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Comment by jeena | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree, humans worked for 80 hours a week and then together reduced to 40 hours a week. I don't see why they could not reduce it to 30 or 20 hours a week.

Everyone worked on a Saturday then suddenly most of the people stopped working on the Saturday, I don't see why it would be impossible for most of the people in the society to stop working on Friday too.

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Exactly! Weekends only exist because workers unionized and forced them to be a thing.

In the US, the government is supposed to create and reinforce individual liberties and property rights. That means creating a legal framework around personal property. It should be protective of peoples’ time as well.

Because 40 hours a week are, if you remove vacations, holidays and sick leaves, on average roughly 4 hours per day. That's the amount tribal people work per day. There is no inherent human need to reduce that time further.

As I said, people can already work for 30 or 20 hours per week. Why is it not enough for you if you stop working on Friday?

Do you want 30 or 20 hours per week with equal pay? Then indeed you have to reduce the supply of work to rise hourly wages. But then, less is produced, the supply of goods is reduced and thus things cost more, most likely disproportionally more than the increase in wages.

> But then, less is produced

That is obviously not true because of two things:

1. Machines take over and do work and create goods

2. Humans are more productive than they were before

Here is a handy graph which I found googling https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-graphical-representati...

Machines only compensate for humans to a certain extend because they are already used as much as possible. If humans work less then there is not the same output because there are no hidden opportunities where machines can do more work. I stick with my original point: If humans work less then there is less output.

We are more productive now, but that surplus is used to put a supercomputer into the hand of every person and new clothes to wear every other month. If people wouldn't buy that, then the increase in productivity could lead to less working hours.

Btw, as far as I understand your graph, it is not telling that we are more productive but that farms are more productive if they are bigger.

As far as I know, Western workers are just more productive because they assemble pre-made parts and the final value of the product is ascribed to them when in reality, they just profit from wage differences. That's not sustainable.

If that wage difference is ever closed then people will even get less for the same amount of work.

> Because 40 hours a week are, if you remove vacations, holidays and sick leaves, on average roughly 4 hours per day.

I'm sorry, but who told you this?

The median amount of PTO in American companies is 10 days + 8 days of Federal holidays. That 18 days vs 260 weekdays, or 7% of the work year, meaning the average American works 7.5 hours a day, not 4.

Tribal people don't have weekends. It's 2*52 days + 18 days = 122 days out of 365. That's 5.3h per day. To me, that is close enough to 4 hours that people don't feel stressed to the point that there is a desire for change.

In comparision, people spend 3 hours on average watching TV.

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