I'm happy when "my" tax dollars are spent making my life better. Isn't that the whole point? (Obviously, this will work when everyone in the country has a 6 hour work week)
We have far, far more productivity than would necessitate everyone putting in 40+ hours a week, it's just that that productivity is not well-spread around at all.
Since money is used as a medium of exchange, it's essentially a placeholder for your labor (when you receive it from your employer/customers as payment) or value provided to others. It is arguable whether society has as much right over an individual's labor as he/she does, I think they don't (while society may have a contribution, it might be significantly below 50%).
One last and minor thing we'll have to disagree on: I don't think government equals society. An individual can be a part of society without being part of government, and I also believe government sometimes represents its own interests at the expense of society.
I know that in an abstract imaginary world you may think something else but that's all it is: imaginary. In the real world, no society = no money = no economics = no government.
Perhaps what you're referring to is legal tender, which indeed requires a government to exist. However, not all money is legal tender (for example, euros are not legal tender in the US, afaik).
Historically, states and credit-based money came first. THEN came the unit of account and medium of exchange money that you are talking about.
Going back to the original point, can you go to a deserted island and make "money"? No. You need society. You need government. You need an economic system. The money is only partially "yours".
Actually, the Wikipedia page on "fiat money" (if that's what you're referring to) says: "Fiat money originated in 11th century China" [1]. There were many commodity currencies before that.
> Going back to the original point, can you go to a deserted island and make "money"? No. You need society. You need government. You need an economic system. The money is only partially "yours".
That's if there is only one person on that island. If more people live on the island, they might start trading services and use some some improvised currency, e.g., coconuts or seashells. In this case, you have a society and money, but not necessarily a government.
I'm referring to ledgers of credit. They originated in Mesopotamia, thousands of years ago. Check out the book "Debt" by David Graeber.
> That's if there is only one person on that island. If more people live on the island, they might start trading services and use some some improvised currency, e.g., coconuts or seashells. In this case, you have a society and money, but not necessarily a government.
See, that's completely untrue. What is actually going to happen is that multiple people on that society are going to bludgeon each other to death once there are enough people to constitute a society.
I think the contemporary startup idea that people have to be "working and playing" at the office for 10-14 hours a day to make anything significant happen is at worst, misguided, and, to a cynic like me, just a way to grind people out of your company before they can vest any significant amount of equity.
Kidding.
I'm not completely disparaging the long workday and loads of perks to keep you at the office. It is nice to have good food nearby most hours of the day, and amenities such as gyms help coalesce my time at the office around the "productive" part of my day. Where it falls apart is when managers have to justify their employees' work: even if the 6hr worker and the 10hr worker are equally productive, they're going to point to the 10 every time to justify their employees' salary and their own ability of a manager to get more out of them. Then the 6hr worker is asked to stay later for "team morale," which often amounts to little more than twiddling thumbs and waiting out the clock, with hopefully some of that time spent wondering why they're even there in the first place.
Also, fuck people asking you to stay for "team morale". If you left earlier, I'd think "If I worked harder, maybe they would let me leave earlier, too..."
I (and others) anecdotally lose steam part way through the day. The last couple hours are a waste. I see no reason why that would happen earlier if the day ended earlier.
Reason why ER nurses work 12 is continuance of care. You're better off being looked after by 2 shifts who are familiar with your case rather than 3 or 4. More people just add complexity
Also, I can't see how 6hours would mean no stretch/brain breaks.
"Exempt" workers, which is most of us in the tech industry, are paid a salary and have essentially no limit to the hours that may be asked of us.
You may be asked, but do you really have to accept? (I'm asking from Europe) It sounds insane to sell 24 of your hours per day for any typical salary?
1. Abolish "At-will" employment and replace it with "Just Cause". This will bring the US in line with the rest of the developed world.
2. Implement working time restrictions similar to the European Working Time Directive for both exempt, and non-exempt employees.
We have been in a race to the bottom with regard to labor law over the last 30 years.
Some of those systems don't work in the long run, the rent control in Sweden results in each available apartment getting thousands of requests with people actually waiting decades to get an apartment, and this isn't some low income housing this is just because the majority of the apartments in places like Stockholm are rent controlled and managed by the government.
I just get sad every time I see it.
Rents do get bid up due to things like the minimum wage rising. This is because the power relationship between landlord and tenant is heavily skewed in favour of the landlord. The employee/employer relationship also suffers from the same disease.
Disclosure: I'm a US/UK dual citizen, and a landlord myself.
Sincere question as I don't know much about the UK rental market: why aren't the private landlords in this segment of the market competing with each other? Is it difficult to build additional rental housing cheaply enough?
That's the best part - it's free! Due to increases in productivity (better technology), people can work less overall.
They are still being paid the same (per hour salary was increased) and they had to hire more staff, one of the big pluses they've reported is that it was much easier for them to recruit new employees but that's not something unique considering they've just given everyone a 25% raise by mandating that they should work only 6 hours.
So overall their operational expenses have went up, by how much well hard to say, they've managed to increase their workforce by almost 30% so that's a flat out 30% increase in operational costs, since recruiting and maintaining an employee is considerably more expensive (on boarding process & training costs, more heads means more benefits have to be paid out) than paying overtime then the operational costs have probably even risen more than a flat 30%. This is a government funded experiment and so it the employer so who ended up paying the bill well the Swedish people, at least those who pay into the system since now Sweden has the lowest (actual) pay-in ratio of all countries within the EAA and no much north sea oil and gas to cover for it like their richer neighbor Norway.
Let's take a simple example. You have a village and someone plants an apple tree. Everybody who wants an apple has to pay to the owner (planter). Now let's say (to make it less politically controversial) that the owner dies, and the village decides that anyone in the village can take, say, 10 apples per month.
I would then say the apples are free, wouldn't you? It perfectly fits the definition of the word.
And this is analogous to technological innovation. Someone spent time creating this innovation in the past, and the products of this innovation can be free, you don't have to pay anyone to use it, they are already dead.
So I have shown you, I hope, that free things can appear "out of thin air" in the economy. Then it's just a matter of social consensus how to redistribute the free things, for example, people can decide that they will just work two hours less.
But in this case what happens is that then the population doubles and they decide that now each person can take 15 apples, not only now they have had a 300% increase in apple consumption which puts a stress on the tree, and the left over apples that were used to be sold in order to pay the gardener to take care of the tree are also now gone so your free tree dies and rots away and everyone is sad because there are no more apples.
No matter what economical model you choose there is no such thing as "free" you have a society which can produce X amount of capital that's the pie you have to play with. Over unity doesn't exists in economics anymore that it can exist in nature.
P.S. Even money isn't free to maintain, so even if i drop a bag of money into your lap it will cost you.
And I think your view is too narrow.
> the cost of the apples represented that cost
No, the cost of apples represented how much people wanted them. It had nothing to do with the cost of the tree maintenance. There is no requirement for the person to even maintain the tree - some food actually grows on trees. :-)
When the population doubles the village may decide differently. Your scenario is just one possible option, and that's my point.
> No matter what economical model you choose there is no such thing as "free"
That's not correct. This problem was dealt with very differently in different economic schools. Classicals for example had concept of land and rent (extraction). For them, it could have been "free", or rather, they understood that there is an arrangement in society. Neoclassicals, neokeynesians and austrians pretty much ignore this problem. Marx invented labor theory of value (all value comes from labor) to deal with it, which was quite a good attempt to find a generally acceptable solution (and you even allude to it where you try to claim that maintenance by humans is always required), but is unfortunately inconsistent.
I think the simplest resolution is to simply accept that things (and even ideas) can produce value on their own, without human intervention. This value can then be captured easily by humans, because these things don't protest like humans do. And this capture is not all that different from landowner capturing rent. It's just a matter of laws and customs how the windfalls from capture of the (free) value produced by things is distributed.
You may argue then how any profit should be distributed? Well, I have no idea, and I don't think anyone has, really. Even if you have just two people (say two different specializations) that are both required to produce certain thing, how do you divide profits from the thing? There is no correct answer to that question.
Capitalist's answer is to make one of them owner who decides for both, communist's answer is to divide them equally, democrat's answer is them to take vote, answer from labor theory is inconsistent and paradoxical (if you consider technical innovation in one job, one of them now works less but gets paid as before, which contradicts the assumption that value comes from labor), answer from free market theory is even weirder - that there is no profit to be divided, and answer from practice seems to be that it simply depends on political power of the parties (which may simply translate to bigger stick if you have just two people).
> Even money isn't free to maintain, so even if i drop a bag of money into your lap it will cost you.
This is arguably a different meaning of "free". On level of physics, nothing is really "free", because there is energy and entropy.. But in everyday use of the word "free" we are dealing with values relevant for humans, and they don't entirely map to these physics terms (in fact they often contradict, for example in GDP calculation).
$80 / 8 hours = $10/hour
$80 / 6 hours = $13.33/hour
In any case, I think this was mostly resolved in modern society, with concept of overtime pay. (I assume, when talking about 6-hour work day, we are implicitly talking about employment.) No one is prevented working more, given that someone is willing to pay more (to the same person). And reason for this arrangement is precisely to give people the choice to cash on the free time or the extra value.
1) More jobs = more spending = more taxes in indirect ways (businesses) 2) Less stress on other public programs, such as welfare (if these people aren't employed, who is paying for their xyz?)