A friend once presented me with a model of thinking about work and time. Categorize all tasks on two scales: how much you like doing something, and how good you are at it. Now, draw a square and break it into four quadrants. One will be "good at it, but don't like doing it". Another will be "Good at it, and like doing it". The remaining ones are "Bad at it, but like doing it" and "Bad at it, and don't like doing it".
Assuming you have resources to hire help and outsource, consider doing the following:
For things you like doing that you are good at, make that your main job. You will be effective and happy.
For things you don't like doing and are bad at, outsource. If you try doing these yourself, you will be miserable, and the outcome will be sub-par (you're bad at it!).
For things you like doing and are bad at, make that your hobby.
For the things that you don't like doing but are good at, either do them yourself or outsource, depending on your time availability and resources to hire help.
I've been doing this for a few years as much as possible. Even at home, my wife and I naturally divide chores along these lines.
>For things you like doing that you are good at, make that your main job. You will be effective and happy.
The other outcome besides being "effective and happy" is "turning something you enjoy into something you hate because now you have to do it." Just because you love doing something doesn't mean you love being forced to do it for someone else 40 hours a week.
It's pretty naïve to think that the things you enjoy in your free time are the things you enjoy doing for paid work and vise versa. I absolutely hate cleaning around my house, I hate everything about it, but I don't mind cleaning for paid work at all.
There's other issues too and quite a few people I know took that route ("doing what you love") and it lead to career dissatisfaction for various reasons.
Jobs have other "stuff" other than just your work, you may love X but hate working in X industry for various reasons, like work environment, salary, job prospects, etc.
The things you enjoy and are good are probably not even viable paid opportunities. (Nobody's going to pay you to put together model airplanes).
You don't get to "test drive" the vast majority of jobs at home first.
There's something to be about not being invested in your work and, essentially, not making your work the focus of your life.
>I miss teaching a lot. Every day, in fact. But the truth is I’m so much happier than I’ve ever been. Getting out of teaching and not being emotionally invested in my work has forced me to do things besides work more. I’ve learned how to cook, I’m making new friends, I’m reading more, I’m rediscovering my love of things I used to do before I was ever a teacher all over again. I do productive things on the side too, like study for my CPA license.
>And the thing is now that I’m thinking about other things, I’ve learned so much about saving, investing, and I’m doing much better with my salary and working toward eventually being independent of a salary if at all possible.
>Your career is just one part of your life. You might not become a much happier person just because you do the work that satisfies you the most. You have to consider the effects it could have on you as a person besides just having to do the work. You should do the work that gives you balance, and not the work you love the most.
There's something to be said for it. It's not for everyone,there's some people who do work they find truly meaningful and are happy about devoting themselves to it. However, most people probably shouldn't look for meaning in their work less it traps them from experiencing meaning and happiness elsewhere.
To be clear, I am not saying nobody should ever make a career out of doing what they enjoy during in their free time, I'm saying it doesn't guarantee career satisfaction and there are potential pitfalls of going down that route. It also definitely should not be generic advice to everyone.
"Do it for the money" is good advice. I feel like if I were trying to find satisfaction in paid work I'd be supremely unhappy and unfulfilled.
"Good chunk" is hard to disagree with. In general, we've implicitly agreed to bad terms, and assume we must work until the "retirement age" of 65. In most developed countries, wages are high enough for this to be completely optional. By being slightly less materialistic, a ~10 year career is possible for above average salaries, and a < 20 year career is possible for most salaries.
Doing something that's not your passion for 40 hours a week for 10-20 years is a heck of a lot more tolerable than doing it for 45 years.
Also, I am a big fan of _not_ making your hobby your vocation. The job should not be meaningless, but filing your taxes, looking for gigs, networking etc. when all you really enjoy is getting on stage and playing your guitar, is not a recipe for lasting romance about being a rockstar.
Just because you enjoy doing something doesn't mean you will enjoy doing it for 40+ hours a week for 45 years.
I actually do enjoy programming and I get paid (well) to do it but going to work is certainly not "awesome," and I would not do it if I didn't have to.
You could absolutely love caring for children but hate being a child care worker because of dealing with parents and issues like abuse and negligent at home among other reasons.
> Sure but you spend a good chunk of your life at work, so it's difficult not to want it to be meaningful.
not.at.all.
What is this obsession with only doing what you love to pay bills? I've seen only miserable people with this mindset, because it's extremely hard to find niche where you can sustain yourself (and often family) and avoid mundane, boring, tiring tasks that naturally come with it. I am sure there are some which are not miserable and achieved what they wanted, but never ever seen those in person.
I propose, based on my humble experiences, an alternative. Not claiming its for everybody, but it works for me. Ignore work for a minute and let the stuff you do in your free time define who you are. For me it's adventures, exotic travelling, activities like climbing, mountaineering, diving, ski touring, and recently paragliding. Whatever works for you. Get out of your comfort zone, and don't come back until you are 70 or on wheelchair.
With this setup, I couldn't care less what happens at work (in corporate IT, none is truly horrible, usually it is actually OKish), I enjoy the good parts, move through bad parts, and I simply don't care. At the end, it's just work.
"It's pretty naïve to think that the things you enjoy in your free time are the things you enjoy doing for paid work and vise versa. I absolutely hate cleaning around my house, I hate everything about it, but I don't mind cleaning for paid work at all."
I fully agree. There are lots of things I'll do for paid work that I don't really want to do at home - and I'll do the stuff happily. It makes money, and the time at work passes along. When it is somewhat easy as well, it gives me lots of time to think - and that is a serious bonus. It also makes it really easy to disconnect from work.
Alternatively, it makes it easier to define myself by what I choose to do with my time. The most interesting things about myself aren't tied to my job at all and I rather like that - and at this point, a seemingly interesting job is just a bonus.
OT but what I found most astonishing about this article it's how the author takes for granted that kids would be involved in drugs and games and other vices.
Honestly, what kind of society is this? I would be scared to raise kids in a place where these things were common.
Two-by-two grids are almost ubiquitous in management circles. They go by many names: BC grids after Boston Consultancy Group, decision matrices, and so on. They crop up in Covey's 7 Habits.
They're extremely useful for concisely articulating a tightly-defined situation and mapping items in order to make decisions. Their weakness is that they may oversimplify and lack nuance.
I used to use important/urgent decision grids quite frequently at work.
What about things that you don't like that would have a material benefit to you in the long run? A simple example being exercise. Decision matrices seem bound for immediate needs.
These models aren't meant to be algorithms you can mechanically life your life by, they are helpful in thinking (differently) about a number of things.
Exercise is clearly an example of something that's important but non-urgent in Covey's model.
The good-at/enjoys model is mostly applicable to things you've decided (or had decided for you) you have to do, somehow. Once you've decided that exercise is something you should do, thinking about it in terms of good-at/enjoys can be helpful in deciding how to go about it.
Simple models are great when you have no experience with something. You can grasp a simple model relatively quickly because... it's simple.
As you use the model, you realize its weaknesses. You also gain knowledge about a domain. You learn how to perform with speed, agility, nuance, and expertise.
the model has served its purpose. It is no longer useful, because your personal prowess outgrew it. However, it was useful in the beginning.
I'd suggest that for "things you like doing and are bad at", "use time and money to get better at them" is another valid approach.
Particularly if you like doing them more than any of the things in the "things you like doing and are good at" quadrant, or if there are other ancilliary benefits to the things that you'd be learning.
My dad explained this to me the same way decades ago, but with a third axis - things people will pay you money for. I may be good at some stuff that I like a lot but nobody will pay me for, so if it's my main job I'll starve.
I suspect you're asking the wrong question. If you're truly good at multiple things, and you've eliminated everything you don't like doing, you're ahead of the curve and beyond this model.
Happiness is a funny thing, because you can't just keep going straight. Doing only things you like (or things you're good at) isn't a recipe for long-term happiness. Both lottery winners and victims of horrific accidents revert to an average happiness over the long term.
You can read more. This book[1] by my college Psychology professor is the first that came to mind:
>Both lottery winners and victims of horrific accidents revert to an average happiness over the long term.
Could it then be that people who buy time also regress to the average happiness after a while? It seems pointless to measure happiness then, if we're just bound to always have the same happiness.
Call me old fashioned, but rather than working yourself silly to then spend your money buying time back, why don't we set society up so that you have to work less in the first place to earn a living?
Well... I suppose it's because we don't set up societies. In some sense the technology has done its job. When Keynes predicted the 15 hour workweek he (ironically) got the technology predictions right, but the economics/sociology wrong.
Individuals don't make the choices to optimize for less work. As few individuals make those choices, it is more socially and/or economically difficult to make those choices.
For the middle classes, major aspects of the modern economy are also competitive "races." Good neighborhoods, good schools, good colleges... These things are effectively competitive, not absolute. Costs rise with earnings. T
The social context isn't limited to pure economics. Generally speaking, people don't tend to choose lifestyles at all. We like to fantasize it, but don't do it that much. I think this comes down the the "we" problem. Lifestyle invention is something people do as groups (if at all) not individuals. We're more individualistic in modern culture, so there's less room for it even though it is more possible than ever. A religious group could more easily decide on a 15-hr-workweek, or some other major lifestyle engineering choice. There are stranger choices that endure longer than that.
If you sit down and run the numbers, it's not even close. Going to work to pay other people to do things for you to "free up time" simply does not work. You will work a lot more than you would if you just did things for yourself. Money is an extremely inefficient middle-man, given taxes and everyone wanting their cut.
Keep in mind you have to deduct taxes from your income, and the expenses it costs you to earn your income (clothes, transport, bought food, parking, car & maintenance, expensive housing, etc.).
Also keep in mind you must pay others with after-tax dollars. So when you pay that mechanic or plumber $85 per hour, that's a LOT of money, not even similar to you EARNING $85/hr.
I wrote a book about it, and in all my research and calculations, it roughly works out that most people earn only around 30-50% as much as they think they do.. so even if your salary is $120k, you're only earning something like $30/hr at absolute best, which is much lower than you pay a plumber or mechanic.
This is demonstrably false, because otherwise the logical conclusion is to do everything yourself. Including growing your own food.
The entire premise of market economies is that people are better at different things and by working together you get a higher aggregate amount of value. I.e Get more stuff with less resources spent(which includes time)
If it didn't work. Market economies wouldn't work.
Are your perhaps not including the efficiency of the worker in your calculations? Mechanic could probably change the brakes on a car without even thinking about it, you would probably take a hour of research and work grabbing the right replacement before you even start. Most farmers have a large of agricultural knowledge which allows them produce food cheaply in large quantities.
> because otherwise the logical conclusion is to do everything yourself
The logical conclusion is to do as much as you can yourself, and only get others to do things you are unable to do yourself. Where possible, don't use the work/income/tax/payment cycle to do it, try to use bartering or something more efficient where there are not so many middle-men taking a cut.
> The entire premise of market economies is that people are better at different things and by working together you get a higher aggregate amount of value
Ah-ha, you're right - but it doesn't create "higher value" for the individual worker.. it's higher value for those at the top of the pyramid.
> If it didn't work. Market economies wouldn't work.
Again, you are right, they don't work! The rich are getting vastly richer while the workers are getting vastly poorer. Look around you.
You might not have noticed, but the reason everyone goes to work every day for their entire lives is NOT because it's the most efficient or smartest thing for them to do. It's because they have been convinced that it is, and they are chasing the carrot dangling on a stick in front of them (house, car, new iPhone, etc.)
>Mechanic could probably change the brakes on a car without even thinking about it, you would probably take a few hours research before you even start.
I can tell you have never tried. Even the first time I did it I took less than an hour (inc research), and actually it would still have been "cheaper" even if it took 8+ hours (I was earning ~$70k as salary, mechanics where I live start at $145/hr)
>don't use the work/income/tax/payment cycle to do it, try to use bartering
Fyi, bartering is taxable in the USA.[1]
Yes, lots of people barter without reporting "fair market value" of bartered services to the IRS and yes, there isn't a large scale manhunt or crackdown for the tax evaders.
So it's very possible that people think bartering is cheaper because of ignorance of IRS laws. It's still technically "tax evasion". (Similar to how driving across state lines to buy things for 0% sales tax is also technically tax evasion when you don't declare the purchases in your home state's tax forms.)
E.g. A homeowner's lawn service costs $3000 a year. The homeowner could barter his web developer skills to make a "lawn care website" in exchange for 1 year of lawn care. The homeowner is supposed to declare the $3000-fair-market-value as income. If the homeowner is in 30% tax bracket, he owes ~$900 extra taxes PLUS he still has to expend the extra hours writing HTML/javascript to fulfill his side of the trade.
Is bartering that much cheaper if it's not "under the table" and you add in the the extra work+time to satisfy your end of the deal? (Especially if that extra work could be expended on other projects that are worth more than $3000 -or- working on websites more interesting to the homeowner than a lawn care service.)
It is extraordinarily unlikely any of my ancestors were ever rich.
And even if some of my ancestors were rich, my life today as a worker is economically better of by, oh I don't know, a factor of 1000.
If we also take in to account things like decrease in child mortality, clean running water, modern medicine, the internet, Wikipedia, Khan Academy, disposable computers, my life today as a worker is better off by a factor of at least 10,000.[1]
Additionally, despite what Jubal Harshaw might have us believe[2], it is infeasible that any given person should hope to be proficient at a wide variety of tasks.
While I certainly can do most automotive servicing myself, I lack a few specialist tools that would make the tasks efficient and enjoyable, so I outsource some / most if it as I choose.
'my life today as a worker is better off by a factor of at least 10,000.'
Is it? I see this kind of argument in many places: "I don't have to wash clothes by hand" or "You wouldn't be saying this if you tried picking wheat for 14 hours"
But I think the issue with the argument is they are comparing against the wrong metric. We should be optimizing for human happiness. Innovation is a terrible proxy for this, as we are only marginally more happy than our predecessors in some areas. The main problem with happiness is that it is relatively indifferent to things that are unpleasant (such as picking wheat every day for 14 hours), as our brain quickly adapts and this becomes a new baseline. The things that make us unhappy in the long term (lack of exercise, lack of space, less predictable life, lack of control) are still around for almost everyone, regardless of them being saved menial chores.
You raise some good points with regard to happiness, although I don't think I said anything about happiness. I simply said better off.
As a Registered Armchair Psychologist, I'm not entirely convinced that our brains quickly adapt to unpleasantness. I've heard quite a few soldiers come back from tours of duty with quite the mental health issues, ditto victims of abuse, etc etc.
My argument, and I side with Deirdre McCloskey here, is that we, we in the modern liberal west, and some other developing countries, are better off by far than our peasant ancestors because we have more predictability in and more control over our lives precisely because we have the ability to start our own businesses, to innovate and bring new products to market, to be economically upwardly mobile, to buy better health insurance... shall I go on? Rather than half half our siblings die early from disease and war.
With regard to happiness, well I'll defer to the experts here and side with David Steindl-Rast who claims that in order to be happy on a more frequent / long term basis we ought to cultivate gratefulness[1]. And in that sense I'll agree with you in that, despite adverse conditions, some people do still manage to be happy for what they do have.
The trajectory of the income gap, the rising price of housing, and the erosion of purchasing power, I treat as a separate issue. Moving forward this certainly does look like it's going to rapidly become a problem. Perhaps.
Love it. The self-defeatist rationalization of the utterly housebroken. "At least I have plumbing", he mews as he faithfully gives half of his profits to his master.
I defiantly earn more than say the pay for my cleaner even after a tax. I could prepare all my meals, but I've done the work I've worked that it defiantly pays more just to buy them.
I've done the calculations, and for me its defiantly more time efficient. I think your picking a particular inefficient example. Mechanics where I live don't earn that much at all.
I could service my car which for me would take me most of my day. My daily pay rate could defiantly pay for a full service after tax.
What i'm seeing here is that you just need to figure out what per hour rate is after tax, and use that to make quick calculations based on your local market.
"they are chasing the carrot dangling on a stick in front of them (house, car, new iPhone, etc.)" - Not everyone is like that. I have a cheap small car, a cheap smartphone, house that requires low maintenance I then plough the savings into services which I means I have more time and less stress. Then the rest goes into retirement funds and cheap vanguard funds.
If anything however its made my life a bit boring but very comfortable and laidback.
> What i'm seeing here is that you just need to figure out what per hour rate is after tax, and use that to make quick calculations based on your local market.
Yep, it's a whole chapter in the book I wrote on the topic of working less to live your dreams.
The other thing to realize is that when you are spending money, you are spending the time you have left in your life. You can never, ever get that time back, so spending should be very precious.
It's quite a mind-shift, but once you make it you'll never be able to go back.
All that seems to be a philosophy, not a fact. Obviously, when I'm spending my hour equivalent on full featured dinner, I'm saving myself around five hours, not even comparing quality and extra time to achieve it. That's how competence and production lines basically work.
> The logical conclusion is to do as much as you can yourself, and only get others to do things you are unable to do yourself.
I think there's also a social/psychological aspect to this. When people pay for something that they are unable to do/produce by themselves, they feel (or at least should feel, from the society's point of view) some respect for the person doing the job, because he is a specialist with some non-trivial skills. In contrast, when people pay for something that they can do (or at least think that they can) but don't like to, they feel sympathy at best, or superiority and disdain at worst, because the job doer is now perceived more as a servant.
This works great if you measure value in terms of dollars spent per hour, but most people don't.
I don't pay the mechanic to fix my car because it is cheaper than doing it myself, I pay the mechanic to do it because I don't want to do it myself. I have the means to avoid doing many things I don't enjoy by paying others to do it.
If someone has a job they don't enjoy AND they have the ability to choose how many hours they work then your system would probably work, but most jobs have requirements for hours per week anyway so those hours are spent either way. After that you have to maximize the enjoyment value of the time you have free.
Why would the answer be so absolute? Shouldn't this calculation just shift the break even point where it makes sense to do things yourself to somewhere where you do more things yourself?
Even if I accepted these calculations, I still have to work a 40 hour week. I can't optimize time spent on my profession, time spent on life maintenance, and leisure time. So I just work with what I have left over, and given these constraints I choose not to change my own oil, sure as I am I could do it.
> You will work a lot more than you would if you just did things for yourself.
Nonsense. I would work no more nor no fewer hours in a given year regardless of whether I hired a plumber or mechanic. In fact, given that I won't adjust my work hours either way, then hiring people gives me more free time.
I may (or not) have a smaller bank balance, but that appears to be beside the point you're trying to make.
But, a professional plumber or mechanic is probably many times more efficient than I am. I recently fixed the air conditioner in my car by replacing a bad relay. It took me about 5 hours to figure out what was wrong, figure out how to fix it, find the right replacement part and then replace it. A professional mechanic probably could have done it in 15 minutes which they probably would have rounded up to an hour which would still cost me much less than my after tax earnings for the 5 hours it took me. If it had been something more complicated that actually took specialized tools and more specialized skills, I probably would have come out even worse trying to fix it for myself.
Even with something relatively unskilled like cleaning someone who does it every day is still probably at least twice as fast as I am which makes up for the entire cost of taxes even if my hourly rate is the same as theirs.
What would your alternative suggestion be though? Toil on a farm growing your own vegetables? (nb for me this is in the "don't like doing" and "I'm bad at it" quadrant).
And if the implied alternative is to be workable for everyone, we have to magic roads, healthcare etc out of nowhere with no tax dollars.
> What would your alternative suggestion be though?
My alternative is only go to work as much as you need to. Food, shelter and some basic enjoyment, not more. That's something like $10-20k per year, at most. Which means you really only need to work 2ish days a week.
> And if the implied alternative is to be workable for everyone, we have to magic roads, healthcare etc out of nowhere with no tax dollars.
Not no tax dollars, but certainly less. It's clear that if everyone only went to work half as much we'd only need to build half the roads and trains and airports.
If every single person went to work only 4/5ths of what they do now. (i.e. 4 days per week instead of 5), The economy would only grow at 4/5ths of what it does now, but otherwise, everything would continue to function more-or-less like it does today. Once you see that, you realize it's also true for 3/5ths or even 2/5ths.
> It's clear that if everyone only went to work half as much we'd only need to build half the roads and trains and airports.
Er, no. First, not all existing road/rail/air trips are for work, and, second, more time out of work would quite likely not merely preserve, but increase, non-work trips.
> If every single person went to work only 4/5ths of what they do now. (i.e. 4 days per week instead of 5), The economy would only grow at 4/5ths of what it does now
That's not at all obvious. The natural naive assumption is that there would be a one-time 20% contraction but after that growth rate would be unaffected; less naively, there's some reason to suspect that the one-time hit would be less, because productiob isn't linear, and the highest value work would be the last displaced.
But, more to the point, the general idea that utility is reduced ybbworkong for trade vs. working for one self is not well supported by evidence.
No, that maths is way off. If everyone went to work 4/5 of what they did now, the economy would contract by 20%, one of the biggest crashes in history.
It could be argued that societies that found themselves with the sorts of lifestyles you espouse (Australian Aboriginals; pre-Columbian indigenous of North America; etc) have all been decimated by societies that toiled.
> It's clear that if everyone only went to work half as much we'd only need to build half the roads and trains and airports.
Not only is this not "clear", it's also false. To connect two towns, you need 1 road. If everyone only went to work half as often, you still need 1 road – you can't have 0.5 roads. And if people work half as much, but only 4 hours per day, you wouldn't save anything.
Sure, with less utilization comes less need for maintainance, but not all wear and tear results from direct use.
Over time, most cost of a road is maintenance cost, not initial construction. While this probably isn't linear with use, it does scale with use, so that lower use means lower maintenance cost. The cost of a single lane road supporting current usage levels is not an individual less quantum unit of road cost.
There's some areas where the trade off works. I hire a yard company that comes out to take care of my yard every single week, brings equipment, hauls of trimmings and otherwise does maintenance that would take a couple of hours a week for me to do myself. They show up with a team of 3-4 people for about $180 / month.
We do something similar by hiring a house cleaning service that comes in every 2 weeks to do a heavy and thorough cleaning of our house for about $200 / month. That job would use an entire day of the weekend to do ourselves.
It's not every little task, but if there's a market for it there are certainly some areas where you can buy your time back relatively efficiently.
For $380 / month I buy back about 30 hours of my non-working time every month with those two services.
If you're self employed or have your own business you can use pre-tax dollars for a lot of those expenses.
Out of curiosity why would you include food, housing, and transport, etc in your calculation. Those are sunk costs so if the premise is "I'll work 2 extra hours a week" in order to pay someone to 6 hours of cleaning, cooking, etc, then those sunk costs don't really enter into it.
It's seems like what you're really calculating is profit per hour.
> Out of curiosity why would you include food, housing, and transport, etc in your calculation.
Because they are all higher as a result of going to work. i.e. if you buy lunch at work everyday for $15, you would only spend $5 if you were at home and ate a sandwich you made yourself.. so the $10 per day difference is a "cost" of going to work. Same for transport (would be $0 without work).
Housing is often greatly inflated because of work. i.e. I want to earn the big bucks in Silicon Valley, so I pay $4000/mo rent. Or I just move way out someplace and only spend $1000/mo.. therefore the $3000 difference per month is a "cost" of going to work.
> It's seems like what you're really calculating is profit per hour.
That's an interesting way to say it.... I guess I would say "how much are you really getting ahead for every hour of your life you are selling. (hint: it's massively less than most people think)
I like the way you reason on your other posts about the "externalised" costs of not doing your own things at times, as I usually think on similar lines. That is why I usually try to fix my own things, buy second hand, and only buy when truly needed. For instance, I always assume that it will be I that will have to do all the maintenance of whatever I buy.
Is this something you talk about on your book? Do you recommend some store where I can get an epub copy of your book (or pdf, but would prefer epub)? I don't have a Kindle, only a Sony PRS-T1. If you have a referal to yourself (outside amazon), it's perfectly fine!
When we work more and spend money to outsource household stuff, that increases GDP and allows the government to tax more of the economic output.
If you do your own household work, that's not counted in the GDP and is non-taxable. I guess that's why some countries have been subsidising day care, etc.
Intuitively, I'd expect that a day care provider has a higher ratio of children to staff than families have of children to primary caregivers, and that the difference is such that subsidising day care can increase GDP just by freeing up more parents to work
In some cultures, "being the banker" is the ultimate goal in life. I remember talking to a person coming from one of such cultures, telling that "we are taught ambition since we are children". Ambition for the sake of ambition is the root of "being the banker".
So certain cultures are not "back to the parable" - they never moved; they likely, never will, and that's fine, it's their choice, and I don't assume that's negative just because I disagree with it.
This relates to the previous statement:
Call me old fashioned, but rather than working yourself silly to then spend your money buying time back
"Bankers" (or "banking cultures", to follow up with the metaphor) won't do this - they will actually see it as opportunity to produce more with the same time.
Update: Sorry this comment does not quite fit with parent, I actually wanted to post it as a root comment.
My big hope for reducing time spent on current society's tasks is robotics. There already are robots for a lot of tedious tasks, in theory - vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, even window and BBQ grill cleaners. Alas, except for maybe vacuums and mowers, those tend not to buy time but just shift your work from the basic activity to maintaining the robot.
But I think a universal, affordable household robot is absolutely within reach, and it would not require general intelligence, but just well implemented capabilities. From sorting dishes to vacuuming, stairclimbing, taking out the trash to a predefined location, sorting in groceries, to maybe cooking with the help of standardized storage and equipment - I don't care if it's all highly specialized tasks, it just has to do enough of them.
A lot of those time sinks are self-inflicted, when vacuum cleaners came along we didn't use it as an opportunity to save time but rather to keep our carpets cleaner. The same pattern occurs with lawn mowers, washing machines, BBQ grill cleaners, etc.
I know it's a hackneyed quote but our possessions really do own us.
I wish I would have read this before buying a Roomba. I thought it would save me so much time because my wife wanted to clean the floors nightly due to having an infant crawling around. Instead of the time saved resulting in relaxation, it ended up "allowing us" to clean other parts instead.
because not all capitalists work for publicly traded companies where they are legally bound to maximise profits. There are plenty of businesspeople out there who aren't constantly seeking out new ways to increase profits. Usually small business owners.
What kind of impact do these lifestyle businesspeople have on an average person's life? Or do you mean that they are a good example of giving up on pursuing wealth in exchange for spare time and unquantifiable humanly joys?
I mean they're a good model of what healthy capitalism can look like. Provide valuable services, don't work your employees to death to maximise profits for the mob-rule of shareholders, stay small and focus on well-roundedness. I'm very pro-capitalism and I can't stand the enterprise model of business, it's very dehumanising.
The problem is 40 hour week does not apply to high-earning professionals such as brokers, lawyers, doctors etc. I do not think corporate lawyers in Europe stick to a 40 hour week schedule.
I'm currently interning at a law firm, and everyone around here works 10 or more hours a day on average. (official office hours are 09:30-19:30, but only on rare occasions you can leave at 19:30 sharp. )
many of those things are made in south-east Asia, in countries that aren't really "developing" in the sense you're implying. China is a modern country, Taiwan is a modern country.
Because the American (referring to the story in link) would push through his own grand visions, create an empire and crush the little man, either as a struggling independent or as a underpaid cog in a large machine.
If not enough people (majority?) agree on this philosophy, those that do are going to find themselves on the outside of productive society without the means to live in it.
Think small grocery stores, book shops, bakeries, really anything that has been disappearing the last half century. And think how many people can't any more afford to live in the city they were born in.
It's a good idea, but too many people are against it. And, ultimately, the reason we can't do it, is because we're too desperate for money. Modern day society only allows you to reduce your expenses so much - in CA, the latest generation must pay 50%+ of their salary for basic shelter. This doesn't leave much room to trade significant amounts of money for time.
As long, 99% of the population is still shelter insecure (the lowest level of maslow's hierarchy of needs), we won't be able to trade money for time.
This happened to me too. I find the quality of the boss/leadership mitigates this for me. A good leader can make a job into something you love if it can be aligned to what you want to do. I try to attain this utopia with everyone on my teams.
If it feels like work, it's work, otherwise you would do it for free right !? smile Most people enjoy the reward, and that's ok, but there's also people that enjoy the work. But you can't expect it to be fun all the time. But for those of you who hates your work, I think extrinsic motivation (a salary) works just as well as intrinsic motivation for both "success" and happiness.
Good for them. That would be a what, a pretty small fraction of the global population? And that's before asking whether it's true love or just Stockholm syndrome.
Maybe work satisfaction is like a bell-curve? There are a small amount of people who absolutely LOVE what they do and also a very small amount of epople who absolutely HATE what they do with a large majority in the middle.
Basic financial security if you can pull this off better than the average American. Early retirement if you do much better.
Most people are stressed about money. Then they get a raise, their expenses grow with it, and are just as stressed about money. If you can skip grow half of one raise-grow step, you now have some breathing room. If you can skip several, you can get a lot of breathing room, and still have a comfortable life.
In Belgium we have this great thing called servicecheques (="dienstencheques"). It is a government sponsored project where you can buy a servicecheque for 9 euro's, and you will get 3 euro's back from taxes.
Each cheque represents 1 hour of work such as house cleaning, ironing, meal preparing, etc.
This system is to promote low-wage work, but also has the nice benefit so people can cheaply buy home services. Wages are pretty high in Belgium, so this is an ideal solution for both people doing that kind of work, and working people in high need for such services.
Main reason for the scheme is in my opinion to force people into paying taxes. It is probably a market where tax evasion is the most invisible because already some sort of trust relationship is in place.
What these scholars are pushing for eerily resembles good old aristocratic society.
Instead of promoting to consume less (having smaller houses and less clothes, producing less garbage, eating less) they advocate for buying a couple sturdy negroes to do the hard work, while their master can learn to play the piano (and not feel bored/unhappy to cleanup his own shit).
Has the western society already arrived at the point, when there is such an abundance of low-income, unskilled, badly educated people, that the capitalists from Harvard Business School see big potential profits in building a brand new time-saving services industry with all this underutilized labour?
Yeah. This is pretty much the same problem I had with the book "The 4 Hour Work Week". The ultimate solution in my opinion is to automate crappy jobs out of existence and to set up social safety-nets for the displaced workers so that their quality of life increases.
Crappy jobs still bring some income that can then be spent on consuming, often with the leverage of bank loans, keeping the wheels of the economy spinning. Who could be more striving for buying and consuming than a person who can hardly afford anything?
Right. I'm looking at it not from an economics perspective, but from a humanitarian perspective. As much as possible, we should be trying to eliminate drudgery and misery from the human condition.
I remember watching a documentary about a sulfur mine in southeast Asia. The average life expectancy for miners there was something like 2-5 years. It's crazy to me that anyone would even take that job, but:
A. The miners probably didn't know the life expectancy
B. The miners didn't have much of an alternative
C. The society viewed (views?) them as expendable
I think this is an excellent illustration of an area where automation needs to be done, but market forces won't encourage it. The labor is just too cheap. But just because the economics doesn't work, it doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
I absolutely agree with you. In the above comment I was just speculating on the possible economical/political reasoning behind the lack of automation. In addition to simply being cheaper than automated solutions (in the short run), cheap labour might also be seen by capitalists/governments as an economical agent, that is more preferable for the economy with regards to increasing GDP, than those on welfare, because the former still has some spare money to spend, and welfare covers only the very basic needs. I agree that it's truly awful that in some extreme cases people have to pay with their health/life to be a part of a consumerist society.
Non sequitur. Your whole conclusion is based on an non-existing premise, or one that has little sense.
It's not clear why you think this article suggests precluding a healthy system in which people have the ability to afford time-saving services (in exchange of their service to others, which is arguably a foundation of any sane such system). Moreover, it's not clear what does consumption have anything to do with the point of the article; it seems rather orthogonal.
Somewhat related:
Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."
And also:
"I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them."
If someone else is looking for what the study actually means by "buying time", this is the closest thing to an answer that I found in the text:
> In all samples, respondents completed two questions about whether—and how much—money they spent each month to increase their free time by paying someone else to complete unenjoyable daily tasks.
I once found myself in the odd position of working as a janitor while hiring a maid to clean my floors and surfaces at home (only before having guests over) because I couldn't find the time and energy after I was done with my regular job.
The biggest one I can think of is car repair, or driving itself. Mostly it would probably be indirect stuff like food prep, though-- dollar menus and cheap frozen dinners. For the 'working poor', being able to spend less time cooking is an accessible luxury that's hard to resist.
Can someone explain why they're sure this is causation and not correlation? Intuitively it seems to me a happier person would be more inclined to spend money on buying extra time than someone who's unhappy, who would be more inclined to spend on things or experiences.
Well, the text is free so you can just read the article...
Though most of the paper's studies are based on observational and survey data, which is typically where the 'correlation is not causation' criticism is most effective, the authors actually perform a experiment. They give $40 to two groups of participants and task them to make a time-saving purchase and a material purchase, and survey their happiness after each purchase.
Their results from this experiment are inconsistent with your proposed hypothesis as they've controlled for baseline happiness by randomizing the groups. See materials and methods, study 8 from the linked article.
Edit: it's also in the abstract! "A field experiment provides causal evidence that working adults report greater happiness after spending money on a time-saving purchase than on a material purchase."
Experiments never show causation. The caution comes from interpretation of the data, which varies between scientist to scientist. You could say the additional experiments they did were not sufficient evidence but the proper response should be a suggestion of a new experiment that would convince you rather than saying "correlation is not causation ".
It's a good point, though they did also measure how time-stressed people felt. People who felt time-poor but didn't buy time-saving services had poorer life satisfaction. If you were time stressed and bought the services, you were protected from some of the negative effects.
"In contrast, for respondents who spent money on time-saving purchases (n = 804), the negative effect of time pressure on life satisfaction was relatively weak, B = −0.03, Z = 1.46, P = 0.144, 95% CI (−0.08, 0.01). These results suggest that using money to buy time indeed buffers people from the negative effects of time stress on well-being."
Experiments never show causation. The caution comes from interpretation of the data, which varies between scientist to scientist. You could say the additional experiments they did were not sufficient evidence but the proper response should be a suggestion of a new experiment that would convince you rather than saying "correlation is not causation ".
I'm actually surprised more people don't buy time.
I used to pay to have my laundry done. first it was part of a 3hrs for $60 of house cleaning I used to pay for in the mid 90s once every two weeks. Then later when I moved into a apartment with no washer. I loved it. Also loved the house cleaning when it was good.
Would love to pay for some kind of shared personal assistant that would deal with whatever. I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay. I rent a cube at an office with shared assistants that charge for individual services. each phone call $3 for example. I'd love to be able to pay for someone to deal with all my bills, taxes, mail, basic shopping ...
"he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."
I'm not seeing anything described in the article as "buying time" that couldn't also be described as "buying the right to order someone else around" aka "delegating". Surely the most direct way of buying time is by taking a pay cut in exchange for more time off, or even taking unpaid time off. It occurs to me there may be a good proxy for this in comparing similar tech jobs in the US vs the EU / UK. The latter pay less, but receive substantially more time off.
> Surely the most direct way of buying time is by taking a pay cut in exchange for more time off, or even taking unpaid time off.
We don't get those choices. I tried for YEARS to engineer a long-term part-time career in the software industry, and I couldn't get it to happen. I'm perfectly happy to trade more free time for less money, but there are just no takers out there. The industry isn't interested.
As far as taking unpaid time off -- usually, that happens after you've quit your previous job and before you've started the next one.
I can think of two ways you can trade money for time as a SWE:
1) Amazon has started to offer part-time jobs for SWE's (https://www.flexjobs.com/jobs/telecommuting-jobs-at-amazon)
2) relocating from the US to UK / EU gives you 25-100% more PTO and shorter hours in exchange for lower salaries
Home cleaning. I was reluctant to let a stranger clean my home but it is totally worth it. My maid cleans home better than I ever did, and she is faster.
We have been working on that for decades, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dish washers, ready meals, etc. It seems we aren't great at allocating the time these devices free up.
When it takes two hours for a robot/machine to do something that would take you five minutes, most people will think that's one hour and 55 minutes wasted, while it's actually five minutes saved
"What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine. With newly designed graphics from Gapminder, Rosling shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring wash day into an intellectual day of reading."
This is really interesting. I've thought about this. If you live in an area where a living wage is low enough to make this work, it could be really great for everyone.
Say for example, you hire a college student for $15/hour in an area where minimum wage is $10/hour and their rent is $400/mo to work part time for you buying food, cooking food, doing laundry, and cleaning your house. They make $1,200/month, plenty to live comfortably as a college student while still having time to study. They need medical coverage from their college, but this seems to be offered.
Then you don't have to worry about those tasks anymore and life becomes much better. If you make good money, that $1,200/mo is no biggie. Win/win.
Complication: anything you are good at you will want to practice to improve. And deliberate practice is by definition frequently uncomfortable (not enjoyable).
Assuming you have resources to hire help and outsource, consider doing the following:
For things you like doing that you are good at, make that your main job. You will be effective and happy.
For things you don't like doing and are bad at, outsource. If you try doing these yourself, you will be miserable, and the outcome will be sub-par (you're bad at it!).
For things you like doing and are bad at, make that your hobby.
For the things that you don't like doing but are good at, either do them yourself or outsource, depending on your time availability and resources to hire help.
I've been doing this for a few years as much as possible. Even at home, my wife and I naturally divide chores along these lines.
The other outcome besides being "effective and happy" is "turning something you enjoy into something you hate because now you have to do it." Just because you love doing something doesn't mean you love being forced to do it for someone else 40 hours a week.
It's pretty naïve to think that the things you enjoy in your free time are the things you enjoy doing for paid work and vise versa. I absolutely hate cleaning around my house, I hate everything about it, but I don't mind cleaning for paid work at all.
There's other issues too and quite a few people I know took that route ("doing what you love") and it lead to career dissatisfaction for various reasons.
Jobs have other "stuff" other than just your work, you may love X but hate working in X industry for various reasons, like work environment, salary, job prospects, etc.
The things you enjoy and are good are probably not even viable paid opportunities. (Nobody's going to pay you to put together model airplanes).
You don't get to "test drive" the vast majority of jobs at home first.
There's something to be about not being invested in your work and, essentially, not making your work the focus of your life.
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2012/03/18/reader-story-i-...
Sure but you spend a good chunk of your life at work, so it's difficult not to want it to be meaningful.
>I miss teaching a lot. Every day, in fact. But the truth is I’m so much happier than I’ve ever been. Getting out of teaching and not being emotionally invested in my work has forced me to do things besides work more. I’ve learned how to cook, I’m making new friends, I’m reading more, I’m rediscovering my love of things I used to do before I was ever a teacher all over again. I do productive things on the side too, like study for my CPA license.
>And the thing is now that I’m thinking about other things, I’ve learned so much about saving, investing, and I’m doing much better with my salary and working toward eventually being independent of a salary if at all possible.
>Your career is just one part of your life. You might not become a much happier person just because you do the work that satisfies you the most. You have to consider the effects it could have on you as a person besides just having to do the work. You should do the work that gives you balance, and not the work you love the most.
There's something to be said for it. It's not for everyone,there's some people who do work they find truly meaningful and are happy about devoting themselves to it. However, most people probably shouldn't look for meaning in their work less it traps them from experiencing meaning and happiness elsewhere.
To be clear, I am not saying nobody should ever make a career out of doing what they enjoy during in their free time, I'm saying it doesn't guarantee career satisfaction and there are potential pitfalls of going down that route. It also definitely should not be generic advice to everyone.
"Do it for the money" is good advice. I feel like if I were trying to find satisfaction in paid work I'd be supremely unhappy and unfulfilled.
Doing something that's not your passion for 40 hours a week for 10-20 years is a heck of a lot more tolerable than doing it for 45 years.
Also, I am a big fan of _not_ making your hobby your vocation. The job should not be meaningless, but filing your taxes, looking for gigs, networking etc. when all you really enjoy is getting on stage and playing your guitar, is not a recipe for lasting romance about being a rockstar.
I actually do enjoy programming and I get paid (well) to do it but going to work is certainly not "awesome," and I would not do it if I didn't have to.
You could absolutely love caring for children but hate being a child care worker because of dealing with parents and issues like abuse and negligent at home among other reasons.
not.at.all.
What is this obsession with only doing what you love to pay bills? I've seen only miserable people with this mindset, because it's extremely hard to find niche where you can sustain yourself (and often family) and avoid mundane, boring, tiring tasks that naturally come with it. I am sure there are some which are not miserable and achieved what they wanted, but never ever seen those in person.
I propose, based on my humble experiences, an alternative. Not claiming its for everybody, but it works for me. Ignore work for a minute and let the stuff you do in your free time define who you are. For me it's adventures, exotic travelling, activities like climbing, mountaineering, diving, ski touring, and recently paragliding. Whatever works for you. Get out of your comfort zone, and don't come back until you are 70 or on wheelchair.
With this setup, I couldn't care less what happens at work (in corporate IT, none is truly horrible, usually it is actually OKish), I enjoy the good parts, move through bad parts, and I simply don't care. At the end, it's just work.
Simple, easy life.
I fully agree. There are lots of things I'll do for paid work that I don't really want to do at home - and I'll do the stuff happily. It makes money, and the time at work passes along. When it is somewhat easy as well, it gives me lots of time to think - and that is a serious bonus. It also makes it really easy to disconnect from work.
Alternatively, it makes it easier to define myself by what I choose to do with my time. The most interesting things about myself aren't tied to my job at all and I rather like that - and at this point, a seemingly interesting job is just a bonus.
Honestly, what kind of society is this? I would be scared to raise kids in a place where these things were common.
They're extremely useful for concisely articulating a tightly-defined situation and mapping items in order to make decisions. Their weakness is that they may oversimplify and lack nuance.
I used to use important/urgent decision grids quite frequently at work.
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=709139&seqNu...
Exercise is clearly an example of something that's important but non-urgent in Covey's model.
The good-at/enjoys model is mostly applicable to things you've decided (or had decided for you) you have to do, somehow. Once you've decided that exercise is something you should do, thinking about it in terms of good-at/enjoys can be helpful in deciding how to go about it.
Simple models are great when you have no experience with something. You can grasp a simple model relatively quickly because... it's simple.
As you use the model, you realize its weaknesses. You also gain knowledge about a domain. You learn how to perform with speed, agility, nuance, and expertise.
the model has served its purpose. It is no longer useful, because your personal prowess outgrew it. However, it was useful in the beginning.
Particularly if you like doing them more than any of the things in the "things you like doing and are good at" quadrant, or if there are other ancilliary benefits to the things that you'd be learning.
It adds "the world needs this" and "you can be paid to do this" to the four-quadrant diagram you are building.
Happiness is a funny thing, because you can't just keep going straight. Doing only things you like (or things you're good at) isn't a recipe for long-term happiness. Both lottery winners and victims of horrific accidents revert to an average happiness over the long term.
You can read more. This book[1] by my college Psychology professor is the first that came to mind:
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Modern-A...
Could it then be that people who buy time also regress to the average happiness after a while? It seems pointless to measure happiness then, if we're just bound to always have the same happiness.
Life's hard.
Are we not back to the parable of the fisherman and the banker? http://www.garywu.net/fisherman-and-banker/
Individuals don't make the choices to optimize for less work. As few individuals make those choices, it is more socially and/or economically difficult to make those choices.
For the middle classes, major aspects of the modern economy are also competitive "races." Good neighborhoods, good schools, good colleges... These things are effectively competitive, not absolute. Costs rise with earnings. T
The social context isn't limited to pure economics. Generally speaking, people don't tend to choose lifestyles at all. We like to fantasize it, but don't do it that much. I think this comes down the the "we" problem. Lifestyle invention is something people do as groups (if at all) not individuals. We're more individualistic in modern culture, so there's less room for it even though it is more possible than ever. A religious group could more easily decide on a 15-hr-workweek, or some other major lifestyle engineering choice. There are stranger choices that endure longer than that.
Keep in mind you have to deduct taxes from your income, and the expenses it costs you to earn your income (clothes, transport, bought food, parking, car & maintenance, expensive housing, etc.).
Also keep in mind you must pay others with after-tax dollars. So when you pay that mechanic or plumber $85 per hour, that's a LOT of money, not even similar to you EARNING $85/hr.
I wrote a book about it, and in all my research and calculations, it roughly works out that most people earn only around 30-50% as much as they think they do.. so even if your salary is $120k, you're only earning something like $30/hr at absolute best, which is much lower than you pay a plumber or mechanic.
The entire premise of market economies is that people are better at different things and by working together you get a higher aggregate amount of value. I.e Get more stuff with less resources spent(which includes time)
If it didn't work. Market economies wouldn't work.
Are your perhaps not including the efficiency of the worker in your calculations? Mechanic could probably change the brakes on a car without even thinking about it, you would probably take a hour of research and work grabbing the right replacement before you even start. Most farmers have a large of agricultural knowledge which allows them produce food cheaply in large quantities.
The logical conclusion is to do as much as you can yourself, and only get others to do things you are unable to do yourself. Where possible, don't use the work/income/tax/payment cycle to do it, try to use bartering or something more efficient where there are not so many middle-men taking a cut.
> The entire premise of market economies is that people are better at different things and by working together you get a higher aggregate amount of value
Ah-ha, you're right - but it doesn't create "higher value" for the individual worker.. it's higher value for those at the top of the pyramid.
> If it didn't work. Market economies wouldn't work.
Again, you are right, they don't work! The rich are getting vastly richer while the workers are getting vastly poorer. Look around you.
You might not have noticed, but the reason everyone goes to work every day for their entire lives is NOT because it's the most efficient or smartest thing for them to do. It's because they have been convinced that it is, and they are chasing the carrot dangling on a stick in front of them (house, car, new iPhone, etc.)
>Mechanic could probably change the brakes on a car without even thinking about it, you would probably take a few hours research before you even start.
I can tell you have never tried. Even the first time I did it I took less than an hour (inc research), and actually it would still have been "cheaper" even if it took 8+ hours (I was earning ~$70k as salary, mechanics where I live start at $145/hr)
Fyi, bartering is taxable in the USA.[1]
Yes, lots of people barter without reporting "fair market value" of bartered services to the IRS and yes, there isn't a large scale manhunt or crackdown for the tax evaders.
So it's very possible that people think bartering is cheaper because of ignorance of IRS laws. It's still technically "tax evasion". (Similar to how driving across state lines to buy things for 0% sales tax is also technically tax evasion when you don't declare the purchases in your home state's tax forms.)
E.g. A homeowner's lawn service costs $3000 a year. The homeowner could barter his web developer skills to make a "lawn care website" in exchange for 1 year of lawn care. The homeowner is supposed to declare the $3000-fair-market-value as income. If the homeowner is in 30% tax bracket, he owes ~$900 extra taxes PLUS he still has to expend the extra hours writing HTML/javascript to fulfill his side of the trade.
Is bartering that much cheaper if it's not "under the table" and you add in the the extra work+time to satisfy your end of the deal? (Especially if that extra work could be expended on other projects that are worth more than $3000 -or- working on websites more interesting to the homeowner than a lawn care service.)
[1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p525/ar02.html#en_US_2016_p...
And even if some of my ancestors were rich, my life today as a worker is economically better of by, oh I don't know, a factor of 1000.
If we also take in to account things like decrease in child mortality, clean running water, modern medicine, the internet, Wikipedia, Khan Academy, disposable computers, my life today as a worker is better off by a factor of at least 10,000.[1]
Additionally, despite what Jubal Harshaw might have us believe[2], it is infeasible that any given person should hope to be proficient at a wide variety of tasks.
While I certainly can do most automotive servicing myself, I lack a few specialist tools that would make the tasks efficient and enjoyable, so I outsource some / most if it as I choose.
1. Deirde McCloskey bangs on endlessly about this in her book Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeois_Dignity
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man
Is it? I see this kind of argument in many places: "I don't have to wash clothes by hand" or "You wouldn't be saying this if you tried picking wheat for 14 hours"
But I think the issue with the argument is they are comparing against the wrong metric. We should be optimizing for human happiness. Innovation is a terrible proxy for this, as we are only marginally more happy than our predecessors in some areas. The main problem with happiness is that it is relatively indifferent to things that are unpleasant (such as picking wheat every day for 14 hours), as our brain quickly adapts and this becomes a new baseline. The things that make us unhappy in the long term (lack of exercise, lack of space, less predictable life, lack of control) are still around for almost everyone, regardless of them being saved menial chores.
As a Registered Armchair Psychologist, I'm not entirely convinced that our brains quickly adapt to unpleasantness. I've heard quite a few soldiers come back from tours of duty with quite the mental health issues, ditto victims of abuse, etc etc.
My argument, and I side with Deirdre McCloskey here, is that we, we in the modern liberal west, and some other developing countries, are better off by far than our peasant ancestors because we have more predictability in and more control over our lives precisely because we have the ability to start our own businesses, to innovate and bring new products to market, to be economically upwardly mobile, to buy better health insurance... shall I go on? Rather than half half our siblings die early from disease and war.
With regard to happiness, well I'll defer to the experts here and side with David Steindl-Rast who claims that in order to be happy on a more frequent / long term basis we ought to cultivate gratefulness[1]. And in that sense I'll agree with you in that, despite adverse conditions, some people do still manage to be happy for what they do have.
The trajectory of the income gap, the rising price of housing, and the erosion of purchasing power, I treat as a separate issue. Moving forward this certainly does look like it's going to rapidly become a problem. Perhaps.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtBsl3j0YRQ
I've done the calculations, and for me its defiantly more time efficient. I think your picking a particular inefficient example. Mechanics where I live don't earn that much at all.
I could service my car which for me would take me most of my day. My daily pay rate could defiantly pay for a full service after tax.
What i'm seeing here is that you just need to figure out what per hour rate is after tax, and use that to make quick calculations based on your local market.
"they are chasing the carrot dangling on a stick in front of them (house, car, new iPhone, etc.)" - Not everyone is like that. I have a cheap small car, a cheap smartphone, house that requires low maintenance I then plough the savings into services which I means I have more time and less stress. Then the rest goes into retirement funds and cheap vanguard funds.
If anything however its made my life a bit boring but very comfortable and laidback.
Yep, it's a whole chapter in the book I wrote on the topic of working less to live your dreams.
The other thing to realize is that when you are spending money, you are spending the time you have left in your life. You can never, ever get that time back, so spending should be very precious.
It's quite a mind-shift, but once you make it you'll never be able to go back.
I think there's also a social/psychological aspect to this. When people pay for something that they are unable to do/produce by themselves, they feel (or at least should feel, from the society's point of view) some respect for the person doing the job, because he is a specialist with some non-trivial skills. In contrast, when people pay for something that they can do (or at least think that they can) but don't like to, they feel sympathy at best, or superiority and disdain at worst, because the job doer is now perceived more as a servant.
Nonsense. I would work no more nor no fewer hours in a given year regardless of whether I hired a plumber or mechanic. In fact, given that I won't adjust my work hours either way, then hiring people gives me more free time.
I may (or not) have a smaller bank balance, but that appears to be beside the point you're trying to make.
Even with something relatively unskilled like cleaning someone who does it every day is still probably at least twice as fast as I am which makes up for the entire cost of taxes even if my hourly rate is the same as theirs.
And if the implied alternative is to be workable for everyone, we have to magic roads, healthcare etc out of nowhere with no tax dollars.
My alternative is only go to work as much as you need to. Food, shelter and some basic enjoyment, not more. That's something like $10-20k per year, at most. Which means you really only need to work 2ish days a week.
> And if the implied alternative is to be workable for everyone, we have to magic roads, healthcare etc out of nowhere with no tax dollars.
Not no tax dollars, but certainly less. It's clear that if everyone only went to work half as much we'd only need to build half the roads and trains and airports.
If every single person went to work only 4/5ths of what they do now. (i.e. 4 days per week instead of 5), The economy would only grow at 4/5ths of what it does now, but otherwise, everything would continue to function more-or-less like it does today. Once you see that, you realize it's also true for 3/5ths or even 2/5ths.
Er, no. First, not all existing road/rail/air trips are for work, and, second, more time out of work would quite likely not merely preserve, but increase, non-work trips.
> If every single person went to work only 4/5ths of what they do now. (i.e. 4 days per week instead of 5), The economy would only grow at 4/5ths of what it does now
That's not at all obvious. The natural naive assumption is that there would be a one-time 20% contraction but after that growth rate would be unaffected; less naively, there's some reason to suspect that the one-time hit would be less, because productiob isn't linear, and the highest value work would be the last displaced.
But, more to the point, the general idea that utility is reduced ybbworkong for trade vs. working for one self is not well supported by evidence.
You are obviously not married.
> Which means you really only need to work 2ish days a week.
And where do you find these unicorn jobs where you work only two days per week?
Not only is this not "clear", it's also false. To connect two towns, you need 1 road. If everyone only went to work half as often, you still need 1 road – you can't have 0.5 roads. And if people work half as much, but only 4 hours per day, you wouldn't save anything.
Sure, with less utilization comes less need for maintainance, but not all wear and tear results from direct use.
Of course you can. Half a four-lane road is a two-lane road.
We do something similar by hiring a house cleaning service that comes in every 2 weeks to do a heavy and thorough cleaning of our house for about $200 / month. That job would use an entire day of the weekend to do ourselves.
It's not every little task, but if there's a market for it there are certainly some areas where you can buy your time back relatively efficiently.
For $380 / month I buy back about 30 hours of my non-working time every month with those two services.
Out of curiosity why would you include food, housing, and transport, etc in your calculation. Those are sunk costs so if the premise is "I'll work 2 extra hours a week" in order to pay someone to 6 hours of cleaning, cooking, etc, then those sunk costs don't really enter into it.
It's seems like what you're really calculating is profit per hour.
Do you have a link to your book?
Because they are all higher as a result of going to work. i.e. if you buy lunch at work everyday for $15, you would only spend $5 if you were at home and ate a sandwich you made yourself.. so the $10 per day difference is a "cost" of going to work. Same for transport (would be $0 without work). Housing is often greatly inflated because of work. i.e. I want to earn the big bucks in Silicon Valley, so I pay $4000/mo rent. Or I just move way out someplace and only spend $1000/mo.. therefore the $3000 difference per month is a "cost" of going to work.
> It's seems like what you're really calculating is profit per hour.
That's an interesting way to say it.... I guess I would say "how much are you really getting ahead for every hour of your life you are selling. (hint: it's massively less than most people think)
> Do you have a link to your book?
"Work Less to Live Your Dreams" http://amzn.to/2vVzpbG
- to re-do a roof would take me ages, while professionals are pretty quick at it
- I might not even be able to do the roof
- Cleaning personal might mean untinterrupted and fully free time at home on the weekend.
- most employees (at least here in the EU) do their 40h and it is not easy to find other deals.
(disclaimer: I own no roof and have no cleaning personal either)
I didn't say any of this would be easy. Nothing rewarding ever is, in my experience.
The good news is you don't need to "set society up" to do this. You can just work less and live cheaply, and then you're done.
It's especially easy if you're a highly-paid software developer or similar, which you most likely are if you're on HN.
I'm so passionate about it I wrote an e-book called "Work Less to Live Your Dreams". [1]
[1] http://amzn.to/2vVzpbG
Is this something you talk about on your book? Do you recommend some store where I can get an epub copy of your book (or pdf, but would prefer epub)? I don't have a Kindle, only a Sony PRS-T1. If you have a referal to yourself (outside amazon), it's perfectly fine!
Thanks for the input, maybe it will make it into the revised edition.
My book is also on Apple iBook store and kobo. You can buy it off amazon and just read on your computer too.
If you do your own household work, that's not counted in the GDP and is non-taxable. I guess that's why some countries have been subsidising day care, etc.
> If I marry my housekeeper, national GDP goes down
It depends on who "we" is.
In some cultures, "being the banker" is the ultimate goal in life. I remember talking to a person coming from one of such cultures, telling that "we are taught ambition since we are children". Ambition for the sake of ambition is the root of "being the banker".
So certain cultures are not "back to the parable" - they never moved; they likely, never will, and that's fine, it's their choice, and I don't assume that's negative just because I disagree with it.
This relates to the previous statement:
Call me old fashioned, but rather than working yourself silly to then spend your money buying time back
"Bankers" (or "banking cultures", to follow up with the metaphor) won't do this - they will actually see it as opportunity to produce more with the same time.
My big hope for reducing time spent on current society's tasks is robotics. There already are robots for a lot of tedious tasks, in theory - vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, even window and BBQ grill cleaners. Alas, except for maybe vacuums and mowers, those tend not to buy time but just shift your work from the basic activity to maintaining the robot.
But I think a universal, affordable household robot is absolutely within reach, and it would not require general intelligence, but just well implemented capabilities. From sorting dishes to vacuuming, stairclimbing, taking out the trash to a predefined location, sorting in groceries, to maybe cooking with the help of standardized storage and equipment - I don't care if it's all highly specialized tasks, it just has to do enough of them.
I know it's a hackneyed quote but our possessions really do own us.
I think in practice this is very hard and would require modification of economic fundamentals e.g at a very broad level capitalism vs socialism.
If you take Europe as an example the country with the strongest economy is among the shortest working hours.
I'm currently interning at a law firm, and everyone around here works 10 or more hours a day on average. (official office hours are 09:30-19:30, but only on rare occasions you can leave at 19:30 sharp. )
If not enough people (majority?) agree on this philosophy, those that do are going to find themselves on the outside of productive society without the means to live in it.
Think small grocery stores, book shops, bakeries, really anything that has been disappearing the last half century. And think how many people can't any more afford to live in the city they were born in.
As long, 99% of the population is still shelter insecure (the lowest level of maslow's hierarchy of needs), we won't be able to trade money for time.
I like the idea of doing both - earn high, spend low, and reap the rewards in-between.
Most people are stressed about money. Then they get a raise, their expenses grow with it, and are just as stressed about money. If you can skip grow half of one raise-grow step, you now have some breathing room. If you can skip several, you can get a lot of breathing room, and still have a comfortable life.
Each cheque represents 1 hour of work such as house cleaning, ironing, meal preparing, etc.
This system is to promote low-wage work, but also has the nice benefit so people can cheaply buy home services. Wages are pretty high in Belgium, so this is an ideal solution for both people doing that kind of work, and working people in high need for such services.
In the US I would have to pay 1.5-2x that for housework, which puts it squarely into a category of value that I just do myself
Instead of promoting to consume less (having smaller houses and less clothes, producing less garbage, eating less) they advocate for buying a couple sturdy negroes to do the hard work, while their master can learn to play the piano (and not feel bored/unhappy to cleanup his own shit).
Has the western society already arrived at the point, when there is such an abundance of low-income, unskilled, badly educated people, that the capitalists from Harvard Business School see big potential profits in building a brand new time-saving services industry with all this underutilized labour?
I remember watching a documentary about a sulfur mine in southeast Asia. The average life expectancy for miners there was something like 2-5 years. It's crazy to me that anyone would even take that job, but:
A. The miners probably didn't know the life expectancy B. The miners didn't have much of an alternative C. The society viewed (views?) them as expendable
I think this is an excellent illustration of an area where automation needs to be done, but market forces won't encourage it. The labor is just too cheap. But just because the economics doesn't work, it doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
Economics shouldn't be the only consideration.
It's not clear why you think this article suggests precluding a healthy system in which people have the ability to afford time-saving services (in exchange of their service to others, which is arguably a foundation of any sane such system). Moreover, it's not clear what does consumption have anything to do with the point of the article; it seems rather orthogonal.
And also:
"I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them."
The people in developed countries who buy themselves things to save time are happier than those who don't.
Yup. Sounds about right.
The people in developed countries who buy themselves things to save time are happier than those who instead buy material objects.
Maybe my definition is off but the fact these physically don't last long makes them seem less material.
> In all samples, respondents completed two questions about whether—and how much—money they spent each month to increase their free time by paying someone else to complete unenjoyable daily tasks.
The biggest one I can think of is car repair, or driving itself. Mostly it would probably be indirect stuff like food prep, though-- dollar menus and cheap frozen dinners. For the 'working poor', being able to spend less time cooking is an accessible luxury that's hard to resist.
Though most of the paper's studies are based on observational and survey data, which is typically where the 'correlation is not causation' criticism is most effective, the authors actually perform a experiment. They give $40 to two groups of participants and task them to make a time-saving purchase and a material purchase, and survey their happiness after each purchase.
Their results from this experiment are inconsistent with your proposed hypothesis as they've controlled for baseline happiness by randomizing the groups. See materials and methods, study 8 from the linked article.
Edit: it's also in the abstract! "A field experiment provides causal evidence that working adults report greater happiness after spending money on a time-saving purchase than on a material purchase."
"In contrast, for respondents who spent money on time-saving purchases (n = 804), the negative effect of time pressure on life satisfaction was relatively weak, B = −0.03, Z = 1.46, P = 0.144, 95% CI (−0.08, 0.01). These results suggest that using money to buy time indeed buffers people from the negative effects of time stress on well-being."
I used to pay to have my laundry done. first it was part of a 3hrs for $60 of house cleaning I used to pay for in the mid 90s once every two weeks. Then later when I moved into a apartment with no washer. I loved it. Also loved the house cleaning when it was good.
Would love to pay for some kind of shared personal assistant that would deal with whatever. I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay. I rent a cube at an office with shared assistants that charge for individual services. each phone call $3 for example. I'd love to be able to pay for someone to deal with all my bills, taxes, mail, basic shopping ...
We don't get those choices. I tried for YEARS to engineer a long-term part-time career in the software industry, and I couldn't get it to happen. I'm perfectly happy to trade more free time for less money, but there are just no takers out there. The industry isn't interested.
As far as taking unpaid time off -- usually, that happens after you've quit your previous job and before you've started the next one.
2. Yes, it is super-easy to get a visa to work in the UK or EU.
I used to use laundry service, that was amazing.
Now entrepreneurs need to read this and invent robots that does all the house chores!
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/hans-rosling-and-the-magic-w...
House cleaning? Food delivery?
Say for example, you hire a college student for $15/hour in an area where minimum wage is $10/hour and their rent is $400/mo to work part time for you buying food, cooking food, doing laundry, and cleaning your house. They make $1,200/month, plenty to live comfortably as a college student while still having time to study. They need medical coverage from their college, but this seems to be offered.
Then you don't have to worry about those tasks anymore and life becomes much better. If you make good money, that $1,200/mo is no biggie. Win/win.
Is that a joke?