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70 comments on The Four Day Work Week: Sixteen Reasons Why This Might Be an Idea Whose Time Has Come

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BruceMcF on May 2, 2008 - 12:17pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Reason # 10 ("The 4 Day Work Week would increase productivity")

Questionable. Can we conclude from this that a 3 Day Work Week would increase productivity even more, and a 2 Day Work Week even still more .. down to a 0-Day Work Week where productivity reaches its maximum?

Does the logical reductio ad absurdem still work given that the argument is an empirical one rather than a logical one?

Probably not. The argument is not that for any work week, reducing the work week increases productivity, but that for a 5 day on, two day off, eight hour a day work week, reducing the work week increases productivity.

Indeed, the flaw is not the one set forward here, but that the empirical support is for productivity falling from the sixth hour working to the eighth hour working ... but for the impact on commuting, the change in the work week is not focused on reducing the length of the work day, but in reducing the number of commutes per week.

Clearly, the suggested 4-day, 10-hour day would not have any strong support from the evidence sketched at in the piece for any general substantial productivity benefit. And a 5 day, 6 hour day would not reduce the total number of commutes.

Also, the piece reads as if everyone works at a desk job. For a lot of people who work at an hourly wage, there is something to be done or else they are not on the clock, which means that if the number of hours they work in a day is reduced, then the firm has to have more people on the payroll.

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Carolus Obscurus on May 2, 2008 - 12:41pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Does the logical reductio ad absurdem still work given that the argument is an empirical one rather than a logical one?

Point taken – thanks. In fact, after that somewhat clumsy attempt at sarcasm I made much the same empirical argument as you did: it all depends. As you point out, we're not all paper pushers or penmen.

As regards the increased productivity argument I would add the ECON 101 dimension: if the 4-day workweek were as productive as it's made out to be successful firms would have introduced it already and the fuddy-duddies would have gone to the wall. Natural selection Schumpeter Hayek Ludwig von Mises and the American question: if you're so smart why aren't you rich ... etc. etc.

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BruceMcF on May 2, 2008 - 3:07pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

As regards the increased productivity argument I would add the ECON 101 dimension: if the 4-day workweek were as productive as it's made out to be successful firms would have introduced it already and the fuddy-duddies would have gone to the wall.

Having taught ECON-101, I'll also point out that (1) this argument assumes a complete network of perfectly competitive markets which (2) is nothing like what we have.

Firms are not productivity optimizers even in the traditional marginalist theory, they are profit optimizers, and there are many reasons why there can be productivity increases that are not reflected in increased profit for labor hour. Indeed, the massive departures we have to make from the real world in order to arrive at a model in which profit optimizing and productivity optimizing are equivalent should themselves signal that in general, they are anything but equivalent out in the real world.

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Carolus Obscurus on May 2, 2008 - 3:25pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Thanks for making the point (ECON 301?)

Second bash:

As regards the increased productivity argument I would add the ECON 301 dimension: if the 4-day workweek were as productive as it's made out to be successful firms might under certain circumstances have introduced it already and the fuddy-duddies might in some cases have gone to the wall and you can read all about the nitty-gritty in Samuelson's Economics 125th edition.

Is that OK now>? :-)

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70 comments on The Four Day Work Week: Sixteen Reasons Why This Might Be an Idea Whose Time Has Come

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