Having read all of the above, I think it is fair to say that this is a study about what these people "thought." Just because their thought involves some homegrown, personally-favored metrics, doesn't change the fact that this is a qualitative survey report.

I lot of management types really do not want to hear this. They don't like the idea of employees having 3 idle days to recover and reload on a long weekend. They don't understand that being happy(er) can actually improve productivity

I did read it, thus my comment. Did you actually read the methods? This is what you're defending:

"Methods This study took a qualitative approach, using semi-structured interviews with n=15 industry leaders" .. "Participants were identified via media reports " .. "A total of n=15 key informants participated in this study" .. "Recent research into appropriate sample sizes for qualitative research found saturation typically occurs between 9 and 17 interviews and the researchers agreed that no fresh insights or themes arose after the twelfth interview in this study (Hennink & Kaiser, 2022)"

The interviews contain invaluable insights such as: “adopting the 4DWW takes work” “Productivity up, waste removed” “Management -led/employee -driven,” “Train for leisure,”

I stand by my statement.

Well, yes, but the courses I've taken for the computer science portion of my degree feel much more like math or engineering than science; experimental/empirical verification of natural facts are hardly present.

I'm the one that said usually, Feynman didn't have that cop-out and he was specifically talking about social science:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo

Worth watching the clip so you can hear the argument directly. IMO his point is that peer review is not what makes something science. Nor are studies, publishing papers nor p-values, even gathering and reproducing data is not what makes science science.

House tax changes... strong yes

Share tax changes... ugh

My hope was cashed up bogans would start betting on shares instead of housing/crypto. At least it could be funnelled into something productive

The tax is already bad here, even without it. I paid $89,000 taxes just for the last financial year because stock gains are added up on top of the income and my partner doesn’t work and there’s no family support allowance here.

I can apply Australian citizenship next year but I will leave ASAP after becoming a citizen for Singapore, Dubai or Hong Kong where the tax is < 20%

As an Australian, I am not sure that most work done in this country adds to productivity

If you start a business and grow it from hard work, you will now be taxed more. It's not just passive gains, it's all gain.

You give away your bias when it is the other way around.

The H1B is a byproduct and a tool of corporate greed.

Is there not a connection between the two?

You'll have to spell out what you're suggesting here. "Think again" only works on LLMs, and then only sometimes.

I guess you had bad luck working for teams that worked long hours. But as another datapoint, I worked at Google for more than a decade around that time period, for several different teams. Google did have a lot of amenities and people would say that it was to keep you at work, but I didn't see much evidence of that. It didn't keep anyone I knew from going home when they wanted. Being single, I'd stay for dinner or even come in on a weekend to do my laundry. But some weekdays I'd either work from home or get in around 11. Or maybe go for a bike ride at lunch. Nobody kept track. I have little idea how many hours I worked, but there was plenty of time while waiting on compiles to check Memegen and Hacker News. It wasn't a high-stress job.

It's a big company, though, so other teams might be different.

The term '666 schedule' got nixed by marketing.

9a-9p 6 days a week

9AM to 9PM

It's a little bit snark, but I do think it would be an interesting experiment. Wish I had lots of money to try it out.

Billable hour rates would need to increase by 25%.

Agree. The problem is the incentivization. If a painter paints a roof in 5 hours but could do it in 1 hour just to get paid for the 5 hours its not the worker at fault but the system. If the painter got paid for the 5 hours but only did 1 hour of work then everyone wins. The painter can have more time off work or work more for more money, their choice.

Likewise the office worker working 40 hours per week, five days a week. If on some days the worker can come home early because they completed what actually needs to be done then that is better for the worker. But instead companies have a fixed 40 hours + overtime expectation. On the weeks with less work, people do busy work but instead could be using that time doing what they want.

Again the problem is the incentivization.

The actual problem is that workers want to make the most money possible with the least effort possible. Until we have a system where people do work that they want to do, perverse incentives will always be an issue.

Progress is a functioning of effort, time, and luck. It’s a marathon. Keep grinding. Success is proven possible.

> universal healthcare, 4 day work weeks, WFH where possible, walkable cities, and a lot more housing

My my, seems like we gots ourselves a socialist o’er here. We don’t take kindly to your kind ’round these parts. What’s yer idea? Improve folks lives? Treat others with respect and dignity and give e’ryone meaning? Are ya cuckoo in tha head? Git him, boys.

> Naive question but if it works best wouldn't companies that have a four day work week outperform theirs peers and because of that grow faster, and become more common?

Eventually, but what's the typical lifecycle of a company? And if e.g. Treehouse succeeds or fails, was that because of their 4 day work week or because of any of the hundreds of other reasons a company might succeed or fail?

In a perfect free market, like a spherical chicken in a vacuum. Maybe.

Problem is there's no such thing, monopoly powers, government subsidies, inter-company issues, contracts.

All these things can mean that a less functional, more wasteful and less productive organisation performs (in the sense of the metric that companies care about , line go up) better than a 4 day week startup.

In what metric do they get ahead? I think this is the key. What many visualise as getting ahead primarily seems to be fund raising or having a higher monetary value. Especially in startups where the largest mouth, the biggest blagger, or the quickest to mention a buzz word gets you more funding. Being closer to your end goal, with an adoptable product that improves society, is really the only metric that matters.

Think of it like a sprint versus a marathon. If you run at full speed you can get farther than someone keeping a steady pace in the same amount of time, but you’re going to tire yourself out and become slower. You’ll lose in the long run despite looking very “productive” at the start.

Similarly, have you ever been “in the zone” and worked non-stop on a fun project, being super-productive for a full week or even multiple weeks, but then “crashed” (or even burned out) and your output got worse?

New companies are on a race against the clock. At the beginning everything is a cost, you’re constantly losing money. So you plough through to survive until you become stable. Then you need to scale back and take it slower to allow yourself to recuperate and keep going.

Also, keep in mind that small companies can often be very productive simply by having fewer employees and “red tape”. You can have an idea, send a message to someone else, get an immediate OK and get going. When a company gets too big and has lots of processes to keep things running, a lot of effort is wasted on even getting started.

How does that differentiate from a boss or a company philosophy stating a 5 or 6 day week is better? With no reliable metric on better, other than ancedotal evidence. It's not as if it's repeatable experimentation.

As a fellow Australian, this is likely an early window on what the next 5 to 10 years will yield with our recent mass immigration. Economically speaking we could well see a race to the bottom in wages whilst we continue to experience exceptional housing pressure.

The car wash example is interesting, as something I’ve seen and experienced but never thought about in that way.

I wonder how it truly factors into productivity, though. How is productivity measured, and does that measurement capture what is true?

You mention automated car washes as a baseline. I never used those in the past because I figured they’d be rubbish or would scratch the car or whatever. So I’d occasionally wash the car myself, and that’s it. Now that we have manual car washes available, I use them from time to time. They clearly (I assert) do a better job than anything automated. And they do it inside and out.

So I find the comparison interesting, but in need of elaboration.

> Speaking as an Australian, our productivity has been lagging[1] compared to the US

Good.

Developed countries should not aim to emulate the US. To get the same productivity you’d have to lower the standard of living of all the employees to the same level as those in the US.

No. Don’t do it.

Quality of life matters much more than profits.

So then all the productivity improvements are nothing more than boosting the hashrate of your crypto miner? You have to do it to not fall behind, but once everyone has done it, we all end up back in the same spot where we started?

Not if that country also legislates heavy penalties for companies that produce their goods in countries with worse labor laws.

Hey, if fuel gets expensive enough this will be much less of a problem! Let's all thank Trump and Iran for their great work on bringing the four day work week closer to fruition. This isn't how I would've imagined bringing industry back to the States, but it's a promise made, promise kept.

This has the same energy as "if we tax the billionaires, they'll leave". That statement and yours are wrong. Why? Because if it was profitable, they would've done it already. Pretty much any employer would use you as fertilizer if there was an uptick in the stock price.

But let's say it's true. Great. Punish them with tariffs. They also have diminished political power because they're no longer a local employer.

We are colletively at a breaking point as a society where people legitimately can't afford to exist in a society that will soon mint its first trillionaire. This is beyond even French revolution levels of wealth inequality.

Did you know that public market shareholders almost always vote for stock buybacks

An employee-owned co-op results in extremely high risk concentration. If your co-op experiences a downturn, you are likely to lose your job and see the value of your share of the co-op decrease.

There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell

You still need free market economics. If consumers have enough choices then the company with comfortable employees that refuse to invest profits into their operation will lose to the better organized competitor prioritizing a balance between the two.

Trillions of dollars spend on wars which don't need to exist doesn't help.

> A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer?

I thought about this a lot. Some of it is expectation wrapped up in the American Dream. You work hard, and get those rewards. But that isn’t true because life isn’t fair and capitalism isn’t particularly humane or ethical.

Some of it is perceived. The people who strike gold without hard work expect to keep striking more gold, and when the yield shrinks you’re appalled because that’s not how things should be.

US is a deeply individualistic society, now more so than ever. We don’t always sacrifice for the common good, because they’re supposed to work hard just like me.

Anyway if you read all that, thank you.

Depends what your comparison is. Are you comparing with the EU, China or Ethiopia?

Seems to me, the question is more why all that supposed prosperity doesn't translate to the living quality improvements one would expect.

on the whole, most americans are not being compensated for the amount of value their work produces

But, if there exist poorer countries, why is there a five-day work week instead of a seven-day one? Why aren't we all just working 24/7?

This is absurdly ahistorical. Corporations take as much as they can. If there were no law limiting work to 40 hours / week, they would demand far more - as they had before massive workers' protests forced the current limits.

How did the 40-hour workweek come about?

(Certainly not "naturally")

> it's worth considering why it hasn't totally taken over "naturally".

Because is advantageous for employers to keep workers as close to the brink of burnout as possible as a method of control

You can ask that question in the opposite way too: Why does the weekend still exist? Why aren't people working 24/7?

Labor has been completely defeated in the US. Capital sets the terms and has captured the political class. You know this but are using deflection to put blame on individuals who don’t actually hold power. Management can offshore anytime workers present a challenge.

I like to feel that I'm spending my time productively, yeah. Not all of my time, mind you. People generally like to feel their work impacting their environment. Many consider it the most fulfilling part of their lives. Working purely for compensation is a great way to kill most positive energy for a solid half of your waking hours most days. People react differently, of course. For some the knowledge that they're making money alone provides the psychological reward, others find enjoyment in the moment-to-moment of things, even if they're not part of a meaningful goal, and yet others offset the meaninglessness of their work with a fulfilling home life or hobbies.

On the whole though, I'd say yes, people do care about productivity so long as they feel it's connected to their world and oriented in the right-ish direction.

As long as they feel growth of productivity results to increase in their standard of living then why not?

a good number do, I've been surprised by how many low level fast food managers actually care about how well the store's performing due to owner pressure despite seeing little to no wage improvement regardless

I wonder what would happen to costs if we had a 90%+ tax rate on the ultra wealthy... maybe if all these record profits were instead funneled back into society everyone would be better off AND prices would drop... a system like this would be good for society it seems... we should come up with a good name for that system, tho...

Prices are already obscene, and we’re all being ripped off.

I’d much rather pay the prices corrected-for-supporting-livelihoods, than the artificially inflated prices used to line the pockets of the rich.

>> Prices will increase a lot.

Citation needed. Very little of what we buy today as a consumer are commodities whose price is determined primarily by the cost of production — and even then labor costs are rarely the most significant cost.

Most things we buy are priced according to what the consumer is willing to pay for it, and the balance sheet of the companies that sell most of the things we buy show there’s a lot of wiggle room there.

You should hire people to cover those hours outside of the 9-5 then. Or do you expect your employees to slave away for your benefit without getting anything but the bare minimum from you?

I'd pretty happily work e.g. a 4-day work week for the QoL of 20 years ago - but I can't actually do so, it's not a option with most employers.