This is true today if you wanted to live at the same standard of middle class living in 1929, complete with eating only meals hand cooked from base ingredients and no concern with the environmental effects of things like burning coal and garbage.
So even if you want a rising standard of living, work hours could conceivably be shorter.
That said, the fundamental point that most of us wouldn't accept 1929 lifestyles for any amount of leisure is right.
It's perfectly possible to opt for 1929 levels of health care.
I know a number of people who've intentionally decided to live pretty much like that. Mostly they don't do it anymore after a few years, but it's totally an available option if you really want it. Saying "society poses" an expensive standard of living is not much proof that you're being forced to do anything.
But iceboxes were certainly common, as were fans. I guess my point being: the people of the 1920s weren't savages, and while it's obvious that they didn't enjoy the same comforts we enjoy today there were still many conveniences that did exist.
The past is a strange place, with odd customs, but it's not totally alien or barbaric.
With an extra 3 days of leisure every week I'd think I could handle not driving 80 mph on the highway. There are pictures of these 20s and 30s cars at the top of dirt roads in the rocky mountains so what ever power they had still let them go places.
Do I really need all the car that the civic is?
And for an extra three days of leisure a week, you'd be giving up not just driving on the highway, but indeed a whole load of things.
Again - for most things, nobody is making you consume these additional goods and services above the 1930 average. But, as we can see, they're quite popular and people apparently prefer to work more and consume more rather than work less and consume less.
Yes, a high infant mortality rate skews the figures. Still, I'd be willing to bet that the average 40 year old in 1929 had a life expectancy at least 10 years less than the average 40 year old in 2017.
Edit: Table 21 in this report is informative: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_11.pdf Expected years remaining for a 40 year old in 1929-31 was 29.67. In 2011 it was 40.58.
Washing machines, for example, use less water than dish washing by hand. Laundry machines similarly. I bet printing presses have gotten better too.
If you accept that maintaining a 1929 lifestyle you can do 16 hour weeks: the price of food alone has dropped immensely, I bet fridges are more efficient than they were in the 30s, not even to talk about automation... Shouldn't we be able to do our current lifestyle with less than 16 hours
So, if 16 hours of donating effort to society, in exchange for a standard of living means status quo, would investing in 32 hours now, mean improvements that move the needle forward?
Or... is it possible that we wouldn't be able to exactly measure when 16 real hours are logged, because it would require totalitarian surveillance?
Every office I've worked in is filled with people blathering innanely about things that have nothing to do with finishing up our shared miserable toil, and getting the fuck away from my personal nightmare dungeon.
Then there's the meetings.
The meetings where you sit in a room with people who do almost nothing but talk in meetings. To them? That's what work actually is.
Pointless meetings. Hours long meetings. Reading emails. Emails upon emails. Alerts for alerts. Noise without signal. And why? For what?
Somewhere in all this, there's probably a reason for it, but honestly, I get the feeling that half the people with white collar day jobs serve no purpose other than to dress nice and demostrate headcount to rival departments, to justify budgets and win BIGNESS perception contests among "executives." (my staff meeting is bigger than yours, so who's more important?)
If you started extracting "work that matters" from these kinds of corporate heirarchies, I get the feeling we'd start hemorhaging employment rate, and so it must be prevented because people need boondoggles to feel useful, and have a reason to dress nice and belong somewhere for some reason or whatever.
If it's per-capita income, is there any weighting done for different groups of income? I feel if the statistics group together Silicon Valley CEOs and Starbucks waitresses, it's easy to get a non-representatively high (though technically correct) per-capita income.
Also, how much of the increase is from the economy simply recovering from the 1929 crisis back to normal levels?
> So even if you want a rising standard of living, work hours could conceivably be shorter.
2) That assumes that jobs that provide such increased wages are also flexible enough that you can freely choose how many hours per week you want to work. That assumption doesn't seem to be the case in practice.
I'm sorry? Are you suggesting that by working 16 hours a week each, a modern couple could live to the same standard as their 1929 middle class counterparts, i.e. owning thier home and supporting a family on one full time sallary and with one full time housekeeping and child-rearing?
This will be news to the masses of modern couples who are both working full time for a sallary, housekeeping in their spare time, and with no hope in sight of owning a home or being able to afford to start a family.
If you can arrange a remote working gig, you can live comfortable in a by-now first world country like Taiwan on 16 hours/week of American salary. (It might be easier to find a place to work 40% of weeks of the year fulltime, instead of 40% of hours each week. Same principle.)
I think this a chronic strawman tactic ( present company cheerfully exempted ) - misclassify land as capital, then complain about capitalism.
If slavery were legal, then labor would be capital too.
Your second point is sort-of true. That's why when Britain freed the slaves they bought them free.
Next: let's please not confuse accounting and economics :)
And your argument is weird: using the market you can exchange all kinds of things for each other. What's the difference between exchanging land for capital vs labour for capital in that argument?
Making a clear distinction between capital (which we can produce more of) and land (which is fixed in supply for as long as we stay on earth) is just good economics. See also Henry George's Progress and Poverty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty), the book that essentially kicked off the Progressive Era in 19th century America.
One of the things that's interesting about this - if you can substitute capital for it, it's not really land. "Land" also means something abstract, in a manner similar to the ellipsoid used in GPS calculations in aviation. Its a "where", less a "what".
But then again, we tend to conflate rents and profits, which creates a lot of confusion.
In Marx's definition, for instance, capital is defined by currency, and by the liquidity of one's assets. Therefore, considering land as capital would make sense. Microeconomics analysis is another realm where separating land and capital does not necessarily make sense : because of the liquidity effect described above, it may be useless to distinguish land and capital when you have no macro concern.
My point here is that the definition of capital, and the classification of land related to capital is intimately related to the analysis you're making, and, therefore, to the position you're defending. As a consequence, what you understand as a person building a strawman is related not to that person building that strawman, but to that person's analysis being in conflict with semantics you take for granted. And ironically, when you try to establish a distinction that makes no sense in that person's logical framework, they may think that you're trying to drown the matter.
In fact, they may even be right, in the context of the analysis of social capital, because you're in fact struggling to establish your capital as more legitimate than theirs.
This kind of problematic is why it is so important for the one of us which build products for our clients, to take the time to understand their domain, their vocabulary and the context limits to this vocabulary.
You can of course express the original observation in Marxist terms as well: it's not just any capital owners that are getting a bigger slice of the pie, but especially land owners.
Thanks to the existence of market prices, we can even abstract away from the specific owners and say that the factors of production themselves get different slices of the pie.
That works because even when some piece of capital is bought and sold, the new owner gets roughly the same amount of return on them as the old one. (If it wasn't so, we would classify whatever the new owner is doing differently as having input their own labour into the process.)
Ie building a multi-story building swaps capital for land. Georgism is (among other things) about untaxing capital and labour, so that such substitutions can work out better.
< insert endless " I know he can get the job, but can he do the job?" with Dan Hedaya sequence from the intro to "Joe vs the Volcano" here. >
There is some literature which shows that returns to capital are just as weak as returns to labor.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/01/cap...
I don't think you can really blame employees for presentism, I think it's generally more difficult to make part-time work arrangements in the white collar world, whereas at the lower end of wages, where it benefits capital owners, blue-collar workers are forced to be part-time...
I'd argue that it only benefits capital owners in the sense of having a convenient thing ( that's hopefully nearly irrelevant ) to measure.
Edit: I think Piketty glosses over what's actually capital and what is not. It's not the complement of labor - production is the mixing of land, labor and capital. That's three things.
Yeah what a nightmare. Where's soylent goo when you need it??
I don't see any compelling reason (but I haven't thought about it too hard) to believe that we couldn't have some sort of an increase in standard of living and a decrease in average hours/week worked.
The trade offs are obviously complex, though.
- not having to fake looking busy
- not rushing through contradictory orders
- no draconian hierarchy that forbid solving problems
etc etc
Each one is different but many desk jobs ended up straining me more than prepping sandwiches from 7am to 2pm. In the latter I was sweating but passed a 3 week adaptation phase things were swift and smooth.
That's where you get the joke: "how many people does it take to dig a hole?"
"One person to dig a hole. One person to make sure they are working under union regulations. Another person to make sure they are compliant with environmental regulations. Another person to handle payroll." And so on.
And so on.
If it's "make a pencil"[1] rather than "dig a hole", then the number seems to go up quite a bit.
[1] reference to "I, Pencil"
Sure if all things remained equal, if basically nothing changed at all from 1929 to 2029 then yes his prediction would be accurate. But did he actually believe that?
And that, really, only in the US.
I wished you stopped at "eating only meals hand cooked"
It's garbage that people in 1929 had "no concern with the environmental effects of things like burning coal and garbage"
OK, they probably had no concern, but that was because there was none to have.
They didn't buy stuff and throw it away, there was no disposable society. They lived simply. Not travelling the world, or large distances to go to X every weekend.
But whats worse in your comment to me is you can live a much much better lifestyle than 1929 on 16 hours a week, traveling the world and having great things while respecting the environment.
You just can't have the things society says you should have.