The text we read last week looked at international trends in working hours, and at the link between the amount of time people work and their productivity.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, the English philosopher, was not a fan of work. In his 1932 essay, “In Praise of Idleness”, he reckoned that if society were better managed the average person would only need to work four hours a day. Such a small working day would “entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life.” The rest of the day could be devoted to the pursuit of science, painting and writing.
Russell thought that technological advancement could free people from toil. John Maynard Keynes mooted a similar idea in a 1930 essay, "Economic possibilities for our grandchildren", in which he reckoned people might need to work no more than 15 hours per week by 2030. But over eighty years after these speculations people seem to be working harder than ever. The Financial Times reports today that Workaholics Anonymous groups are taking off. Over the summer, Bank of America faced intense criticism after a Stakhanovite intern died. But data from the OECD, a club of rich countries, tell a more positive story. For the countries for which data are available the vast majority of people work fewer hours than they did in 1990 (see figure 1). And it seems that more productive—and, consequently, better-paid—workers put in less time in at the office. The graph in figure 2 shows the relationship between productivity (GDP per hour worked) and annual working hours.
The Greeks are some of the most hardworking in the OECD, putting in over 2,000 hours a year on average. Germans, on the other hand, are comparative slackers, working about 1,400 hours each year. But German productivity is about 70% higher.
One important question concerns whether appetite for work actually diminishes as people earn more. There are countervailing effects. On the one hand, a higher wage raises the opportunity cost of leisure time and should lead people to work more. On the other hand, a higher income should lead a worker to consume more of the stuff he or she enjoys, which presumably includes leisure. Some research shows that higher pay does not, on net, lead workers to do more. Rather, they may work less. A famous study by Colin Camerer and colleagues, which looked at taxi drivers, reached a controversial conclusion. The authors suggested that taxi drivers had a daily income "target", and that: “When wages are high, drivers will reach their target more quickly and quit early; on low-wage days they will drive longer hours to reach the target.” Alternatively, the graph above might suggest that people who work fewer hours are more productive. This idea is not new. Adam Smith reckoned that “[T]he man who works so moderately as to be able to work constantly, not only preserves his health the longest, but in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of works.”
There are aberrations, of course. Americans are relatively productive and work relatively long hours. And within the American labour force hours worked among the rich have risen while those of the poor have fallen. But a paper released yesterday by the New Zealand Productivity Commission showed that even if you work more hours, you do not necessarily work better. The paper made envious comparisons between Kiwis and Australians—the latter group has more efficient workers.
So maybe we should be more self-critical about how much we work. Working less may make us more productive. And, as Russell argued, working less will guarantee “happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia".
Figure 1
Figure 2
1. What two key points are made in the article?
3. State whether, according to the article, the following claims are true or false:
Dawson, D. & Zee, P. (2005) Work hours and reducing fatigue related risk: good research vs good policy. JAMA. 209 (9) 1104-1106.
Using the prompts below, complete the following paraphrases:
Paragraph 6
Despite established links between heavy working schedules and increased fatigue,
Paragraph 7
One reason that restricting working hours might not be a good idea is
At the beginning of the course we looked at how journal articles are linguistically dense and difficult to read because there's a lot more information condensed into noun phrases. In order to understand the texts, we need to unpack these noun phrases into a more concrete form.
Remember that when we talk about a clause we mean a stretch of text that has a subject and a verb. A phrase on the other hand, whether a noun phrase, verb phrase or prepositional phrase, is just a group of words that behaves like a single unit.
The the noun phrases in bold below are taken from paragraph 1 of the text. Unpack them to a full clause structure using simpler language. The first one has been done for you as an example. Once you've done the first four, find two more noun phrases that could be unpacked into an easier-to-read form. Compare your answers in groups.
Physicians experience chronic sleep restriction.
Physicians’ experience things which restrict their sleep over a long period of time.
There is not yet a significant body of evidence based data.
The data delineates the relationship between work patterns and sleep duration.
Anecdote and economics have driven much of the public debate over the legitimacy and necessity for extended work hours.
Prepositional phrase Noun phrase Verb phrase
Complete Unit 10 of Academic Vocabulary in Use: Nouns and the words they combine with.