How to slow down scientific progress

Also: Why didn't we get the four-hour workday?

In this update:

• How to slow down scientific progress

• Why didn't we get the four-hour workday?

• Links and tweets

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How to slow down scientific progress, according to Leo Szilard

Leo Szilard—the physicist who first conceived of the nuclear chain reaction and who urged the US to undertake the Manhattan Project—also wrote fiction. His book of short stories, The Voice of the Dolphins, contains a story “The Mark Gable Foundation,” dated 1948, from which I will present to you an excerpt, without comment:

“I’m thinking of setting up a trust fund. I want to do something that will really contribute to the happiness of mankind; but it’s very difficult to know what to do with money. When Mr. Rosenblatt told me that you’d be here tonight I asked the mayor to invite me. I certainly would value your advice.”

“Would you intend to do anything for the advancement of science?” I asked.

“No,” Mark Gable said. “I believe scientific progress is too fast as it is.”

“I share your feeling about this point,” I said with the fervor of conviction, “but then why not do something about the retardation of scientific progress?”

“That I would very much like to do,” Mark Gable said, “but how do I go about it?”

“Well,” I said, “I think that shouldn’t be very difficult. As a matter of fact, I think it would be quite easy. You could set up a foundation, with an annual endowment of thirty million dollars. Research workers in need of funds could apply for grants, if they could make out a convincing case. Have ten committees, each composed of twelve scientists, appointed to pass on these applications. Take the most active scientists out of the laboratory and make them members of these committees. And the very best men in the field should be appointed as chairmen at salaries of fifty thousand dollars each. Also have about twenty prizes of one hundred thousand dollars each for the best scientific papers of the year. This is just about all you would have to do. Your lawyers could easily prepare a charter for the foundation. As a matter of fact, any of the National Science Foundation bills which were introduced in the Seventy-ninth and Eightieth Congresses could perfectly well serve as a model.”

“I think you had better explain to Mr. Gable why this foundation would in fact retard the progress of science,” said a bespectacled young man sitting at the far end of the table, whose name I didn’t get at the time of introduction.

“It should be obvious,” I said. “First of all, the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications for funds. Secondly, the scientific workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results. For a few years there might be a great increase in scientific output; but by going after the obvious, pretty soon science would dry out. Science would become something like a parlor game. Some things would be considered interesting, others not. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants. Those who wouldn’t would not, and pretty soon they would learn to follow the fashion, too.”

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/szilard-on-slowing-science

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Why didn't we get the four-hour workday?

John Maynard Keynes famously predicted in 1930 that by now we would only be working fifteen hours a week. What is less well-known is that his was nowhere near the only such prediction, nor the first—a wide range of commentators, including Charles Steinmetz and Buckminster Fuller, made similar forecasts. (And even Keynes’s prediction is generally misquoted.)

Why didn’t any of them come true? I recently discussed this with Jason Feifer on his podcast Build for Tomorrow. Here’s some elaboration with more quotes and charts.

The predictions

A 1934 book, The Economy of Abundance, summarizes many of the predictions (Chapter 2):

The technocrats promised every family on the continent of North America $20,000 a year [about $400,000 today], and a sixteen-hour work week. This is perhaps the peak of promises based on an abundance economy. Charles P. Steinmetz saw a two-hour working day on the horizon—he was the scientist who made giant power possible—but he stipulated no family budget total beyond “necessities and comforts.” …

Fred Henderson, in his Economic Consequences of Power Production, is more specific: “Without any further increase in our knowledge of power and of technical processes, or of our available materials, we could multiply production ten times over if the needs of the world were permitted to express themselves in effective demand. … It would not be a question of an eight-hour day or a six-day week, but more probably of a six-months working year—which is already the rule for university dons.”

Buckminster Fuller is still more definite. Modern man, he calculates, is 630 times more able than was Adam. Eliminating wasteful forms of work, four million Americans laboring fifty-two seven-hour days in the year (364 working hours, an average of one per day) “could keep up with every survival need”—meaning basic necessities for the whole population.

Walter N. Polakov announces that “fifty weeks, four days, six hours is enough”—a twenty-four hour week and two weeks’ vacation…

Harold Rugg in The Great Technology estimates a possible minimum living standard between ten- and twenty-fold greater than the minimums of 1929, on a sixteen- to twenty-hour work-week. …

One can continue to cite such evidence indefinitely. Fortunately, A. M. Newman has been collecting it for years and saves us the trouble by the following summary: “Among them [such estimates] a substantial agreement is found that by better use of the mechanical facilities at our disposal we could produce many times our present supply of goods at considerably less effort.” The five-hour day tends to be the maximum estimate in Mr. Newman’s collection.

As for Keynes, his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” wasn’t even saying that a fifteen-hour work week would be necessary for production. He thought it would be necessary to satisfy our psychological need for work, implying that our physical needs could be satisfied with less (exactly how much less, he doesn’t estimate):

For many ages to come … everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich today, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter—to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.

Why is the 40-hour work week still standard?

Here are my hypotheses (not mutually exclusive):

The predictions got the elasticity wrong

When labor gets more productive, workers can choose to work less for the same real wage, to make more money by working the same amount, or something in between.

Most of these predictions (if they were meant as predictions—see below) basically assumed the former: that living standards would stay constant, and working hours would be reduced. But as inventions like electricity and the assembly line were boosting labor productivity, inventions like the washing machine and the automobile were improving personal life. Workers wanted to earn more than they used to, to buy all the new products that were just becoming available. Some of the excess labor productivity was used to produce, and to consume, these new goods, rather than all of it going to increased leisure.

And as Jason Feifer pointed out on the podcast, even the new leisure itself required new goods and services to make the most of it, such as sports equipment or flights to vacation destinations.

Work got better

There was a shift from physical labor in farms and factories to mental labor in offices, and from routine work to more mentally challenging work.

Robert Gordon documents this in The Rise and Fall of American Growth. In 1910, 47% of US jobs were what Gordon classifies as “disagreeable” (farming, blue-collar labor, and domestic service), and only 8% of jobs were “non-routine cognitive” (managerial and professional). By 2009, only 3% of jobs were “disagreeable” and over 37% were “non-routine cognitive”:

Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth

This partly explains why, when NPR’s Planet Money set out to check on Keynes’s prediction in 2015, they found people who claimed they worked 50 to 100 hours per week—they were a psychotherapist and a university professor.

Working hours did decrease significantly

Just not as much as some predicted. A 70-hour work week, spread over six days, was once common. Now in France and Spain the average is around 35 hours:

And we got more vacation and holiday time as well:

Total lifetime working hours decreased even more

As family incomes grew, and as social ideas of childhood evolved, child labor waned, and children stayed more years in school

On the other end of life’s timeline, retirement was invented. Robert Gordon explains:

In the pre-1920 era, there was no concept of “retirement.” Workers “worked until they dropped”—that is, they kept working until they were physically unable to do their jobs, after which they became dependent on their children, or on church charity and other kinds of private welfare programs.

Rising incomes enabled the creation of retirement, which can be seen in falling labor participation rates of older men:

But it gets better—life expectancy was also rising, meaning people had more years of life to actually enjoy their retirement. Here’s a chart to show this—it’s data from England and Wales, but I chose it here to show that the increases were not only in life expectancy at birth, but at older ages as well. For instance, someone retiring at age 60 in 1920 could expect about fifteen more years; by 2013 another nine years had been added to that:

Our World in Data

Putting this all together, Nicholas Crafts came up with these estimates for expected lifetime hours of work for men aged 20:

Year Work hours Other hours

1881 114,491 (49%) 119,269 (51%)

1951 94,343 (33%) 191,429 (67%)

2011 70,612 (20%) 276,522 (80%)

A reduction from 49% of an adult life spent working to 20% is almost as great as a reduction from forty hours a week to fifteen.

There is a psychological value to work

People don’t need infinite leisure. They need things to do. Keynes had this right when he said that “everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented.”

Economist Paul Romer went to Burning Man and pointed out:

… if you ask, what do people do if you put them in a setting where there’s supposed to be no compensation, no quid pro quo, and you just give them a chance to be there for a week. What do they do?

They work.

How seriously were these predictions meant?

A careful reading of The Economy of Abundance, however, makes me wonder whether these estimates were seriously meant as predictions. An alternate interpretation is that they were just illustrations of the potential for productive capacity.

Elided from the block quote above are other estimates, not of the potential for a shorter working week or year, but of how much the production of industry could be increased. For instance:

“It is an open secret,” said Thorstein Veblen in 1919, “that with a reasonably free hand the production experts could readily increase the ordinary output of industry by several fold—variously estimated at some 300 to 1200 percent.”

Veblen was an early promoter of technocracy as an industrial philosophy; I mentioned him in my review of American Genesis. Or take this, which the book attributes to J. A. Hobson:

With existing plant and power, and natural resources, labor and managerial knowledge, the world could produce at least twice as much wealth per capita as it is actually producing, without undue strain upon human energy.

These productivity increases weren’t supposed to come from advanced technology—they were to come from better organization and “scientific management.” The Economy of Abundance was written by Stuart Chase, an economist who coined the term “New Deal.” Ultimately, Chase was arguing that capitalism was wasteful and inefficient, and that with centralized government control, the waste could be eliminated. He cited an earlier study of his that had found millions of workers’ worth of manpower wasted on inefficient production, on distribution, and on “vicious goods and services.” He suggested that “an Industrial General Staff” appointed by the President to direct the economy could double the standard of living.

So it’s not clear how much people actually expected a sixteen-hour work week or whatever. Some of them might have just been saying that productivity could be much higher, regardless of whether that turned into shorter working hours, higher wages, or a combination of both—and regardless of whether they saw that as a miracle of capitalism, or a condemnation of it.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/the-four-hour-workday-prediction

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Links and tweets

Progress Forum

• Building Fast and Slow Part III: Design of the World Trade Center (Brian Potter)

• Why pessimism sounds smart (a oldie by yours truly)

Announcements

• Foresight Institute has a spot for a J1 visa in San Francisco in 2023 (@allisondman)

Tweets

• One container ship carries more than the whole English fleet did 440 years ago. Also: “What, load boxes ashore and then load the boxes on the ship?”

• “A fully general argument against ever doing anything that changes anything, ever”

• Sometimes giving someone a book changes the course of their life

Retweets

• “We already have the tools to preserve brains fantastically well”

• So many of the world’s great infrastructure projects would be impossible today

• The 1930 campaign to stop people from listening to recorded music

• Who are some good, interesting, up-and-coming, not-yet-famous essayists/bloggers?

• ChatGPT can correct OCR errors in historical texts

• California court rules that economic growth as such is an environmental harm (!)

• A rapid combo test for covid, flu and RSV. Unfortunately illegal in the US