Why force things? I don't want 50% more waking hours. I enjoy my sleep tremendously.
Personally, I dislike the need for sleep. I put it off for as long as I can manage, and try to get as little of it as I can get away with. For me, I have a hard time functioning well with less than 4 hours a night, but anything more then 5.5 hours and I feel like I've thrown the day away. The idea of voluntarily checking out from the world isn't as relaxing to me as picking up a book to read, or learning something new, or doing something productive that isn't work/startup-related.
Either way, I assume that nobody would force you to take a drug that you didn't want to take.
Suddenly, you can take a drug that decreases your need for sleep by 50%. People only need 4h of sleep per night now, for a full nights' sleep - 3h, if you're willing to skimp a little, 2h isn't unheard of (in the way that only getting 4h of sleep a night, now, isn't unheard of either).
Suddenly, there's a significant advantage in the hands of everyone willing to take this drug. Students are expected to study more and harder, because they don't need 8h of sleep every night. Entrance exams to schools get more difficult. Software developers are now enticed to work longer hours - longer hours than they already are. Labor / shift workers (hospitality / food industry) are expected to work longer shifts, and they have to, because businesses have to be open longer because more people are awake for more of the day.
Now, also, you have to consider: this is just sleep, in terms of brain repair. Your body has to put itself back together every night, too - repairing microscopic muscle tears, fixing bruises, etc etc etc. Your body would probably start slowly falling apart on 2-3h of sleep per night, even if your mind was fully rested.
I really, really hope this doesn't happen.
But if this sort of thing ever does happen, then I absolutely hope that it goes down as you've described.
In the time I've been alive, I've seen more and more employers gravitating towards fewer hours, more lenient work schedules, etc. My first job was basically a minimum of 10 hours a day, and 6, sometimes 7 days a week. Nowadays, companies (especially in tech, mind you) are realizing the difficulty in recruiting / training / keeping personnel and are competing on benefits to the extent that 'unlimited' vacation days, telework, longer maternity and paternity leaves, etc. And before the obvious counterargument is made, this isn't limited just to technology (though it does seem to be blazing the trail.) Tech, agriculture, finance, business, and any industry in which recruiting and keeping talent are tricky are basically trading dollars for perks, and often, the result of that is that employees get to keep more of their personal time for themselves.
Sure, this hasn't affected every industry, and for industries where labor is a commodity, it may never occur, but just as sure as you believe your scenario is the result of capitalism, I believe that the increase in perks / time / accommodation is the same.
> trading dollars for perks
And I suppose it also has to do a lot with how much leverage employees have against their employers. Those of us in tech have more leverage on average than, say, a hospitality worker.
It's a lot more nuanced than I had initially thought, for sure.
Most things are a LOT more nuanced than most people give credence to, and there's zero dishonor in acknowledging that. With almost every issue I've delved into (especially political ones), there are arguments for and against any given issue that I can't hand-wave away. I might prioritize some factors ahead of others, but just about every political issue in the world is a matter of tradeoffs, and there are very few obvious wins.
I agree with your assertion here that much of the strengths to be found in capitalism revolve around the notion of resolving power imbalances. For every good story I've read, somewhere, there's a terrifying story -- I'm reminded of the old Hazard county mine worker strikes, for example.
But while unions are ostensibly the surest fix in mitigating those power imbalances (in fostering leverage to the people), the more I look at them the more I realize that they need to be truly cooperative. Union power is real enough that there are places like Sweden which have no minimum wage, and yet still have high effective wages. But in America at least, unions with political power often exploit that political power towards complacency, corruption, and often trend towards being less effective stewards of their member interests. In essence, too much cooperation between unions and policy makers may yield counter-intuitive results that manifest in ineffective unions, which yields declining memberships, which yields power imbalances in favor of corporations.
The point, if I have one, is that while so many people get wrapped up in the idea of "unions bad" or "unions good", we lose the ability to objectively evaluate whether a given union is good or bad because we ideologically insist that they be a certain way. Similarly, evaluations of government, corporations, regulations, trade, capitalism, socialism, et al all falter as soon as we begin to put too much faith in the institution that we stop performing scientifically objective and individual evaluations upon them.
Thanks for the conversation, and in particular, for the open mind. It's always a pleasure to engage with someone who I know to be willing to adjust their opinions to facts, and while capitalism surely isn't always good, it definitely isn't always bad either.
Like hell they won't. It will become a social and economic imperative before you know it.
Statistically you are unlikely to be one of those people for whom 5-6 hours sleep daily is sufficient, so all you are doing to yourself is contributing to increased aggression, dulling of empathy and reduced impulse control that comes with insufficient sleep.
I wasn't going to bed at regular hours, and I wasn't waking up to an alarm, so I guess I am in that group (also, I don't have increased aggression or impulse control, but I don't know how I'd measure empathy). That said, I did not realize that I was statistically rare, so thanks for pointing out that maybe my 5 hours a night advice isn't applicable to others. Regardless of the amount of time involved in sleeping, I still would prefer not to have to take it, if that were an option.