How game theory explains why the four-day workweek is stalled in the U.S.
☀️ Welcome back to another five-day workweek, an 86-year-old tradition many attribute to Henry Ford — though unions had been fighting for it for decades
Today: How to spot a liar, misogynist algorithms, and emotional willpower. Written by Harris Sockel
It’s Monday, which means (for most of us, anyway) the start of another 40-hour week. But it doesn’t have to be this way! The UK, Germany, Belgium, and Spain have all piloted four-day workweeks and found that they (no surprise) lead to workers who are happier and healthier. Perhaps less intuitively, they also found people are just as productive.
As for the U.S., Richard Nixon originally proposed a four-day workweek back in the ’60s. (It led nowhere.) Earlier this month, Bernie Sanders revived the idea in a new bill.
Why do Americans cling to the M-F grind?
In “Game theory explains why the four day work week is stalled in America,” math PhD and Principal Research Scientist at Georgia Tech, Tim Andersen, Ph.D., offers one answer. If you’re not familiar with the concept, game theory is the study of how rational actors exchange costs and benefits in a competitive situation.
Within an eight-hour workday, most of us are only productive for 3 hours. Andersen argues that employees accept an unnecessarily long 40-hour week because their bosses aren’t monitoring their every move. He claims, “Having top talent at your firm is worth their slacking off now and then versus having mediocre talent that you keep working like galley slaves.”
In other words, we exchange the cost of a 40-hour workweek for the benefit of occasional slacking… and the status quo continues.
What else we’re reading
- Former detective of 12 years Joshua Mason gives us a masterclass in how to spot a liar. (“Being a detective was like having a front-row seat to the Olympics of lying,” he says. Fun!) Rule #1: Honesty is direct, whereas dishonesty tends to be indirect. If it’s not a firm “yes” or “no” there’s usually some misdirection happening — for example, “If I ask someone if they liked an article I wrote, and they say, ‘It was really interesting,’ that’s a no. They probably didn’t like it but didn’t want to hurt my feelings.”
- Social media posts related to women’s health that use words like “cervix,” “uterus,” and “menopause” are routinely censored via algorithms for being “sexually explicit” even though they’re not. Social scientist Katie Jgln argues for commonsense community guidelines that don’t perpetuate the idea that “the female body and various body parts are still considered inherently sexual, whereas our bodily functions are still inherently shameful.”
🚀 Your daily dose of practical wisdom (about willpower)
Don’t think of your willpower as a finite resource — it’s more like an emotion, “ebbing and flowing in response to what’s happening to us and how we feel,” writes bestselling author of Indistractable Nir Eyal.
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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