The Oil Drum

This is a guest post by Aaron Newton, who is working with coauthor Sharon Astyk on the forthcoming book, A Nation of Farmers. Aaron contributes at Groovy Green; he also blogs at Powering Down. Aaron is a land planner and garden farmer in suburban North Carolina, seeking ways to transform the current course of human land use development in an effort to prepare for the effects of global oil production peak and its outcome on automotive suburban America.

The notion of our standard work week here in America has remained largely the same since 1938. That was the year the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, standardizing the eight hour work day and the 40 hour work week. Each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday workers all over the country wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast and go to work. But the notion that the majority of the workforce should keep these hours is based on nothing more than an idea put forth but the Federal government almost 70 years ago. To be sure it was an improvement in the lives of many Americans who were at the time forced to work 10+ hours a day, sometimes 6 days of the week. So a 40 hour work week was seen as an upgrade in the lives of many of U.S. citizens. 8 is a nice round number; one third of each 24 hour day. In theory it leaves 8 hours for sleep and 8 hours for other activities like eating, bathing, raising children and enjoying life. But the notion that we should work for 5 of these days in a row before taking 2 for ourselves is, as best I can tell, rather arbitrary.

The idea of a shorter work week is not a new one to anyone old enough to have lived through the energy shocks of the 1970's. It should be fairly obvious to anyone interested in conserving oil that reducing the number of daily commutes per week would reduce the overall demand for oil. There are about 133 million workers in America. Around 80% of them get to work by driving alone in a car. The average commute covers about 16 miles each way.

So let's stop and do some math...and I'll try to argue for 16 reasons why a four day work week is a good idea.

The notion of our standard work week here in America has remained largely the same since 1938. That was the year the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, standardizing the eight hour work day and the 40 hour work week. Each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday workers all over the country wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast and go to work. But the notion that the majority of the workforce should keep these hours is based on nothing more than an idea put forth but the Federal government almost 70 years ago. To be sure it was an improvement in the lives of many Americans who were at the time forced to work 10+ hours a day, sometimes 6 days of the week. So a 40 hour work week was seen as an upgrade in the lives of many of U.S. citizens. 8 is a nice round number; one third of each 24 hour day. In theory it leaves 8 hours for sleep and 8 hours for other activities like eating, bathing, raising children and enjoying life. But the notion that we should work for 5 of these days in a row before taking 2 for ourselves is, as best I can tell, rather arbitrary.

The idea of a shorter work week is not a new one to anyone old enough to have lived through the energy shocks of the 1970's. It should be fairly obvious to anyone interested in conserving oil that reducing the number of daily commutes per week would reduce the overall demand for oil. There are about 133 million workers in America. Around 80% of them get to work by driving alone in a car. The average commute covers about 16 miles each way.

So let's stop and do some math...and I'll try to argue for 16 reasons why a four day work week is a good idea.

Seems like an interesting time to update some oil price graphs again.

Last time I got around to covering it, on January 20th, it meant we were within a week and and a couple of bucks of topping out, before going into a $10 decline for a month. After that bottom, we started up into the rally that's been going on until now. My guess is it's starting to get ripe for for a correction again unless we really do bomb Iran.

I had predicted at the beginning of the year that prices in 2006 would be $65 ± $20 in the absence of a major oil shock. I'm sticking to my story for now.

Right. Daily closing price of West Texas Intermediate. 2002-present. Expressed in then current US dollars. Source: EIA. Click to enlarge.

Average daily oil production, by month, from various estimates for OPEC and non-OPEC as a percentage of their highest month (May, 2005 in the non-OPEC case, September 2005 in the OPEC case). Click to enlarge. Believed to be all liquids. Graph is not zero-scaled. Source: EIA.

Update [2006-2-5 0:40:43 by Stuart Staniford]: Added this graph of OPEC and non-OPEC supply during the "plateau" period.

Paula, both here and on her blog, correctly suggested that education should also be considered as an independent variable. So, what I did was pull together some data on % college educated for each state and include it in with the data Stuart had already collected...and then I conducted a multivariate regression on the data, which is presented below.  That regression allows us to find out what the effects are for all of these independent variables on gsp/cap after controlling for the effects of the other variables.  This allows to get a better picture of what's going on (though we lose the visual facility that Stuart had with his bivariate graphs).  Much more under the fold.

So, what's the takeaway?  Stuart's right: states with higher vmts have lower gsp/cap, even after controlling for education and population density.

The graph to the right shows Gross State Product/Capita (source: BEA, 2003) plotted versus Vehicle Miles Traveled/Capita (source: FHWA, 2003 table VM-2) for 48 of the 50 US states. Click the graph to enlarge it.