#Far better to tank 50% of your existing economy than to sacrifice even a single point of sustained growth

[togglessymposium]

I notice that I’m confused. Adjusting for inflation and population, 75% of the 2023 Unites States GDP is… the economy in 2015 or 2016. From $76,000 per capita down to $57,000. Hardly the dark ages! This has pretty much always been true, right? At least in the modern era. If your entire economy is growing by a 4% a year, that compounds very quickly, and cutting a linear percentage off of that means going back in time a relatively modest amount. During the postwar boom, that would shrink down to only a couple years!

Going back in time to 2015 by making 3/4ths as much stuff (per capita) doesn’t even mean making 3/4ths of any given good; you can grow just as much food and offload the reduced production in to other stuff. In particular, you can trim down positional goods with a fairly minimal impact on quality of life, although I don’t know how much of the physical actually-real economy really is in that category. That seems like a difficult thing to measure, but I wouldn’t be enormously shocked to discover that some 15-20% of the actually-real economy gets thrown down the bottomless well of red-queen-race competitions; for example, shrinking the amount of wealth sunk in to advertising agencies would probably leave the relevant firms in basically the same relative position they are in now, with a slightly higher quality of life for the rest of us. And in a free market, allocation of resources should in theory take care of this ‘mostly automatically’, with the price of advertising rising faster than the price of food since demand for the latter is inelastic, perhaps helped along with some farm subsidies like we already have. So I don’t think that even necessarily puts you back the entire 25%, not in a way that matters!

Now, some of this may just be that economic growth numbers are basically fake, I suppose. Like, if the stock market goes up 10%, that doesn’t mean that the community has 10% more stuff to go around, it just means that a larger fraction of that stuff is controlled by the sort of people that own lots of stocks. But on paper it can look like the economy ‘grew’ for a bit, at least until inflation reaches its new equilibrium. But quite a lot of it is also real improvements in ‘worker productivity’, that is, in the force multiplier that technology offers to the typical man-hour in an aggregate of productive firms. And at least in principle, shrinking the overall labor-hour pool by 25% doesn’t seem like it would also tank the rate at which we reap these technological and capital gains; if we could grow at 4% per year in 2015 when the GDP per capita was $57,000, I don’t see why we couldn’t grow at 4% per year in 2023 if the GDP was $57,000 per capita. So we’d ‘keep pace’ in that sense, staying a fixed few years ‘behind schedule’, in exchange for workers getting an extra ten hours a week of leisure for their own use.

Now, this isn’t an argument that this plan is fine and we should just wave our magic wand and reduce full-time employment to 30 hours, because contra OP I do have a certain faith in the proposition that this stuff actually is complicated, even if robber barons do love to hide behind that complexity to justify their own evils. I’m not assuming this model is right. If nothing else, this would have to break as you cut back to really short work weeks like five hours. But I am saying that merely ‘making 25% less stuff’ doesn’t seem nearly as bad as it sounds, unless the GDP numbers are just wildly dissociated from the facts on the ground. For a 25% cut to be really scary, it seems like a great many other things have to be false, including most of what people point to to justify the current ordering of state power.

I'm up to the "I dunno maybe children working 13 hour shifts is bad, guys" part of Capital and it feels important to inform people that haven't read it yet that capitalists in the 19th century were not by any means wringing their hands and twirling their mustaches about employing children to squeeze out profits, they were hiring "experts" to write newspaper articles for them, explaining how "well, the socialists have these big demands about an 8-hour work day, and taking Saturdays off, but it's actually just so complicated, it's too complicated for most people to understand, we just NEED to hire children for night shifts because the stamina of their strong, youthful bodies is the only way we can survive as a business! It's science, you see. Economics doesn't work like that, just ask our economics professors at Oxford. You CAN'T turn a profit only working people 8 hours! Trust the experts, they know. It's just so complicated..."

That exact infuriating cadence that you read in New York Times articles, in the Atlantic Monthly, in the WaPo and all the other bourgeois rags where "everything is so complicated, and it's actually a lot more complicated than you think.." that has been around since the beginning. It is nothing new. So the next time you see some op-ed from Matt Yglesias or any of those other guys huffing their own farts about how "complicated" everything is, and how "unrealistic" a 30-hour work week is, remember that Marx was dealing with that exact class of "intellectuals" "explaining" how working 13 hours at age 10 was "vital" to the "moral fibre" of those poor kids.