Well, Canada has only one of those three, but I have to say that I think the government provided health-care does, in fact, significantly reduce resistance to paying taxes. It’s not particularly logical, as lots of Canadian taxes go to paying non-medical expenses, but every Canadian can point at the health-care system and say “that’s where my taxes are going”, so it’s much easier not to feel as resentful about the government’s share of your paycheck.
I’m quite convinced that’s half of the right’s fear of government provided care. It might well make people more sympathetic to tax increases. And I do think their fear is well founded, which is yet another reason why I favour the Canadian system.
The other benefit is a bit more abstract. I think that having a system that we all pay into but is not considered charity binds us together. I think many of us find a small measure of comfort in the fact that other Canadians care enough about us that they’re willing to provide us with medical care, regardless of whether we can afford it or not. And unlike welfare and other forms of government assistance, there’s rarely (I’ve never seen it) any resentment or shaming. Rich or poor, there’s no differentiation in the doctor’s office.
Of course, that’s heavily idealized, but I think it’s useful to have something in which all Canadians feel they are beneficiaries and not simply the funders.
Not terribly logical, but what binds a community rarely is.
That the top brackets are gaining a greater proportion of the wealth is not up for debate.
But what you’re overlooking is that total wealth has increased drastically. We have a smaller piece of a much larger pie.
Now we should be getting a larger piece of the pie, but I don’t think that’s why we’re working more. This isn’t just an abstract philosophical experiment, it’s testable. If income inequality drives the long hours then countries with high inequality should have more hours worked.
The data is here if you’re interested, someone can run the numbers but at a glance I don’t see a correlation.
Well, that is exactly the point of the article and the study behind it. [quote=“aluchko, post:103, topic:71891”]
But what you’re overlooking is that total wealth has increased drastically. We have a smaller piece of a much larger pie.
Now we should be getting a larger piece of the pie, but I don’t think that’s why we’re working more. This isn’t just an abstract philosophical experiment, it’s testable. If income inequality drives the long hours then countries with high inequality should have more hours worked.
[/quote]
You’re assuming a correlation based on what precisely? Shouldn’t we be factoring in standard of living and subsistence income too? Family size?
Scandinavian countries are doing well and the US and Mexico are doing poorly from a quick eyeball check (had to sort the gini one), so it doesn’t seem to counter the scenario.
Besides, I’m not sure I’d have expected this to be the one thing that proves the point somehow contradicts the study. We still have a massive chunk of the population that’s basically required to work 40 (or more) hours a week in order to afford rent, food, utilities, health insurance, and basic survival needs. Having some fancy tech be inexpensive doesn’t offset that problem.
Absolutely agree on both caveats. They create a feedback loop where they’re so necessary and so much better that of course they define themselves by their work (and, not co-incidentally, demand higher compensation that might be warranted in the process).
We’ve discussed this over dinner more than once and we’d each happily take half our pay in order to work half as many hours if that was an option for us.
Working half the hours actually became an option for me over the last few years. It’s mostly the result of privilege which resulted in established low-overhead/high-pay consulting work. But it’s also a result of a firm decision I made that I’d value time over money whenever I had the choice. Looking back, I was already on that path when I decided I was done with corporate life.
Your point about working the hours given by corporate America is very interesting in the context of automation. Instead of reducing hours, increasing roboticisation is likely to go straight to allowing no work at all (and no pay) for significant swaths of the American workforce. A guaranteed minimum income is going to have to come along sooner or later, but its main purpose as implemented by the powers that be will be to prop up the consumer economy, with basic food and shelter for the permanently unemployed being a secondary concern.
The other half of the right’s fear being that single-payer universal will remove a serious chain keeping employees stuck at companies they hate. Neoliberal economics loves the free flow of trade and capital, but the free flow of labour? Not so much.
This.
I know so many friends in the 'States that have terrible jobs, that they hate, but they can’t ever leave because they need the health care. Its so obscene to me.
I’ve had co-workers (especially when contractors) ‘let go’ for doing the right thing and standing up for the right reasons, and I’ve had to bite my tongue more than once while engineering an escape because suddenly losing a job is absolutely devastating.
It’s an engineered constant state of fear, despite us having the resources to guarantee everybody a decent and dignified life.
And thats crazy! Happy workers are BETTER workers! We know this! We prove it over and over again! And yet so many are kept frightened and unhappy and it just makes no sense!
I always freak out a little over the super happy over enthusiastic servers when I’m in the US who I know have a litany of things they need to say and do beyond actually serving me, and that if they don’t they’ll be fired and its so freaky! You can feel the anxiety running underneath it all, its just so wrong.
We can’t see the actual study because of a paywall but this quote by the author should set off alarm bells:
This explanation leaves an important question: If the very rich—the
workers who have reaped above-average gains from the increased
productivity since Keynes’s time—can afford to work less, why don’t they?
I asked Friedman about this and he theorized that for many top earners,
work is a labor of love. They are doing work they care about and are
interested in, and doing more of it isn’t such a burden—it may even be a
pleasure. They derive meaning from their jobs, and it is an important
part of how they think of themselves. And, of course, they are
compensated for it at a level that makes it worth their while.
So when presented with a counterexample to his hypothesis he not only claims that top-earners the only ones working because they find some enjoyment. But he also claims long hours are caused both by undercompensation and overcompensation!!
Again I’m very sceptical that they “need” to do so. Students and struggling artists regularly make do on fractions of a regular salary, sometimes while raising families. I think it’s a fairly small portion who have enough poverty that they need > 40 hours to make sufficient income for shelter and survival in their communities.
Much more likely I think it’s an effect of culture, people don’t work long hours because they’re trying to reach some standard of living X, they do so because they’re trying to out-succeed their co-workers and neighbours.
Sure you can work a 20 hour week, but your friend works 40 hours and has a much nicer lifestyle.
If you increased middle class salaries by 50% by redistributing from the top 1% I suspect you’d see no long term impact in number of hours worked. I mean how many middle class people try to cut back hours after getting a raise?
Presumably Friedman would agree with my prediction since he claims good compensation causes people to work long hours as well.
Who has the option of cutting back hours for a “full time” job or any professional one? Almost no one. It is all or nothing and most professional class jobs are salaried with the expectation of at least 40 hours a week of work.
This is becoming true of all professional work, including engineers, lawyers and doctors. As a scary number of people have noted here, professionals are shamed into isolated silence by their debt burdens. There’s not time or hope to recovered home equity and retirement assets lost during the recession.
That can’t be a quote by the author because Friedman is the author. Also: top (working) earners aren’t the problem here, it’s the top .1% and above, which make tons but don’t do jack.
Dude, have you heard of a single parent? I was one. Everything you’re saying is basically the opposite of true. 40 hours was survival if I was lucky, and the same is true (and more so in most cases) for the massive number of single moms out there.
Then you add in the massive amount of working poor who have responsibilities (child support, people to take care of, family, etc.) and for them the whole ‘I could just work 20 hours’ bit sounds beyond detached.
I’m glad you’re doing okay and don’t have any responsibilities, but that’s not true for everyone.
Meanwhile, you’re still missing the key point (that productivity has increased but the people doing the work aren’t gaining a proportionate amount of the benefit), which is what the whole article, tons of studies, and this conversation should actually be about… not some tangential red herring.
Yup. I’m working an hourly job doing tech support. It actually does pay quite well, to the point that I’m actually comfortable asking for fewer hours. Here’s how the convo with my boss went:
Me: “Hey, can I work fewer hours?”
Boss: “No.”
Me: “Okay then.”
I didn’t quit and look for another job. Because I have prescriptions that will rapidly bankrupt me if I lose my insurance for a month or two. Seriously, the cost of my prescriptions would just pull the plug on my savings. They cost more than housing. I’m glad I only have to pay the full price one month a year, which covers my entire deductible. Which just so happened today. The bank denied the payment and called me concerned about fraud.
It is a quote by the author. We can’t see the study because that’s paywalled, but the author did an interview and that quote is from the interview and pasted in the BoingBoing article.
And the point of the quote is that Friedman is presented with evidence that contradicts his hypothesis and responds first by claiming that group is somehow different and then by essentially contradicting his own hypothesis.
There’s people for whom that applies, but for most I suspect it’s the state that if you want to give your kids good food, nice clothes, a decent place to live, some organized extra-cirricular activities, etc then it’s a big struggle because all the two parent families are trying to do the same with twice the resources.
Children have been successfully raised for tens of thousands of years with far less wealth than you have access to. The problem is all the other parents in your community are raising the bar in what’s considered a necessary investment to raise a child.
I didn’t miss that point, I readily agree with it, but that’s not what this conversation should be about.
The story is a specific claim that the long work hours in the US are caused by inequality, the red herring is trying to make this into an argument about whether inequality is unjust and bad when everyone already agrees with that statement.
You’re missing my point, I don’t deny that for a second.
But the reason isn’t because of inequality. It’s because what’s considered necessary to be a parent is a huge investment. If we doubled the salary of everyone outside of the top 1% I think it would be just as difficult or possibly even worse for single parents.
All the two parent families would be dumping that extra disposable income into their children and the well-being gap created between that and what a single parent can provide could be even larger.
