Believe it or not a 4 day work week would boost the economy. What do you think people do on their day off? SPEND MONEY. Chores, lunch, home/car repairs, you name it.
It’s fantastic for local economies. It’s HORRIBLE for big capital though.
The average American drives up to 3000 miles a year just commuting back and forth to and from work. That’s tires and gasoline and oil changes and engine work. It’s also new cars every few years so the vehicle stays reliable. It’s a massive chunk of corporate revenue.
And that worker also needs to eat out, usually settling on fast food, that worker also needs work clothes and supplies, and the offices they work in require massive investment in cleaning, upkeep, computer networking, air conditioning, and so on.
Most of this is done through major corporate companies and that money goes overseas or into huge mega-companies which send it all to some central financial institution that doesn’t pay taxes.
Meanwhile, in Work From home environments, you save money and put that money back into your immediate surroundings, which are usually nearby stores. You drive less, and less cars on the road mean less pollution, less wear on the roads and less expenditures from the state. Lower insurance premiums with less driving, and people are generally healthier because they have more time to do things like daily walks before the sun goes down, or cook healthier meals from local markets, leading to healthier people less medical expenses in the long run.
Why won’t anyone think of the capital?
Want to fix all this?
Make one simple change to capitalism: put in. A constitutional hard cap on personal wealth. Anything income or gift or whatever over 1 million goes 100% to taxes
Nobody has some inherent right to be rich or powerful. Nobody got extremely rich by themselves or through hard work, it’s just sheer fucking luck and standing on the backs of others
Nobody should have to be poor either
So without changing and overhauling the entire world, just set a hard cap on personal wealth.
May e also company sizes. Any networth over 1 billion? 100% to tax. Companies shouldn’t be able to have over, say 1000 employees either.
I don’t want a trillion dollar company with 200.000 employees. Give me 10.000 companies worth 100 million dollar companies that each employ a hundred or so workers.
Two simple rules that would change the world. Nobody would be sicher more powerful than anyone else.
All it requires is that everyone in the world says ENOUGH. Enough with the abuses from the rich and powerful
Alright, let’s run a quick model.
Let’s say the upper cap is $1000k.
You are a CEO and you get a salary of, say, $10k, plus 1000 shares, each worth $1. So, in total, that year your worth is $120k + $1000 = $121k.
Now, you’re incredibly successful as a CEO, you make your shareholders drool for your company’s shares. Which makes their price skyrocket. Each share is now worth $1000! Such success!
But wait! No! Catastrophe!
Your worth has just gone up to $120k + $1000k! The share’s value on their own hits the upper limit of wealth!
They’re not your money, mind you, you can’t do anything with them unless you cash them in, sell them.
So, you have two choices - you stop getting any salary and have $0 for spending (hopefully the office cafeteria is well stocked!), or you sell some shares, give the money to charity, and pray the stock price doesn’t go up. And if it does, you have to sell again, lose the money, and… oh, but now you no longer hold a controlling interest in your own company - some three dudes who work together bought up the shares, spread them around evenly (so neither of them goes above the $1000k), and they effectively control your own company, telling you what to do with it.
Companies shouldn’t be able to have over, say 1000 employees either.
So, instead of having some large companies, you end up with chains of “totally not the same” companies that just work together. “Oh, we’ve outsourced our HR to company X, which is Totally Not The Same as our company, they just don’t work with anybody else and we have full data transparency with them.”
Yes, they’ll find loopholes. Close those, too.
I am pretty sure than between the current model that is slowly but inexorably going towards: “2 kinds of people in the world: trillionaires and people depending on trillionaire’s charity to survive”, and the model decribed above, we can find a middle ground.
Not so long ago, the ratio between CEOs pay and median worker pay was 20. Today it’s 280. There were successful and motivated CEO at the time.
The US had a period during which the highest tax bracket was 90%. There were CEO, there were rich folks and there were entrepreneurs.
Enough with all the “impossible”. The current situation is the anomaly. The current situation is the not sustainable approach. It’s not just the US, neo-liberalism has spread over the decades with the very very very exact same results absolutely everywhere it was tried:
-impoverished population overall -reduction of services to the population -increased public deficit -ultra-rich getting immensely richer
Either we keep saying “it’s complicated” and keep course. Its end is already known: a collapse of the economy on itself: there is not enough people left making a decent enough living to buy what is produced, and everything belong to the ultra-rich.
Or we change course. It’s almost a matter of survival for the poor.I agree! I’m only saying that often the “simple solutions” aren’t really solutions when you stop for a moment to really think about the consequences.
There are several countries that have a wealth tax and they still have rich CEOs, so there is a way to address the problems that you’re describing.
Of course! It’s just never as easy as people think.
Oh yeah, 100% agree.
You’re right that their plan won’t literally work as they’ve designed it, but they have the right idea and ideas can be refined.
When share prices drive someone above the wealth limit, the excess shares are distributed equally among everyone involved in the companies
So, what you’re writing is in good faith, I can tell, but shows a fundamental lack of understanding how shares work.
If the value of a company goes up, the number of shares doesn’t change, the price per share increases. So, if a company emitted 100 shares, and they were valued at $10 each, for the worth of the company being $1,000.
Now, stuff happens, and the company is now worth $10,000. It doesn’t mean that there are now 1000 shares, it means that each share is now worth $100.
Which means that there are no “excess shares”.
What a company could do is something called “stock dilution”. For example, you have that company from before, worth $10,000, with 100 shares, $100 per share, right? They dilute the shares and emit another 100 shares, bringing the total to 200. But the value of the company is still $10,000, it just means that the value per share is now $50.
Seems like a good idea? Here’s the problem - control over a company is still determined by the percentage of owned shares. You had 100 shares? You need 51 to independently control the company. You now have 200? You now need 101 shares for the exact same level of control.
Which means: either the CEO of that company loses control of the company (effectively “gives it away”, potentially to malicious actors from the competition who just want to shut him down), or he still needs to own 50%+1 shares (so from 51 to 101 shares), meaning his wealth doesn’t change at all.
Huey Long campaigned on a wealth cap back in the 30’s on his ‘Share our wealth’ platform. The excess wealth taxed at 100% was to be used for essentially a universal basic income (Each person to receive the equivalent of $38k yearly).
He was assassinated. The rich elite of Louisiana and the Oil companies he massively increased state taxes on to fund his public programs rejoiced.
Ken Burn’s first documentary was on Huey Long, highly worth a watch.
Putting a hard cap on the ratio between the highest and the lowest paid workers in any organisation would help as well.
THIS might be a better solution, although it still doesn’t fix the “CEO is only earning $1 a year” situations like with Bezos or Zuckerberg.
Agreed. Fixing our issues has nothing to do with invading Greenland and Venezuela, but is entirely to do with the redistribution of wealth.
Make one simple change to capitalism: put in. A constitutional hard cap on personal wealth. Anything income or gift or whatever over 1 million goes 100% to taxes
You don’t understand where the vast majority of the wealthiest’s wealth comes from. There’s no “income” or “gift” at that level, it’s just the fact that they own things that are becoming more valuable over time. The vast majority of the increase in these people’s wealth over time is newly-created; it’s value that literally didn’t exist before, not an amount of cash money taken away from anyone else.
Speaking of value: net worth is just a valuation, a price tag. It’s the market saying “I would pay you $X for a share of this if you sold it”. If I buy a rookie baseball card for $5 and the player becomes famous for whatever reason and my card is now worth $100 because the demand significantly increased, my net worth increased by $95, but no one was deprived of $95 to make that so.
A hard cap on wealth is effectively legislating that if something you already own becomes too valuable, you’re not allowed to continue owning it anymore. And any sensible person should understand why that makes zero sense.
The vast majority of the increase in these people’s wealth over time is newly-created; it’s value that literally didn’t exist before, not an amount of cash money taken away from anyone else.
A wealth tax will go after that, and that will absolutely make sense. They can sell the shares they have in the companies, and that will make them think twice before cheating the system to grossely exagerate the value of their companies.
And if we talk about start-ups or other special cases where the CEOs can’t sell shares and/or we don’t really know their worth, we can have them give shares as payment. The gov will sit on them until they have actual value and sell them, or relesase them back if said value was lower than estimated at the time.
A wealth tax will go after that, and that will absolutely make sense.
It absolutely doesn’t make sense to charge a tax of real/actual money on a value that’s theoretical.
They can sell the shares they have in the companies, and that will make them think twice before cheating the system to grossely exagerate the value of their companies.
It’s irrational to assume “cheating the system to grossely [sic] exagerate [sic] the value of their companies” of every entity valued at more than an arbitrary $X.
For example, Costco is a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and yet it’s famous for how generous it is both to its customers and to its workforce. Its founder left the company a billionaire himself.
we can have them give shares as payment
“The stuff you own is now too valuable, so we get to steal it from you.”
No.
A hard cap on wealth is effectively legislating that if something you already own becomes too valuable, you’re not allowed to continue owning it anymore
I don’t know how else it would work. Do you? The alternative is that a handful of people are permitted own and control most of society’s resources while everyone else subsists on scraps. No one person should control the same amount of resources as a small or medium-sized government, except without the checks and balances that governments (should) have. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The way I imagine it working is that if you own stock in a company that now went up in value and now pushes your net worth above the cap, this puts you in a position where you now have more control than society permits you to have. In this case, some of your stock is sold off for taxes or parts of the company are split off and sold for taxes. You can of course proactively structure your business with the understanding that you’ll give up business unit x and y while keeping z if you do get close to the cap rather than waiting and having the government force your hand. Either way, the end result is that you have less control, the government gets tax money to fund social programs, and others take on some of the control you previously enjoyed by buying up your stock or business units (e.g., a worker collective pools their savings to buy it).
Not sure how well all that would work in practice, or all of the detailed policies that would be required to make it fair and avoid major disruptions to the market. All I know is what we have now is definitely not working.
I don’t know how else it would work.
That’s my point, actually. It doesn’t work in practice. Given that ultimately, it’s third parties that determine the value of things you own that are on the open market, placing hard limits like that would open the door to massive gaming of those systems. It’d also be practically impossible to enforce in any real way, as that would require an actual full audit (net worth figures you see in the media are educated guesses, not enough certainty for the application of law), during which the valuation of the assets in question can be manipulated downward in myriad ways.
The alternative is that a handful of people are permitted own and control most of society’s resources while everyone else subsists on scraps.
The poor aren’t poor because the wealthy are wealthy. Like I said, the vast majority of the wealthiest people’s wealth is not cash money, it’s a theoretical price tag going up over time. Over the past hundred years, the number of billionaires per capita has increased 7x, but a hundred years ago, poverty was MUCH more prevalent than it is today.
The two simply aren’t connected the way you assume they are, because wealth isn’t the zero-sum game you assume it is.
The way I imagine it working is that if you own stock in a company that now went up in value and now pushes your net worth above the cap, this puts you in a position where you now have more control than society permits you to have.
Really take a moment to think about this concept. You own a thing that’s valuable to others. If it becomes too valuable (a threshold defined completely arbitrarily, by the way) to others, “society” no longer “permits” you to continue owning it?
In this case, some of your stock is sold off for taxes or parts of the company are split off and sold for taxes.
In other words, the government will literally steal your stuff if the public decides it’s more valuable than the amount the government arbitrarily decided is too much?
the government gets tax money to fund social programs
Extremely wishful thinking. You’re actually more likely to net a loss of tax revenue overall attempting this, as people nearing the cap will rearrange their assets to avoid going over the cap, so no new revenue will be coming in, meanwhile the logistic cost of even determining whether someone is over the cap is certainly going to cost much more taxpayer money than what is brought in (which, again, is most likely to be literally zero or very close to it).
There is a reason that every country that’s previously attempted a policy like this aimed at the wealthiest has either since repealed it, or changed it such that it no longer targets the wealthiest (i.e. a ‘wealth tax’ that the middle class is made to pay as well). I’m interested in learning from their mistakes, not repeating them.
Not sure how well all that would work in practice
That’s for sure.
You make valid points and perhaps a wealth cap is a naive solution to the problem. Enhancing or even just properly enforcing existing anti-trust laws might be a better way to accomplish many of the same goals.
To your point about wealth not being a zero-sum game, it depends. There have been many innovators who have created wealth for both themselves and society as a whole and have been justly rewarded. I have no problem with that. Then there is wealth that is created via anti-competitive, exploitative, and rent-seeking practices. In many cases, a company will start off doing the former, then grow to be a huge monster that no longer innovates and instead continually enshittifies and becomes an overall parasite on society that blocks competition and stifles innovation, often capturing regulatory agencies and doing all sorts of unethical things with no consequences. At that point, the company and the individuals controlling it are no longer net contributors to society and need to be put in check, or otherwise, it does become a zero-sum game.
a huge monster that no longer innovates and instead continually enshittifies and becomes an overall parasite on society that blocks competition and stifles innovation, often capturing regulatory agencies and doing all sorts of unethical things with no consequences.
Regulation that prevents the anti-competitive etc. behaviors directly, instead of trying to assess a roundabout ‘fine’ based on net worth (which also carries the implicit assumption that any entity that reaches the ‘cap’ does so unethically, which is absolutely not the case—for example, Costco is a company with a famous reputation for being generous to both its customer base and its workforce, and it’s valued at several hundred billion, its founder is a billionaire himself), is the best way to approach this, I think.
And honestly, if we’re at a point where the sources of the regulation are truly “captured”, then we’re also at a point where trying to deal with the above behaviors with a tax is even less likely to succeed. Fixing that ‘capture’ should be the primary focus in that case.
At that point, the company and the individuals controlling it are no longer net contributors to society and need to be put in check, or otherwise, it does become a zero-sum game.
That’s not really what “zero-sum” means. What you’re describing is the company/entity becoming a net drain on the economy, but that doesn’t change the fact that wealth isn’t zero-sum. Being zero-sum would mean that it’s impossible for the grand total combined wealth among everyone to ever change, and therefore no one’s wealth can ever go up without someone else’s going down, or vice versa.
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The poor aren’t poor because the wealthy are wealthy. Like I said, the vast majority of the wealthiest people’s wealth is not cash money, it’s a theoretical price tag going up over time. Over the past hundred years, the number of billionaires per capita has increased 7x, but a hundred years ago, poverty was MUCH more prevalent than it is today.
The poor are poor because while they’re paid peanuts, everybody else estimates the value they create through their work in very large numbers. It is absolutely a matter of work-value distribution. Calling that “wealth redistribution” is an artifact to prop the “tax is steal” propaganda.
Tax the companies “theoretical price tag” and see it adjusting to much more realistic numbers, that would be beneficial for everyone.
Lastly, we can keep saying all we want about one hundred years ago, but at the time, economic growth was 2 digits. Today it’s one digit, and almost all of it value goes straight up to the ultra-rich. Growth is decreasing but ultra-rich worth net keeps increasing at faster rate. How can one not see this is bonkers?
8 malignant narcissist pedofiles who we’ve allowed to destroy the world.
8 really rich guys who, collectively, work 2-3 days a week? 🤔
Hours.
No no no, when you ask them, they work 200 hours a week. Each of them. At the very least!
“work”
Hey, they might do some extremely cushy paperwork related labor on 2 different days in a week. You know, for like half an hour at a time.
collectively. so i’d give them that.
Work being asking a bunch of people for ideas, and pointing a finger and saying “Do that.”
I can handle that gig. Make me a Billionaire.
Hi
Also more economically productive. But the ultra-wealthy are aristocrats cosplaying as managers, and reducing the workweek of the filthy poors reduces how entertaining their cosplay is to them.
It also gives people more time to organize, work a side gig to pull themselves out of poverty, or go to school for the same reason. Can’t have any of that
Gotta have your wage slaves and debt slaves.
work a side gig
so you want to make the work week shorter so the work week can become longer? pls explain
I want people to have more flexibility in their lives to make choices for themselves rather than having it dictated to them by their employer, that’s all. If someone wants to make the choice that they want another gig with their additional free time this change would give them then I don’t see an issue with that.
cant have well rested workers with more time to think, question, and organise.
As the world evolves (supposedly), productivity rockets skywards.
And we have gone from a…
- 3 hour work day… to a…
- 6 hour work day… to a…
- 12 hour work day… to a…
- 7 hour work day… (or 8 or 9 or more if you’re in the US or China or a factory- or fascist country)
And of course this is pitiful. We should be working a couple days a week at most.
The very idea that we have to work when we have so much automation is ludicrous. Why do we have to make our owners richer? Why can’t we turn them into fertiliser instead? And why can’t we make them really, and I mean really aware of the possibility.That cartoon “there’s so many of them, why don’t they just eat the lesser class?” (ok, I don’t remember how it was formulated), is something the billionaires (and politicians) ought to have pinned in each of their rooms.
Still, right now we should be at two days or 2 hour work days.
But thanks to AI, work days ought to be longer. You’ll have to catch up for all the people that got laid off/
I’ve got a job where I work 4 one week and 3 the other. It’s 12 hour shifts though.
Unfortunately I still need a part time job to cover bills… But if I didn’t it would be amazing
I have a 35-hour week with flexible hours so I could put it in 3 days if I wished. That seems awful to me though, I can’t really focus on my work anymore after 6 hours. All a matter of perspective I guess.
I can’t really focus on my work anymore after 6 hours.
Who cares, that’s the company’s problem. Do what works for YOU. The company made this policy, you should exploit the shit out of it. That’s what any corporation would do.
I’d get my hours in during the first three days of the week, then spend my free time making MY life better.
Well, you do you, but I prefer to actually get work done when I’m at work. If I don’t like my work anymore (well, it’s not my hobby, but still not that bad), I’ll go work somewhere else.
Valid.
Wondering how much would 8 guillotine cost
They are reusable.
But you never know where the really rich guys might go. We may have to camp out beside a number of bunkers across the world. Like a spare key, it’s better to have an extra one and not use it than to not have one when you need it.
If they’re hiding in bunkers, you can just seal it up from the outside.
Yeah. I guess I’m just partial to the imagery of waiting until they’re all together and having an angry mob… Give them all a haircut… At the same time.
You don’t really need a device. If the guillotine breaks down, you can do just as effective a job with a random rock.
You only need one. Make them wait in line and watch their colleagues go before them.
And give it a dull blade, so it takes 3 or 4 chops to finish the job.
Same thing with that proposed billionaire tax in CA.
Bunch of assholes.
policy favors money always always will
Of course people want a four-day workweek. That part is obvious and frankly irrelevant.
The real question is: who actually benefits without losing income? The answer is: a minority. Roughly 25–35% of workers, mostly salaried, white-collar, outcome-based roles, can compress or rearrange work without taking a pay hit. For them, four days is mostly a scheduling change.
The other 65–70% of workers, trades, service, healthcare, retail, logistics, commission, flat-rate, piece-work, are paid by volume, not vibes. Fewer days means fewer billable units, fewer closes, fewer shifts, or longer days just to break even.
I work flat-rate. I close work orders. If I work four days, I make less money. There is no efficiency fairy that replaces raw volume.
The four-day workweek isn’t a universal labor reform. It’s a white-collar benefit marketed as moral progress, and it collapses the moment you apply it to people who actually produce, fix, transport, or serve things.
This is not true at all. No one calling for the reduced hours is calling for reduced pay.
Of course no one is doing that. I work on throughput, not salary. A lot of people are in the same position, whether they are flat-rate or hourly. If I cut my schedule down to four days, I simply will not make enough money to sustain myself. There is a hard limit to how much work I can complete in a single day, and I cannot compress six days of output into four. That is the point I was making, a four-day workweek does not benefit workers whose income is tied to throughput or hours worked. It primarily benefits salaried employees whose pay is disconnected from daily output
Did you actually read what I wrote?
The real question is: who actually benefits without losing income? The answer is: a minority. Roughly 25-35% of workers, mostly salaried, white-collar, outcome-based roles, can compress or rearrange work without taking a pay hit. For them, four days is mostly a scheduling change.
and I cannot compress six days of output into four
the point here is that you shouldn’t need to work 6 days to be able to afford a life.
you are literally fighting for people stealing from you.
https://media.theunderstatement.com/005_B_us_wealth_distribution.png
That is the work I do. I am paid per job completion because I am in the repair industry. My income is entirely self-generated; I make my own salary based on output. That is how this business functions, and there is no alternative model that actually works. To remain competitive, I have to work six days a week. We cannot raise prices beyond a minimum threshold without losing work.
It sounds great to say people should work less and live more. Unfortunately, in certain sectors of the economy, that idea is completely disconnected from reality. In industries driven by throughput and competition, working less directly means earning less, and for many of us, that is simply not an option
You’re not charging enough. You need to reevaluate your costs with your own labor cost included. Don’t ignore yourself just because you’re doing gig work.
Does anybody read anything that I actually write?
We have competition in the business. We have to offer lower prices to stay in business to be competitive. You can’t just charge more… People are going to use cheaper services than expensive ones. That’s basic economics.
Does anybody read anything that I actually write?
yes, we do. you are talking about how it works now, and we are talking about how it needs to change.
if no one will provide the kind of cheap labour that can only provide living for you if you do it 6 days per week, then your customers will not run away from you, because the others will do the same. also, your customers also work somewhere, and they will be in the same position.
the solution is not to work seven days a week, the solution is to take back the wealth they are stealing from us.
They are more like 8 little kings
I suppose that’s also the reason their account is suspended.
You’ll never get it when the ones in charge want 8/28 workhours.
