes have productive streaks that shouldn't be interfered with. When I ran a development team, sometimes guys would be on a roll and put in several long days back to back, or even an over nighter. But when the roll was done and they weren't being super productive any more I'd make them take a day off. This wasn't because I was *nice*, it was because I was *greedy*. An exhausted developer occupying a chair did nothing for me, but a rested developer could give me his best effort.
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Stop thinking small. Work 168 hours a week! Hell, even 169.
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With some PHBs that would actually be an increase in productivity.
Note that my definition of "work" is "doing something productive" not "keeping a chair from flying away by planting a fat ass on it".
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innovation is coming out of Iceland? (Score:4, Interesting)
Standard of living. They have innovated their standard of living far beyond the usual. They have just leapfrogged over the standard of living for the vast majority of the Anglosphere. It seems that perhaps the Icelandic economy isn't built and founded upon the principle of "beggar they neighbor".
Re: innovation is coming out of Iceland? (Score:5, Interesting)
Standard of living comes from lots of cod which is abundant in the coastal waters of Iceland, geothermal energy ("free" electricity and heating), and NATO bases which are strategically very important. I guess that's enough to keep a nation of a few hundred thousand living in relative comfort.
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Re: innovation is coming out of Iceland? (Score:2)
100 years ago, Iceland was the poorest nation of Europe, despite the supposed hard working culture producing the most poets per capita.
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The same argument can be made for Japan. It’s a culture problem.
Re: innovation is coming out of Iceland? (Score:4, Informative)
Suicide rates [wikipedia.org]:
United States of America: 14.5 / 100,000
Iceland: 11.2 / 100,000
Besides, there's a trend up in the USA, which is not observable in Iceland (it's a bit erratic, because having a small population, a single suicide causes a jump of more than 0,5 in the gendered historical data)
Please don't mod up anonymous idiots.
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And remind me what great technological or scientific innovation is coming out of Iceland?
Your envy is showing.
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Comes from being the former richest country in the world and now being 15th.
With Iceland nipping at their heels.
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Re:Iceland (Score:4, Informative)
Comes from being the former richest country in the world and now being 15th.
With Iceland nipping at their heels.
What country are you talking about? The 15th richest country nominally is Mexico, or Spain if you use PPP measurements (and you should never use PPP when comparing relative wealth).
If you are looking at wealth per capita (which I assume you are), the United States has never been #1 there. That has been dominated by small nations like Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, and Monaco for quite some time. Comparing nations like that to larger nations is like comparing Manhattan to larger nations. And Manhattan has nearly twice the GDP per capita of Monaco (even with 40x the population).
Other than small nations, you have moderately sized nations with either immense oil resources per capita, like Norway, or tax/banking systems that exploit global trade, like Ireland/Switzerland. Then you have the United States.
I keep having a harder time being proud of my country as I get older and less ignorant, but the US being the wealthiest nation in the world is still its rightful claim to fame. If only that led to a strong quality of life to all its citizens, but I digress.
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We're in a universal asset bubble caused by the dollar being overvalued by many orders of magnitude. Its price relative to other currencies or assets fails to take into account the massive and unprecedented debt of consumers, corporations, and all levels of government, even by their own calculations, and more so by far if GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) are applied.
We have lots of green paper backed by the full faith and credit of a bankrupt government.
It is only a matter of time before wor
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USA. Per capita. Unless you're doing meaningless dick measuring, it's the only reasonable thing to look at. Ditto with PPP, which is specifically meant to adjust raw income to actual purchasing power. I think I was using CIA numbers. Doesn't really matter though, the US used to be well ahead no matter how you measured, now it's somewhere in the pack at the top and falling behind pretty quickly. And GDP/PPP is about the *only* metric it does well on.
But keep making up excuses. That always works for improving
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USA. Per capita. Unless you're doing meaningless dick measuring, it's the only reasonable thing to look at. Ditto with PPP
I brought up many reasons why that is not a very good way to look at relative wealth. PPP is the silliest, since it quite literally means comparing apples to oranges. Purchasing power parity doesn't help you afford foreign goods or sell your goods on the open market, it only benefits from having more cheap and poor labor than your neighbors. It is very good are measuring quality of life within a nation, but that doesn't help measure relative wealth. A nation's assets don't increase in value just because you
Re: (Score:2)
It is very good are measuring quality of life within a nation, but that doesn't help measure relative wealth.
I think quality of life is wealth. Trying to tie that to money is difficult, but ultimately money isn't the important thing, it's just a useful proxy that can be fed into formulae and charts. The good life is what we actually want.
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Define productive.
Because when I look at a lot of other economies, "productive" isn't exactly the first thing that comes to mind either.
Re: Iceland (Score:2)
Non-sequitur.
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When your national myth is "we're the best" your options are quite limited.