Your Time Or Theirs?

Some bloggers wonder what would happen in a post-sleep world. Garrett Jones thinks that work ours would go down because, as work-hours become less valuable, people would work less (as a percentage of awake-time). Matthew Yglesias argues that those at the top and bottom will simply have more hours of work expected of them. Megan McArdle points out how the winds of change would be so great that we can’t just look at it as a work-hours issues.

On the work-hours part, I believe it is primarily dependent on who captures the benefits of extra time. I mean, we might still be working for eight hours a day, five days a week. So it’s not like automation in the requirement for less work. Joshua Green explores the post-work future, which is a similar question because it comes down (moreso) on the question of leverage and the captured benefits of an increase in productivity (or in the case of no-sleep, a potential one).

The modern economy suggests to me that, absent government intervention, the accumulation of benefit would start and mostly end at the top. Instead of just the top and bottom being expected to work more, we all would because the wealthy would be able to play us off against one another. “We’re looking for someone willing to put in 100 hours. Bob over there is. Are you?”

Here in the US, of course, we do have the 40-hour workweek for non-salaried individuals. If that held, then we might successfully get a lot more leisure time. It might not, though, and not just because of the rich. This is what McArdle touches on. Leisure activity costs money. Even leaving aside cappuccinos and theaters, more time at home on the Internet means more used bandwidth. The increased possibility of boredom means that cable TV can start charging more. So we would want more money, and with more hours in the day, there is a really strong likelihood that we would want to be able to work more so that we can make the most of our leisure time. If it isn’t lifted, I’d expect people to start working around the 40-hour limit with second jobs. And since the second jobs are inefficient, I would expect the 40-hour workweek to be re-evaluated.

With any luck, all of our newfound time wouldn’t be soaked up. But it comes back to the question of our future with automation and increased productivity. If more and more of it is kept in the hands of those with the power to purchase the capital that devalues the need for human labor, then it’s a bleak future indeed as we all scramble to find ways to make ourselves useful. Likewise, I can easily imagine employers capture the benefits of the increased potential of man-hours.

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

36 Comments

  1. One thing that I’ve heard about many of the biggest captains of industry is that they tend to sleep 3-4 hours a night. They’ve somehow hit some sort of jackpot in the genetic lottery that allows them to need 3-4 hours and that’s it. So they wake up and work like the dickens and are constantly irritated by underlings that require much more than they do.

    So I’m wondering if there are a non-zero number of captains of industry out there who would have gotten a lot farther in life if only they didn’t need their 7-8 every night.

    • The ties into the college admission post from the other day. If you add up all the things a high school student is asked to do toi get into an elite college: school, sports, other extra-curriculars, plus the three or four gours of homework good high schools give these days, it’s already too much for the sleep most teenagers need. Add a part-time job to that and it’s almost impossible (though plenty of kids attempt it.) So you get a significant bias towards kids who

      1. Can get along on abnormally little sleep, and
      2. Don’t need to help their families out economically

    • It isn’t just Captains of Industry. I know lawyer’s with their own small to medium sized firms (they are usually among the founding partners) who sleep that little as well. At one firm I worked for, it was not unusual for the head guy to send out e-mails at 4 in the morning and this was a small 7 lawyer firm.

    • I’m skeptical that 1) it’s happening consistently rather than you know, a few times and it just becomes “their life,” (i.e. a story they tell to try to leverage more work out of underlings; 2) if it is, it doesn’t devastate their quality of life and health and they just claim it doesn’t.

      I do believe that jobs sometimes force people to do this for periods of time – POTUS, ER docs, sure, maybe some CEOs. But the health effects build up and eventually catch up to people. That’s my bias, anyway. I’ll believe exceptions to this are particularly frequent among business executives when I see it thoroughly documented. Until then, it strikes me as a suspiciously likely story from people whose every incentive is to try to get the people around them to work harder.

      • I’ve seen it happen. My first boss (the CEO/founder) required very little sleep. I know this because he would call me at 2 in the morning with a question, then call me again 6:30. His wife (who did periodic accounting work for the company) also commented on it. So I know it does happen at least sometimes.

        • To be fair, you don’t know what is health was like. The effects this raged on his body could be unnoticed to the naked eye.

          • He’ll live, but how will he feel (or more to the point, how did he feel when that was his habit, if indeed it was)? I believe people can/will endure a lot to see their businesses survive. It’s a completely different question whether they are biological anomalies who feel fine and are fully healthy when uniformly getting only three hours of sleep a night.

          • I found a study documenting a mutation that reduces the need for sleep by about two hours per night. That’s only half of what’s claimed here, though.

          • Did you go looking because of my skepticism or did you just happen to recently be looking into the question? If the former, why is getting this claim documented at all important to you? What would it mean for any question of interest if it were true?

          • I looked it up because I was curious, and posted what I found here because it was easy. I’m not sure what you’re looking for here.

          • I’m not aware of evidence to support the claim; I’ve seen it made a number of times not just here; I think it sounds like a silly meme that’s going around that is fundamentally inane and has little import even if it’s true, yet smart people seem to be very intrigued by it despite the fact that all of that is likely quite clear to them too. I’m trying to figure out what’s worth the keystrokes here.

        • I appreciate that people have these experiences with their bosses. Still, though, how many such calls was it really that gave you that impression? And, as ND says, what do you know of the health/quality of life effects that that behavior had for him?

          It’s one thing to be up thinking about work at that time a couple or a few times a week on the one hand (which in itself doesn’t demonstrate how much sleep they are or aren’t getting), and another to honestly not need more than 4 hours of sleep as a way of life, to have that be your way of life, and to spend all that waking time at odd hours working, on the other. Again, it sounds urban-legendy and like a suspiciously useful tale for the self-styled überclass to tell to the rest of us to me, and I’ll believe it when it’s documented for me to see – again, “it” being not the idea that executives are frequently up working at all hours of the night, which I obviously do know to be the case, but the idea that there is a notable concentration among executives of biologically anomalous people who require less than four hours of sleep a night, experience few or no health effects that others would experience when they uniformly get only that much, and who spend almost all of that extra time at work (if at home) for the companies they head.

          Btw, I think you were doing everyone else in your company a disservice if you didn’t make clear to him that there were times of the night you weren’t available to do work.

  2. I’m with you on the without government intervention the post-sleep economy is going to mainly benefit the wealthy. One of the hardest fought for victory for labor was for the eight-hour day and for the weekend. During most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, work days were often twelve to fourteen hours, sometimes even sixteen in the very early days of industrialization, and it took many decades of labor activism and finally government intervention to get the eight hour day and the weekend.

    In a post-sleep economy, we are going to see more of the ridiculously long hours reimposed. We already see this happening in the present with people with all sorts of jobs having to put in more and more hours. A post-sleep economy is going to make it much worse.

    • My hope would be that we would get out in front of it and come up with some sort of compromise. Transition from a 40-hour workweek to a 60-hour workweek. Give them their pound of flesh, but only a pound. By refusing to budge at all, I think the result would be an 80-hour workweek where we essentially work two jobs which would be tiring and inefficient. By lifting caps entirely, I think there would be a race to 80 or even 100 hours a week as we all compete against one another.

      • My sense of history is not really making me this optimistic. Management types have typically not compromised unless forced to at or near gun point on any issue. My feeling is that we are going to repeat a lot of labor battles.

      • A 60 hour work week is ineffecient. I don’t think lessening the need for sleep is going to change that pattern.

        Admittedly, it MIGHT — but basically humans have a point of dimiminshing returns on work that is somewhere between 40 and 60 hours a week.

        This constantly eludes management, despite decades of study on this, and they still persist in understaffing via overtime rather than hiring enough people. (I suppose because head count is easy to determine, productivity per worker per hour requires all that nasty math and references and work).

        I suspect that in a world without sleep (or less), the pointy-haired titans of industry would happily push for 80 hour or 100 hour work weeks, despite the fact that they’d get more done for less by hiring two guys to work 40 hours apiece.

        • Management probably thinks more about cost-saving on salary and budget than anything else. Paying someone 20 hours of overtime a week (if said employee) is hourly is probably seen as being better than paying two 40 hour salaries.

          This is largely about culture more than studies. Plus a kind of Type A Alpha Maling

          • And now the trend is towards simply not paying overtime.

        • A 60 hour work week is ineffecient.

          In the very narrow sense of productivity per hour worked, sure. But there are other factors to take into consideration. Benefits, for example. You may be paying 50% more in wages for a 60-hour-per-week worker, but your expenditures on benefits remain fixed. You’re not paying any more for office space or equipment, either. Unless you have multiple shifts, those resources are just going to waste at night.

          It’s can also be inefficient to add extra people to a project, even aside from physical capital issues, since work is often not arbitrarily divisible. Delays in completion of the project can be inefficient, too.

          The goal of a firm is to make money, not to maximize productivity per hour worked, and there’s not a perfect correspondence between the two.

  3. Will, the Jones and Yglesias links both point to the Jones piece.

  4. None of the linked pieces credit Nancy Kress, who wrote a series of (admittedly, increasingly bad) SF novels about a new aristocracy: people who don’t need to sleep.

    • And yet my epic SF decadology about a future in which no one needs to poop continues to get rejection notices.

          • Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million” anticipated you:

            Her wastes are hemodialyzed out of her bloodstream while she sleeps — that means she doesn’t have to go to the bathroom.

            Like the Bible says, there is nothing new where the sun don’t shine.

      • Have you ever considered that more humans might take pleasure in relieving themselves than they let on?

        • Dude, I have small children. Closing the door for a 5-minute poop in relative peace is the highlight of my existence.

      • Which number was that? The original story was pretty good (it made Dozois’s best-of-the-year anthology), novel #1 was OK, 2 was bad, and then I stopped.

        • I think it was the first one. The idea was intriguing but the prose was horrible,

          This is generally my problem with SF.

          • There’s a reason Vonnegut invented Kilgore Trout, who had mind-bogglingly original ideas but couldn’t write for sour apples. The weird thing is that the name obviously refers to Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote beautifully.

  5. I wonder how much overlap there is between people who think that if we no longer needed to sleep employers would “force” us to spend all/most of the extra time working, and those who think that the economy is running out of work to do.

    • Salaried people will have to work nights!

      Lazy people will continue to do nothing.

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