Most studies on the topic indicate that >50 hours has <1 factor on productivity. So probably working weeks on end at 80 hours is the same as working at about 20-30 hour workweeks.
What’s true on average might not be true for certain individuals, and power-law mechanics might make those individuals more significant than everyone else who makes up the average.
Like imagine Elon Musk works 80 hours a week and he doesn’t suffer any negative consequence, he just becomes the most productive human ever according to the market.
And then a bunch of other people work 80 hours and they do suffer burnout and become slightly less productive than if they had worked 40 hours.
If you say “What’s the expected value of working 80 hours rather than 40?” in that scenario, it’s extremely positive, because the tiny chance you become Elon and have half the wealth in America offsets the very high probability you become a burnout who does no better than average.
I'm pretty smart and a hard worker. I have a Masters degree in computer science. I can do about 4 to 6 hours of concentrated work per day. I never seen anyone do more or better. I know plenty of people who claim to work a crazy amout of hours. But in the end it always turns out they are deceiving themselves.
I don't know Elon, so maybe he is different. But in the end, I'll believe it when I see it.
I have seen a lot of people do more and better. But different work, not coding.
Like leading and managing people is very possible for some elite people to do for say 70 hours a week and mostly involves talking, persuading, answering emails and phone calls, and most importantly making good decisions.
The value of good leadership and good decisions is directly proportional to the number and quality of people being led.
So that could be a huge value. Doing twice as much of it could way more than double that value with compounding.
Quality of work beats quantity any day of the week. And at 80 hours, there just cannot be any quality left. At that point, your mistakes will cost you more. Maybe the people below you might offset your stupidity at that point.
I had managers doing 60+ hours. They were not the greatest, in fact, they were terrible.
As Elon, by virtue of his massive wealth now, is depriving an ungodly amount of people of financial resources and opportunities. I mean on that scale I venture to say it's like a Usain Bolt sucking up nearly all the sponsoring for 100m sprinting so there are very few left to even challenge him in a professional sense which makes him even more "valuable".
[Of course in this analogy (achievements in sports/wealth) there is a external natural limit in sports all acknowledge: "age"].
So, while form a individual perspective (one-dimension) the expected value investing 80hr/week in becoming a centibillionaire is "positive" on the whole this approach can at aome point severely limit the space of possibilities in terms of technology.
I guess that's why Elon - certainly aware of this - tries to push concepts like "rate of innovation" where he makes his patents "open source" so he can offset his own stifling influence.
> As Elon, by virtue of his massive wealth now, is depriving an ungodly amount of people of financial resources and opportunities.
That doesn’t make any sense at all. His wealth isn’t made up of financial resources and opportunities that other people could have used - his wealth is the price that other people would be willing to pay him to own shares in the companies he created.
I think it’s a common misconception out there that paper billionaires like Elon and Jeff Bezos have like a giant pile of cans of food in a warehouse somewhere that they could give out to people but don’t because they like having the biggest pile.
I'm wondering if "getting rid" of that much money, using it for good things, but without most of it disappearing in corruption, is more than a full time job
> His wealth isn’t made up of financial resources and opportunities that other people could have used
This is literally how profit works. You make sure your costs (salaries you pay your workers) are less than the value they produce. In other words, you keep some of the financial resources and opportunities that others could have had.
That’s a hyper-localized view. The teams of people who tamed farming, semiconductors and medicine have added many multiples more value than they kept to society.
Imagine that a novel creation is worth 100 units of value to society. It’s entirely possible for society to take 50 units, the workers to share 25 units, and the CEO to keep 25 units and for literally everyone to be better off than if that creation was never made.
The view above compares against an alternative split of 60/35/5 while ignoring the case where the split is 0/0/0.
Even in a 90/9/1 split, why are the workers depriving society of such a large share by hoarding 9% for themselves?
> In other words, you keep some of the financial resources and opportunities that others could have had.
Those workers needed to be organized in such a manner that the value they produce is actually worthwhile and their productive output sustainable over a long period of time.
Think about the example of a production line worker in a Tesla factory -- is that individual worker being paid less than the overall value they produce for the company? Hopefully, or else Tesla will soon be going out of business (simplified obviously, but I think you'll see my point). Now consider if Tesla failed to profit off of their workers, and the factory did go out of business. Does that line worker now have more financial resources and opportunities than they would have had, which you claim were being in a sense taken from them by Musk?
Of course not! Instead, they're just out of a job entirely, because their productive output on that production line is worthless if the rest of the line isn't working (and the rest of the company isn't functioning). And chances are, that line worker doesn't have the vision, drive, knowledge, skills, etc. of Musk to get the Tesla factory up to being something economically sustainable and productive all on his own. That's not a knock on the production line worker, it's just a simple fact that such a feat is insanely difficult, and very few people have the characteristics, judgement, and luck to build anything of the sort.
So in the case of Tesla profiting off the worker, the worker gets some financial resources and opportunities, whereas in the case that Tesla fails to profit off the worker, the worker gets zero financial resources and opportunities (plus the world gets zero Teslas, battery tech improvements, etc). In the ideal, free enterprise truly is a positive sum endeavor.
1. the wealth of such people corresponds solely to an increase in the pool of available wealth (as opposed to just redistribution from other people), and
2. that increase is solely attributable to them,
it remains true that the distribution of the wealth pool is an arbitrary social choice. Billionaires being billionaires deprives other people of resources, by definition.
If a billionaire increased the size of society’s pie by more than their total amount of pie, they’ve made both themself and the rest of society overall better. You can argue that none of them have done this, but I don’t agree that it’s obvious or definitionally true that none of them have.
Example: what value to assign to the productivity benefits that Amazon and AWS have created for individuals, companies etc and society in general? I think we can all agree that it is an enormous amount in dollar terms.
1. saved money does not necessarily represent an increase in wealth. A rich individual can save against the will of the rest of the population. When you remember that total debt = total credit (savings on your bank account) then you are basically keeping people waiting and making them unable to pay their debts back.
On the contrary, wealth is mutually exclusive by definition.
Regardless if it's cash, stocks, land or a pile of cans of food - if I have a piece of it you don't have the same piece.
So yes "by virtue of his massive wealth now, is depriving an ungodly amount of people of financial resources and opportunities" is exactly how wealth works.
I don’t disagree with your point, but I think it doesn’t take the following in to account: Wealth is not a fixed sum. The global GDP increases over time, which I interpret has new wealth being created. If Elon hadn’t created his businesses, his wealth wouldn’t be in the hands of other people, it just wouldn’t exist.
It's very well understood that making a product can create surplus value. This is basic economics. Contrarily to simply robbing someone else, which would be 0-sum (if not negative).
However if the product is being sold you are still taking someone's money. If you wanted to purely increase wealth for everybody you would be giving away the product for free. Many no-profits do that. (duh)
Yet, the tradeoffs are complex and some economic activities are purely exploitative.
In fact, inequality is rising across various societies and quality of life is actually decreasing for hundreds of millions.
Wealth redistribution through taxes has been a cornerstone of modern society and one of the biggest push to move societies out of feudalism. And now we are witnessing something described as technofeudalism.
> If Elon hadn’t created his businesses, his wealth wouldn’t be in the hands of other people, it just wouldn’t exist.
Either Musk made cars entirely by himself (which is not the case) or his employees did it. You are assuming that such workers would have all been unemployed if Musk did not exist, which is very unlikely.
Also, it's false that ALL of Musk's wealth would not exist. Only the fraction due to value created by the company (if any). [And I repeat, the products are obviously created by the workers]
An interesting question would be: if company X never existed, could the workers be doing something more beneficial instead? Plenty of organization has been described as a net negative for humanity.
And this is without accounting for negative externalities, e.g. causing pollution, or making another company go bankrupt, regulatory capture, creation of monopolies and the list is pretty long.
> The global GDP increases over time, which I interpret has new wealth being created
That's incorrect. Part of GDP is due to production of products and services, but a significant part is due to speculation that is not backed by any increase in productivity.
Additionally, GDP is in no way able to measure overall real wealth, quality of life, access to opportunities and so on: not destroying the environment does not increase GDP. As much as going for a walk with your SO does not increase GDP.
> I also assume that over 1 or 2 generations that his wealth will mostly circulate around.
"You are assuming that such workers would have all been unemployed if Musk did not exist, which is very unlikely."
No, they would work, but would they be more productive in those other jobs? Possibly not.
I wonder what would happen if current engineers at SpaceX were suddenly "redistributed" to Boeing or Blue Origin. Maybe they would raise the technical aptitude of those companies. Or maybe not, maybe the companies would grind them down to their corporate level.
You can demotivate smart people and reduce their creativity to almost zero by insisting on idiotic corporate rules and punishing them for "transgressions" (e.g. innovation that wasn't approved beforehand). They will still be working in highly qualified positions, but their collective effort won't be as productive.
It is notable what a big portion of contemporary technology is attributable to relatively small organizations (such as Bell Labs) which were able to motivate smart and creative people to do their best.
> No, they would work, but would they be more productive in those other jobs? Possibly not.
On possibly yes - it depends. Yet, the company mission and priority is usually "maximize shareholders value".
Not "maximize worker creativity and happiness and empower them as much as possible".
Not "maximize technology, wealth, quality of life for humanity"
The last two might sometimes happen as fortunate side effects. Often not. See all the complaints from Tesla workers around safety and anti-union activities.
No, most of Bezos’ or Musk’s wealth is tied to the value of their companies. To this extent, they don’t “own” a thing that someone else is deprived of.
Investors choose to put there money in profitable businesses. Where do you think profit comes from? Elon isn't responsible for the profit, he is just in the position to claim it, sell it off. You don't have to be a communist to think this, its just how things work.
https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-wo...