Rings true in software. Adding interfaces between people hugely complicates things, so you have strong incentives to get as much done by individual people as possible.

But we don't bill by the hour. And we also don't do per-job work. And we also don't have a cartel protecting our jobs (Why isn't paper-shuffling done by paralegals? Does 3 years of law school plus the bar really help?)

There's also the question of if you (or me, or one) were to work 6 hour days rather than 10 hour days, if it's the blogging or the work that would get cut out. I'm not sure what the answer is.

This issue got a lot of discussion a couple of years ago when EA_Spouse put up her LiveJournal. This article discusses precisely why Galt's assumption is utter bullshit.

My experience definitely agrees with you on this one. The only people I've known who really needed long days to be productive were those working lab jobs or simulations, things that are less intensive but take lots of time, and they'll just twiddle their thumbs for half of the 11-hour day.

The analysts at I-banks and young lawyers I know work the long hours for the same reason you do, it's just expected. They will go into work and read for a few hours until some work gets tossed at them shortly after noon, and then they'll work until 8 on it.

If it weren't for billable hours or expectations of late hours, I bet that nearly every professional could get their work done in 40-50 hours a week on average.

Isn't there some research on the effects of long hours on productivity in cognitively demanding professions? As I remember it, the gist is that productivity/hour drops off pretty quickly, for just the reasons you'd expect. But I don't have the details at my fingertips.

There are all sorts of paper-shuffling, and where the line is between paralegal work and lawyer work changes firm by firm. One factor is that there's some easy, boring stuff that's so important that you want it done by someone who has malpractice liability, or a license to lose.

I think your assessment is good.

You don't talk about competition: there are situations where putting in the extra effort will win you the job.

But on the whole, and with exceptions, developed countries are moving towards shorter hours. Productivity gain, as a concept, would seem to point firmly in that direction, so why the surprise?

I think there's a black humour about productivity which stems from the lack of ways of measuring it in a typical office environment. When you know how to use a tool effectively, no one knows. Or you could be struggling with a new tool; and no one knows.

5 to 1.

I think Galt is insane to suggest that one person working 80 hours is more efficient than two people working 40. It might be true for some people that one person working 40 hours gest more done than two people working 40 (so claim many programmers, I believe), but that's an entirely different claim. There's such a thing as diminishing return w/r/t time investment.

I was gonna link EA spouse too.

Conventional wisdom among programmers, at least, is that there's a point beyond which working extra hours is counterproductive; if you write bad code up front you pay for it later. (i've seen studies cited--second- or third-hand--that set the figure around 50 hours/wk.)

Also, anything that takes creativity (broadly defined) requires downtime; the brain needs to fill up with stuff again.

on preview: multiply-pwned. Coordination is always a problem, as is just wanting to do everything yourself.

When doing proper full-on philosophy actual hours spent, for me, are largely irrelevant. Most of that stuff comes when I'm not specifically trying. I'll be doing something else, and it'll just happen -- I'll get an idea or two things I hadn't connected before will suddenly appear linked, etc.

I do need to put in the hours of reading but there's a limit to how much of that I can do in a day before it all starts to blur into nonsense.

The actual writing up is just donkey-work and while it's time consuming and requires concentration, it's secondary to the real work.

I'd be surprised if doubling the amount of time I spent 'working' on philosophy would actually increase the amount of good stuff that comes out by much at all. I'd get more done with a bit more reading, for certain, but doubling it? No way.

I agree with you as I commented on her blog. I see a lot of claims about high paying jobs which require 80 hour work weeks and I think they are 90% bs.

Yeah. What puzzles me about the assumption that intellectually challenging jobs innately require long hours is that it seems to be new in the last couple of decades -- I don't think it was conventional wisdom in, say, the first half of the twentieth century that a lawyer would expect to work over an eight-hour day. And lawyering hasn't changed, except insofar as computers have made it less laborious.

Oh. I think that one person 80 will almost always be less productive than two working 40, except that there can easily be cases where person A working 80 will get more done than B and C both working 40, but you can't hire more of A. I think that my most recent experience is of this type of situation (3 people working 80+ did what might have taken 15 or 20 doing their jobs for 40 hours a week, but there would have been no way to get those 15 or 20 together in time. And I was most certainly not one of those 3).

Also, just because one person working 80 will get more done than two working 40 doesn't mean that one working 50 won't get more done than two working 30.

It's the same in the science/analysis/software rackets. After a certain number of hours in any one day you can bet on wasting even more time the next correcting the goofs.

As I understand it, at the salaried level in say, IT work, the long hours are largely driven by HR avoiding benefits packages for new employees, and in some states, difficult to get rid of ones. Particularly if you don't have a constant need. Commercial sciences seem to be about the same.

Following Jakes comment ... the optimal thing from a corporate point of view here is identify persons A, hire only them, and work them as many hours as you can.

Academics is tied up with the tenure game, which is slightly different.

Isn't it likely that at least in the higher paying type jobs the long hours expected are an attempt by the firm/ partners or whatever to get their "money's worth" out of these individuals. In my experience I worry when someone spends long hours at a task, barring a deadline.

16: Yes. Hiring people is a pain in the ass, especially when the company is very small, and one person who sucks can end up having a large negative effect. Much more tempting for everyone involved to just work a little harder.

And especially when people are compensated by salary and equity, and the company is small enough that people perceive a bigger potential gain to their share of equity than the extra effort they put in.

13 I think a lot of this is propaganda trying to justify high salaries.

17: Among the (very young) people I know in those hour-intensive jobs, it seems to vary a lot. The consultants I know work pretty long hours on the job mostly because they're given a big task and not much time at the hiring firm's HQ to accomplish it. They cram a busy work week into 4 days, so long hours are par for the course.

The investment banking guys honestly seem to view the hours as a hazing ritual. That's the only rationale I could really imagine for it. They certainly weren't working that whole time.

20, 21: Yeah, and for law firms lowering efficiency with the same number of salaries to pay is a plus, what with the way billing works.

19: that's the startup dynamic, yes. But there is hiring resistance in much larger companies too....

the `hazing' thing is part of what's going on with physicians, too.

22: in that sense the lawyers are sort of backward to say, a tech startup.

hazing

Isn't this part of how people in those professions justify their salaries?

Put me down as part of the chorus saying that mistakes multiply quickly once you get beyond a 8 hour day.

I will also say, and this may be peculiar to my experience, that it takes me longer to recover from job stress than I expect.

I worked really hard this summer (for a variety of reason) -- only about 45-50 hours a week, but working full speed doing chalenging work constantly and, once I got a chance to slow down, I was just dead tired constantly for the months of September-November.

I am just now starting to lose the constant feeling of waking through my life thinkig, "I am not a functioning human being right now." I'm not back to full strength yet, but I'm doing a lot better than I was.

Now, I may be particularly prone to that sort of fatigue, partially because when I am working hard I don't have a lot in my life to pull me away from work, so it is possible to really overdo it. But when I look around the world, I think a lot of people are doing their jobs in a state of moderate to severe burn-out because of lack of recovery time in their jobs, and it seems horribly inefficient to me.

Regarding the update, I think this reflects a change in social mores. Working long hours has become a status symbol in a way, a sign of an important high paying job. So while in a previous time rich people might pretend not to work hard when in fact they did, now rich people may pretend to work hard when in fact they don't. This also serves as justification for class disparities, see for example articles claiming Paris Hilton actually works very hard at being Paris Hilton.

There have been other changes in social mores, for example parents seem to be expected to be much more involved in every detail of their children's lives.

I think 22 is the phenomena involved. Law firms in some circumstances, like big litigations, can just bill out the junk hours.

In patent prosecution you really can't bill out junk hours as much so there is a lot less pressure to do such crazy hours and there is more emphasis on efficiency. It also has pretty neatly divisible chunks of work.

In any case, law firms make more profit on one person billing 2x hours than on two persons billing x hours due to the fixed costs involved in things like rent.

Plus training one new attorney is easier than training two new attorneys.

I do hear stories about programmers that are 10x productive over normal programmers, but the moral of these stories tend to be that you need to stock the kitchen with plenty of tasty freetos rather than that you need to pay these people 6-7 times normal programmers. Which would be weird if the salary market is anywhere near an ideal free market.

Last year, I worked at a gov't job and did a lot of side human rights research. I am now working what I think is more hours than I did at BOTH those things combined, and accomplishing less worthwile than EITHER of them. ("Accomplishing less" is not quite apples to apples but my firm perceives itself as being a human rights type firm.)

I wonder how efficient the hierarchical structure of firms are. I pulled some late nights researching and working on the complaint for a potential case that we ended up not bringing--I could have told my boss we shouldn't file that case the day I started. But it would have been impolitic, so I had to be much more subtle than that and stay up until 2 am multiple nights doing research that I knew wasn't going to lead anywhere. The main contribution I've made since I've been here is a bit of research I did on a complete whim because I felt like it one evening.

Hiring smart people with fancy degrees and paying them very very well so you can treat them like pieces of luggage seems like a bizarre way to do business. But I guess it works--for the firms, at any rate--or it wouldn't be the universal model.

Anyway, I am putting my productive surplus to good use: I have finally pulled ahead of the Unfogged Reading Group. Anyone up for a discussion of Section 14?

Also, there's a flip side to the training thing--crazier hours means higher turnover.

"But I guess it works--for the firms, at any rate--or it wouldn't be the universal model."

That assumes that we work in a free market where efficiency is rewarded. I'm not entirely sure that's obviously true. There are all kinds of other factors involved -- inertia, corporate culture, etc -- that might mitigate against it.

I've been in many jobs, indeed most of my paid (non-academic) jobs, where I could genuinely do most of my work (well) in a couple of hours a day. In most places of employment it's not easy to admit to that. Corporate culture doesn't work that way.

Also, there's a flip side to the training thing--crazier hours means higher turnover.

It's almost as if treating your employees like trash is some form of false economizing.

30: why don't you go back? I assume that you're getting paid more, and assume that the partners are making more money off of you than the government was which is why they're paying you more, but...

29: Tasty freetos help. But not as much as being able to work on what you want to (preferably something interesting), feeling like your contribution makes a noticeable difference in something, and not getting hassled by your boss. Also, equity.

There's a few things going on here. One is a perverse mentality by the business class in this country that seems to be offended by the idea of a worker having a reasonably prosperous existence with a 40 hour workweek.

But another driving force here is benefits, particularly health care. By setting up a system where the providing of health insurance and other benefits has been put on businesses, you give them a significant economic incentive to work the the hell out of existing employees, particularly salaried ones and others that don't qualify for overtime. Check out the average cost of a decent health plan per employee, it's nuts. One 80 hour a week employee is often much cheaper than two 40 hour employees. Nationalization of health care in this country would be a significant step towards remedying this.

Coming in very late, I do not agree with the conclusion in the update that it is just not true that there is any reason for professionals to work long hours. I think the first paragraph in comment 1 presents a common experience in terms of my practice. Of course, this does not mean that after a certain point, your efficiency drops off, but it becomes a question of trading off the inefficiencies.

A simple example is writing a brief. When I worked at a big firm, different associates often would be assigned different parts of a brief to research and write. However, laid on top of that was another process of senior associate integration of the parts and then partner revision of the whole. At my current firm, usually, I ask an associate to research relevant points of law and give me a stack of highlighted, marked cases, and I write the whole brief. It saves a huge amount of time (but thus makes us much less money, alas) if I write the whole thing, because the brief has to stand together as an integrated whole--stylistically, thematically and legally.

There is an economic impact to this, of course. Life would be nicer if I nonetheless was in the office only eight hours a day. However, if another lawyer will do the same quality work for less because he is being slightly more efficient, given the high cost of legal services, they are going to go to him or her. So, to compete, I do what everyone else does.

Now, that is not to say that there are not other reasons for the long hours, including the ones cited above (instutional expectations, firm economics etc.). On the economics point, typical firms have a strong financial incentive to work associates long hours because associates do not get overtime, so once you have recovered their fixed costs, it is almost all profit. However, as I note above, I do not think this economic incentive explains everything about hours lawyers, in particular, work.

16 and 36 : Absolutely the case in my organization. The loaded cost of a full time employee is crazy high (good benefits). My employer makes every effort to avoid hiring new. A constant pressure to push tasks down to lower levels (perceived dumb tasks) and make us top level support folks do more (work smarter, not harder!).

Don't law firms also benefit if associates quit shortly before making partner due to burnout, as that way the existing partners don't have to give them a share of the money?

It's possible that most associates simply think that the salary, the status, the possibility of being a partner one day, etc. are worth it and that if they could work half the hours at half the salary, they wouldn't. I can honestly say that I would take a 50% pay cut in a heartbeat for a sane schedule but I'm married, I went to a law school with a generous loan forgiveness program, and I've always been a hippie.

35: it was a one year clerkship (not a true clerkship--an immigration court) and it wasn't in the city where my husband lives....We graduated from school at the same time and law jobs hire first.

This job theoretically allows me to do human rights work and live in Chicago, which is an extremely rare combination. In practice...last week I slept in Philadelphia Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, San Juan Tuesday, Washington Wednesday, Little Rock Thursday. I was in Chicago Friday and Saturday night but probably won't be back until after new year's. (This is partially my choice--my extended family is in NY and I'm going there for the holidays.)

Don't law firms also benefit if associates quit shortly before making partner due to burnout, as that way the existing partners don't have to give them a share of the money?

I suspect for most big firms (at least in New York) this is not a consideration. They simply tell the people who do not make partner to go find another job. In big firm life here, there is no particular expectation that you will get to stay.

The health care thing is definitely a good point....

Payroll taxes would also max out at 85,000, so they'd be sig. higher for two employees at 60,000 rather than one employee at 120,000. Or am I remembering that wrong?

42 - Correct re: payroll taxes.

Gswift's right about benefits, and yeah, it's become part of the justification for salaries. But I think the justification is itself a symptom. It seems to me that the pressure on professionals to work longer hours, harder, started happening in the 80s. And I wonder if, like the backlash against public school spending post integration, the long work hour thing might not be a reaction to women and brown people starting to enter the professional workforce. Maybe it's a supply and demand thing--more potential workers means employers can demand more--or maybe it's a more insidious attempt to raise the bar higher and keep the upstarts out, or maybe it's just professional (men) themselves feeling anxious about more competition and therefore working longer hours to try to stay on top.

As to 1 and 37, I'm dubious. I'm sure everyone here has read the same things I have about the guy in software developing whose come up with this group programming thing, where people work together to solve problems rather than doing so individually. According to what I've read, the resulting software is less buggy, at least, b/c ppl can catch other ppl's errors. In higher ed, too, there's a decent amount of research on group learning, and I've done some of it in my classroom: it can be really effective in getting students to be more independent from the teacher and come up with results that are much better than they'd be able to do on their own. So I'm kinda dubious about the lone wolf theory of worker productivity.

Where is Bitch, Ph D? the world wonders, full stop.

One of my new-lawyer buddies said that there were a non-trivial number of students in his class who, if given the chance between two jobs that were identical in every way, except one required billing 1900 hours a year and one required billing 2200, would take the latter.

This seems ludicrous to me, but people clearly have an inflated view of how likely good things are to happen to them, so if one firm says "partners here make $10M a year!" and another says "partners here make $1M a year!", even if you aren't actually going to make partner at either one, you might think you will and so the first will seem a lot more attractive.

44: I'd never thought about it that way but it makes some sense.

Though, I think NYC law firms (to judge by my father in law's experience) and residencies haven't changed all that much.

I don't really buy the "it's more efficient because you know more theory." The people who work the longest hours are those with the least experience and expertise. The lesson of the past couple years for me has been that recent law school graduates are, as far as potential employers are concerned, fungible.

44: people are always coming up with new revolutionary software development methods. And they always seem to work at first, due to some effect who's name I can't remember, where trying anything new has a benefit, because it's something new. They almost all fall by the wayside.

The people who work the longest hours are those with the least experience and expertise.

That is the conventional wisdom. I am not sure it actually is true at a lot of big firms. The last firm I was at was nortorious for having hard working associates, but I am given to understand that it is true almost all years that the average number of hours billed per year was higher for partners than it was for associates. I have heard this from partners at other firms, too. Of course, the partners got to do more interesting stuff, and more stuff they could do at home. Being a partner (albeit in a small firm) now, this rings true to me.

49: Actually, thinking about actual law partners I know, this makes some sense. They're the ones who didn't leave after a year or two, after all. More interesting work, more ability to work from home, and being able to control your own time would all be important.

More interesting work, more ability to work from home, and being able to control your own time would all be important.

This makes a big difference. It's still work, but somehow reviewing a brief or a depostion outline sitting on the deck of your beach house sounds a bit more bearable (sadly, small firm partners do not have beach houses--heck, I do not even have have a picnic table in my back yard--but I do have flexibility in when/where I work).

Not to mention the ability to pass any unpleasant task off to an underling.

Not to mention the ability to pass any unpleasant task off to an underling.

Not as true as I would like, but certainly there's some of that.

Of course, when you make partner, you will find that the more senior partners still include you in the underling category, so there is no shortage of stuff rolling downhill.

I wonder if one place where the market breaks down is that employers' representations about work hours, travel, the type of work you'll be doing etc. during job interviews are about as likely as not to be false or misleading, whereas their representations about salary are seen as more definite and more binding. Even if you would make 2/3 of the salary for 2/3 of the hours, at the time of the interview the 2/3 of the salary is a sure thing, whereas the 2/3 of the hours is anything but.

Even if you would make 2/3 of the salary for 2/3 of the hours, at the time of the interview the 2/3 of the salary is a sure thing, whereas the 2/3 of the hours is anything but.

Certainly true.

54,55: That's very true. I knew a guy who was a very employable technical programmer who solved this by working 6mo at a stretch. 50% for 50% pay works out that way.

44: I can imagine that it might be more efficient for one person to write an essay or a brief in one go and have other people proofread, rather than have everyone do separate pieces and then try to knit them together. And I can see that being true of some stretches of programming. Maybe not the whole project, but there are certain times where more input would just mean more people getting in the way.

On the other hand, if I could form a group to write my dissertation, I might actually get stuff done.

Maybe that could be our Collective Action Project.

Yes, benefits are big. Small firms are starting to not offer them. Big ones do, but they act as if they are acutely aware that every hour you are asleep (or, say, blowing snot bubble with your kids), you are costing them money. And it's true - you are.

Universal health care!

Law firms that bill clients by the hour and pay associates by the year have an enormous incentive to work the young ones to the breaking point. The firm bills every hour at the same rate, but pays almost nothing on the margin after a point (there is a negligible increase in bonuses perhaps). Hours 60-80 are by for the most productive for the firm's profit margin.

I've said it before, if you want to get paid like a defense lawyer or better and work like a human being, foin the plaintiffs' bar.

Note: enforcement of federal of overtime laws inside law firms would also make overtime go away.

61: make overtime go away from law firms, or from federal law? Or both?

I talked with Mom about this very subject not long ago, reflecting on changes in expectations during Dad's decades of employment - that's from his war-delayed Caltech graduation in 1946 through to retirement in the '80s. She recalls first noticing the sustained push for more hours as a general thing during the '60s, and comments that the most enthusiastic boosters of it tended to be the hard-core political conservatives, particularly evangelical and Mormon. She associates it with the Goldwater-triggered movement conservatism.

If associates were paid time and a half for hours over 40, their jobs would be split up and they would not be expected to work more than 40 hours.

The Mormon work ethic is what made America great.

Also, it's much easier to do work away from the office now, what with the internet and laptops that contain the contents of 1 billion briefcases. This leads to people expecting themselves and each other to do some catching up at home. This leads to people thinking "Well I might as well stay here at the office and catch up on stuff, if I go home people won't realize how hard I'm working."

It's all crazy and better suited to a person like myself who is trying to get a PhD as soon as possible than a person who expects to hold their current job for 2-3 more decades.

Jake at 48: And they always seem to work at first, due to some effect who's name I can't remember, where trying anything new has a benefit, because it's something new.

I think you mean the Hawthorne effect.

Count me with Idealist. There are strong reasons to think 80 hours of one person might be better than 40 hours from two people:

1. Sharing information/coordination is a hassle
2. There are never enough good people
3. Sole ownership -- both of work and of client relationships -- has value
4. Experience itself builds competence

I have worked in a number of professional industries, and in all I have seen the following factors result in higher working hours. Coordination is a major cost, you never have enough top performers, and having one superstar own a process/job/client often yields goods results. You're better off paying that guy/gal more and having him/her work more. If you are doing a complex corpoate deal, you really don't want to have to explain the details to two different lawyers. You want one lawyer owning the whole thing.

Now there has also been, I think, a change in social norms whereby the 12-14 hour work day has become a professional services norm. And no doubt this norm creates a kind of network externality as a result of which it is rare to take the time to build systems or work pratices in which two forty hour people would be better substitutes for one eighty hour person. That said, it seems to me that the practice of maximizing hours from knowledge workers has a lot of economic rationale behind it.

Now there has also been, I think, a change in social norms whereby the 12-14 hour work day has become a professional services norm

And you advised me to get a real job.

the 12-14 hour work day

For a salaried employee, this should be considered worker abuse.

I don't buy it. It's not just fatigue--there's also a definite drop off in morale, which is a different problem but also a real problem. (How I react to crazy hours depends on why I'm working the crazy hours. If it's because there is a job that genuinely needs doing and it genuinely has to be me that does it, I handle it much better than if I'm spinning my wheels because it's expected that I will put in long hours, or because there's a self-inflicted crisis.)

This, more than anything else that's happened, makes me seriously wish I was born in another country.

68:
It's still good advice, B-Wo! Lots of academics I know work that hard. And many professionals do not. The whole point of the professional services is to parlay them into a better gig in industry.
69:
But we aren't talking about salaried workers, are we?

(This expectation of working 12-14 days for an interesting professional job, that is.)

I can't say what you're speaking of, but I'm talking about salaried employees, as opposed to ones paid hourly.

But we aren't talking about salaried workers, are we?

We aren't? That's what law associates and software engineers are. I'm confused.

Hi.

Sorry, my mistake, Apostropher. I completely flipped the sign on your statement, and read you as refering to hourly employees.

That sad error acknowledged, I am unsure why a a 12 hour day is abuse. Is it abuse for a lawyer paid 125k?

Personally I think my incremental production going from a 60 hour work week to 80 would be small or even negative. So the advantages to the firm are questionable. Now perhaps law firms don't care how good the work is if they can bill the hours. But why do clients put up with this? If I were a client I would refuse to pay full rate for anyone billing over 60 hours a week (perhaps with some exception for the genuine short term emergency situation). Do any clients do this? I have only heard of clients objecting to obvious fraud or error (such as more than 168 hours a week).

Is it abuse for a lawyer paid 125k?

I don't know what apo will say, but as for me... hell yes it's abuse. It's made a bit more tolerable by the fact that the lawyer's getting 125k, but I've known too many miserable people in that situation to think it's okay. There's a reason people go to smaller firms or get a job as corporate counsel.

The one situation in which I can see 12-hour days being okay is if it's truly the employee's choice. There have certainly been times at work where I've gotten deep enough into what I've been doing, and been enjoying it enough, that I've been happy to keep at it for as long as I can. But IME those situations are rare.

If I were a client I would refuse to pay full rate for anyone billing over 60 hours a week

That presumes that all of the attorney's hours are going to get billed to a single client. That's not always the case.

Even if you're really into it and want to keep working, you're under a moral obligation to stop at 8 hours, else you'll just create the expectation for more.

I, of course, think it's absurd that an 8-hour workday has been reinterpreted to mean 8 to 5, instead of 9 to 5. Eight to 5 is nine hours, people! (I have already taken into account and discounted the predictable response.)

Eight to 5 is nine hours, people!

Not in base 5.

12 hour days. Jesus. It's pretty hard to imagine a job where I'd be ok with that kind of workload. Maybe if I was auditioning fluffers or something.

81 simply doesn't make sense.

1. Can something that that is chosen in the absence of coercion by someone in the top 1% of all people who have ever lived in terms of wealth, edcation, and liberty count as abuse? I guess, technically, yes. But I would the default answer to be a strong negative.
2. A 12 hour day is just not that bad! For a single person, or a person without kids, a 12 hour day can be done standing on your head. Whether it's a great plan for a 2 year stretch, or a life plan I myself would choose is another matter. Almost everyone I know spent their 20s working frequent, frequent 12 hour days. None seem much scarred.

79 No, it could be part of the agreement with the law firm. Of course the law firm could lie but I think most would be reluctant to commit outright fraud which would be clearly documented in their own records.

84.1 simply doesn't make sense.

I've put in 80-100 hour weeks before when a project was hitting crunch time, but I jolly well got paid a bonus for it or got comp time off once the deadline was met. I also happen to work for a very good (family-owned) company that respects the fact that people have families and those should be more important than your job. We already get markedly less vacation time in America than most other first-world countries; working longer days in addition to that is abuse in my book.

Look, assuming eight hours of sleep, half of your waking hours is enough time to spend at work. For an employer to expect more than that without additional compensation is just wrong.

assuming eight hours of sleep

This from teh hero (who gets it exactly right, by the by).

Almost everyone I know spent their 20s working frequent, frequent 12 hour days.

Sounds like a fun crowd.

We all own two cars, but the Europeans are taking 5 and 6 weeks of vacation a year. What a bunch of suckers we are.

84 Were these people actually working 12 hour days or just pretending to work 12 hour days? Note reading unfogged does not count as working.

Can something that that is chosen in the absence of coercion by someone in the top 1% of all people who have ever lived in terms of wealth, edcation, and liberty count as abuse?

A) Coercion is not a binary thing.
B) By your definition, fraternity pledges choose in the absence of coercion to undergo hazing. Does that mean that hazing can't rise to the level of abuse?

Almost everyone I know spent their 20s working frequent, frequent 12 hour days. None seem much scarred.

And I know people who were made completely miserable by it. Yay, our anecdotes cancel out.

Almost everyone I know spent their 20s working frequent, frequent 12 hour days. None seem much scarred.

Scarring isn't the appropriate yardstick here, baa.

I think the term "abuse" is going to derail us. I would just say that a culture in which 12-hour work days are normal is one in which the work/life balance is regrettably out of whack.

I think the term "abuse" is going to derail us.

You're right. We should call it "torture" instead.

reading unfogged does not count as working.

Though it sure can seem like it at times.

The problem (one of the problems) is that there really are people who enjoy working 12-14 hours aday. When you have enough of those people in the labor pool, well, the rest of us are kind of screwed.

Even if you were just reading unfogged, the very fact of having to be in the office pretending to work instead of, say, making dinner or sitting indoors reading scotch and drinking Dickens (iykwim) is offensive. It's offensive. I'm offended.

I spent almost all day in my room, of course, reading unfogged and pretending to work. Wait, that's a total lie; I didn't get up until around ten and then I went shopping and I spent a lot of time in the kitchen too*. Nevermind.

*You'd better believe that a side-product of dinner was some tasty-smelling beef broth strained into pure clarified nerdvana.

People who enjoy working 12-14 hour days have the work/life balance regrettably out of whack.

Some subset of them might not, but I'd be willing to stick with a lightly modified version of the above claim.

People who enjoy working 12-14 hour days have the work/life balance regrettably out of whack.

I don't know if I'd go that far. There's at least one person I work with who regularly works 6 to 6. But I'm pretty sure he'd be doing what he does even if he were making 1/10th what he makes. He just loves it, as much as anyone might love reading Dickens. And he's a happy guy.

What a bunch of suckers we are.

Honest to god, this isn't going to change unless people start making a fuss about it at work. And very few people are willing to do that.

The latest stunt I've run into in the "eight hour day" is at the federal contracting outfit where my girlfriend started recently. They're all about the billable hours, and track in 6-minute (1/10 hour) increments. However, they have company meetings which are officially off the clock - not billed to overhead, but just time you have to make up elsewhere in the day or week. The culture is such that it's possible to not show up, but it's definitely frowned upon, and probably not a good move for someone who wants to move up in the organization.

How does 84.1 not make sense? If we want to say that Yale law grads are being abused, then this word means something different from what I thought it meant. That is all.

Re 90: this is a fair point. Few people in the office for 12 hours work 12 hours. But then few people in the office 8 hours work 8 hours.

Re 87: I jolly well got paid a bonus for it or got comp time off once the deadline was met. Why not just recognize that this will periodically be part of the job and assign a salary accordingly? Or have advancement to the next level or the end of the year bonus map on to 'above-and-beyondness.' I get ther sense that these things are happening in to most of the people McCardle is talking about, (who are, usually, in highly paid, or otherwise desireable jobs)

91: Thank you for finding the limit case. I would concur that frat hazing is abusive. Do you think a 25 year old Yale law school grad making 125k as base salary and working 80 hours is abused? I think such a person might be abused, but the 80 hours would not factor into this determination. Would they be abused at 40 hours and 62K? I think it's just fine to choose 80 hours and 125k instead of 40 hours and 62k.

96: However, if we brought back the 40-hour work week and somehow reinternalized the idea that people should go the fuck home at 5 or 6 (which wouldn't be that hard; most people would prefer to do that, after all), then the rare few who are obsessive and want to work 12 hour days would go home and do whatever it is--programming, reading in their field--in their free time.

It used to be called "hobbies," I think.

102 seems to me to be a massive rationalization. Given that in a lot of urban areas, the median cost of a house is over 500k, it's a bit much to suggest that the decision to work 80 hours for 125k is a free choice. The difference between 125 and 62, in a lot of markets, is the difference between having a modicum of economic security (e.g., what if your partner gets sick or laid off?), and having none.

The idea that 40 hours/62k is equal in kind to, and different only in amount from, 80 hours/125k baffles me. (Why not 160 hours/250k? Sleep one hour a week and two on Sundays!)

I'd take the former over the latter any day.

Er, one hour a day and two on Sundays.

105: Oh, absolutely. But the thing is that 62k in, say, the greater LA area just isn't going to give you economic security. If you have a partner, and they too are making 62k, then you seem secure, sure: but if one of you gets sick or laid off, then you're fucked.

Do you think a 25 year old Yale law school grad making 125k as base salary and working 80 hours is abused?

The salary isn't the point. The percentage of one's life one is expected to devote to an employer is.

Do you think a 25 year old Yale law school grad making 125k as base salary and working 80 hours is abused?

Probably, yes. Is it the worst abuse I can imagine? No. You seem to want to make this a binary choice, but it's not.

I think such a person might be abused, but the 80 hours would not factor into this determination.

Why not?

I think it's just fine to choose 80 hours and 125k instead of 40 hours and 62k.

I submit that the majority of people who get themselves into the 80-hour/125k salary jobs have no fucking clue what they're in for when they sign up, and that once they're in characterizing their decision to stay as a fully free choice is... incomplete.

I walked away from a large salary offer because of this expectation (80+ hour weeks). `Best' isn't an easy balance to find in this job market. Lot's of people told me I was crazy (I went back to school, instead --- cutting my income to about 1/5th).

"Lot's" ??? I must be tired.

Honest to god, this isn't going to change unless people start making a fuss about it at work. And very few people are willing to do that.

Part of the problem nowdays is the lack of unionization. There's not much protection for dissenters. In a lot of companies that kind of fuss invites a game of corporate Whack A Mole.

The orginal question here was "is there an economic rationale for hours to be crepping up." I submit the answer is yes, because in many, many areas 1 person at X hours will be more efficient than 2 people at X/2. This result, incidentally, is separable from the question of whether the work week should be 40 or 60 hours.

Then there came the question of whether a 12 hour day, or the expectation thereof, is abusive, or whatever we want to call it. Sure, we are all creatures of our social structures and any description of "choice" is therby incomplete. But look, the vast majority of the people McCardle was talking about in her original post are highly compensated -- in money, in the coolness or prestige of their job, whatever. Many of these jobs have tournament strucures whereby the initial pain is a weed-out. People are going into law firms, I-banks, and top tier academic labs with more-or-less open eyes. Or at least, as open as human eyes ever are. I certainly do not want to calim that a 40/hour a week job for 62K is similar to a 80 hour a week job at 125k. These seem to me like radically different lives. But you do not have to be a Harvard chemistry professor. You do not have to be a partner in a law firm. But if you do want to be either of these things, you should probably be prepared to work 80 hours a week in your 20s. It is hard for me to see this among the injustices of the world.

112: True. I still have a strong "suck it up" tendency, though, when it comes to things like men complaining about not being able to get away from work and spend time with their kids. If the women on the mommy track, or who got laid off when they got married or had kids back in the day, can take those risks, surely some of the men can and should as well.

Young lawyers are also in a sort of weird position in that they're probably being paid quite well, but are also paying off exhorbitant loans. I'm not sure how many could afford to drop down to $60K a year in an expensive area given the extra expenses. It took my lawyer friends a few years out of law school in order to have a lifestyle significantly better than a graduate students, once you factor in the extra social expectations. (Shorter: I can wear jeans to work and refuse to own a car. They can't.)

It is deeply whacked that never seeing your kids or spouse is considered to be the good life. But I do get the sense that for most of my lawyer friends, the ridiculous hours are are temporary (several years, but temporary) lifestyle until they make partner or jump ship from a big crazy firm into a smaller practice.

Gotta agree with baa's 113, as long as we keep the distinction between "is it unfair/abusive/torture" and "is this how we want things to be in our country" in mind. I wouldn't call it unfair or abusive, but I do think it's a fucked up way to "run" a society.

Baa: An abusive system can lead to its members voluntarily abusing themselves and each other for the sake of a bad standard. That's what abusive systems are like. Social arrangements can be as dysfunctional, stupid, and cruel as economic orders, religious creeds, or any other kind of organization, and the fact that members participate in their exploitation doesn't make the thing any more innately moral or desirable.

Obviously, we make more profit on that 70th hour than on the 10th. On the other hand, it's a rare associate who's going to be happy turning in 2500+ billable hours year after year.

We have a standing joke in my office -- OK, it's not very funny -- I'll see an associate who's been putting in long hours, and accuse him/her of violating the 12 hour rule. That is, not leaving 12 hours between departure at night and arrival. There's a rule? "Do you know what the penalty is for violating the 12 hour rule" Pause. "No life. It's self-executing."

It is hard for me to see this among the injustices of the world.

It isn't, if you look at it the way you're framing it in that comment. But the problem is that it sets an expectation and raises the bar, and that lets employers put pressure on everyone else who didn't choose that life. The same logic that recognizes that a minimum wage benefits everyone should recognize that a maximum workweek would do the same. Yes, there are some people who work for under minimum, either legally or illegally; and there will be some people who will work over maximum. But without it (and without unions, as gswift says), it's not just a question of what some individuals choose, and the rest of us can make other choices.

Many of these jobs have tournament strucures whereby the initial pain is a weed-out.

This, too. I bailed on the corporate world because I was bored shitless, but the expectation was that in two years, you would either move up or you'd move on to something else. When you're 22, just out of school, not married, not pregnant, not really tied down, working your ass off, living at the office, and partying your ass off occasionally with your co-workers isn't really that bad a lifestyle.

It's when you try to do that when you're 30, married, two kids, and you realize that your kids think you're Batman because they know Daddy is always gone just like Bruce Wayne that you have problems.

baa, I suspect you are concentrating on edge cases.

For every Harvard professor or partner at a big firm, how many people do you think are working long hours without any expectation of a plum job at the end of it, or any straightforward way to avoid the hours?

There are lots of people struggling away at fairly tech and IT jobs making 60k a year and fully expected to put in lots of 80+ hour weeks. Hell, there are people in their early 20s doing this for 30k/year in tech support --- there is no obvious path out of tech support. Lots of people putting in 100 hour weeks for years on a tenure run at some low-ranked state U. but afraid the alternative would be adjunct hell.

Furthermore, while I agree that in some situations one person working X hours (as long as X is not debilitating) can be more efficient that two people at X/2. On the other hand, I think there are situations where 2 people at X/2 are at least as efficient than one at X, but that would need a new hire, and new hires are to be avoided. And some cases where X/2 work is much more efficient, but corporate culture makes it difficult to try.

I think there are lots of scenarios to consider, and overall they type you are describing is really a small corner of the space.

I fully support this thread and its existence, but it is most depressing. Fucking hell.

Get back to work, Stanley.

See what I mean?

124 would've been a more clever retort were the unfoggedtariat not working me 12+ hours per day.

But we reward you with band names. Welcome to the new economy, baby.

I say all the above having stared down the barrel of that trade off a couple of times, in a way I'm staring down it again now.

It probably says something about the extent to which this is an entirely voluntary choice by lawyers that many public interest jobs, government and fellowships with $37,500 salaries are MUCH harder to get than firm jobs with $125,000 salaries. A fancy law degree, good connections, and a good resume are not necessarily enough.

This has to do with content of the work as well as hours, of course....

The other thing is that you do not know what it is going to be like until you start. Employer's assurances about hours and working conditions and travel and the sort of work you do are, again, completely unreliable. You find out in your first month that things were misrepresented or misunderstood when you interviewed--and then what? You can't just up and quit, there's a professional reputation at stake. There's an expectation that you'll stay for at least a year. Maybe people exaggerate the damage that it would do to leave...but there's no guarantee that the next job won't be the same damn situation.

There was one job I had before law school where I took the job in large part because of its affiliation with a university--great benefits, free classes, TONS of vacation, the works--and found out on my first day that they were dropping the university affiliation in a few weeks and that this had been planned for some time.

And I'm one of those type A nuts who can be fairly cheerful about 12-14 hour days under the right circumstances, by the way. It's not just the hours. It's the lack of control over your life and work.

I would cut my salary in half, tomorrow, without batting an eyelash, for my life back. For the right job I'd quarter it without batting an eyelash. Did I mention I make less than the going rate for graduates of my school (though still more than I ever expected to make) don't get health benefits through my employer?

I'm actually pretty well qualified for some of those jobs. But they don't exist in Chicago, and I had to work in the same city as my husband. I expect to have have slept in that city a grand total of 4 nights in the month of December.

I don't know if it's abuse, but the only times I remember being this actively unhappy for this long a period were: (1) acute family emergencies; (2) the month after 9/11; (2) eighth grade.

damn, hit post by accident

127 cont: ... but I really don't know how to make it work in anything like an optimal (for me) way. It's frustrating.

I should add that my firm isn't really like that. Our associates are going to average something like 1870 this year, up from last year and the year before, but hardly rowing galleys. In my office, the associates aren't worried about being seen on the weekends or in the evening because the guy in charge of associate productivity/development isn't impressed in the least by that stuff. So long as they're reachable when needed -- and in the current era everyone is -- attendance is not taken.

Katherine, your experience is not normal. Not over anything but a very short term.

The same logic that recognizes that a minimum wage benefits everyone should recognize that a maximum workweek would do the same

But this logic is wrong. A minimum wage, just to be clear, does not benefit everyone. In particular, it does not benefit someone who wants to work for lower than that minimum, and cannot find work at the minimum or above. That person, as a result of the minimum wage, gets no job, rather than a job they would want. Now I know there has been much debate here and elsewhere that as a matter of fact there just is no such person; I find this claim really, really hard to understand. And I do not think anyone would believe it with respect to almost any other good other than labor.

On the main question, the claim is not that everyone should work 10-12 hours a day, every day. The claim is a) that for lots of jobs 1 person at X beats two people at X/2, and b) lots of people do work 10-12 hours a day willingly and without (much) remorse.

128: Katherine: I'm not in nearly the same field, but there are a different set of choices that end up similarly frustrating. And I've happily worked many a 14 hour day when I'm in the middle of something interesting. Having no life outside work just isn't ok though.

It's not normal--it's a weird situation, the result of a clearly misguided attempt to find a paying human rights job--but I don't know a single associate at a law firm who seems happy.

126: True. But my "12+ hours per day" refers to my time ATM. All my comments here are merely a hobby. Considering anything involving w-lfs-n's cock as "a long day" seems shamefully ironic.

131: baa, to reiterate: I don't think we fundamentally disagree on much but I believe that your for your claims a) is the minority case (for long hour salaried positions) and b) is partially acculturation, and not necessarily a good thing.

The arguments about min wage laws that I've seen aren't quite what you characterize. More like the general improvement over the whole system is much larger than any small (or possibly zero) number of localized detriments like you describe. Anyway, I'll not divert into all of that and I don't really know enough about it even if I wanted to.

I should say that I-banking and law are not lives with which I am familiar, but programming, biostatistics, clinical monitoring, and IT are. And the "you will work 60+ hours or find another job" scenarios are distressingly common in the latter.

135: Right, I endorse the idea that we should not to rehash the entire 'is the minimum wage a good idea' argument here. And I certainly agree that there is a reasonable position that the benefits of a minimum wage outweigh costs. My spleen was mainly raised by Bphd's claim that "everyont benefits." No everyone does not benefit. Alas, there are tradeoffs on both sides of the issue, like most things in life.

Likewise, I agree that there's oodles of acculturation everywhere. But I think there are strong economic reasons to think we get more efficiency by working longer. That's a bummer, of course. But those are the breaks. Whether it would be more desireable to have some other acculturation I am trying to remain silent on. (in large part because I think it's complicated and am not sure what I think.)

136: yes, I agree. Nothing I say here should be seen as denying the existence of abusive employers. A tight labor market is everyone's friend.

Baa, you're saying that the minimum wage law is unfair to people who *want* to work for less than a sub-poverty wage? Look, waiters, babysitters, housekeepers, nannies, gardeners, migrant farmworkers, the folks who deliver your newspaper, and a host of other people work for less than minimum. You act like sub-minimum wage jobs simply don't exist, which isn't the case.

And ime of hiring nannies, babysitters, and housekeepers--and supervising newspaper delivery folks, which was my first post-college job, and waiting tables myself and being a frequent restaurant customer, there is not a single person I have ever come in contact with who objected to being paid more than minimum. Try offering your babysitter $10/hour, or telling your housekeeper that you're giving her two weeks paid vacation and a raise. Leave a 25% tip. Offer the paperboy a tip, or (if you're doing the job I did once), tell him there's another route coming open right next to his and he can earn more money if he picks it up. It's amazing, and sad, how fucking pathetically grateful people are when you don't assume that anyone chooses to work for the minimum that the market will bear for any reason other than absolute necessity.

I think baa's "want" was contingent on being unable to find anything else.

But fwiw, what I meant by "everone benefits" is that the minimum wage prevents employers from driving wages down because, let's face it, there's almost always someone out there who is more desperate than the next guy.

139: Yeah, well, the argument that "desperate people will work for pennies" isn't exactly an anti-minimum wage argument imho.

Anyway, I won't derail the thread with this, b/c I'm tired and I have to wrap some goddamnfucking Christmas presents. I really wish I didn't have to take PK to school tomorrow morning.

Is there a good link for people interested in unionizing their workplaces? Not that I'm interested, ahem, but just in case anyone is? I know people who tried SEIU and were met with utter disappointment.

Being told that "you don't have to be partner in a law firm" makes me want to punch someone in the face by the way.

I'm considering not studying anymore for Con Law and instead printing out and turning in a copy of the Covering thread to Prof. Yoshino. But I didn't participate in the thread, so I suppose that'd be plagiarism.

Also, I'd never looked at the picture attached to his profile before, and am now laughing. It's not that he doesn't look like that, but still.

But I think there are strong economic reasons to think we get more efficiency by working longer.

Are you disputing the notion that at a certain point diminishing returns kick in, or are you arguing about where that point is? If you look back at the link I posted in 2, you see that there is in fact greater efficiency from longer working hours, up to a certain point. But if you go much beyond 40 hours per week, or if you keep it up for more than a couple of months, the marginal efficiency goes way down.

printing out and turning in a copy of the Covering thread to Prof. Yoshino

You should definitely do this. At least in addition to studying.

143: find a happy place!

138: You act like sub-minimum wage jobs simply don't exist, which isn't the case.
Indeed, I agree that these jobs exist. But I'm not the one who thinks (as you do, I think) that it should be illegal to hire someone to work for these wages. Hey, you can always pay more, of course. But for almost every good or service under the sun, it is generally recognized that setting a price floor or ceiling will mean that some trade that both participants (buyer, seller) want to make won't get done. I think that if we make these wages illegal, and enforce those laws, some people who are now working won't be. Do you agree?

145: Josh, sure there's a point of diminishing returns. But does this mean that for laww, finance, academic chemistry, etc. 80 hours from one guy doesn't beat 40 from two? I don't think it does. That's the only point I'm trying to make here. McCardle made the (to me, pretty obvious) point that in lots of jobs, splitting the work turns out to be a bad option, and this is a big cause of higher workign hours among knowledge professionals. I think this is correct.

Fair enough, but clearly a lot of people don't find it quite so obvious. Just look at most of the comments on this thread.

knowledge professionals

This is one of those phrases that makes me want to touch base.

I just want to be sure we're on the same page, SB. Let's circle-back off-line.

find a happy place!

I gathered from her comment that that place just might be right between your eyes.

I confess, baa, though I'm generally in agreement with you here, that I'm having a hard time thinking of a job that someone would be willing to pay $3/hour for, but not $5/hour. I understand that theoretically it must be the case, but I'm blanking on anything specific.

But does this mean that for laww, finance, academic chemistry, etc. 80 hours from one guy doesn't beat 40 from two? I don't think it does. That's the only point I'm trying to make here. McCardle made the (to me, pretty obvious) point that in lots of jobs, splitting the work turns out to be a bad option, and this is a big cause of higher workign hours among knowledge professionals. I think this is correct.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I'd like a bit more to go on here than your intuition. I understand that you find it pretty obvious, but it should also be pretty obvious at this point that I (and a few others) don't.

Maybe baa would agree that 80 hours in one week, followed by an entire week off, is an acceptable compromise.

I understand that theoretically it must be the case, but I'm blanking on anything specific.

Imagine a person or institution who/that's really cheap. There, that wasn't so hard.

I'm having a hard time thinking of a job that someone would be willing to pay $3/hour for, but not $5/hour.

Libertarians are fond of portraying minimum wage laws as people will be out looking for jobs with employers replying "I'd love to hire you, but the government won't let me."

The reality tends to be some guy pulling up in his pickup to a group Mexicans outside the Home Depot with "I need a shitload of rocks moved, and I'll pay three bucks an hour." Then the desperately poor all jostle for the opportunity to make enough to eat.

151: baa's argument about minimum wage makes more sense when you consider a large workforce. If you consider a shop with 100 employees, I suspect you'll be able to come up with a few ideas.

I think the other thing I'm reacting strongly to is the sense I'm getting of "Oh, knowledge professionals are *so* *special*... sure, the proles can split their work, but what we do is too hard/complicated/important for that!" (I'm not saying that this is intentional on anyone's part or even that it exists outside of my own head.) That's certainly what lies behind a lot of the iterations of this conversation I've read in the software industry; the cult of the ueber-programmer, the one who's orders of magnitude more productive than Joe Sixpack Coder, is pretty intense.

I think that you can certainly find individuals who are twice as effective as any two replacements you can reasonable expect to have at hand (this is particularly true if one of them is the same person). Baa seems to think this is the rule, though, and my intuition and anectdotal evidence just doesn't back that up. I don't have anything more solid that he does, but I would hazard a guess we could start a process of replacing 80/hr jobs with 2 40/hr jobs slowly enough to allow for some labour shift and trainging in such a way that there were large productivity gains. If we enforced this across the board (and I'm not suggesting that) I'd guess that the gains dominate any losses due to the restriction of highly efficient people. I know they exist, I just don't think there are enough of them to really make so much difference. Could be wrong though. I certainly think that baa's economic arguments rely on some pretty strong assertions which have not been supported.

I'm also certain that (non-controversially) an individuals mean productivity has a non linear relation with hours/wk worked. I'm pretty sure (this could be controversial) that for the vast majority of people, 80/wk is into the nonlinear degredation part of the curve.

156: Afaics, the `ueber-programmer' exists, but not in numbers large enough to make much difference to any policy effects of this nature.

158 was me

Uber-programmers are better off spending their second 40 hours doing open source work anyway.

Could be wrong though. I certainly think that baa's economic arguments rely on some pretty strong assertions which have not been supported.

Offhand, I'd say Europe provides a good comparison here. They work a lot less hours than we do, but the productivity per hour is very close.

My impression (backed up with Josh's link in 2) is that if you want more productivity, you should replace that 80hr/$125k job with a 60hr/$125k job.

If you want more productivity beyond that and you can't divide the task, you're just hosed.

You can get short-term gains by pushing it; these are not sustainable. People are good at lying to themselves about how effective they are when underslept.

(perhaps this is untrue at super genius level; see 158)

Libertarians are fond of portraying minimum wage laws as people will be out looking for jobs with employers replying "I'd love to hire you, but the government won't let me."

Wow, those wacky libertarians, protraying minimum wage law as a barrier to employment! Look, it's just the case that (mostly) raising the price of something means people consume less of it. Indeed, those day laborers you speak of almost certainly *aren't* paid minimum wage. Nor do they get benefits. I feel sure you'd agree that if we raise the minimum wage to $15/hour some of that day labor just won't get done. And it certainly all won't get done by the same people. Yes, there are cases where employer power pushes down wages, and there are cases where demand for labor is really inelastic, but it would just be awesome if proponents of the minimum wage justed faced up to the fact that it will almost certainly depress employment. You can still think it's a good idea overall!

To ogged's question, I think the best place to look for jobs where an employer would hire at $3.00 not $5.00 are those places where now where the prevailing wage is ~$3.00 (of course, these are usually staffed illegally). Just to be clear: these are bad jobs. I would far prefer a world where everyone is paid a wage that at least comes close to the US poverty line. But given that we have a world filled with people who are way below the US poverty line, I don't think we help the poor overall by instituting a wage floor.

On the point of the thread raised by Josh and soubzriquet. The point is something like this. Putting aside for a moment the number of hours worked in a week, do you believe that for certain projects there are efficiencies to having one person in charge of the whole thing? I think there are. For example, it reduces the need for coordination, it reduces the need for information sharing, and it concentrates responsibility and accountability. Have you ever tried writing a document with five people splitting it up? I do not generally think that one hour from five people in writing a document is as efficient as one person spending five hours. Now, there can be other factors at play: the 10th hour of a fresh person will be more efficient than the 140th hour of an exhausted person, etc. Nonetheless, there are explicable factors that make you want to concentrate a project in a few hands.

Baa, as I said upthread, the point of my minimum wage allusion was that even though there are people who work for less than minimum, the existence of the floor prevents employers from driving wages down to sweatshop levels. You say "there are cases where employer power pushes down wages," but before workplace regulation, we had the same kind of working conditions that exist now in factories in China. It's not just isolated cases; it's the logic of the market. No floor drives down wages for *everyone*. A floor keeps most wages above that floor, and in cases where doing that is economically unfeasible (restaurants, farmworkers), there are either explicit or tacit exceptions made.

Anyway, the real problem driving unemployment these days, imho, isn't fucking minimum wage. It's the cost of health insurance and the horrendous overheads of benefits and bonuses to top employers. A couple of those multimillion dollar paychecks would cover a hell of a lot of minimum wage employees that X company "can't afford" to hire.

but it would just be awesome if proponents of the minimum wage justed faced up to the fact that it will almost certainly depress employment. You can still think it's a good idea overall!

We were arguing this at Apo's a little while ago, and someone (apo, i believe) cited that raises of the nat'l min wage have twice resulted in no change in unemployment, and of the remaining, half have seen an increase in unemployment, and the other half an increase in unemployment.

hah, that last "increase" should, of course, be "decrease"

for certain projects there are efficiencies to having one person in charge of the whole thing

Probably, sure. But that doesn't mean that this is a broad rule of thumb, or that it drives the 80 hour work week. And the efficiencies of putting one person in charge may well be counterbalanced by the problems inherent in working in a vacuum.

In any case, even if X person being in charge is the best possible idea, there's no reason to make X person work more than 40 hours. You just recognize that the project will take until the end of the month, rather than the end of the week, to complete.

Wow, those wacky libertarians, protraying minimum wage law as a barrier to employment! Look, it's just the case that (mostly) raising the price of something means people consume less of it.

Ah, the "it's Econ 101" argument. Except that labor markets don't really behave this way unless pushed to extremes.

I feel sure you'd agree that if we raise the minimum wage to $15/hour some of that day labor just won't get done.

Doubtless people would just stop having their houses roofed and lawns mowed. Anarchy would ensue.

There is suprisingly little evidence for job losses due to resonable minimum wages:

http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/briefingpapers_bp150
http://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v84y1994i4p772-93.html
http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1109&context=iir

That's what annoys me about minimum wage conversations. Inevitably there's the "everybody knows a price increase means less will be consumed", and "what if we raise it to 20 an hour, or 50?"

The data on said employment bloodbath never seems to materialize.

Some business owners say they hire less b/c of a hike in min. wage. On the other hand, people go out and spend their bigger paychecks, which boosts some businesses, and some of them take on new employees. People making the "increasing the price of goods decreases the demand" argument always elide this part.

A data point here.

One of my friends used to be the senior networking engineer for Redstorm Entertainment, and had done other programming in computer gaming before that. He's now left the field and gone into security coding instead, and one of the reasons he left was his inability to persuade owner-level management to look at their own productivity data. As he presents it, at least, there is a reliable sharp fall-off of gains from working people more than 40-45 hours a week. Some crunch time is probably inevitable at the end of a project just because there's always something that takes longer, but even there he regards more than 2-4 weeks of 50-60 hours at the end of a year-long or multi-year project as detrimental, and it sounds like he can back it up with reference to the documented time spent correcting errors.

As he tells it, once a cultural expectation of ever-longer hours is in place, there are just enough managers who regard it as a matter of machismo and pride to push it that much bit further. Electronic Arts had more of these chest-beating times, and the extremely unhealthy environment to match. But there'll always be someone who regards the long hours as a point of project pride, and who will mock and tear down efforts to arrange work so that everyone gets done what they need to do in 40-hour weeks. The latter will be held up as "soft", "losing their edge", and the like. He says, though, that at least in computer gaming, anyone who insists that the extra hours actually are more productive is either ignorant of the full data or willfully lying about it - that it is that clear-cut, and that people choose the long hour approach as managers in spite of what it does to the work rather than because of it.

My friend's been offered the management of game lines, after he quit the field as well as before, but says he's just not going to do it until and unless he finds a company whose senior folks will back him in his preferred work week and some other considerations, and so far nobody will.

I'm just gonna point out that after Atrios mentioned it, but didn't explicate, I went looking for articles on monopsony, but then didn't really have time to try to fully understand it, because I have a bunch of my own work to do. I'm sure there are economists who think the monopsony explanation doesn't apply to the empirical data that minimum wage laws don't always increase unemployment, and from what I read of it I naively didn't think it would, but then there are dynamic monopsony models that I haven't read about yet that may apply better. Anyway, my point is there are theoretical situations in which minimum wage laws increase employment, so you really can't say that it's just obvious from laws of human nature that people are going to be shut out of jobs if you raise the minimum wage; it isn't.

Maybe baa would agree that 80 hours in one week, followed by an entire week off, is an acceptable compromise.

I've had this exact schedule! Working third shift, days were 10 pm to 8 am, for eight days in a row. Then you got six days off.

Look, it's just the case that (mostly) raising the price of something means people consume less of it.

On things they don't need, perhaps. But prices on everything have steadily risen due to inflation for all of our history, and yet we're consuming more of everything. If you have a really sharp increase in the price of something, then you may see less consumption, but when it levers up steadily, that just isn't the case. And for some things, even sharp increases don't make a big dent. Gasoline consumption didn't drop noticeably when it spiked over $3/gallon last year.

Arguing from first principles isn't generally sound with something as large and complex as the US economy.

Katherine, a quick note here, and then I'll take it off-line. You do not have to put up with dishonesty -- if they knowingly lied to you about the job, you can ditch them without remorse. In addition, I don't think the 1 year custom applies if, for example, you're looking for a job in your husband's locale, and you tell the interviewer 'I thought it was what I wanted, but what I really want is to be here.' Also, surely the travel schedule (except for going to the main office -- you have to do plenty of that in the beginning just so they can really get to know you) is case dependent, and atypical. If it isn't -- if the next 3 cases are going to be the same, you might just have to pronounce the having-it-all experiment a failure.

There's no dishonor in guessing wrong, and life's pretty short to spend a year being miserable (when the misery is curable).

Katherine, a quick note here, and then I'll take it off-line. You do not have to put up with dishonesty -- if they knowingly lied to you about the job, you can ditch them without remorse. In addition, I don't think the 1 year custom applies if, for example, you're looking for a job in your husband's locale, and you tell the interviewer 'I thought it was what I wanted, but what I really want is to be here.' Also, surely the travel schedule (except for going to the main office -- you have to do plenty of that in the beginning just so they can really get to know you) is case dependent, and atypical. If it isn't -- if the next 3 cases are going to be the same, you might just have to pronounce the having-it-all experiment a failure.

There's no dishonor in guessing wrong, and life's pretty short to spend a year being miserable (when the misery is curable).

Dammit.

In any case, even if X person being in charge is the best possible idea, there's no reason to make X person work more than 40 hours. You just recognize that the project will take until the end of the month, rather than the end of the week, to complete.

I completely agree. It's only the combination of the "hard to divide work" hypothesis with a very competitive market that makes the work week 60 not 40. But we do have that in many fields. I just took that as an unstated premise of McCardle's argument. Again, I'll just repeat myself at this point: has anyone tried to write something by committee and not found it a time-wasting nightmare? That's part of the intuition and the experience underlying my support for the "hard to divide work" hypothesis. This isn't something I feel happy about, I just think it's a fact about the way the world is.

On the minimum wage. Ok, just to be clear, the reason that it's "econ 101" to think that a minimum wage will increase unemployment is not (only) a mindless commitment to theory, but also oodles of evidence that for all sorts of goods/services increases in price has the result of less goods bought. There are of course complexities to this, but is it a point that people deny globally? If so, Ok, I give up.

The price elasticity of labor is, of course, an emiprical question, so what I suppose we should be asking is "what is the job losses that will relate to minimum wage hike of X%." With due respect to the Card and Kreuger work cited by JoeO, I think it is just not the state of play that we should think it likely that increases curently contemplated will have no meaningful effects. This is of course, a matter of debate.

Gswift, follow the link here for one paper reviewing the "minimum wage literature, which does not supoprt the "hey no worries" position. And while I appreciate the rhetorical deck-stacking, it's not that anyone predicts a 'bloodbath' from a $2 increase, rather, they predict lower employment than otherwise. The point -- or at least the point I care about -- isn't that rich people don't get their yards mowed, but rather that poor people who would benefit from particpation in the labor market don't get to participate. Given that there are lots of other ways to provide assistance to poor people that does not run the risk of having this adverse effect on the labor market, I find the support for the minimum wage puzzling.

"I find the support for the minimum wage puzzling."

From my point of view, there's an ethical element to it as well. There's something wrong with paying people, say, $2 an hour for work. It's not just a matter of economics.

Further, any method of assisting poor people while avoiding wage increases is essentially about corporate subsidy. Companies getting away with paying a less than living wage knowing that the state is picking up the slack.

Which, I assume, you'd be against?

181 -- I took baa's 179 to mean he would be in favor of the state picking up the slack for corporations which pay employees less than a living wage -- that way the employees get the benefits of participation in the labor force which they might otherwise miss out on. baa, am I misreadin?

re: 181

Yeah, however, he (if I am not mistaken) tends generally to be against that sort of state intervention?

Anyway, as I said, there's an ethical dimension to it, viz (CRUDELY) people who think that paying $2 an hour is acceptable for any job, are bastards, and we (in the form of our tax revenue) shouldn't be subsidising their bastardry.

misreading

(And granted that baa and his friends may have a different conception of "a living wage" than what my friends and I think it means.)

We have a standing joke in my office...I'll see an associate who's been putting in long hours, and accuse him/her of violating the 12 hour rule. That is, not leaving 12 hours between departure at night and arrival. There's a rule? "Do you know what the penalty is for violating the 12 hour rule" Pause. "No life. It's self-executing."

This would be funny, if it weren't for the fact that I worked on a project for a year that REALLY DID have a 9-hour rule. We had to report to work by 8:30 every morning but, if you worked late, you were allowed to come in late the next day, but only a maximum of 9 hours after the time that you left the previous night. And this rule was actually instituted as an improvement to help work-life balance and morale over the previous conditions, where we were expected to show up by 8:30 no matter what. Over my time there, the 9-hour rule was eventually shortened to a 7-hour rule.

Thanks Charley.

I don't think, honestly, that their was active deception on their part. I think it was a question of coming from such utterly different worlds that you talk past each other. (There were references to "other trips, like everyone here does"; I had no idea what everyone here did. I wouldn't have thought it was even economically sustainable.)

Further, any method of assisting poor people while avoiding wage increases is essentially about corporate subsidy. Companies getting away with paying a less than living wage knowing that the state is picking up the slack.

I am not sure I would describe the EITC as a corporate subsidy. Can you explain the logic whereby an increase in the EITC drives down wages?

I also think it's unhelpful to describe people paying a wage of X as bastards. If Nike opens a plant in Mexico, are they bastards for paying people the average wage for labor in Mexico?

Hey, I also feel the ethical intuition that everyone just deserves a wage that ensures them a middle-class lifestyle. But given that we are in a world where a salary of 25,000 puts you in the richest 10% of all people on the planet, it's not clear to me how sustainable a position this is. Lots of people's lives would be made much better by jobs that pay a wage far below the one which gives me no uneasy feelings. I do not think it is a winning proposition to pretend we can make employers pay that difference.

It probably says something about the extent to which this is an entirely voluntary choice by lawyers that many public interest jobs, government and fellowships with $37,500 salaries are MUCH harder to get than firm jobs with $125,000 salaries. A fancy law degree, good connections, and a good resume are not necessarily enough.

I just wanted to see this bit again, and revel in its truthfulness.

I should say that this post should not be read as griping about my own, personal, work life, which involves a whole lot of being a Slacky McSlackerton as the amount of time I spend here would indicate, and I generally have the work ethic and habits of a stoned marmot. I shouldn't be taken as an example of anything. And lawyers are at least paid exorbitantly for our long hours -- the injustice here is really a couple of rungs down the economic ladder with people who are working the long hours and not being paid ridiculous sums of money.

But I still don't buy the 'lawyering is hard to divide up efficiently' rationale for why lawyers' hours efficiently have to be so long. Particular tasks, like writing a brief, are hard to split up, but any given particular task isn't what's keeping you at the office until three (Usually: of course, there are going to be occasional genuine emergencies); it's the fact that the pile of other particular tasks kept you from getting to it until it was an emergency. More people working shorter hours wouldn't necessarily mean a whole lot more coordination, it would mean that each person would be responsible for fewer discrete matters.

richest 10% of people on the planet

This is a red herring. It costs way more to live in an apartment and feed yourself in Cinncinnatti than it does in Bangalore.

More people working shorter hours wouldn't necessarily mean a whole lot more coordination, it would mean that each person would be responsible for fewer discrete matters.

Yes!

189: Exactly. Purchasing Power Parity is the metric we would want here, I think. And even that statistic might oversimplify.

a red herring s/b stupid, stupid, stupid.

An annual income of $850 puts you in the top 50% richest people in the world! I can tell you're really a glass-half-empty type, Clownae. Can I borrow the yacht this weekend?

Sorry, we're having the Rockefellers over to do blow.

Fucking rich people.

Hey, the band name thread is over there.

$5 in NYC is not the same as $5 in Banglore, sure enough. The point is that many, many people in the world, and indeed in the US, live lives that would be dramatically improved by a $5/hour job. That's the reality. So saying "it just seems unethical to pay someone $2 an hour" doesn't seem like an adequate response, although I feel the same pull. That doesn't help us close the gap between where we are and where we want to be. I'd rather let the labor market set wages, and try to use government in other ways to better the condition of the working poor. (EITC, better schools, better infrastructure, subsidies to Haliburton -- whoops, how did that one slip in?)

I read nattarGcM's point in 183 as being that a $2/hr salary in the contemporaray first world is unethical -- I did not think he was saying anything about third-world sweat shops. Perhaps I was wrong to insert that qualification.

contemporaray

re: 197

Yes, you're right. Reading it any other way seems wilfully obtuse to me, frankly.

There's just no excuse for a company to pay less than minimum wage levels in a first world country. None.

There's just no excuse for a company to pay less than minimum wage levels in a first world country. None.

So, can people from the third world move here and get paid that wage, or is that immoral too? Is it immoral to have low-paid entry level programs for people with no job history to get labor market experience? Is it moral to fire someone in the US who would work for $2 and outsource the job to India for the same wage? In a world where $2/hour is, unfortunately, the prevailing wage for many people, these are questions we may have to answer. Righteous harrumphing is its own kind of answer, of course. Yours in obtusity!

So, can people from the third world move here and get paid that wage, or is that immoral too?

Yes.

it immoral to have low-paid entry level programs for people with no job history to get labor market experience?

Yes.

Is it moral to fire someone in the US who would work for $2 and outsource the job to India for the same wage?

Not necessarily, depends on the circumstances.

Any more questions?

it's not that anyone predicts a 'bloodbath' from a $2 increase, rather, they predict lower employment than otherwise.

These predictions are virtually always being pushed by a "Chicago School" type. And several people have pointed out now, this prediction just doesn't jive with historical data.

The point -- or at least the point I care about -- isn't that rich people don't get their yards mowed, but rather that poor people who would benefit from particpation in the labor market don't get to participate.

Dude, I don't know you, so maybe you're the exception. But generally when a libertarian starts telling me they oppose minimum wages out of concern for poor people, I know I'm being fed a line.

There's a fairly simple assessment -- 'does this wage enable people to achieve a certain minimal standard of living, where they actually live?'.

If the answer is no, I can't see any excuse that a company has for paying it. Appealing to issues surrounding globalisation doesn't explain why it's ethically acceptable for a first world company to pay wages below that level.

the injustice here is really a couple of rungs down the economic ladder with people who are working the long hours and not being paid ridiculous sums of money.

I do not view it as an injustice, necessarily, but I think it certainly is true that it is a whole different conversation when you are talking about people being paid $50,000 a year to work 80 hour weeks rather than people getting paid $250,000 a year (what experienced associates at many big firms likely make with bonuses).

204: And there are one hell of a lot more people doing $50,000 80/hr weeks than there are doing $250,000 80/hr weeks.

Any policy shifts attempting to address this need to focus on the former.

See, this is what makes LB so great. Rather than wussing out, she just is willing to face up to the implications of what she believes. Of course, I think it's pretty silly to declare it capital I Immoral to have someone move to the US for a $2/hour job, but moral to have them stay in Mexico for a $2/hour job. Maybe even with purchaing power differences, he'd rather live in the US. I also think it's silly to declare a $2/hour internship program capital immoral. People might want that opportunity. But hey, LB thinks these people shouldn't have those choices, and that's one way to roll.

re 202: Don't be a doofus (and I use this term with affection). I'm not a libertarian. I'm not trying to "feed you a line." I don't gain or lose in any appreciable way from the minimum wage being set to $0, $5, $7 or $10. I don't hire anyone at close to this wage, and the incremental expenses that it would impose on me are de minimus. Lots of people benefit from jobs that seem really terrible from a middle-class US perspective. That's the world we live in. Your sincere concern for the well-being of the poor does not alter this fact.

re: 203. I'd want to distinguish two questions: a) what do we, as a society, want to make sure is the minimal standard that every citizen gets, b) what is the lowest wage an employer legally be able to offer and employee be legally able to accept. It is not necessarily the case that a and b have the same answer/are directly connected. You (Matt) seem to equate these and I think that's not always (or often) right. As a for instance, I think we should provide universal education to all children. I do not think employers should be forced to provide education to the children of every employee.

206: minimum wage arguments really have nothing to do with middle class living standards, so it is distracting to keep bringing that up; they are about working class living standards with some minimal security.

re: 206

I'd like to see an explanation of why a) and b) should come apart specifically in the case of wages. That requires a substantive answer and the analogy with education is far from obvious.

Of course, I think it's pretty silly to declare it capital I Immoral to have someone move to the US for a $2/hour job, but moral to have them stay in Mexico for a $2/hour job.

I'm not sure how this matters: we have no control over wage levels in Mexico. We do have control over them here.

I have a really stupid minimum wage question, because we keep talking about moving people above a floor, where the floor is something like dollars needed for a minimally acceptable lifestyle.

Here's the stupid question: the floor moves too, right? Along with inflation & expectations? If you raise the minimum wage, doesn't the floor just creep up, too? This is a really stupid question, I know, because probably the floor doesn't move as fast as the minimum wage would, but doesn't this just turn into a big nasty circle?

Only if all wages move up in synch with the minimum wage. Most spending is done by people who are nowhere near the minimum wage, so raising the minimum isn't going to exert all that much inflationary pressure.

Gotcha. I'm not very good at economics.

Yes, wot LB said.

Incidentally, the UK introduced a minimum wage a few years back and it has been increased fairly regularly. With no massive inflationary pressure [UK inflation has been very low] and no substantive increase in unemployment.

212: that's ok... neither are a surprising number of economists

My economics TA was mean to me. He said I was naive for giving an answer on a test that was what was in the book. It wasn't my fault that the book gave a stupid answer.

I forget what the minimum wage in Alberta is at the moment, but one of the weirder things when I was visiting this summer was how irrelevant the minimum wage seemed to be. I think it's something like $6.95, but minimum wage-type jobs were starting at $13 or so. Booming economies are fun (except for all the shops that were shutting down because they couldn't find anyone to work.)

Minimum wage here is around $10.45 US for adults over the age of 21.

207: replace middle class with working class in the arguments I make, and I don't think it changes much.

208: here's how it would go:
1. wage floors deform the labor market -- it prevents transactions from taking place that benefit both parties
2. The benefits of wage floors are not well targeted to the poor/needy. Many people working at minimum wage are part time workers, teenagers, or do not belong to poor households. Citation
3. The employment-reducing effects of the minimum wage is more likely to fall on relatively less productive workers, as they are the ones who will be least economical to employ at the higher wage.
4. Thus, if we want to make sure that everyone in the US has a reasonable income, there seem to be many reasons to favor more targeted programs that do not deform the labor market (the EITC) rather than ones that are untargeted and are likely to increase unemployment (the minimum wage).

215: That's been getting pretty crazy --- a year or two ago I was reading an article about how Ft. McMurray, Alberta, wasn't even able to keep tradesmen, let alone retail & service.

I spent a while in just pre-collapse `silicon valley'. On constant feature was the help wanted signs in most service industry spots. Not so much because they couldn't find the people, but because they couldn't afford to live within a sane commute.

217 -- look at the conditions of working people in the US prior to the introduction of the minimum wage. It seems to me like people who favor a rolling back of the reforms of the 1940's are advocating a return to the 1920's and 30's.

That was poorly phrased. "It seems to me like when you advocate a rolling back of the reforms of the 1940's, you are advocating a return to the 1920's and 30's.

Maybe I'm an econ idiot, but I really fail to see how anyone can argue that minimum wage is detrimental. Have we no sense of history? The very arguments being employed--in the rest of the world, people work for pennies a day!--are precisely the arguments *for* a minimum wage. There will always be desperate people, but do we really want to embrace a system that means a lot of the workers Baa is concerned about will live in shanty towns and bring their kids into the fields with them?

Re. the 120 hour on/1 week off argument, sounds to me like a recipe for a hell of a lot of stress and a massively disorganized life. It's not like you can put the kids on hold for a week, or eat fast food for a week and then fast the next week and maintain any kind of decent health.

120 hour on/1 week off argument

It was 80 on / week off. Eight 10-hr days, followed by six off. Of course it isn't a good schedule for a parent, but that was before I had kids. The six-day weekend is the bomb, though.

218: It doesn't help that Ft. McMurray is on the north end of nowhere. But it's true even in bigger (by Western Canadian standards) towns. The housing market is absolutely ridiculous, too, as you can't really buy a house easily now, and if you want to build one, you'll be moving in in 2008 or 9.

Re. the 120 hour on/1 week off argument, sounds to me like a recipe for a hell of a lot of stress and a massively disorganized life.

Pretty much. Mr. Soon-to-be Mr.Cala (I need to come up with a pseud for him) is working a three-weeks at 120 hours on, one week off schedule right now and after about three months of it, he can't do anything more than count the days till the next break. This is without a family, too.

See, the problem with the "it wouldn't be doable for a parent, but it's okay when you don't have kids" thing is that most workers *do* have kids. So again, it sets a kind of expectation that a work schedule is doable--"Apo's doing it, and so is Mr. Cala, what's your problem?"--that sets single people against parents and feeds into the "well, you chose to have children, it's your problem" nonsense. Whether or not people have kids, they still have lives. And putting your life on hold for a week or two at a time then trying to pack it all in once a month is just nuts.

three-weeks at 120 hours on, one week off

Wait, you mean 120 hours worked in each of the three weeks?

I really do think, Bphd, that this is a debate rooted in different belief about how markets operate. If I thought an the ony effects of an increase in the minimum was that poor people would get more money, I'd be for it. I don't believe that. I likewise don't believe that minimum wage laws have been particularly important in elevating people out of poverty; rather I think economic growth and access to jobs has played the largest role. Hence my discomfort with the minimum wage. On the ethical issues, I understand where Matt and LB are coming from, I feel the same pull myself, but have (reluctantly) come to the opinion that the views they hold don't make much sense as a basis for law. I think they are a much stronger basis for decisions about how much you should personally pay people.

But the "belief" thing flies in the face of established historical evidence. I mean, I can believe that if we get rid of organized religion, all the people will live for today and that'll make the world a better place, but there are examples to hand that demonstrate that this simply isn't the case.

224: B, somebody has to work third shift in a 24-hour shop. Believe me, the eight-days-on/six-days-off setup is vastly preferable to any other one I can imagine.

So, the options were your schedule (working a double shift) or just settling in on the night shift. Yeah, that is a hard choice.

No, you worked a regular 5-day-a-week schedule if you didn't do the overnight shift. Doing a 5-day-a-week third shift would mean that you never got reacquainted to daylight hours.

Oh, I see what you mean. Yes. But really, I loved that schedule.

228: I know, I have a friend who's done shift work for years. She's the one I have in mind when I say that the whole "put your life on hold" thing is unhealthy and ridiculously stressful.

'Nother question: why not just get rid of 24 hour shops? (I know the answer here--I too have run to the grocery store or pharmacy at midnight. But in theory.)

I actively preferred working third shift. Fits better with my sleep schedule anyhow. If I didn't have kids, I'd still be looking for a job that would let me work overnight.

What historical evidence are you talking about? It's not the case that the consensus of economists is that he minimum wage just transfers $ to poor people. Indeed, the consensus is the opposite. There has been recent controversy on this point, but it is still mainstream economic thinking tha the minimum wage increases unemployment. See the link in 179. Is the historical evidence that the rise of american prosperity coincides with the minimum wage? This seems weird to me. The US was already really, really rich by world standards when the minimum wage was adopted in 1938.

The thing is that evidence, rather than theorizing, that the minimum wage will increase unemployment has never been strong enough to be unambiguous. The most we've ever been talking about is maybe it does a little. While the evidence that it increases incomes for the working poor is strong and obvious.

it is still mainstream economic thinking

This falls somewhere short of a persuasive argument for me.

Rich by world standards isn't what I'm talking about, nor is the consensus of economists (which is theory, as opposed to actual evidence). I'm talking about tenements, piece-work instead of wages, strike-breaking by waiting workers out 'til they're on the verge of starvation, workplace injuries brought on by long days and fast pacing, turning most workers into day laborers, firing women once they had kids, and massive strikes by workers driven to the breaking point. Which, while it might bring back support for unions, isn't exactly a desireable way to go about doing that.

baa, mainstream (US) economics is not particularly grounded in reality these days. My (limited) understanding is that the empirical evidence on minimum wage is at best ambiguous, but people tend to concentrate on how this doesn't contradict the dogmatic position on minimum wages. Or rather, it isn't neccessarily the economists doing this, but policy people who are cherry picking economic arguments to support the policy they want, and the economists aren't putting up enough of a stink about it.

Re. mainstream economics, what about the guy who just won the nobel prize for realizing that by providing paper evidence of property ownership by the poor, you give them entry into the broader economic system and provide a foundation for wealth creation? That's hardly mainstream economic thinking, but my understanding is that it's been incredibly effective where it's been done. Ditto microlending, especially when it's aimed at women, which, again, pretty much flies in the face of mainstream economic theory.

Baa: could we get back to the 80-hr-efficiency claim? What I have a hard time understanding is why people seem to think that 'knowledge workers' aren't hit just as hard as everybody else by the massive decreases in long-term efficiency that set in when you start to get above 40-50 hrs for any serious time. AFAIK (see the various links on this thread), what Real Evidence We Have suggests precisely the opposite--the situations involving judgment calls are where ability really tanks.

The coordination thing, again, merely implies that each person be given just one discrete task--to do in 40-50 hr weeks. Claiming "but we need it done sooner!" is a false argument, if you accept my productivity premise, because after 5 months of 80 hour weeks you are actually getting less done in an 80 hr week than you would in a 40 one.

You might claim: but if this were true, people would realize it, and stop doing it. This does not follow. First, I could easily sketch out a model (some sort of ability-stock-depletion thing) such that the overwork-effect is cumulative but slow, thereby being difficult to detect--at any given point in time, you WILL always get more work out of *this week* by adding 10 hours; but the net present value over the next year will be negative, for example. Moreover, it's not hard to come up with corporate incentive structures that would discourage experimentation of the sort that would reveal this.

Essentially the claim has to be some selection effect argument that the particular people in these industries are just ubermenschen who are immune to the debilitating effects of overwork that hit normal humans. I find this much less plausible than the persistent organizational pathology story.

BPhD, 239: I think you may be confusing the two. Hernando de Soto is the Peruvian economist who argues for freeing up 'dead capital' by granting title, etc.; he has received many prizes (mostly from libertarian-ish groups) but not a Nobel. Is this who you were thinking of?

Muhammad Yunus, on the other hand, just won the Nobel *Peace* prize for his work on microcredit.

239 -- are you sure? I thought economists were pretty comfortable with microcredit.

I'm talking about tenements, piece-work instead of wages, strike-breaking by waiting workers out 'til they're on the verge of starvation, workplace injuries brought on by long days and fast pacing, turning most workers into day laborers, firing women once they had kids, and massive strikes by workers driven to the breaking point

And what exactly does this have to do with chaging the minimum wage from 5.15 to 7.15 in today's America. I say: nothing.

There are at last three arguments going on in parallel here.

One is that empirical evidence on the unployment efects of the minimum wage are small enough that the benefits outweight the costs. I get this argument. I don't think it is correct, but I think it's a reasonable position to have. I would ask these people if they wouldn't prefer an increase in the EITC or other more targted programs that direct more benefit to the poor. I would also ask why they are so confident there will be no significant adverse effects of the minimum wage given a) the strong empirical precedent in many other markets for price floors leading to lowered demand and b) the current controversy on empirical data on the effects of the minimum wage.

Two is that paying below a living wage is immoral. I think this intuition, although a powerful one, turns out to be a bad grounding for making policy. I tried to suggest why that might be above.

Third is an argument that minimum wage law is of a piece with all sorts of good laws that have helped people move from shanty to shack to apartment to house the world over. I really think this is mistaken economic history of the rise of a prosperous working class, and of no direct relevance to the debate over the minimum wage in the contemporary US.

241: I stand corrected, and thank you.

242: Inasmuch as microcredit means lending money to people who have no collateral, I don't think so. But I'm willing to be corrected on that one as well.

And what exactly does this have to do with chaging the minimum wage from 5.15 to 7.15 in today's America. I say: nothing.

It has to do with the foundations of *why* the contemporary US no longer has these things. It isn't because we're just so morally advanced or so wealthy. We were wealthy back in the 20s, as well, and we had those things then. If you want to argue over the specific *value* of the minimum wage ($5 vs $7), that's a very different argument than the one you've been making up to this point, which is that the minimum wage is inherently unnecessary and bad for workers.

In a (state of nature)/(free market utopia), the working class has nothing and is continually desperate and hopeless, while a few people/corporations with private security forces have everything. Government interventions like the minimum wage prevent this from happening.

Yeah X. Trapnel, let's get back to that. I agree that it's easy to imagine a model where people get locked into pretty bad policies, and I didn't mean to come across as a strong advocate for the proposition that a 80 hour week is rational or optimal.

My interest was more with McCardle's point that many jobs are not easily split. My experience is just directly opposed to LB's in this regard, and I was surprised so many people agreed with her and thought McCardle mistaken. I would tend to agree that many additional factors are necessary to move from the point that tasks are not easily split to the prevalence of 60 hour work weeks we now see. I suspect that the efficiency of having fewer hands on the tiller + the general scarcity of top performers + highly competitive industries is one part of the story in professional services and finance. I think a shift in cultural norms is also part of the story, however.

245: sorry, I am not getting you here.

246:you have precisely understood me. The more private armies, the merrier.

247, Baa: but indivisibility really doesn't get her what she wants, which is "A very smart expert working 80 hours a week will be more productive than two equally smart people working forty hours a week." My counterclaim is, unless there is something really different about these folks, the 80-hr person will be functioning *very badly* after a few months of this. She probably won't even realize she's functioning so badly. And because the effect is largely through depletion of overall cognitive functioning, it will always seem like if she just puts in more hours this week she will get more done.

What indivisibility WILL get you "a smart expert working 80 hrs for a month or two on a project, then taking a lot of time off, will get more done than two equally smart folks @ 40 for the same month or two" but this is a *drastically* different claim that doesn't remotely resemble, say, Big Firm law jobs or EA Crunch Time.

The same goes for general skill--unless talent *also* correlates strongly with hitherto-unexplained-resistance-to-cognitive-degradation-with-overwork, you are *wasting* your talented worker by asking her to put in 80 hr weeks, unless you are careful about only doing it occasionally and providing recovery time.

Also worth pointing out that some of the places where this is most true aren't "highly competitive industries", not exactly. It's important not to confuse "competitive industry" with "brilliant people fiercely trying to outdo each other within it"; the latter has no necessary connection to the former. Law: cartelized by the ABA. Medicine: cartelized by the AMA. Computer games: relies heavily on IP, the raison d'etre of which is to give market power where it otherwise wouldn't exist.

I completely don't get what it is you're not understanding. But I'm willing to drop it, in any case, since I should do something other than hang on on the internets derailing threads all day for a change.

It all depends on where diminishing returns kicks in. How do you feel about 1 person at 60 hours > 1 person at 40 and 50% of another person at 40?

223: I wasn't arguing that it was a great life, or even okay. But it *is* very lucrative and short-term, and easier to manage when you don't have a family.

244: an economist might say that lending w/ no collateral & low interest rates was a lousy strategy for the lender making money, AND a good strategy for the borrower moving up in the world.

(I'm not an economist, so I don't know if that's what they really do say.)

251, Baa: I think that's an empirical question that is framed at way too high a level of abstraction to give any answer but "it depends." I used 80 because (a) what I *have* read on the subject suggests that 80 => huge, huge ability hit when sustained and (b) many jobs nevertheless actually do sustain these hours over time. So I feel pretty good about saying "80 is stupid." As a Hayekian left-libertarian sort, I won't pretend have any sort of Gosplan Optimal Working Hours spreadsheet.

251: See, that requires some very specific factual assumptions: mainly, that the job is 'indivisible' and requires between 40 and 60 hours a week -- enough to be unpleasant, but not enough to hit diminishing returns (although 60 is still more than you'd think. That's pretty close to what I work, and it means that weekdays are work-eat-sleep, no other activity). That strikes me as false about lawyering: while there are 'indivisible' chunks, they are usually smaller than 60 hpw -- most lawyers aren't doing one task straight all week.

It's possible that you could find a job that fell into that category, but I wouldn't expect it to be the norm.

Baa: (I will say, though, that if we tend to see substantial decreases across various domains around 45ish, then it entirely makes sense to take that as our default when considering what's appropriate, and to take a skeptical attitude towards claims about productivity that don't *explicitly and with evidence* incorporate plausible views about declining ability into their calculations. I think this is the right epistemic stance precisely because there are so many temptations to think a free lunch is out there, just this once--if I just work a little harder, just for one more week, etc. We always SEE the work that gets done in that extra hour; we rarely notice the marginally lower ability we have the next day, and the causal connection isn't direct.)

179 said:

".... Given that there are lots of other ways to provide assistance to poor people that does not run the risk of having this adverse effect on the labor market, I find the support for the minimum wage puzzling. "

This depends on how great you expect the employment loss to be. If for example you expect a 10% increase in the minimum wage to cost 1% of minimum wage jobs then it would pretty clearly help poor workers overall. Liberal support for a popular feasible measure that will help poor workers overall is not at all puzzling. If you want to argue it is wrongheaded you need to provide evidence that the employment losses would outweigh the wage gains.

I think it should be noted that for many people the fact that long hours in the office keeps them away from their families is a feature not a bug. They would rather be surfing the web on the fast internet connection in the office than dealing with some domestic problem.

Of course, I think it's pretty silly to declare it capital I Immoral to have someone move to the US for a $2/hour job, but moral to have them stay in Mexico for a $2/hour job. Maybe even with purchaing power differences, he'd rather live in the US.

You know, this isn't at all a likely scenario, given how difficult it is for a Mexican to legally immigrate to the US. But I suppose we could talk about what's a moral wage for an illegal alien, but that's too much for me right now.

It is at least an interesting argument, one I hadn't thought of before, that someone should be allowed to accept a low wage b/c they value other things (such as choice of a nation) more than above-squalor wages. But someone already here isn't going to have that same valuation, and it's unfair to that person if we allow the wage floor to be depressed too much.

BPhD: if anything economists are likely to overrate the power of property rights and microcredit. Seriously. It's kind of like saying "libertarians don't fully appreciate how government regulation can interfere with economic growth and prosperity."