kojus

> Never in the history of the world have people had to work fewer hours per week

This is false, medieval workers used to work less than we do[0]. We work less than 1800s laborers, but their life conditions was such an aberration that it gave rise to the socialist movement, mass strikes and bloody revolution attempts, which in turn forced governments and capitalists to reduce the average labor time.

[0]: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

Why not simply reducing working hours for everyone? The risk of UBI is that rent-seekers might just engulf this guaranteed income by raising their prices, and then we will rapidly be back to square one.

Working 40 hours a week is not a natural law, peasants in the Middle Age worked less hours annually than us today. Reducing work hours would also have a positive environmental effect.

Otherwise, I wholly agree with your diagnosis of the situation.

As someone who studied cognitive science in college, I can tell you that reproductibility is a big concern among researchers not only in cognitive psychology, but also in the social, clinical and developmental subfields. Reproductibility is also a concern for serious sociologists, and I'm sure it's the same thing in most of the other disciplines you've listed.

By contrast, most of evolutionary psychology is hardly testable since it tries to extrapolate what constitutes human essence at this point primarily from observable human behaviors, which is might be more a function of our current environment rather than genetics. It can also be used politically to justify anything, from neo-Nazism to anarcho-communism.

I've heard Japan still relies a lot on faxes rather than emails, and I wouldn't be surprised if a four-day workweek in the West at an average IT corporation would result in 50% fewer emails, as a lot of them are superfluous.

It seems like reducing work hours is the most effective way to combat climate change.