You're using examples that are fundamentally flawed, as the high end jobs you named tend to be folks more likely to be partners or principals in their own businesses.
For a good part of the 20th century, white-collar, salaried jobs were 40 hour jobs. Blue collar or non-exempt jobs were 40 hour jobs with overtime. Today, we declare almost everyone to be an exempt employee, work them ragged, and run as lean as possible. We do this because unlike in the 1960's, companies bear no cost -- those burnt out 45 year olds don't get disability pensions or insurance anymore. Those costs are borne by the public at large via social safety net programs.
If you mandated that most workers work only 40 hours per week, you would provide companies with a powerful incentive to deal with the high fixed costs associated with hiring an employee. It doesn't make "economic sense" to hire people because the law has been changed to make that the case. Now it makes sense to hire freelancers, contractors, etc who are easier to abuse.
I was not intending to name any particular high-end jobs. In fact, I picked "neurosurgeon" randomly so as to pick a profession far outside most people on this forum. The point that you missed is that the people who will still have jobs in this scenario are likely to be people in professions where the demand exceeds the supply and is not easily replaceable (or the demand would not exceed supply).
To bring it back to an HN audience, consider high-end software engineers. There is ferocious demand for them and they can demand wages that is an integer multiple of the average wage in the US and employers will pay that. Most of these companies hiring high-end software engineers are essentially in a price war with other companies. The pool of new software engineers capable of the job does not grow fast enough to fill the growth in demand. When a company poaches a software engineer from another company, all they have done is move the demand to a new company. Forcing people to work less does not create a vast pool of highly skilled workers with deep technical expertise, nor does it make it any easier to develop that expertise. The number of jobs increase on their own. The number of workers qualified to fill those jobs does not. As the average skill required of those jobs continues to rise, the number of qualified people will diminish.
Software engineers earn a multiple of the median wage, but not an order of magnitude more. The jobs our work displaces are order of magnitude material. If anything, compared to the value we create, we're grossly underpaid. I think this is due to the inability of employers to see us as fundamentally different from the workers our automation displaces. The perception remains (and i've seen this first hand) that developers are replaceable, and this means that there are limits to how much you're considered entitled to.
I would agree that some software engineers are underpaid. However, it is not legally enforced in the US unlike many countries, it is more of a statistical phenomenon. Many software engineers grossly underestimate the other costs associated with their efforts, which I state as a software engineer by trade with P&L responsibility. Most software engineers find pay that is at the level of their value to a first approximation.
The reality is that "developers" are replaceable, it is not just a perception. And by "developer" I mean developers that have a few years of experience under their belt but no real differentiating skills. This is an important distinction; I've met developers in their 40s with no differentiating skills despite decades of work history and developers fresh out of school that could materially differentiate themselves from ordinary developers. It is an important distinction. Developers with interesting skills are a lot less replaceable.
To be honest, I don't need any "developers" in the generic sense. My company does not hire them. We hire people with material skills that (1) we need and (2) are not widely available in the pool of people that call themselves "developers". I literally can't use the rest no matter how the conversation is framed. We pay well above the median wage for the developers we do hire because we know we are hiring them for their unique and valuable skill set. We absolutely pay for talent but have no interest in average talent.
US median household income in 2012 was $45,018 [Wikipedia]. There are certainly two-engineer households that make an order of magnitude more; actually there are individual engineers at large successful companies who make that much if you include stock and option grants (which you should, because the IRS certainly does).
Most engineers aren't so well-compensated. Most doctors aren't neurosurgeons, either.
Where are these developers at, and do they have decent working conditions and hours? $450k may not sound so glamorous if you work 80 hours a week in a hell hole.
I looked at Jane Street in college but it seems they start their developers at $100k with no bonus, i.e., less than Google, Facebook, etc., even though Manhattan is even more expensive than the Valley.
Finance is a bad example because the traders that software replaces make an order of magnitude more than median wage. So, the software deeloper in finance could be underpaid making an order of magnitude above median.
The best example of this is revenue per employee. Google and Apple have close to $1,000,000 revenue per employee. How many of their engineers are bringing home more than 20% of that?
> Now it makes sense to hire freelancers, contractors, etc who are easier to abuse.
I imagine it's different for software developers than, say, graphic designers or copywriters, but why do you feel freelancers/contractors are easier to abuse? In my experience, W2 is more likely to turn into "hey work 60 hours a week for free!" with little I can do about it because the employer is my sole source of income.
With contracting, I have my eggs split into multiple baskets. When one client tries to take advantage of me, their work is put on the back burner until they pay up / shape up / whatever and I still have a half-dozen other sources of income. So long as I'm semi-diligent about marketing, I'm now in the position of power. And sure, 60-hour weeks still happen, but I get paid for every hour, so there's that.
The reason for smaller pensions and so on aren't internal factors alone.
Often the fact is that some nation abroad can salary and staff workers, with fewer regulations, more health risks, lower costs and almost equivalent products.
If you mandated that most workers work only 40 hours per week, be cognizant that many companies would just throw in the towel. (And now you have two problems.)
This was the thesis of the original blog post. What do you do with a world or nation where 95% of the jobs are uneconomical to perform locally?
When job growth is no longer linked to the economy, how do you employ people?
Honestly the hard answer is "bring the standard of living around the world to the same level". Arguably the easiest way to do this is to lower your own.
The easy answer is to tax the wealthy. All that money generated through economic growth ends up somewhere. This is in fact what the the g20 are working on right now by developing a global tax on financial transactions.
Update: reflecting on this a bit more, if capital now is more economically useful than labor, this just means that 'jobs' have shifted from labor to capital. Instead of building a tax base on top of the labor force, we would need to build one on top of the capital force. It's quite unlikely that this can be done though.
Finally someone states the obvious. Find a way to globally tax all this profit. Take that tax money and use it to create free education, health care and much earlier social security. Devote tax money to public transit, research institutes, recreation. In short realize that all this capital growth should be used for something good.
Good luck with that "global" tax on financial transactions; there are numerous markets in second-tier countries which see this as an excellent competitive advantage, and those countries are motivated to resist pressure to implement the tax due to past histories of humiliation and exploitation by developed countries. The wealthy have a much higher ability to rearrange their lives and businesses to avoid taxes than average people, just ask Eduardo Saverin. As a practical proposal, taxing the wealthy is likely to result in a much less significant result than you would expect.
I don't think this is true. Will stock trading move to senegal because the NYSE has a per-trade tax? Will the rich move to chile because they're taxed less there? Wealthy people still have to live inside the system, they ony escape heavier taxation because they're allowed to.
>When job growth is no longer linked to the economy, how do you employ people?
Better yet, when job growth is no longer linked to the economy why do you employ people? At some point we will reach a point where there just isn't any real reason for most people to work. They won't be qualified for the work there is left to do and resources won't be scarce enough that we need an artificial determining factor like salary to decide who gets them.
Everyone devoting 40+ hours of their week to earning a living won't be a requirement forever so at some point humanity will need to think about that.
If by "throw in the towel" you mean "work diligently to find ways to replace workers with technology in order to remain profitable," then I fully agree with you. Heaping more burden on employers simply accelerates the process. It's all going to the same place in the end, so we're just talking about adjustments to the rate at which we get there anyway.
bunch of wimps, I grew up on a farm, still know people who farm. I work in an office now, its air conditioned, its heated, I sit all day, how is my forty hours or more being worked until ragged? Burned out at 45? Really? How about it being that your leaving so many productive hours on the table is what really is burning you out?
I am not saying you have to work fifty or sixty hours a week, I know some successful and happy people who have, but I am saying most people shut down at the end of their day as if work is all they are. So yeah, that forty and out is going to burn you out. Stay active, even if it means more work.
Get a second job, get a hobby. Do something. Sometimes I think that farm life was better because there was always something to do. People turn off more than their job when they adapt that forty hour mindset.
Horrible comparison. Software development could hardly be further from working on a farm. Farm is physically demanding but not remotely mentally so. Move hay from the barn to the cattle feeding areas. Sow this part with the currently planned plants, etc. It will wear you out physically but your body will get used to that and you can push yourself quite far. By contrast, if your mind won't work on a problem anymore then no amount of pleading, begging, yelling, etc. will force it to.
Software development is closer to writing fiction novels. Now how many fiction authors do you know of who write 40+ hours per week for months on end? Has it ever been done at all?
That wasn't what was being said... What was being said was "leaving the office and watching tv for 5 hours will run you down". Or that people should be active for more than 40 hours per week.
"most people shut down at the end of their day as if work is all they are"
I think lack of exercise is a large part of this. Regular exercise gives you more energy. I'm afraid I have no references for this, but I'm reliably informed that there are.
So I would modify this as "Do exercise. Not to much. Then do what matters to you".
For a good part of the 20th century, white-collar, salaried jobs were 40 hour jobs. Blue collar or non-exempt jobs were 40 hour jobs with overtime. Today, we declare almost everyone to be an exempt employee, work them ragged, and run as lean as possible. We do this because unlike in the 1960's, companies bear no cost -- those burnt out 45 year olds don't get disability pensions or insurance anymore. Those costs are borne by the public at large via social safety net programs.
If you mandated that most workers work only 40 hours per week, you would provide companies with a powerful incentive to deal with the high fixed costs associated with hiring an employee. It doesn't make "economic sense" to hire people because the law has been changed to make that the case. Now it makes sense to hire freelancers, contractors, etc who are easier to abuse.