Speaking of real people in the real world, Denmark reduced its workweek from 40 to 37 hours, and this did not produce any decline in medical outcomes. I suspect reducing to 35 or 33 or 30 would also have no such effect.
I don't necessarily want a cashier or a postman who has devoted his entire life to their career. Just 1-2 days a week is more than enough to be a very proficient cashier or postman.
One can even go the other way and say that I don't want a prostitute or truck loader that has devoted their entire life to their profession, for the obvious reason of physical degredation.
I'm a programmer, which I consider a pretty high skilled job, and I'm losing my fucking time in my day job. Granted, I need to practice the craft to keep up. But there is a point where I should stop and just learn. I would learn much faster if I could just use 20% of my work time learning. And no, I can't do it on the weekends. This would be overwork, and I have a life.
Doctors are quite special: they deal with several cases a day. They encounter various situations, and their personal experience is by itself statistically significant. To them, more work will mean more data, and better trained instincts.
Programmers often work on less than 1 project a year. At that scale, personal experience is mere anecdotal evidence. More work will just mean some more anecdotal evidence. That's not nearly enough data to feed our instinct. Simply put, working full time is a suboptimal way to learn.
Now that I think of it, I bet even doctors would benefit from stepping back, and do some directed learning instead of just treating patients.
A professional programmer who programs every day is going to spend half an hour every morning getting back into the zone. The same guy working 1 or 2 days a week is going to spend half that time just getting back up to speed on what the other programmers have been doing the other 3 or 4 days he's been away. It just doesn't scale. The 5 day guy is not going to be 5x as productive, but 10-20x.
There is no problem with my reasoning, because the world has settled on 35-40 hrs/week as being about the right balance. 100 hours doesn't work; my conjecture is that neither does 10.
There's a problem with that reasoning, because that number exists only because of Judeo-Christian traditions about the days that begin and end a week, the fact that 8 is a third of 24, the fact that the US had an active labor movement in the early 20th century, and the fact that US-style capitalism has been very influential around the world (largely for military reasons.)
Basing a chain of reasoning on the premiss that the status quo is the result of careful calibration over time is abandoning reason at the outset.
100 hours worked just fine, for owners.
A few questions about your larger assertion:
1) Could a 2-day a week dentist have a longer career than a 4-day dentist, ultimately leading to a higher saturation of experienced dentists?
2) Do you think that between a 2-day and a 4-day dentist of equivalent experience that one would perform better on an average workday than the other, or would they be equally affected by fatigue?
3) Do you agree that time for reflection and study are a requirement for skill-building, and do you think that there's any evidence pointing to an ideal ratio of reflection to practice that wouldn't advantage the 2-day dentist over the 4-day one?
Only if you're cynic to the core. If you follow that argument through (many do), then you would be okay with engaging in highly unethical (yet legal) behaviour.
> the world has settled on 35-40 hrs/week as being about the right balance.
If the criterion for "balance" is actually squeezing the most of your employees. Which works wonderfully mid term (1-2 years), but I wouldn't be so sure about long term (10-20 years), where time devoted to directed learning could compound to a significant a difference.
More importantly, though, if maximising your employer's benefits is your goal in life, something must be deeply wrong with you.
They say yes, you say no. I see no reason to believe your version over theirs. (no, "everyone does it" is neither a proof, nor a reason, it is "that's the way we did it yesterday, that's the way we will do it in the future, why should we change?", the motto of almost every doomed enterprise)
The naturalistic fallacy.
Taken to its extreme form that implies that only the best dentist in the world has any work. But even finding a dentist that is accepting new customers, especially if one is seeking an NHS dentist, can be quite difficult. I don't see anyone turning their noses up at a dentist because that dentist happens to only work two days a week.
I am also unsure that extra experience would allow the dentist to differentiate themselves that far in quality. It is not uncommon, if you interview a lot of people in some capacity, to meet a large number of people who seem to have done, rather than the 5 or 10 years work on their CV, one year 5 or 10 times – in terms of the experience that they have garnered and the things they've achieved. Other people have done far less work in their lives, but have crammed far more into it, or have achieved far better results. Sometimes that's because of their personality – how readily they put themselves forwards for things, other times it's because of the nature of their employment. If dentist B is of the latter type, and dentist A is of the former type, then I would choose dentist B.
Quite aside from the question of why a dentist would publish how many days a week they worked. If my dentist worked 2 days a week, chances are I wouldn't know.
So you only read the first half of the first quote? Reading the entire paragraph makes it clear that it's not referring to dentists:
> technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people [...] spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.
A lot of this boils down to a very old question: why do we operate this machine we call the economy? Do we do it for our own interest, or is it an end in itself that uses us? What are we working for here? It's a question that if followed goes beyond economics and gets quite metaphysical.
Consider the following thought experiment: two workers in skilled jobs, let's say they're dentists. Dentist A works 5 days a week and the occasional weekend, like most people do now. Dentist B figures she can get by working 1 or 2 days a week and spend the rest of her time playing roller hockey and fishing, and on a dentist's pay, she can.
Now fast forward a year, dentist A has done 5x the dentistry of B, has encountered 5x as many tricky situations and dealt with them, has kept her equipment in tip-top shape because it's being used every day, has had the time to bounce ideas off other dentists in the practice and so on. A is just after 1 year, a much more experienced and better dentist than B. So who do you go to, when you need some work done? The one who has devoted her life to dentistry and does it every day, or the one who sort of does it on the side when she can be bothered? Pretty soon B won't have any work at all - even from people who like the idea of working a 2 day week!
So these ideas about falling work weeks are nice in theory, but they don't take into account human nature and how real people think.