https://apnews.com/article/jd-vance-childless-cat-ladies-bir...
They don't scream, but the social pressure is absolutely there.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/30/nx-s1-5382208/whats-behind-th...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bridget-phil...
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/25/parenti...
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/may/25...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/11/what-is-pron...
https://www.vox.com/policy/363543/pronatalism-vance-birth-ra...
https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/commentary/the-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/style/women-pronatalist-m...
https://fairerdisputations.org/have-more-kids/
https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-parental-dead-end-of-consent-m...
As someone who also follows pro/anti natalist space closely, I'm not worried pronatlism efforts are going to move the needle though.
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...
If this were true (and I don't concede that it is), then you've just stated that the minimum bribe sufficient to persuade someone to become a parent is a lottery jackpot.
Mostly though, people who won lotteries would rather spend that on themselves. Demographic collapse is inevitable, and you'll die without even understanding why it happened.
Well, the reason why you choose the absurdly improbable example, is because it's still the least absurd/improbable. Why does this need to be explained to you?
As the other person pointed out, a lottery jackpot is also far above the minimum, it was just the most obvious example of a sudden windfall. And even then I was considering lottery jackpots here which are usually $0.5m-5m, not tens or hundreds of millions which seems common in the US (I could be wrong on that).
Children have been treated like state/church assets for multiple centuries if not millennia now.
Could you give some examples outside of government? I would imagine the wealth owners would cut those jobs pretty quickly? I've always been told that private enterprise was so much more efficient and good at cutting waste.
> they’re high-paid, private-sector roles that persist because the system values control and optics just as much as output
Sounds like you've answered your own question - these jobs are needed for the system to work. They're not "extra".
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-administr...
Case in point: the “but capitalists don’t form a group”/“Why workweek had been shortened to 40h then? No gays, no imigrants back then?” on this submission.
* When we asked the same question in the 2010s with productivity gains from technology, it was the gays and the immigrants that were the reason we couldn’t
* When we asked the same question in the 2000s with productivity gains from technology, it was the gays and the immigrants and the Iraq War that were the reason we couldn’t (until the housing crisis)
* When asked in the 90s, it was the gays, the immigrants, and budget shortfalls that were the reasons we couldn’t (nevermind continued tax cuts)
* When asked in the 80s, it was the gays, the immigrants, and the Soviets as cause for not shortening workweeks
I can go back for several more decades this way. It’s seemingly always the fault of minority groups that we can’t roll back workweeks and reclaim leisure time, rather than the fault of the monied elite demanding ever more for themselves. Until enough people acknowledge and accept this, I get to spend my time fighting to exist rather than all of us enjoying more community and leisure time together.
Imagine how productive economy will become if 996 workweek will become mandatory!
Here, an old-fashioned LMGTFY: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2015/10/how-did-the-40-hour-...
Wikipedia has a far more gruesome and comprehensive history of the US Labor movement, like the history of the NLRB, anti-union efforts in the 1860-1930s, the Coal Wars, Battle of Blair Mountain, etc. Everyone should know this history, at the very least so they can understand the harm that comes from delaying action further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...
https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1lo783l/hows_...
What's with this low quality comment. If you have nothing productive to add, don't comment.
Or try to make a change yourself. Start a business and try a 4 day work week. Everyone should love it according to your world view and you could just be slightly less "greedy" and hire immigrants and trans folks and every other 'misfortunate' soul.
Your line about 'just start a business' is something people say but never actually execute on themselves. Try making a store to compete with Amazon, a or a grocer to compete with our consolidated giants. They can and will use the economy of massive scale they have to crush your business into oblivion, taking a short term loss to maintain a death grip on the market
That's capital.
What about the average American with pensions and 401ks that are invested in stocks? Or the "FIRE" crowd on reddit with 6 figures invested in Vanguard ETFs? Is "Capital" just a slur to be used against owners of capital you don't like, or you think have too much?
Own capital or be owned by those who do. That's how it works.
We're trapped in a game that's taking the world to a bad place, but which we're doing really well at.
Pensions and 401ks are today's "people taking care of elders when they're too old to work" - an idea as old as humanity. It's just abstracted through markets.
You didn't answer the question. Are those people "captial" or not? If it's just "own capital", then most Americans are "capital" because they at least have some sort of 401k or pension, but I suspect you wouldn't put them in the same group as "people who have hoovered up the majority of wealth" or whatever.
59% of Americans have a 401k or other retirement account.[1] They accumulate capital so they don't need to work when they're old. A small fraction of them are the "Reddit FIRE" types.
The top 1% own more than 50% of all equity in private and public companies.[2] They and their kids and maybe grandkids don't need to work to live.
Would you put both in the same group? Other than "owns productive assets" they don't have that much in common.
1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/691202/percentage-americans-ret...
2. https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1212/average-net...
Others (retirement savers) using the same tools as that minority doesn't make them the same as that minority. Degree of control matters. That's what I was responding to.
"You know the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? About a billion dollars"
self-reported ? also, substantial numbers of adult people fall into various classifications that definitely do not have such a thing. Are those not counted at all ? also, how is it so precise with no caveats, callouts or error bars ?!
BS
More importantly, the 401k-s invested in the stock market aren't capital either but they do provide intermediating third parties with controlling power without any assurance that it will be used in the interest of the account holders - pretty much like bank accounts work.
Thus, 401k holders are not holders of capital, they only notionally own a share of pooled assets which are controlled by third parties for those parties' own ends and connections - mutual funds, banks, etc.
I feel you. I'm saying the exact same thing all over this thread.
> 401k holders are not holders of capital
There's capital and Capital. All 401k holders own capital. But the run of the mill retirement saver has no outsize influence on politics or business beyond what's available to a private citizen. Capital, with a capital C (haha!) controls both.
Probably not. In the sense it's being used in this discussion, capital are people whose majority of income comes from dividends and rents. So your typical 401k (likely - I am not American) isn't in that category, rather they are labor with some savings for an old age.
The main difference is whether you need to work for someone or not. That determines your social class and to a large extent, self-interests.
So the average boomer after retirement?
I also don't see too many boomers funding Super PACs and getting their favorite laws passed.
Aren't you scared how American system pits retirees and their kids against each other? What you just said means, essentially, if workers want to improve their working conditions, they have to go against shareholder profits, and they're threatening their parents survival (which relies on these profits). Isn't it f'ed up?
Of course they could start their own business with better morals but they'd be outcompeted by businesses which didn't care, that's the whole reason we need regulations and all the rest of it.
Back to reality, we would have 16x6 workweeks if not for government regulation. That much is not up for debate. Moving to 4x8 workweek is just a logical next step demanded by the circumstances.
Immigrants maybe, but nobody in the rust belt thinks their town is being hollowed out and flooded with fentanyl because of trans people. That's not to say they have no grievances against trans people, but to think that the right think trans people are "to blame for this misfortune" shows a huge ignorance of the right's politics.
You're making the same mistake as the parent comment, by conflating social issues with economic ones. Evangelicals have a lot to hate about trans people on the social front, but I'm not aware of any that thinks the decline of American manufacturing is due to trans people. At best it's something like "low birth rates is shrinking the labor force", but even that's more social than economic.
They're pointing out the use of Goldsteins to distract from the root cause of the issue (increasing wealth inequality) and get a significant fraction of the general population to believe the problem is more directly caused by immigrants than changes in legislation that allow for more corporate abuse. It's moot that trans people aren't a reasonable cause of economic problems because they are a distraction from economic problem.s
Then perhaps the right should stop spending a large portion of their political messaging on trans people?
I mean, for fuck's sake, nobody is making up the right's weird culture-war obsession with children's genitals. It's real, it's happening, and it's disturbing. Last election cycle Cruz was running ads depicting trans kids as big burly men who beat up little girls - literally. I'm not exaggerating. This is not hyperbole. This is actually their platform.
If your platform seems fucking stupid and completely devoid of any substance, then maybe you should not be aligning yourself with those people. Nobody should be expected to hand-hold and coddle you in the face of what can only be described as complete and utter idiocy. We're all very tired of this - you have played stupid for far too long.
Honestly, currently in a country led by the (far) right, I hear about the argument maybe once a year / 18 months at best.
Not even the immigrants get much discussion nowadays.
Again, that ad Cruz ran is real. He chose to use his very precious ad space on that. A cheap, low-intelligence blow to trans people. We have to acknowledge the reality of the situation we are in: the right is mostly focused on rage-baiting hard-working Americans with stupid culture war bullshit. And it works really, really well.
It doesn't neatly map to left/right politics globally, though. E.g. Sweden massively scaled back access to puberty blockers under social democrats.
There is no business in the world, except those already financially unhealthy, that would choose no-growth + reduced cost over growth + same cost.
It just goes against every business ethos except Arizona Iced Tea.
If that were the case, why are so many companies bent on eliminating some employees and equipping the rest with AI to make up the difference? Wouldn't it be in their best interest to retain ALL those employees and equip them all with AI?
The AI wave is masking a lot of poor economic outlook at the moment
It feels as though we've reached a compromise some time back where people are roughly ok with trading 40 hours of their productivity per week for enough units to live a pretty comfortable life on (comfortable is relative, and we're relatively much more comfortable than 99% of humans who ever lived).
Work expands to fill available hours. We don’t get more leisure time. That’s not ‘allowed’.
The working class will only get any benefits through class fight and collective action, but that ship has sailed.
Capitalism has won.
The industrial revolution coincides more or less with when starvation started to disappear from the developed world.
In many countries, holidays and PTO are a norm. I personally know a few people that choose to work 4 days a week, I know another bunch that actually retired early or simply don't jump from a job to another because they can free ride for a bit (no judgment).
That also means that you 1/ have to actually prioritize leisure over money 2/ have actually something leisurely to do.
Aren't retirement ages being raised everwhere across Europe?
Before that labor was exploited. After that labor was exploited.
We don’t seem to be willing to do that again.
Atomisation, which liberalism promotes heavily to the underclass, has all but destroyed humanity.
This contradicts what you already said ("there are always more TODOs"). Which one should I reply to?
If your employment has fixed deadlines, and your employer does not react to efficiency increases by setting earlier deadlines, then you should expect the headline effect (efficiency increases mean your weekly hours decrease).
> I can finish it on Monday and have it ready for the Friday deadline and then spend my time how I wish OR I can report the task completed and then expect to have more tasks assigned
Are you serious? Do you think you just have free choice of whether to do more work or not? If you completed a task in 15 minutes and spent the rest of the week surfing do you think that would be allowed by your employer? Most employee contracts would forbid it.
If I want to live in a particularly desirable house, I have to earn more money than the other people who want to live there too, so I can outbid them. So I'll work harder than them to do so.
(Trivial concocted example for illustration purposes, not meant to be nitpicked)
I'm not saying overtime is not allowed, but if it's expected to be the norm then it very much must be in the contract. If the overtime is not a regular expectation then it must be compensated appropriately, and even then there are upper limits to the amount of overtime.
People used to be able to sell themselves/their children into slavery and business people were just fine with it. Then we made them feel shame to treat humans that way. Then we made them feel shame for employing little kids. Them we made them feel shame for threatening a person's ability to provide for their family as leverage to dictate. As soon as they could, they backslid on the last one. Certain states are repealing their child work laws.
This is not normal. This is not how the US was the majority of my life.
AI has nothing to do with this. Worker productivity has already been shooting up and workers have been given nothing to match their efforts. As long as capitalism is the default economic system, any pro-worker change will have to be taken. Most corporations can't even allow workers to toil anywhere but under their direct supervision. Giving people more free time is clearly out of the question.
My advice to would-be CEOs and managers is to just let people be, don’t try to squeeze blood from a stone. It’s good to have some slack in the workline for when you need it, because the workers who have been treated well are far more likely to jump into an emergency and dump massive loads of work all at once, since they have a lot in reserves. Those emergencies are moments that make or break companies.
The problem is you will increase cycle times. There is a sort of time dilation that occurs around weekends. Thursdays will become the new Fridays and on Mondays people will be kind of groggy from being out for 3 days. So basically Tuesdays and Wednesdays become the days to really do hardcore work. That means it takes longer to get big projects done as people naturally schedule things around Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
A better model is to just have people be remote, and do a little bit of work each workday. This keeps people a little more fresh and boils their days down to just getting 1 or 2 important decisions made.
I'm not against workers asking for more money in the slightest, they don't do that nearly as often as they should, but this sounds a bit like "big brain idea: give me more money lol".
... screams the economics-illiterate left. If they pay you money for your work/time, then it's by definition fungible.
e.g. See "Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19198649
The OP is arguing this is even more true when AI does routine tasks, and the remaining tasks are more creative, strategic, inspiration-based.
As a business owner I’m using AI to hire fewer people for less time, massively reducing HR headaches. It’s great!
But also get real if you don't believe that kill bots won't take all the cannon fodder jobs. Computer programs don't have the nasty habit of disobeying orders or revolt.
You can just do things!
People need to have lives, not just jobs+recovery. Working for 5 consecutive days feels like living in the office and only coming home to sleep and do home chores - this doesn't even justify commuting.
In the United States, employees have no leverage.
If only there was some kind of organisation that workers could form to improve their collective bargaining power...
Possibly higher than that on HN though.
I was speaking to a particular audience, here, which isn't a randomized sample of the American workforce. And the sort of people who do the sort of jobs that we all do here, we're the ones that it's being talked about "shortening" the workweek... because for the other crowd, shortening the workweek happens when you piss off the assistant manager, and they only schedule you for 3 hours next week.
Additionally, you might consider that instead of focusing on the less than 10% that are startups, you should talk about the more than 95% that aren't gigantic fortune 100 companies with employee head counts numbering in the tens and hundreds of thousands.
In a labor market, companies aren't entitled to labor and laborers aren't entitled to jobs. If a company isn't viable then it isn't viable. If a job doesn't pay what you want, you dont have to do it. Things get complicated (intentionally?) when companies control large swaths of jobs at once or have outsized impacts on their employees' lives and future careers. Employees don't have nearly as much impact in the other direction (individually) and this asymmetry is the cause of lots of abuse historically. Unions are one way to help steady and maintain the labor market in order to keep it fair and efficient and powerful.
In general, things are worth improving even if there aren't perfect answers.
Never really heard of one that didn't end up corrupted. Usually from the get-go. To call my argument "weird" tells me how little personal experience you have with unions.
>Neither is your next implication that some companies wouldn't be viable if they had to pay more so therefore paying more is bad.
Not some. Practically all companies. In tech, maybe only the FAANG set would be able to shoulder that burden.
>If a company isn't viable then it isn't viable.
Some companies are viable in one environment, but not in another. If you're changing the environment to make fewer companies viable, then you're putting more people out of work. This should be obvious. It isn't, I think, because some second grade teachers pass children who should have flunked out.
>In general, things are worth improving even if there aren't perfect answers.
Dimwitted people will try to "improve" things right until the world burns down around them. Any attempt to point out to them that this is occurring will be met with even more ambitious-but-ill-conceived attempts at improving things.
We have them across the pond and they work for us - they are us. We can run for election in them. We can run them.
> To call my argument "weird" tells me how little personal experience you have with unions.
Sounds like you are the one with a limited experience of the world. The world is much bigger than America. The idea that "unions can't work" is fed to you and you gobble it up.
> Not some. Practically all companies. In tech, maybe only the FAANG set would be able to shoulder that burden.
In Europe, companies have to pay a living wage and they still function. They just don't always turn into giant funnels to siphon wealth into the hands of the ultra wealthy. If that's failure, then let them fail!
> Some companies are viable in one environment, but not in another. If you're changing the environment to make fewer companies viable, then you're putting more people out of work. This should be obvious. It isn't, I think, because some second grade teachers pass children who should have flunked out.
We have unions in the UK/EU and companies are still viable. Only people who failed geography and don't realise there are other countries out there would think that.
> Dimwitted people will try to "improve" things right until the world burns down around them. Any attempt to point out to them that this is occurring will be met with even more ambitious-but-ill-conceived attempts at improving things.
Whereas the really clever people want to keep things the same, because they are terrified of change.
So the UK and Europe are communist now?
It this rhetorical?
Like it or not, this is worth highlighting indeed. As I heard unions are an extra barrier for job seekers: in some occupations a union also has to approve an employee, not just the employer and this can make getting in the occupation prohibitively hard. Whoever knows better pleas comment, especially if and why this is not a problem.
Setting that aside, employees still have no leverage as many benefits that people rely on are tied to employment requirements. People can't take off time to retrain for a better job, have to come in when they're sick, etc., because if they upset their employer, they may lose their job which means losing food assistance they need for their kids, and employers know this...
This is a systemic issue.
And the only way you will fix it is by collective bargaining. Not by giving up.
To infect more people. This should be outlawed as sabotage and bioterrorism. If an employee would come in sick to my office I would be really mad at them, fire them if they do so twice.
Spending time at the office looking busy not a product.
I once had 4 days sick, and my manager had to call me into a meeting with HIS manager to impress upon me that there was 6 months left to the year and I could only take 2 more sick days before they would have to count it against me on my performance review.
We have continuously been able to do more in less time because of new technology for 250 years, since the Industrial Revolution since.
The increased productivity has benefited workers either by higher wages or shorter hours. Mostly the former.
I'm sure this trend will continue.
People might be better off according to some metric despite the fact that wages have stagnated. Could you not move the goalpost?
> Increased productivity has not benefited workers since the neoliberal turn in the late 70’s
Your metric is that "wages have stagnated", but that is a meaningless statement without context. Have they risen faster than inflation? Yes. Do people have more purchasing power today than the 70s? Yes. Is your definition extremely narrow to include your cherry-picked countries? Yes.
Most of the world is much better off today than the 70s.
I know I'm fighting against the populist zeitgeist here, so unlikely to make much traction, but anyway.
By moving the goalpost.
> Your metric is that "wages have stagnated", but that is a meaningless statement without context.
It is meaningful and has all the context you need if you fill in the minimal blanks.
- Wages stagnating means they were trending better before
- Trending like they did before meant that wages would be better by now
> Have they risen faster than inflation? Yes. Do people have more purchasing power today than the 70s? Yes.
Argue that stagnated is misleading if you want. For all I know that means that they have only marginally gone up or done, not literally stayed the exact same.
Maybe you think marginally better wages is enough. Fine for you.
The point I’m making is quite pointed and can’t be so easily dismissed with the empty rah-rah-progress slogans.
- Productivity has gone up under Neoliberalism
- Wages have stagnated
- Which means that Neoliberalism has not benefitted normal people
- Which means that relatively speaking people are worse off compared to if the wage trend of yester-decade continued
- ... even if one thinks that people are in absolute terms better off now
Which means that neoliberalism has been bad for regular people.
> Is your definition extremely narrow to include your cherry-picked countries? Yes.
Cherry-picked countries? Bro this board is the US. Not in terms of people but the country of origin and the majority of the focus on topics.
But the lopsided distribution is the case for the whole world of course. Percentage-wise:
- The bottom is a little better off
- The middle is a little better off than the bottom
- The top is massively better off
> Most of the world is much better off today than the 70s.
This could be argued for or against subjectively for hours. People have smarthpones. Housing is expensive. As is typical the elitist[1] side goes for the subjective angle.
What I referred to is objective. But more narrow.
> I know I'm fighting against the populist zeitgeist here, so unlikely to make much traction, but anyway.
It’s you and the ghost of Marie Antoinette against the world huh.
[1]: In general: elitist or uninformed.
That is silly. The populist zeitgeist is very much anti "the thing they call neoliberalism".
But the argument is ridiculously shallow. It cherry picks a few decades in human history, in a few western countries, where we observed very high increases of standard of living. It then sets that as the standard by which we should compare to.
It does not lower itself to examine, what caused that period in all of human history? How did it compare to 50 years prior to that period? Does it make sense to set that period as the benchmark? In other words, was it an anomaly, what caused the anomaly, was it sustainable?
None of this is addressed in any social media post (reddit, hn, wherever). It is far easier to just repeat the manta.
Is it still the 90s? I thought after that wages stagnated compared to productivity.
Your job will continue to be at least 40 hours, the base pay adjusted for inflation will decrease, the "benefits" that are too complicated to understand and extract yourself from will increase, and you definitely will come back into the office one day. =)
And they'll exhaust humanity, destroy ecosystems, and kill all the flora and fauna to achieve this.
It was like this when we won the 8-hour day norm that we have now! The 8-hour day may have been enabled by technology in some sense, but it was won with a fight.
For instance the amount of people employed in agriculture in France dropped from 60% in the 1800s to 3% today, a 95% reduction. Assuming everyone worked 40 hour weeks back in 1800s, that means everyone should only have to work 2 hours a week today, right?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-labor-force-...
I hope that working more for less wouldn’t have many takers but there may be a few.
I would venture a solid guess that for 88.91% of the population - if their salary is reduced by their employer by 20% they would stay in the same place and not look for another job...
In the West there’s a 40-hour work week. In China there’s 996. In Japan you don’t go home til your boss does - even if you hardly see your family.
Each society has norms that stop people working even more than they otherwise would. Everyone converges on that amount of work, regardless of productivity.
If you want to work less, you need to get everyone else to work less.
atemerev•7mo ago
Ygg2•7mo ago
That way, masses won't ever have time to think!
atemerev•7mo ago
M95D•7mo ago
No, they won't. They'll just spend more time on their phones watching cat videos.
atemerev•7mo ago