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Comment by forgotpwtomain | Hacker News Reader

I don't see any supporting evidence in this article which suggests that people working 15 hours are happier than those working say 35 hours. It's also hard for me to imagine that 15 hours is enough to sustain a level of productive output requiring intellectual work and extensive knowledge of a subject matter - unused skills rust and 15 hours seems like some kind of bare minimum level just to sustain rudimentary skill, let alone develop it.

> A recent poll among Brits revealed that as many as 37 per cent think they have a job that doesn’t even need to exist.

I'm not going to deliberate on the prevalence of bullshit jobs and their impact on quality of life (which seems to be where the article takes it's main pitch), but given that - I rather disagree that not working is the solution that obviously follows.

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>unused skills rust and 15 hours seems like some kind of bare minimum level just to sustain rudimentary skill

Eh I think skills are stickier than that. FWIW, I spent about 6 months doing almost no programming, but I didn't feel particularly unproductive when I started again.

Besides which, there's no reason people can't be continuing developing their skills in the remaining hours anyway. The 15 hours is just how much time you have to spend doing what you're told. And you can likely learn much more efficiently if you work with that intent instead of acquiring skills incidentally as your job requires.

Exactly, when it frees up time you can be productive doing your own things.

Having 2 days off a week, really is only enough time to do chores, not enough to spend on your own skills or do anything productive for yourself.

As a contractor, I tend to take 1-3 months off between contracts + it seems to help, not hinder. I'm much fresher when I go into the next contract.

For many people "doing their own things" is gonna be playing more Counter-Strike.

Of course, that's their right, but whether you can make a sustainable economy out of subsidizing that is another question...a question that is much more pressing than "wouldn't that be better?" and one the article doesn't even attempt to answer, probably because it is largely impossible and anything like it is speculation akin to religion.

> For many people "doing their own things" is gonna be playing more Counter-Strike.

Also is "more Counter-Strike" at all correlated with a quality of life increase? 45 free minutes you wouldn't have had to get rid of some stress shooting things - probably yes? 5 hours a day - probably not?

> For many people "doing their own things" is gonna be playing more Counter-Strike.

Or worse, shooting heroin.

Or even worse, building open source software, attending city hall meetings, or parenting.

Right, because everyone in Appalacia who doesn't have a job is doing all of those things with the "leisure" time they have from not working.

>Or even worse, building open source software, attending city hall meetings, or parenting.

Pretty much none of that is happening in areas where unemployment is chronic, even in a nation as wealthy as the United States. It's quite a mystery as to why well-educated people persist in the mistaken belief that UBI will magically cause recipients to behave nobly.

If your assertion was true, then I'd expect those areas to be so full of crime, misery and drug abuse, that it would make international news.

> It's quite a mystery as to why well-educated people persist in the mistaken belief that UBI will magically cause recipients to behave nobly.

I find the reverse to be the mystery - why some people persist in the belief that people on UBI will mostly turn to spending their days abusing drugs and cheap entertainment? Like if humans were zombies who need an employer to give their life a direction?

>If your assertion was true, then I'd expect those areas to be so full of crime, misery and drug abuse, that it would make international news.

I invite you to walk the streets of downtown Detroit or, as thehardsphere points out, parts of Appalachia if you still have doubts.

The only reason such areas in the US don't make international news is that third-world countries still have it relatively worse and, even then, governments of other nations issue formal cautions to their citizens against travelling to these areas.

Are you so weak as an individual that government giving you 20k extra per year just for being a citizen would drive you personally to become an alcoholic or heroine abuser? Even though all studies on UBI prove otherwise? Or do you just think anyone who can't make it to middle class on their own accord is probably already a drug user?

>heroine abuser

I protest this unseemly slander; I'll have you know that I treat women with respect. /s

In answer to your question, A) you can pretty much find a study that says anything you want and B) a considerable number of my high school classmates from lower and lower middle class families did, in fact, fall prey to drug addiction and I know all too well that, had circumstances been just slightly different, I might have joined them. Am I weak? Perhaps, perhaps. But no more so than a great many others.

Seriously, go to Detroit or one of these other afflicted areas and walk around. Many of these people are already on public assistance programs. If you survive the experience, come back and see if you can manage to still say to me with a straight face that people will find their own productive purpose in life given UBI.

Who cares?

For other people, that extra time and the safety net may enable them to start a business or do charity work or run for their local school board. I'd argue it's worth it for society to subsidize 1,000 people playing Counter-Strike for every one person who could be empowered to start the next Google.

We should all care if the discussion is about whether it is sustainable policy.

It's not a normative argument, it's a is this even possible? Isn't that a necessary question?

If it's impossible, it's only politics and the puritanical "a living must be earned" mentality holding it back. More than enough value is generated in the USA to pay for some form of Basic Income--value that is _currently_ distributed comically unevenly. All it takes is political will.

wealth and value is created, not distributed. I'm sick and tired of hearing from communists about taking money away from hard working people and giving to those less deserving.

I definitely would read more books and try new tech if I worked 15 hours a week. With a 40+ hours workweek I just coast on my current skills at work and am too tired in the evening to learn other stuff.

> I definitely would read more books and try new tech if I worked 15 hours a week

because EVERYONE is as productive as you are? give me a break.

So a few years ago I read Tim Ferriss' "the four hour work week" - and while I will not go on a screed about the part that I find ridiculous, I do think the chapter (and recurring thread) about "what do you do with when you work 4 hours a week" is entirely relevant here.

The summary / thesis of life-after-work is that we must "find a muse" - which is to say, since you no longer must work your entire life away, you may now re-allocate those same hours doing something that you love. Even something that you are wildly, obsessively, passionate about.

A small portion of the current policy research around AI & Automation is how do we deal with the emotional fallout among people who feel they've lost their purpose. How do we convince people that it is OK to "take a handout"?

There are really deep cultural implications to that idea. There are people who believe "there's no such thing as a free lunch" - consider the Georgia representative who very specifically floated the idea of making poor children sweep floors in schools in exchange for meals "in order to teach them the important life lesson that there is no such thing as a free lunch" http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gop-rep-suggests-kids-... ... like that is someone who really believes in that as a principle as opposed to just a colloquialism.

What would it do to their self esteem if they were suddenly taking free money?

How many parents would be happy to spend an extra hour with their kids in the morning? A couple of extra hours at night? A few extra hours to learn guitar or beat that next level of super-mario?

I've move from a company where I had to be there 9-5:30+ to a company with flex hours. Earlier in the week I leave around 3-4 somewhat regularly because on other days I have to be at work until 8:30+.

Even with a couple extra hours at home a week it's hard to find exactly what I should be doing. I tried to put together a schedule of taking some online classes I've watched to for a while, writing, spending 30-1 hour playing games I've been meaning to play, and generally calling / talking to friends and family more. However I still find myself in a loop of checking reddit, youtube, facebook, and hackernews over and over around 7PM.

I understand its a problem born from extreme privilege but if the future is filled with more free time it's a problem that many will run into.

Personally, I filled that time around grad school and killing time finding my first job by taking vocational classes at my local community college. I learned both welding and machining in my evenings, and now that's the foundation of my hobbies.

If I had 5 extra hours in a workweek I'd probably do house chores like grocery shopping, maintenance, doctor appointments, cleaning, cooking for the week, etc. That way, my regular free time is actually free.

Coming home after 8 hours of work to 1-2 hours of chores isn't fun.

Here's a short list of things I would like to study or do if I only had the time, in no particular order:

Piano, saxophone, geology, astronomy, japanese, game development on old consoles, hiking, weight training, personal site redesign, writing novels, writing stories, designing board and card games, mobile app development, virtual reality development, drawing, composing music, game production and publishing, cooking, etc.

It should be noted that for all of these things listed there was at least a small period of my life where I spent a good chunk of time doing them.

Instead right now I seem to only have the time, energy, and motivation for board game design (and recording it in a diary), keeping my puppy active and happy (walks, fetch), playing some games, fixing a bug or adding a small feature or two in a mobile app once a week, and writing one short story for an anthology once a year.

And I only work 40 hours a week. When I worked 60+ I didn't have energy to do anything but eat dinner and sleep.

> 15 hours seems like some kind of bare minimum level just to sustain rudimentary skill, let alone develop it

I've been programming professionally, and developing my skills at a medium pace for a couple of decades. After a few years now of actually tracking my time to the minute, I often get less than 15 hours of programming in a 40 hour work week. Meetings, chat & email, lunches & breaks, and sooner or later some degree of management, these things add up to a majority of your time.

If you filled a 15 hour work week with meetings and included a lunch hour, then yeah, there's no coding getting done. But I would hope spending less time working means and implies to a greater degree shedding all the time we spend at work not working.

As much as i hate to say it, meetings and planning matter. blindly programming isn't work.

The key is having productive meetings.

If a meeting ends with no action items (assigned to specific people) and no decisions made, it was a useless meeting, and you should stop having it. Status updates can be written down and emailed, or better, posted to a wiki.

Does it scale like that though?

If you do 15 hours of work over a 40 hour week, do you still do 15 hours of work over a 15 hour week, or do people end up doing 5 hours of work?

Is there any evidence either way? These discussions always bring out the anecdotes, but we need hard stats to show whether this is even doable.

I have worked in at least one organization where the meetings were likely there to prevent work from being done too quickly with an activity that still counted as billable hours. Just before I left, the "daily stand-up" included the entire development team and testing team, and lasted a minimum of 45 minutes. That was nearly 20 people, packed into one office, justifying their existence on a daily basis.

So some people would actually dedicate that 15 hours to getting things done, and some people would still fill it up with bullshit and game the management metrics to maximize pay per unit of effort.

Anecdata, but I'm MUCH happier when working 15 instead of 35 and certainly 40-50 hours a week, provided I'm making the same money (or more to the point, keeping the same'ish lifestyle, albeit with more free time.)

That doesn't mean I'm unoccupied an additional 20 hours a week, but being occupied with my choice of activities is way better.

Contributing my own anecdata: I'm in a similar situation - I voluntarily started working 20 hours/week for the last 9 years. In my spare time I've taken up multiple new hobbies and cultivated older hobbies into semi-part-time jobs (a few hours a month). I can't ever imagine the torture of working 40+ hours/week ever again.

Yeah. There are lots of useful things people could be doing, and largely I think that doing productive things is good for people.

He's literally selling a book called UTOPIA.

There's a reason he cites a survey as one of his main pieces of evidence - he doesn't have any. It's pie in the sky feel good that doesn't have any evidence.

You don't start with universal basic income and a 15-hour work week when the current baseline is 40 hours and a lack of decent health insurance.

To be fair, he seems to be speaking about the socially developed part of the western world. Fairly decent to very good quality universal healthcare is available in large parts of western Europe, Japan, Canada... Even large parts of eastern Europe have (the remains of) somewhat decent universal healthcare thanks to their socialist past.

It's fairly clear that there isn't even support in the current US ruling class for universal healthcare. That makes anything even remotely like basic income largely irrelevant there.

I get the feeling that 15 hours is a ballpark number and there are certain occupations that do require more time "in the seat" to make good progress. It's probably also true that if you're putting in only ~15 hours of productivity, you're probably going to dedicate some extra time to learning new things, advancing skills, etc.

My experience tells me that, as a developer, an awful lot of what I do could definitely fit in that 15 hour window if there are 2 other people also doing "my" job. Splitting up my week's tasks with the 3 of us putting in 45 hours would result in much more productivity, in my opinion.

I'd then have much more time to do things I wanted to do, and experiment with new tech for shits and giggles. That often gets pushed back in favor of other life experiences these days.

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