Owen Hatherley: The right calls for hard work, the left for more jobs. The dream of mechanisation leading to shorter working hours seems forgotten
The solution to (nearly) everything: working less | Rutger Bregman
Excessive work and pressure are status symbols. But overtime is deadly. If we worked less we’d make fewer errors, address inequality and have a better life
Why working fewer hours would make us more productive
A shorter working week could improve our mental and physical health and even mitigate climate change, research shows
What if jobs are not the solution but the problem? | Aeon Essays
Economists believe in full employment. Americans think that work builds character. But what if jobs aren’t working anymore?
What if jobs are not the solution but the problem? | Aeon Essays
Economists believe in full employment. Americans think that work builds character. But what if jobs aren’t working anymore?
Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working | Brookings
The job market is a whole lot better than it was during the worst of the Great Recession, but around 7 million American men between the ages of 25 and 54 – mostly too old to be in school and too young to retire – are neither working nor looking for work. That amounts to […]
Work less, get more: New Zealand firm's four-day week an 'unmitigated success'
Reduced hours for same pay increased successful work-life balance management, cutting stress levels and boosting commitment
Distinguishing Labor from Work - Aaron Ross Powell
We should get rid of the former, if we can, but we should absolutely keep the latter.
Let’s hear it for the four-hour working day
Are you working your brain too hard? Take it easy – like Charles Darwin, Alice Munro or Thomas Jefferson
Anarchy and modern convenience
A major part of anarchy and socialism is the concept of anti-work. An obsession with work is a colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist construct. As such, the anti-work movement—a focus on working less overall and sharing labor more equally—is an important part of decolonization, feminism, and anti-capitalism. A common criticism of this is that reducing the amount everyone works to something like 20 hours a week instead of 40+ means we would have to give up a lot of conveniences.
In 2026, I’m no longer interested in ‘working on myself’
We think of ourselves as full-time projects, but what if doing so much inner work does more harm than good?
Less stress, more productivity: why working fewer hours is better for you and your employer
There’s always too much work to be done on software projects, too many features to implement, too many bugs to fix. Some days you’re just not going through the backlog fast enough, you’re not producing enough code, and it’s taking too long to fix a seemingly-impossible bug. And to make things worse you’re wasting time in pointless meetings instead of getting work done. Once it gets bad enough you can find yourself always scrambling, working overtime just to keep up. Pretty soon it’s just expected, and you need to be available to answer emails at all hours even when there are no emergencies. You’re tired and burnt out and there’s still just as much work as before. The real solution is not working even harder or even longer, but rather the complete opposite: working fewer hours.
Doing nothing at work
Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they do work, they should be working at a slower pace. I like to aim to be running at 80% utilization by default: unless I have a high-pressure project going on, I spend 20% of my workday away from the computer.
36 important life and work lessons a top tech executive learned before turning 30
The days are long but the decades are short.
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consistently intensify it: In the study, employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. That may sound like a win, but it’s not quite so simple. These changes can be unsustainable, leading to workload creep, cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems. To correct for this, companies need to adopt an “AI practice,” or a set of norms and standards around AI use that can include intentional pauses, sequencing work, and adding more human grounding.
Still Waters, Rapid Currents: Early Labor Market Transformation under Generative AI
We study the early labor market impacts of AI chatbots by linking large-scale adoption surveys to administrative labor market records in Denmark. We document rapid currents: most employers in exposed occupations have adopted chatbot initiatives, workers report productivity benefits, and new AI-related tasks are widespread. Yet these currents have not broken the surface: using difference-indifferences, we estimate precise null effects on earnings and recorded hours at both the worker and workplace levels, ruling out effects larger than 2% two years after the launch of ChatGPT. What moves is the structure of work: employers absorb AI through task reorganization—including new tasks in content generation, AI oversight, and AI integration—and adopters transition into higher-paying occupations where AI chatbots are more relevant, though still too few to move average earnings. Technological change reshapes work well before it surfaces in earnings or hours.
Preface | The World After Capital
Since publishing the previous version of The World After Capital, I have met with people across the political spectrum to discuss the ideas from the book. When I present these in person, I emphasize that the ideas are neither left nor right but forward (credit to Scott Santens who first used this phrase about Universal Basic Income). My writing, however, at times has alienated readers who identify as being more on the right. In this new edition, I am therefore making an extra effort to emphasize how both my diagnosis of where we are at and my suggestions for how to move forward do not map onto the existing political divides. Instead this is a new way of understanding our challenges and opportunities that can be the basis for movements and parties that are not trapped in Industrial Age ideology.