Item — HN Reader

> The only solution to competition is centrally enforced precommitment. First, the government should actually enforce the eight-hour workday. Then it should reduce the workday, for all employers at once, so no one can get ahead by cheating. I don't see any other solution.

This would not really be a solution. All it would result in is more people taking work home, because job evaluations would still be based on how much progress one made on the primary project. To get ahead and get that next promotion, many people would still feel compelled to work extra (unreported) hours. I suspect a madate such as what you propose would simply push the long work-days into being unreported.

This is basically what happens in graduate school (in the US, at least). I just finished a PhD program; as part of our contrats students agreed to only work 20 hours per week. There is no way one could finish a dissertation working on 20 hours per week, so everyone worked longer hours. Sure, you could complain about how many hours you worked (and some people did), but that did not change the fact that only 10–20% of Astronomy PhDs get faculty jobs, so if you want that faculty job, you need to put in the hours to do great research, regardless of the mandated 20 hour limit.

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Do you think there /is/ a solution to the problem? Or is this just one of the side effects of capitalism?

I'm not trolling here...just curious. My own mind tends to go in the direction of the parent, but, I also see how enforcement would be next to impossible.

I think you're trying to solve a wrong problem. Work isn't a problem. Work is what propelled humanity to explore, understand and conquer the world around us. Human work is a requirement for the development of medicine, greener technologies, safer transportation and even space exploration and colonization.

If there are any problems about work, they are about making it more enjoyable, making good work more widely accessible and distributing the proceeds fairly.

That is the exact problem with the 4 hour workday and other forms of part-time work. As I've heard many people describe part-time work : 40% of the pay for 80% of the work.

Until that changes, I would not expect part-time work to happen for anyone but really high up managers where such a trade may actually make sense.

I am not sure there is an institutional or global solution. But I am also not convinced it is an institutional or global problem. There are certainly individual solutions—accepting a different standard of living in exchange for fewer working hours, selecting careers which have better working hours—but I have trouble envisioning a global change (short of a cultural attitude shift) which would "solve" this "problem".

Sorry, tragedies of the commons don't have individual solutions. If everyone else is overfishing the common supply, you overfish as well, or go out of business. If everyone else is using performance enhancing drugs, you use them as well, or drop out. If everyone else is working 80 hour weeks and thus bidding up the price of houses, you do the same, or you can't buy a house. These things are very well studied in game theory, and I wasn't kidding when I said the only solution is centrally enforced precommitment.

You are equating basic competition with the tragedy of the commons. Even if it were a zero sum game (which it is not) it still would not be an example of the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons is when individuals have the option to consume, but do not have to bear the cost. They then choose to over-consume because they have no incentive not to. In your example the people who work 80 hours to afford a house, have to work 80, thus bearing the cost themselves.

Individual liberty may be a resource being depleted by an emergently enforced necessity to work.

Is this issue really a tragedy of the commons though? What resource is being depleted?

The market value of labor, relative to other goods.

Also see the book "Two-Income Trap", it basically describes how households didn't become better off from making both partners work, because that just bid down the price of labor relative to housing and education. Everyone ended up in the same position as before, but now they work 2x more and cannot opt out. Also the non-working partner in the family provided a safety net because they could start working if things got rough, and now that safety net is gone.

> Everyone ended up in the same position as before, but now they work 2x more

Surely the extra people working produced more output (e.g. ~twice as many bugs fixed/year or ~twice as many new anti-cancer drugs/year). Supply of some things would remain constraint and their prices would be bidden up, but many others would have their supply increased and prices could even fall (e.g. due to capital costs spread over a larger number of units). We definitely have not ended up in the same position as before.

Sure, it's not the same position. Smartphones are getting cheaper. But how much do you spend on smartphones? The main argument is about things like housing and education, which don't seem to be getting cheaper.

Not sure if I undertstand what was meant by "The only solution to competition" but I don't think competition is a problem.