Hello, A-Level Econ teacher here. I always teach my students not to confuse productivity (output produced per unit of time) and production (total units of output). It feels this mistake is made a few times in this episode.
Keynes "family friend of the show" in the Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren imagined a world in which we work 15 hour weeks. Interesting to speculate whether this has come true over our entire time on earth:
"Although I did read an interesting thing while I was looking this up, that actually he was less wrong than you'd think because we have longer retirements and so what we've ended up doing is having vastly more leisure hours over our life, but we have to pay for them earlier on in our career."
Is the interesting thing referred to this piece by Nicholas Crafts?
This was very interesting and I’m fairly convinced that a four day week would not be catastrophic (even if output declined 20% the UK would still be on par with Italy who don’t seem that poverty-stricken). But think it is worth noting that many of the theoretical benefits discussed probably wouldn’t be relevant if applied universally?
-Offering a four day week may make it easier to attract talent now, but presumably if everyone offered it, it would be no more of a carrot than offering a five-day week is now
-People might currently be more likely to stay in a company offering a four-day week, but not obvious that this effect would remain if all the outside options were also four-day.
-The absenteeism argument sounds odd to me: tackling the problem of people not coming in enough but allowing them to not come in as much! I guess ‘unplanned’ absenteeism is worse, but still
The “consumption takes time” argument is interesting (there is a book on this but looks quite hardcode, discussed here: http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2018/07/taking-time-seriously-in-economics/) but I wonder how it applies to the service sector. Yes, going out for coffee, or to shows, or shops, requires time off for the consumer but usually also requires someone working on the other side of that transaction: “work expands to fill the time” doesn’t feel that relevant for Sainsburys, coffee shops, or hairdressers etc… There must be a few of those sectors where time working is not far off linearly related to production.
(btw, I wonder if anyone else found it frustrating hearing the word ‘productivity’ referring to the amount produced, rather than the amount produced per inputs. For me, it seems obvious that productivity would increase in a four day week but production would decrease, as productivity doesn’t increase enough to offset the decline in inputs)
Hello, A-Level Econ teacher here. I always teach my students not to confuse productivity (output produced per unit of time) and production (total units of output). It feels this mistake is made a few times in this episode.
Keynes "family friend of the show" in the Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren imagined a world in which we work 15 hour weeks. Interesting to speculate whether this has come true over our entire time on earth:
"Although I did read an interesting thing while I was looking this up, that actually he was less wrong than you'd think because we have longer retirements and so what we've ended up doing is having vastly more leisure hours over our life, but we have to pay for them earlier on in our career."
Is the interesting thing referred to this piece by Nicholas Crafts?
https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/152800/7/WRAP-15-hour-week-Keynes%E2%80%99s-prediction-Crafts-2022.pdf
This was very interesting and I’m fairly convinced that a four day week would not be catastrophic (even if output declined 20% the UK would still be on par with Italy who don’t seem that poverty-stricken). But think it is worth noting that many of the theoretical benefits discussed probably wouldn’t be relevant if applied universally?
-Offering a four day week may make it easier to attract talent now, but presumably if everyone offered it, it would be no more of a carrot than offering a five-day week is now
-People might currently be more likely to stay in a company offering a four-day week, but not obvious that this effect would remain if all the outside options were also four-day.
-The absenteeism argument sounds odd to me: tackling the problem of people not coming in enough but allowing them to not come in as much! I guess ‘unplanned’ absenteeism is worse, but still
The “consumption takes time” argument is interesting (there is a book on this but looks quite hardcode, discussed here: http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2018/07/taking-time-seriously-in-economics/) but I wonder how it applies to the service sector. Yes, going out for coffee, or to shows, or shops, requires time off for the consumer but usually also requires someone working on the other side of that transaction: “work expands to fill the time” doesn’t feel that relevant for Sainsburys, coffee shops, or hairdressers etc… There must be a few of those sectors where time working is not far off linearly related to production.
(btw, I wonder if anyone else found it frustrating hearing the word ‘productivity’ referring to the amount produced, rather than the amount produced per inputs. For me, it seems obvious that productivity would increase in a four day week but production would decrease, as productivity doesn’t increase enough to offset the decline in inputs)
(ah, yes, +1 to Raj Chande)