Freedom at work

The Adam Smith Institute has an atypically incoherent article on France. It notes that blacksmithery has taken off in France over the last 20 years, in line with increased horse ownership, and quotes a blacksmith pointing out that French people’s 35-hour weeks give them more time to ride horses.

It then, on the basis of pretty much nothing, assumes this is a bad thing. The evil State must be compelling people to spend their time riding horses and getting them shod, for surely nobody would *choose* to work fewer hours in order to do fun things outside of work…

I’m agnostic over the enforced limiting of working hours. Obviously, if you want to work ridiculous hours for ridiculous cash, it seems silly for the state to intervene. However, the outcome of a US-style system with few limitations is that everyone ends up working longer hours than they’d optimally choose, so they don’t appear weak and lazy compared to their colleagues, who are all doing exactly the same thing. Society needs to strike a balance between the two; the ASI just assumes that the first outcome is Bad and the second is Good.

Meanwhile in the US, not only do you have to work 100 hours a week with 10 days’ holiday, you can’t even sleep with your colleages to make up for the fact you never have time to meet anybody else. I don’t have much sympathy for Boeing chief Harry Stonecipher, given that he drew up the code of conduct under which he was sacked, but the concept that such a code of conduct would exist is, well, fucking insane. Were I to work for a firm with HR policies like Boeing’s, I’d have been sacked several times for a wide range of reasons, none of which would have had any impact whatsoever on my ability to perform effectively at my job.

Would you rather have the freedom to work a 100-hour week, or the freedom to go out with your colleagues?

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6 thoughts on “Freedom at work

  1. I do like the way the ASI explains everything at the level of the opening pages of an Introductory Economics textbook, presumably because that’s the most advanced level they understand.

    "More horses means more demand for horseshoes, and that means more work for blacksmiths." Gee, thanks, Dr Maden Pirie! Your PhD sure wasn’t a waste of effort!

  2. The french economy does have some problems at the moment… but they will not be solved by the recommendations of the twits that "explain everything at the level of the opening pages of an Introductory Economics textbook" as… Simon says. They really didn’t get past those first pages, too boring I guess…. "asymmetries of information? Bah."

  3. Um, I think you are the ones who have no understanding of economics, a basic economic principle is that "supply derives its own demand" therefore limiting supply e.g by limiting th amount of work each member of the population can do will also limit demand and therefore lead to a fall in real output i.e less wealth for the population. Also Madsen is going to be the first private British astronaut. How cool is that?

  4. a basic economic principle is that "supply derives its own demand"

    That would be the vulgar version of Say’s Law, which is pretty much on life support since the vicious kicking Keynes gave it in the 1930s.

    The proposition that if people work less, they have less "output" to consume is pretty self-evidently true, apart from soldiers and other people whose job is the destruction of expensive and/or useful things. But conversely, they have more leisure.

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