Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)

Decreasing working hours increases labor availability (=> so you'd expect people to get paid less as a result), but higher headcount for comparable output is also totally undesirable for an employer: The only potential benefit is some limited redundancy (bus factor), but this comes at the cost of communication overhead (meetings), decreased software design coherence, no "single source of truth" (person), all of which cost money/time to mitigate.

I don't like it, but I understand why we ended up here...

Four-day week trials, for example, keep showing productivity holds or improves — Iceland ran the biggest pilot, the UK had 61 companies in their trial, Microsoft Japan saw a 40% boost. The data is there.

Yet I know a CEO who suggested implementing a four-day week if the least productive 10% of workers came in an extra day instead. Just bonkers.

Sure, politicians are going to be happy with less economic power, and as a result less political and military power. Seems exactly like something politicians would go for. /s

They have name for “Less work for same pay” : inflation.