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Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

All that is necessary to enable the average worker to work many fewer hours a week is for the amount produced in those fewer hours (over the whole economy) to be sufficient to allow everyone to live comfortably, and for the output to be shared reasonably equitably.

We have the former. We've had it for 50 years. The only problem is the latter: We have allowed the people at the very top to take all the extra gains from the productivity increases since about 1970.

Changing the system to prevent that level of blatant skimming off the top, and ensure that the benefits of the economy are shared equitably, is what we as a society need to be working on right now.

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I don't really disagree with you that much. Clearly there are government policies that can redistribute wealthy more equitably than, for example, what happens in the US, as evidenced by other 1st world social democracies that have very different tax policies and lower Gini coefficients.

But that said:

1. In a competitive economy, that can never be handled by a company-by-company basis (except for companies that have huge monopolistic moats, hence all the perks at the large tech companies), as other companies will be willing to work more and take more business. So it would have to be handled at a government/societal level, and this article talks nothing about that.

2. In a competitive global economy, it can be extremely difficult for one country to provide tons of worker protections and benefits if other countries are willing to forgo those benefits to get ahead. Indeed, that has happened in many Western European countries: if you have a job, especially a government or trade-protected job, you're sitting pretty. However, many of these countries have had to deal with overall lower growth which has resulted in staggering youth unemployment.

> blatant skimming off the top

That skimming off the top is via ownership of shares. I wish we had a culture that rather than savings, we invested. If the masses did that there'd be much less cause to complain and more right for ordinary people to vote on company board members that promote better values.

This reads very much as "I wish the poors and plebs would start doing things my way, rather than criticizing my way for being only accessible to the wealthy and effectively legalized gambling."

I forget the exact numbers right now, but a depressingly large percentage of Americans today literally do not make enough money to be able to save anything. These are not problems that can be solved by market solutions. We cannot fix inequality that dwarfs that of the Gilded Age by encouraging people living paycheck to paycheck to buy stock so they can have the privilege of a single vote out of millions on whether Rich White Guy A or Rich White Guy B gets to be on the board.

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