d-squared wrote:
> but one argument that I
> always think ought to get more traction is that
> capitalism has singularly failed to shorten the working
> day. A lot of people intuitively realise that there is
> something wrong here; we were promised robot slaves and
> unlimited leisure time in the comic books, and now the
> space age is here and we're still working like dogs.
Broken record, here. Yes, it's uncanny how the argument doesn't get more
traction. I mentioned yesterday in a post on this thread that a reduction of
U.S. annual hours to approximately European standards could be expected to
generate (or preserve) around 10 million jobs, the same number John Kerry
claims (with less supporting argument) his economic policies would produce
in four years. Kerry's 10 million estimate comes from a memo from Lawrence
Katz who projects that number from the lowering of the unemployment rate to
4.1%. Sounds to me like a tautology: if the unemployment rate drops while
the labour force grows, jobs will be created. That's right up there with
Calvin Coolidge's "When a great many people are unable to find work,
unemployment results."
That same Katz commented some years ago on a Brookings Institute paper about
hours reduction as work sharing. He made a number of sensible background
points but his main point and emphasis was utterly unsubstantiated. He even
produced a pseudo-algebraic 'model' ("the best case scenario for advocates
of work-sharing") that only pertains if one assumes that the given hours of
work are optimal for maximizing output, a condition that has been clearly
demonstrated to be contrary to theory. And, of course, he just had to frame
his discussion with a recital of the "lump-of-output fallacy," Richard
Layard's lame attempt to lend greater terminological precision to the
utterly fraudulent claim of a "lump-of-labour fallacy".
The bottom line for Katz was the conclusion that "there are a number of good
reasons to believe that mandated work-sharing is unlikely to produce much of
a reduction in unemployment." One of those "good reasons" being his
theoretically bankrupt model and the other being the allegedly fallacious
assumption "implicit" in arguments for work-sharing. That, I'm afraid is
what passes for the conventional wisdom in economics on the hours of labour.
Tom Walker
