Timesizing®com
©2002-04 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080 - Homepage
Currently available courses in timesizing
together with an overly harsh critique
More than anything else, worktime economics needs a champion within economics itself, as ecological economics has in Herman Daly. We did have one as long as Juliet Schor was teaching in an economics department. She is now marginalized in a sociology department (at Boston College) - sociology and psychology are probably the softest of the soft sciences. Worse, the person with the most hard data on worktime economics from American history is in a department of leisure studies. We have not done our strategic homework in this shorter-hours movement, and we will remain in the political hinterlands until we do. We need someone with math aptitude to bull their way through a mainstream economics department, the bigger-name the better, put up with the oceans of irrelevant and intimidating B.S., and trick out a PhD. Then we need to do the numbers on worktime economics. We need to model how much more voluminous, speedy, dynamic, robust, sustainable economic growth we would have if we re-activated the tens of millions of consumers de-activated by downsizing. We need the charts and graphs. We need the articles in mainstream economics journals. Meantime, this is what we have -
- *Leisure Studies program with *Ben Hunnicutt at the *University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.
This program has the advantage of being relatively unentangled with the simplicity movement, and, one feels, even its low-key leftist language is merely faute-de-mieux. The program is historical and sociogical in slant. Its major problem is the name of the department, Leisure Studies, which tends to get its degree dismissed as frivolous in our culture of "hard work builds character" and "I'm overworked so I'm important." The other department that Ben straddles is the Dept. of Health & Sport Studies. A PhD with Ben in "Health Studies" would have better cultural PR than "Leisure Studies," but would the university let you drop the "Sport" from the department name? It probably doesn't matter, because who's going to look at your actual sheepskin anyway? Just drop "Sport" on your resumes and references, and "PhD in Health Studies" will wind up as your doctorate of record. It might even gain the same super-relevant cachet as Physicians for Nuclear Disarmament. But will it get you a job in an economics department or a business school - the 'death stars' that the shorter-hours movement needs to penetrate and transform from within?
- *Sociology program with *Juliet Schor at *Boston College, Newton, Mass.
This program is sociological and economic in its slant. Unfortunately, sociology is, with geography and political science, among the 'softest' or least prestigious of the social sciences (though any of the standard social sciences has better cultural PR in America today than leisure studies). Recently dismissed geography may be regaining shape, but sociology remains a fuzzy catch-all for any hobbyhorse that won't readily fit in the other social sciences. Juliet Schor's economics background offsets this to some extent, but her appointment in a sociology department undermines her hard-nosed economics background. The other downside is that she's become entangled with the simplicity movement of late. Her Second Big Book after her seminal The Overworked American (1991) was The Overspent American (1998?), which of course criticizes the very activity that is most needed during those periods when timesizing has come closest to an actual nationwide implementation, such as the Great Depression in America (see 1933), and the ongoing recession in Japan (though admittedly, timesizing, once established, expedites the simplicity movement as nothing else because we no longer have to keep people busily, possibly unmarketably 'productive' for an arbitrarily, obsoletely long workweek). Juliet's wandering focus is reminiscent of Art Dahlberg, who was right on target in his first two books - Utopia Through Capitalism (1927) and Jobs, Machines & Capital (1932) - but who then lost focus in When Capital Goes on Strike (1938), Money in Motion, National Income Visualized, et al.
- A course in economic system design is currently offered at the University of Ottawa by Philippe Crabbé, 613-562-5800x1430, office hrs Mon 3-4 and Wed 1:30-2:30. This is the only place in academe where we have seen the words "economic" and "system" together, so we thought we'd better audit it (winter semester, 2007). It's a graduate-level course with two course numbers, ECO6108 and SYS5140. It's optional for economics students but mandatory for system science students. Consequently it usually attracts more of the latter and is slanted toward systems theory rather than economics. Parts of it are useful for providing a criticism of conventional economics from the systems standpoint, but as Prof. Crabbé points out, systems theory as yet has no dramatic accomplishments to its credit and so its critique has not gained widespread publicity or effect. However, we predict that it will have more credibility and effectiveness than other disciplines that have criticized conventional economics and/or upheld worktime economics, such as industrial relations, organizational behavior, sociology and leisure studies. The three main textbooks of ECO6108/SYS5140 are:
- Eric Beinhocker, The Origin of Weath - Evolution, Complexity and the Radical Remaking of Economics (Harvard Business School, 2006)
- Samuel Bowles, Macroeconomic Theory - Behavior, Institutions and Evolution (Princeton U. Press, 2004)
- G. Midgley, Systems Thinking, 4 vol. (Sage, 2003)
- And now, at least one course at Evergreen State College in Washington with a Take Back Your Time theme.
- And in some ways, the most obvious, but the most mysterious, *Temple University in Philadelphia - or maybe we should say, *Temple University Press - because it has published Ben Hunnicutt (Work Without End, 1988 and Kellogg's Six-Hour Day, 1996) and other timesizing contributions, e.g., Reducing Workweeks to Prevent Layoffs (Fred Best); Working Time in Transition (Karl Hinrichs); Half a Job: Bad and Good Part-Time Jobs (Chris Tilly); Time and Social Theory (Barbara Adam); and others too numerous to mention (including many, alas, that swiftly trigger our crap-detector). But is there an actual worktime economics course at Temple U? Only hours of web search - or a lucky tip from you, dear reader, to *timesizing(at)aol.com - will tell.
In short, though the triangulation of these diverse departments adds to the potential stability of our movement and forwards the long-term goal of our economic design (survivability via maximum variability), the timesizing/shorter-worktime movement needs, in the near term, to get into actual economics departments. It also needs to persuade ecologists and ecological economists that it is their top priority, not the simplicity movement, since imbalances within the economy itself (e.g., between production and consumption, due to the unspendable concentration of spending power, and thence the uninvestable concentration of investment capital) is going to provide more immediate and unignorable incentives for change than the environment, Anders Hayden notwithstanding.
If any readers are aware of other college courses on trimming the worktime or better, adjusting it against unemployment, whether in English (in USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, or South Africa), French, German, Japanese, or whatever wherever, please let us know. E-mail us or phone 617-623-8080 (Boston).
Meanwhile, here's is an evolving outline of our dream curriculum for a Department of Worktime Economics:
A) Worktime Economics 101: Defining economics as political arithmetic, statistics, quantification, math as a second language. Defining time as quantified motion or activity and in context of dimensional paradigm of measurement and stepped de-specification. Defining work as quintessentially timed transfer of control in exchange for money. Defining money as generalized access to others’ time (services) or output (products). The pioneers in worktime economics: Petty, Sismondi, Technocrats, Dahlberg, Reuther, Hunnicutt, Schor.
B) Economic Design 101; what is the institutional core? avoiding the pitfalls, such as one step to perfection, mixing politics and economics (per person vs. per job), inflationary vs. deflationary incentive, defining vs. refining, the role of direct democracy, preventing sabotage, enabling program succession, maintaining and satisfying rising expectations, managing macho competitiveness. Impact of worktime economics on free trade. Designing company-specific trade regulation based on “consumer base: it gets your jobs or you lose its markets.” Why productivity has to be per-hour, not per-worker, and why free trade & competitiveness have to be qualified by a new groundrule, “You get to access our consumer markets only insofar as you employ them.”
C) Constructing Worktime Economics Within Ecological Economics - A New Strategic Subdiscipline: Designing ecological principles into core economic institutions and systems: minimum necessary departure from status quo, incrementalism, punctuated equilibrium, sustainability, homeostasis: in unemployment-controlled worksharing, in overtime-controlled training and hiring.
D) The three major obstacles to shorter hours: labor’s priority (higher pay, not shorter hours) mgmt’s selfish delusion (concentrated income creates jobs via investment, not centrifuged income via circulation) everyone’s 18th century mindset (if I’m busier than you, I’m more important than you)
E) Current Events and Trends in Worktime, eg: S.Korea cutting workweek 44 to 40 over seven years, isolated unions, eg: in Australia, talking about shorter hours, but in general, slippage backward over a wide front because we have not made the case for the technological imperative of shorter hours - in order to avoid a consumer-collapse depression. And we have not made the case for SWT’s labor-power imperative - as long as labor keeps fighting for higher pay instead of shorter hours, they will keep losing because they are bucking market forces instead of harnessing them. What we’re seeing on the daily worktime news-tracking is a massive rollback in Europe and both sides are using the competitiveness argument. E.g., “The group said tight [workweek] limits hurts competitiveness with wealthier western nations.” So we need to attack at the core, the schools of economics and management that teach short-term employment-concentrating consumerbase-eroding longer hours, against their own self-interest, but also against discipline for them, CEOs and employers in general - discipline for anyone else is fine
F) The Role of Boredom in Management & Economic Decision-Making: eg: Sydran Group to leave fast-food business (10/02 NYT B4) and Toys’R’Us to leave toy business
And here are some additional topics that at the moment are just concepts for single 1-1½-hour lectures or workshops:
Menu of Proposed Keynotes (or Workshops) -
A) How SWT Can Unite the Nation with a Democrat-style Social Safety Net and Republican-style Small Government: Replacing business downsizing and government upsizing with timesizing as the real “Third Way”
B) Boosting the ‘Recovery’ by Trimming Hours, Not Jobs, in Today’s Workaholic America
C) Why We Have to Implement Several Ideas at Once or Shorter Hours Looks Stupid and Ludicrous and Arbitrary and Guilty and Counter-Intuitive and Lazy and Crazy, eg: Chirac “recently cheered foreign observers when he threw his powerful advocacy behind moves to change the ludicrously-backward 35-hour maximum working week schedule imposed by the previous Socialist administration as a ‘job sharing’ measure (in truth, an un-, or at least under-, employment sharing one).” (Sean Corrigan of Mises.org, 9/23/04)
D) Worksharing as “next up” in human evolution - Humanity’s five great sharing techniques so far, each parallelling a major social science, and how fundamental progress will speed up once we debug and implement automatic worksharing.
E) Why is longer hours more dangerous than offshore outsourcing? Because the core is already swinging against free trade: “Rethinking free trade” 9/29/2004 Boston Globe, A15, and “An elder [Samuelson] challenges outsourcing’s orthodoxy” 9/9/2004 NY Times, C1, and we have long experience dealing with free trade’s “tragedy of the commons”.
Menu of Proposed Workshops (or Keynotes) -
A) Designing a Gradual, Market-Oriented Full-Employment Program Using Shorter Hours: The Timesizing Model
B) How Can We Educate Labor to Quit Shooting Themselves in the Foot Putting Higher Pay for Themselves Before Shorter Hours for Everyone?
C) The Place of Time among the Dimensions - Is it really fourth or have we skipped an important step? (Yes, as a special case of momentum, it’s actually fifth. Newton was right, mass is fourth, and skipping that has slid us into skipping over time balancing into a premature attempt at money balancing. Ergo, our unsustainable skimming-and-charity system)
D) Fundraising for Shorter Worktime: Making the case that next to the basic time-providing contribution of nuclear disarmament, SWT is the All-Points Priority Issue and Cause, the Master Conundrum to be solved and acted upon, because it solves or eases the maximum number of other human problems in our lifetimes, large and small. It is the greatest problem intersection and conjunction, the vulnerable core of the economic Death Star, detoxifiable with finite time and energy. It solves the problem of un- or under-employment in the Automation & Robotics Age and gives us the Pearl of Great Price, a win in the greatest of Great Games, secure possession of the Holy Grail of economic design...
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