Realize, productivity for almost all work currently valued in the economy peaks at around ~20 hours/week.
What does this imply about the 40/45 hour work week, or the bloated abominations we find in e.g. Silicon Valley?
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It's almost like certain Marxist arguments about surplus labour may not be as spurious as certain social institutions would have ya think.
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The official capitalist mythos is that capitalism is about efficiency, productivity.
It's really only about rent exploitation. Productivity and efficiency are only valued when they generate profits.
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Lots of potential & actual problems with the second order inferences drawn by Marxist economists, but pretty hard to argue against this one.
How many hours a week do you spend performing busyness, with nothing to do? Be honest.
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If you can perform challenging intellectual work or heavy labour for more than 2-3 hours at peak efficiency, you're either a mutant or on drugs.
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Quantity of output matters.
Maximising efficiency when the result is still *less* even if better value per hour still loses.
Less is less.
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We're talking total output times quality, here. For intellectual work, 1 good idea crushes 10 mediocre ones.
Quantity is severely overrated in a lot of professions.
E.g. most of my work is spent correcting bad design documents that could have been done much better, slower.
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Good ideas have to be implemented and implementation is about quantity of output not just elegance or efficiency or lack of mistakes.
Efficiency and productivity is absolutely fundamental don’t get me wrong but you can’t isolate that as the single dime is up to optimise on.
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Don’t know where you got the idea that capitalism is about productivity tho.
It’s about returns on capital. Not the same thing.
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I didn't?
The mythos of capitalism, that they sell you on every level of discourse, is that it makes the most productive, efficient & prosperous society.
The reality, as I already stated, is that it's about the bottom line only. We'll happily hamstring ourselves to increase it.
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I don’t hear that mythos being pushed where I am at least.
Naked capitalism is very bad at capturing externalities. Hybrid forms can be much better.
And far from obvious that there is a better workable system - the right variant of capitalism is the question IMO.
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Sure. I am from a hypercapitalistic country that everyone seems to think is at least part socialist.
All it is is a different distribution of spoils. Fewer billionaires, fewer poor & homeless...
Yeah, it's a pretty specifically neoliberal fiction I think. Chicago magick.
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