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I feel like one of the issues with economic malaise is pretty clearly the fact that if you look at 1826 -> 1876 -> 1926 -> 1976 -> 2026, every one of these 50 year periods saw a massive, qualitative, jump in quality of life, except the last one

Like the Internet and computing haven't delivered the kinds of gains of previous industrial revolutions, and welfare politics kind of stalled out

Solutions for each of these 1. Universal healthcare to make it so that full time employment isn't super incentived 2. Make COBRA like 2-4 years and better, make Section 8 and SNAP universal 3. YIMBY

I feel like people underestimate the degree to which Healthcare is driving the 40-hour work week. Like a corporation really does not want to hire you for 35 hours, because they still have to pay you a full healthcare package. And you don't want to work 20 hours because then no benefits

Working hours are reduced, it has just been obscured by the fact that we transitioned from hourly labor to salaries. In a factory, eight hours was eight hours. With white collar salaried work, you can do only shopping at work and “W”FH on Fridays and duck out for doctors’ appointments and get…

…sucked into dumb Bluesky threads on company time and even get sucked off on company time if you play your Grindr cards right.

erosion of boundary between work and non-work goes both ways tho. clock out at the factory job and you're done. a lot (not all) of white collar jobs can hit you with the emergency email at 8pm on a saturday that requires you to suddenly log back in