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Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day work week
(techcrunch.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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Sure, I agree with that. However, we also need to consider what a "net decrease in productivity" actually means for the population as a whole, and whether it's something we want to accept as a trade-off for more free time. Briefly, we can collectively choose to work four, three, or even two days a week, despite seeing a decrease in overall productivity. However, a decrease in productivity means that stuff like clothes, transport, food, IT services, and pretty much everything you can think of that someone has to produce becomes more scarce.
You basically need to answer the question of "would you prefer two days off per week with current access to goods and services, or have more days off with reduced access to goods and services". Of course, there may come along technological innovations that change this in some ways, and there are studies showing that a lot of people can be sufficiently productive on a four-day work week. On a society level, I still think the point stands as an overall tradeoff we need to consider when talking about whether we should reduce the work-week.
My point is that it's not just a "capitalists are bad, and we're owed more free time" thing. If we produce less, then goods and services become scarcer for everyone. I would say the distribution of wealth in society, and how it's shifted the past 20-50 years is more concerning than the fact that we're working the same hours as we were 20-50 years ago.
Would not having 30 dresses make you unhappier, if you have time to spend doing things you enjoy instead of consumption being the only thing you have to show for all the time you spend at work?
How much transportation is actually what we need for living and how much is induced by being forced to go to work?
Food has the amazing ability to just grow with limited human intervention, so there is no reason to assume a reduction in food availability. Also with more free time people could tend to a small garden for some of their food more easily.
IT services... You are on a platform run by volunteers in their free time. More free time would mean more of such services available.
Capitalism has outpaced "intrinsic" consumption since at least a hundred years in the industrialized nations. Most consumption is induced by advertisment and social pressure manipulating us to consume more, so we work more, so we consume more, so the rich can extract more wealth in every cycle for themselves. You cannot separate wealth distribution, scarcity and work time from each other.
For the average people i'd wager the available goods and services wouldn't change much, as the people who make goods and services exclusive to the super rich like yachts would be producing other goods instead.
It feels like you're attributing to me an opinion that a decrease in the availability of goods and services would be a universally bad thing. I never said that.
For my own part, I don't own much excess stuff. I use whatever clothes I buy until they're worn out, and the only furniture I own is a couch, a bed, a kitchen table and two chairs. However, I do enjoy climbing, hiking, and skiing, all of which require a bit of equipment to do. Lower productivity would likely imply that those things become less available/more expensive.
As for food: Saying that it "has the amazing ability to just grow without much human intervention" just makes you seem unaware of the fact that loads of people would literally starve if it weren't for modern farming equipment, synthetic fertiliser, preservation methods, and transportation. For people to rely on "a small garden for some of their food" is not a practice that works at scale with the population density in the world today. There's a reason the population on earth was relatively stable until the industrial revolution, and has grown exponentially since: Modern technology makes it possible for us to feed very many more people with a lot less land and resources.
IT services: Yes, I'm on a platform run by volunteers. I'm on it using hardware that was built by workers, with materials developed, extracted and refined by workers, on electricity produced and distributed by workers, over an internet that is possible because of workers. All these workers are reliant on their own corporate IT systems in order to be as efficient as they are today. You can't just extract the last link in a huge web of dependencies, and act like it could work on its own.
Anyway, all these things are side-notes. My primary point (which I still believe stands) is that we cannot expect to reduce productivity across the board (i.e. everyone works significantly less), and expect that there will not be a price to pay. Whether that price is worth paying is an open discussion, which I haven't really decided what I think about myself.
My argument is that a lot of what we consider "productive" actually is not at the consumption for which it is produced isn't intrinsic, but artificially induced to produce more. Production became its own end under Capitalism rather than a mean to satisfy needs.
Also we need to consider, see the farming example, how much we currently buy instead of do ourselves for a lack of time and energy. As for the risk of starvation if it wasnt for modern means of agriculture i disagree in part. In many industrialized countries the majority of agricultural land use is for animal farming. Aside from being destructive to the environment and climate, the overconsumption of meat leads to more diseases like colon cancer.
With your example of internet, how much bandwidth is used to feed people advertisement so they consume more? How much computing hardware is wasted on LLMs and other slop?
Capitalism is self reinforcing. Once you break the cycle you start seeing how much of it just goes to reproduce the capitalist system, rather than serve any human needs.
Most jobs I've ever had haven't been about creating anything used directly by a normal person, they've been about optimizing things in ways that squeeze maximum profit for billionaires. I don't think I'm alone, especially in the developed world.
Or we can collectively choose to never shorten the work week while productivity continues to outpace wages forever. Which is what republicans and centrist democrats both want.
You seem to agree with my last point, which was that
That is: The major problem we have today is that the increase in production we've seen the past 20-50 years has primarily benefited the wealthy. This needs to change. Once we have decent wealth distribution, we can make an informed decision on whether we want to reduce our total productivity in order to have more free time.
And since that will have its own set of prerequisites that centrists will work with republicans to block, we'll keep on as we are, with productivity outpacing wages forever.