Mortals of Habit: Dying by - and the Death of - the 40 Hour Workweek

Creatures of habit that we are, we seldom revamp things that have been around since before we were born.  An example is the 8-hour workday.  Since when has it been around?  The eight-hour movement,or 40-hour movement, has its origins in the workers' struggles of the Industrial Revolution.  Karl Marx saw its vital importance to the workers' health, saying in Das Kapital: "By extending the working day, therefore, capitalist production [...] not only produces a deterioration of human labour power by robbing it of its normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity, but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour power itself”. Studies have showed that working 8 hours is not ultimately productive.  Evan Robinson recently wrote - "working over 21 hours continuously is equivalent to being legally drunk. Longer periods of continuous work drastically reduce cognitive function and increase the chance of catastrophic error."



When discussing in HR circles, people will agree on the data and its conclusions, but do HR departments plan on executing a plan making a day more productive that is less conventional?  No. Sweden, in some attempt at reform and finding work-life balance, just switched to a 6-hour workday (or see here, or better here for an explanation).

Conventionality has been the killer of many great ideas. The great unknown has been terrifying traditional types for eons.  As I write this, I am standing up.  I’ve never considered being able to stand up and write.  Not because I didn’t think it wasn’t possible, it just didn’t cross my mind.  The fact that I have access to that option makes me want to try it.  If you are expecting me to say that is better than sitting down, I am sorry to disappoint.  It is not; it is simply different.  But different is what you need sometimes, and sometimes you just need your good ol’ chair.

The point I am trying to make is that there are so many ways to go through our day. There are exponential alternatives on how to structure our day, our time, and our life. So many people are looking for adventure or, when asked what they seek in their significant other, they say someone adventurous. If that were really true, why wouldn’t they take a different way home? That’s adventurous, even if on a smaller scale than what they may have envisioned. Instead of going home after work, take a scenic route or improvise a road trip to the next state over. We don’t do any of these. Well, I try not to do it.   It upsets my family, and I don’t want them to seriously consider placing a tracking chip on me, even though this would avoid driving and texting to notify them of my whereabouts, thereby making the road a much safer place because I am not swerving and trying to be grammatically correct at the same time. Now I am going on a tangent...

I am just tired of discussing and having studies show us how we can improve on our day yet nothing revolutionary happen. The graph below shows the relationship between productivity and annual hours worked.

A paper by John Pencavel implies that reducing working hours is good for productivity.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it is great that IKEA sells standing-up desks. That’s something. But I am still holding out on the 4 hour work days. Or, perhaps, we may see a Basic Living Wage implemented in our lifetimes, with recent pieces such as this one by Scott Santers making the point forcefully based on new research by the IMF and OECD.  Perhaps the time has come for some real change that redefines the position of labor in our societies in a way that strikes a better work-life balance.  I can hope.  Can't I?

Semiotics and Branding

Semiotics is often divided into three branches: Semantics, Syntactics, and Pragmatics. This division owes its existence to the philosophers John Locke and Charles Saunders Peirce.  Semiotics explores the history of signs and symbols as a significant way of communication; in contrast to linguistics, however, semiotics also studies non-linguistics sign systems.

As you may deduce, the study of semiotics is essential to branding. What about your logo, brand, or signs is causing a catalyst-stimulus to act in the minds of your clients, and what is that stimulus?

Though most psychiatrist disagree on the efficacy of color therapy, for the sake of marketing and branding I will describe what marketers agree upon regarding which colors produce what emotional reaction in our psyche.

As you can see in the picture above, different brands would like to convey different moods in people's heads. Dell has chosen a sky blue that shows that they are dependable and trustworthy. Their slogan, "Dell, purely you", shoots for what most people want to feel when they buy a new computer, myself included.  

Colors have always been a key part of the Internet; however, as the Internet has evolved into a massive business, strict color combinations or patterns have taken over and are being used in precise locations to herd you unconsciously into the direction of action and greater consumption. 

Why would Blogger chose their button in orange? Apart from the obvious answer that their logo is in

orange. Could it be that, when you publish, they want you to be confident and cheerful about publishing?

The compose button on your Gmail account is hot red. Hopefully you will hit that happy trigger in your head and do it over and over again, since by composing and writing many emails you are utilizing their services. 

  

As you may notice above, Coca-Cola, Barbie, McDonalds, and Blogger are using vibrant colors. Vibrant colors create a sense of impulsivity in your brain. There is no mystery as to why Budweiser also chose to go with vibrant color cans for sale at music festivals. The more impulsive you get, the more you drink and buy their product.

It is simple to ask: why is this ad in this light blue color? The more you become aware, the less the ads will affect you. Or, better yet, you will start to realize whether you are reasoning based on an emotional pull or on an actual sound decision. Below, Microsoft is taking advantage of your poor understanding of emotional optics to make you jump at the idea of owning this computer. But you've got to do it soon! (The green button is a clear subliminal message that it would be healthy for you to do it as soon as possible.)

For the skeptics in the crowd that believe they are immune to the emotional effects of color, I ask you to take this Color Quiz.  This test will not make you feel a certain way; it actually functions the opposite way: the colors you chose will allow the algorithm to discern how you feel at this very moment. 

Since we are ball of perceptions, we must learn to pay attention to what we are up against. We are living in a world awash with corporations, a world in which corporations are actively conditioning us towards their own purposes, and these corporations ultimately want profit. There is a science to branding and it is not necessarily what looks good. There are studies conducted on the impact of human behavior and colors. How colored environments influence performance, behavior, negative and positive perceptions, moods, and emotions has been studied in-depth and is well-understood for the most part.  But the prevalent use of the psychology of colors for corporate purposes need not make us saps or simple movable parts; we can become aware and resist the conditioning process.

Apart from resisting the constant flow of conditioning triggers, you can use the color wheel below to market your own products as efficiently as possible, by eliciting the responses you would like from your customers or clients. Once you've taken the Color Quiz, color profiling may make more sense to you.   

To entrepreneurs, use color psychology to your advantage in your own business, or avoid it altogether at your own peril.   Likewise, to individuals, it would be wise for you to understand how you are being subliminally pulled in different directions, which may shed some light into your own consumer habits, or you may simply ignore the subject making it easier for marketers to target you towards their desired actions. 

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Cross-posted from Seamless Entrenchment

Adam Smith's Real Thoughts on the Free Market

Adam Smith warned -

“The interest of the dealers [the stock holding class], however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."


- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Chapter XI, Book I. 


(Full book, originally published in 1776, Revised Fifth Edition)

The American Dream is so 1950's

Having to face a different reality than the preceding Boomer and Greatest Generations, many Millennials and Generation Xers express their disdain about both the pervasive economic environment and the overall quality of life they are able to obtain.  As the aftermath of the Financial Crisis of 2008 fails to level off, and indeed continues to enlarge the breach between the haves and the have-nots, the general feeling that emerges and is often expressed can be summed up in one single hopeless sentence: “We were told lies”.

Everything that they were told weren't lies... until they were. What lies were they told? If you go to College, you will have a good job waiting for you and, if you work hard, you will fare better than your parents did.  Now these generations mostly drown under the weight of student loans that they cannot get rid of even if they are forced to declare bankruptcy.  And where are the returns for that investment?  The few that may argue against that question are the exception that proves the rule.

The American Dream rests on the affirmation that, through hard work, each generation will fare better than the preceding.  Now, the American Dream has materialized in wage serfdom sprinkled with fairy dust over progressively shattering hopes and dreams. 

The script that our parents repeated were also repeated by their parents.  Hell, it was even in our history textbooks growing up.  For their generations, it panned out.  But they themselves dismantled or exploited the system that made it a truism.  Today, ironically, many people that don’t go to college are often better off than many of the ones that did.  Tuition costs have risen well above recorded rates of inflation for half a century, significantly hobbling the possible returns on that investment.

Recent economic research indicates that neither the Millennials nor the Xers will live better or enjoy a higher quality of life than the Baby Boomers. That is the new economic trend. In fact, Millennials and Xers will have to work twice as hard just to get to where their parents were, and even then there is no guarantee of that. 
 

Look at this graph. It reveals that younger generations really do face a difficult future. Every group through early-wave Boomers has seen upward jumps in their lifecycle income—all the way up until 2012. But every younger generation that has not yet reached age 60 has experienced no such progress.


From 1983-2010, the real median net worth approximately tripled for Americans over the age of 74 and doubled for the age of 65 to 74. And here is the kicker! It fell 30% for Americans aged 35 to 40. Why do younger generations lag behind?

An obvious explanations is their inferior median income growth. With less income, there is less to save.  A less obvious explanation is that previous generations used to share their wealth to a greater capacity as they became senior citizens, as can be easily observed in the graph above. The scenario we are looking at now is that the wealth will have to be pried from their cold, dead hands.