Those masters of economic logic, the new economics foundation, have been talking to the newspapers again. Gothenburg, a city in Sweden, has decided to experiment with shorter working days for the city employees. At which point nef says:
“Anna Coote, Head of Social Policy at the New Economics Foundation, a UK-based think tank, welcomed the proposals. ‘Shorter working hours create a more committed and stable workforce,’ Ms Coote told The Telegraph. ‘There are indications you can make savings by reducing working hours,’ she added, citing an experiment in Utah where public sector workers were given a three-day weekend.”
“According to OECD data, there is a correlation between shorter working hours and greater productivity. The Greeks are the hardest working members of the OECD, putting in more than 2,000 hours a year compared with the Germans’ 1,400, but their workers are 70 per cent less productive than their Teutonic counterparts.”
Yes, this is absolutely true, there is a correlation between higher productivity and shorter working hours. However, it is not that working shorter hours makes you more productive, although that could happen, sure. Your last hour of an 18 hour working day is unlikely to be as productive as your first of a one hour working day.
The causation is really working the other way around and for a well understood economic reason too. The average wages in any society will be determined by the average productivity of labour in that society. Thus a higher average productivity means a higher average wage. And we’re well aware that most human beings are, most of the time, both greedy and lazy. Meaning that we'd all like to get as much of whatever with as little effort as we can manage. And that laziness also means that as we become increasingly rich we take more of that wealth as increased leisure, that being the point and purpose of going to work in the first place, to be able to afford the things that we want.
Thus more productive labour, in that richer society, works shorter hours. Not at all the other way around, working shorter hours makes you more productive.
There is actually a reason why Giles Wilkes named the nef “not economics frankly”.
