The Big Sleep

[The2ndWheel]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html?_...

THE new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has made no secret of his antipathy to his country’s 35-hour workweek. This drastic solution to unemployment was mandated by the leftist government of Lionel Jospin in 2000. The intention was to share out the available work more evenly and to allow workers to spend more time with their families. Its long-term effects on the economy are still unclear.

In the autobiography-manifesto that he published during his presidential campaign, Mr. Sarkozy wrote of “the harm that the 35-hour week has done to our nation”: “What madness it is to think that the way to increase wealth and create jobs is to work less!” On Oct. 1, he effectively abolished the 35-hour week by removing fiscal penalties on overtime. The strikes and protests in France this month give a taste of the unions’ reaction to President Sarkozy’s measure.

President Sarkozy’s 19th-century predecessors would have been amazed that such comparatively small adjustments are treated as matters of economic life and death. They, too, were worried by the snail-like progress of the French economy, and wondered how to compete with the industrial powerhouse of Britain. But they were faced with something far more ruinous than unemployment.

[pansypoo53219]

1. imagine what a 20 hour work week

would do for unemployment. i mean, weren't machines and puters supposed to make us more leiisurely?

[ixion]

4. yep, they were... and nuclear power was supposed to make electricity near free

and we see how far off base those two corporate predictions were.

[JDPriestly]

2. Interesting -- life without oil.

Until the 20th century, few people needed money. Apart from salt and iron, everything could be paid for in kind. Economic activity was more a means of making the time pass than of making money, which might explain why one of the few winter industries in the Alps was clock-making. Tinkering with tiny mechanisms made time pass less slowly, and the clocks themselves proved that it was indeed passing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html?_...

Is this how we will survive post-peak-oil?

[bemildred]

3. Unlike the well-off, who did nothing 12 months a year.

Aside from starting wars and pillaging and that sort of thing.

[Demeter]

5. And Securities Fraud, Usury, Election Buying, White Collar Crime