Anecdotally, a CEO of my acquaintence says that he's generally very happy to give more vacation time to the sorts of people who directly report to him, on the grounds that basically there's an amount of work X that that person needs to do, and they need to do it regardless of whether they're going on vacation, and so it doesn't cost him to give them more vacation.

On the other hand, this analysis would not hold for a Wal-Mart greeter or, I would imagine, an office worker who does low-level clerical work (for example, X number of claims come in per day, and you have to process those claims). Presumeably, those lower-level employees are both less able to negotiate their own working conditions (as they are more replaceable than a higher-level employee) and more sensitive to decreases in their pay (as they make less money).

Wal-Mart greeter is tough, as would security guard, but even for a claim processor, don't you think there's a possibility that people picking up each other's work when they're on vacation could get as much done in 50 weeks on, 2 off (or, heaven forfend, 48 on 4 off) as they could working the 52 straight?

I thought Matt's post was surprisingly Econ 101-y.

There are real world examples to be looked at. Countries that have increased their workers' mandated holidays and/or decreased their working hours.

I'd imagine it'd be hard for companies to decrease workers' pay in response to holiday increases (or it bloody well should be), it'd be new hires who'd suffer from the attempt to recoup the money.

Also, 3 has a point.

Yglesias does note that wages are sticky, and contemplates them drifting below where they would otherwise have been rather than immediately falling. He just seemed to be missing the point that value to the employer isn't necessarily going to be the same as value to the employee.

it'd be new hires who'd suffer from the attempt to recoup the money.

Yeah well, fuck them. I already have a job. I just need more time away from work.

2

Sure employers could compensate by increasing the pace or intensity of work demanded but don't lefties usually find this objectionable also?

don't lefties usually find this objectionable also?

No, it's the affected workers who object, regardless of political leaning.

Of course, any union worth its salt would object to attempt to drive a terms-and-conditions wedge between new and existing hires.

And, you know, not universally. It all depends on the initial and final pressure of work.

11 to 8, and complete agreement with 10.

8 also ignores that increasing pace and intensity is not a surefire way to increase output, but then, do we expect insight from 8's author?

2: Sure, it's certainly possible to compensate, to some extent, for someone being out. After all, it happens.

I guess that the kind of jobs where vacation costs the most are where work comes in and needs to be immediately turned around -- retail work is like that, as obviously a customer will only stand at a register for so long if you're short-handed. I've walked away from many retail exchanges because the lines were too long.

There are certainly plenty of office examples, too. Anything time-sensitive.

I'm a little dubious of any claim that longer vacations will be near-perfectly compensated for by higher productivity simply because it's not like everyone in America gets the same vacation. My job starts off with 3 weeks, not 2, and moves to 4 pretty quickly. My old job was even more generous -- there were people getting 6 weeks. Other places start off with 1 (or 0) instead of 2 and increase more slowly. And while more and less generous places perhaps aren't the majority, they aren't bizarre anomolies. I'd think that if you could, in most jobs, give people 4 weeks off and get the same total amount of work from them as you could if they got 2 weeks off, employers would have noticed it by now and shifted to a more generous policy as a way of costlessly increasing their attractiveness to workers.

I give plenty of credence to bureaucratic inertia and just raw stupidity, but with the number of examples out there, this really seems like something where you have to give deference to the revealed preference of employers.

A friend of mine works as a literary agent. (It's a very good job for someone who's gone to law school but doesn't want to be a lawyer, btw, because you need to evaluate contracts. It pays a lot better than plain-old publishing. It's a tough business, but she loves it.)

She's pretty much allowed to take as much vacation as she wants from her small firm, mainly because a large chunk of her compensation is based on commissions, but also because there are big lulls in the business. Outside of New York December is pretty slow, so she took a huge chunk of time off around Christmas. She's "entry-level," but there's a pretty flat hierarchy. She has a lot of choice over which projects she wants to take on, and the firm's partners act more like mentors than bosses. At one point one of the New York partners started trying to enforce the formal vacation rules, but a couple of the Boston partners told her to ignore him.

I think that there are some jobs like that. A friend of mien works for a software startup, and the people there seem to take a lot of vacations. The President is Australian and encourages it. They've started doing a lot of business with schools, so their VP for sales has declared that next year she's going to take the whole month of June off. This friend said that tehy treat the engineers like artists. They can go home whenever they feel that they're not being productive, but often they'll work crazy hours when they're "on."

There are cultural factors at work there, and it's certainly true that they're not hourly employees.

Are teachers and professors on vacation all summer? I think not. Not being chained to your desk or workstation doesn't magically give you freedom. I really don't think I would like living in a place that shuts down as everyone goes a la vacance (I'm looking at you, France).

14: Eh, it's an empirical question. The fact that life goes on just fine in countries where everyone gets and takes four weeks of vacations suggests to me that it's workable without impoverishing anyone or shutting down commerce.

We were given an extra two weeks' "bonus leave" last year in lieu of a raise. I think pretty much everyone would have preferred the raise. Because, even though it's nice to have "bonus leave" in the hopper if you need it, most folks just won't take extra vacations. They'll work through and hoard the vacation time so they can retire two weeks early or something. Besides, vacations are expensive, and who can afford them if you haven't gotten a raise in years?

I know that if I were given a week more vacation per year, I would not get less done. The idea that I'm diligently doing work, adding value to the economy every second I'm sitting at my desk is ridiculous (hi, Unfogged!) and, also, there's a mental limit on how much work I can reasonably do. I take at least the equivalent of a week off just in non-Unfogged goofing off time. I'd rather spend that goofing off time on a beach than at my desk, though.

Obviously, this kind of logic doesn't necessarily apply to, say, manufacturing or retail.

I don't know whether my 15 supports the idea that paid vacations exist or not. A lot of these people are paid based on the amount of work they do or, really, how much money they can bring in, and the latter is not always correlated with the amount of time spent working. Lawyers, of course, bill by the hour, so their perception might be skewed.

I also wonder whether Yglesias's views aren't colored by the fact that he works for himself pretty much.

I take at least the equivalent of a week off just in non-Unfogged goofing off time. I'd rather spend that goofing off time on a beach than at my desk, though.

So if you got the extra week at the beach would you stop goofing off the rest of the time?

There's also the whole, 'give people more vacation time, it's the decent thing to do' thing.

Mostly, I was just arguing with the Econ 101ness of it all. I'm not convinced that mandating paid vacation would make people better off (that's the way I lean, but I don't know). But it's a complex enough question that just saying "It's all part of the same compensation package, everything will come out the same in the end," really doesn't settle anything.

Isn't this basically just one of those rare moments when Sausagely reminds us he's 19? It's hard to have much perspective on how the whole working for a living thing functions until you've done it for a while.

I think more people work in jobs where the economics 101 argument is true rather than the type of situation LB is talking about:

http://www.bls.gov/emp/empmajorindustry.htm

I personally would like a norm or law requiring taking more vacation time, but this is the kind of thing that would benefit the upper middle class more than anyone else.

There's also the whole, 'give people more vacation time, it's the decent thing to do' thing.

ERROR DOES NOT COMPUTE

What's your basis for saying the Econ 101 argument is true anywhere? The increased productivity thing is going to be less true when you go down the status ladder, but the possibility of a systematic market failure, where employees would value vacation more highly than employers do, but they don't arrive at the bargain that leaves them both better off, seems reasonably likely to me and doesn't depend on status.

Factory workers need vacations too you know. I can recall factory work, and it's easily as stressful as clerical stuff. Lack of control, working at some pre-determined pace, is a killer. 5 weeks off at least.

Let's try house style : - There's nothing at all implausible about the possibility that one office worker could turn out as much work in 50 weeks as a fellow worker turns out in 52 in at least some cases

In computer programming some programmers used to be able to turn out in a week what others turned out in half a year. It's not so common these days, but still. Mind you, you couldn't actually rely on them.

So if you got the extra week at the beach would you stop goofing off the rest of the time?

Me personally? I think the amount of quality work I can product in a year is constant, and adding a week or more of vacation wouldn't come anywhere near to cutting into that amount of work.

What's your basis for saying the Econ 101 argument is true anywhere?

If your job consists largely of taking up space in a physical location and/or requires no specialized training, and you can do it just as well when you're tired and distracted, then productivity hardly decreases when you are forced to work when you're tired and distracted. Therefore, as many hours are squeezed out as possible. Isn't that true?

However, it seems like more and more employees have the opposite problem, that of being forced by their employer to be on call for 167 hours per week, but only working 25 or 30 so the employer doesn't have to have a bunch of full-time employees that are entitled to benefits.

LB, the argument that you're using here is a pretty standard one in labor economics, but you don't want to call it a market failure or say it's due to transaction costs. The technical term from gamer theory is "suboptimal equilibrium".

Assume that employees are getting 1-2 weeks off but would prefer to take off 4, even if it cost them the pay for those two weeks. Think about it in terms of game theory, and the vacation issue for employees is like the Prisoner's Dilemma. Everyone is motivated to take the extra time off as a group, but without any rules that people have to take that time off, a defector can start taking only 3 weeks off and appear to be a better worker, picking up larger bonuses, raises and promotions. This causes everyone else to defect and take less vacation time in order to keep in the race for performance rewards, and ultimately everyone screws themselves by taking less vacation time.

The way out of these sub-optimal equilibria is through legislation, which ensures that everyone has to cooperate for a minimum amount of vacation. Thus, even if the pay reduces (which I'm sure it will, through higher prices reducing real pay or through lost raises), legislation of minimum time off can improve percieved total compensation. Except for workaholics, who bitch.

If I recall my really awesome labor econ prof correctly, these effects were shown very strongly in the 60s and 70s, when countries started to mandate maternity leave (paid or unpaid). Studies found very sharp increases in women entering the workforce in locations with mandated maternity leave compared to those without, suggesting a considerable increase in total compensation much larger than that implied by the extra pay required by the legislation (anti-discrimination law prevented female salaries from lowering to directly pay for the extra leave, so there was some cross-subsidy from male pay that caused total fiscal compensation to increase as well as total percieved compensation).

"gamer theory"? I suck.

Here's an Econ 201 story: suppose that currently all workers goldbrick for the equivalent of four work weeks' worth of time. Suppose all workers would, if they could choose, rather have paid vacation rather than goldbrick at work, but that this preference is stronger for worse workers than it is for better workers. Worker quality is not otherwise observed by employers.

If workers freely negotiate their compensation, then the more a worker insists on paid vacation, the more the employer knows that they are a low quality worker. Thus employers insist on only hiring workers that don't ask for vacation. Workers know this, so no workers request vacation.

In this scenario, switching to mandated vacation makes all workers better off, without making employers worse off. It's the magic of regulated markets.

Pwned by motherfucking Po-Mo Polymath.

27

"... The increased productivity thing is going to be less true when you go down the status ladder, but the possibility of a systematic market failure, where employees would value vacation more highly than employers do, but they don't arrive at the bargain that leaves them both better off, seems reasonably likely to me and doesn't depend on status."

I think a systemic market failure in the other direction is equally plausible. My employer has been cutting down on all sorts of benefits (like paid vacation time) because they are figuring out that the perceived value to the worker is less than it costs them to provide it.

One of the things they did was institute an use it or lose it policy regarding vacation since in the past many workers would accumulate large quantities of vacation time and then cash it all in when they retired. This is obviously a pure cost to the employer with no possibility of compensating productivity improvements and also pretty clearly demonstrated that many workers would rather have the money. Even with the new policy many workers don't take all their days.

How about a law mandating workers be paid for vacation days they don't take?

35: How about a law mandating they actually take their days?

I've worked in situations where nobody took much of their holiday, not because they wanted the money more but because there was literally no time you could take that wouldn't earn you quiet disapproval of management and peers. In industries where everyone is salaried, and they entire system is constructed to lurch from crisis to crisis, it's really hard to avoid this.

I would be willing to stop commenting on blogs from work in exchange for an additional six weeks' vacation each year. I am pretty sure my employer would come out ahead on the deal, but I fear that my proposing this at my next review would reflect poorly.

31:
I'm using numbers cause that is to big to summarize. I think one problem you run into is that theory only applies if everyone really does want to exchange pay for vacation. I know I wouldn't a lot of the time and I assume others wouldn't as well.

36: Yep. A truly funny moment here was a year ago when we all got a raise and an extra week of vacation (that went along with a hike in the billable hours expectation). The head of the NY office literally said, in the meeting announcing this: "And another week of vacation. I'm not sure why we're doing this, who takes the vacation we've got now?" It sent the message about expectations very clearly.

I've worked in situations where nobody took much of their holiday, not because they wanted the money more but because there was literally no time you could take that wouldn't earn you quiet disapproval of management and peers.

Right. And also, places where the expectation of work you are expected to get done is unchanged, regardless of whether or not you take vacation. The employee is supposed to make the absence seamless/invisible to their colleagues, clients, etc.

I work at a terrific place now, and I'm still scrambling to prepare for a whopping two days out of the office. The fantasy that people are capable of constant availability is really wearing.

expectation of the amount of work

I think that vastly more people are afraid of taking vacations because of some hazy fear of employer retribution than are actually in any danger. It's not the Great Depression any more.

In most skilled industries, hiring a new worker is expensive and not terribly reliable -- a company is doing pretty well if only 10% of the people they hire are useless losers who they either have to fire or (worse) who end up being a leech on their resources for years. That being the case, if you're basically a good employee, your employer would have to be pretty crazy to fire you or ease you out of your job or snub you for taking your vacation time -- even if every day you take is simply loss for them, and you get 4 weeks a year off, it's still probably a vastly better bet for them to keep you basically on the standard track than to try to replace you.

Sure, you may not get to be on the superstar track if you take your full vacation every year, but isn't that what people here are saying? That they want to be able to trade a moderate amount of money for more vacation?

42 may not apply to low-end wage jobs, I really have no idea what the labor market is like there.

I have been told that in Japan no one ever takes their legally mandated holidays except for Westerners, who are regarded as selfish and disloyal for that reason.

In Taiwan the relative absence of paid holiday time was compensated by a bonus thirteenth month of pay at New Years, which few westerners ever got. The Chinese do not have the gift of enjoying idleness (stereotype alert).

In China, they don't even have a word for dolce far niente.

We're also in a cultural moment where the way you show your value as a manager is by demonstrating that you're ruthless about squeezing your people. Managers generally aren't trying to make economically rational decisions about what sorts of compensation and benefits packages produce the most work for the least money. Managers don't necessarily care about producing the most work for the least money. What they care about is showing their own value as managers, and right now you don't do that by being "soft" on employees in most parts of the economy.

What's your basis for saying the Econ 101 argument is true anywhere?

In general, the more money people make, the more vacation time they get from their employer:

The most likely story is that the amount of vacation leave that best balances preferences of
firms and workers is increasing in the skill level of the jobs and is positively associated with wages.
Wages and vacation time tend to move together as job changers move up and down the job quality
ladder as a result of random search outcomes and employer learning about worker quality.

The less money you make, the greater the utility of the money to you and the less likely you would be to trade the money for vacations.

42: Every indication is that a moderate increase in vacation would make people more productive over all, though.

The kind of situation I'm thinking of is something like a smallish tech startup in california. All/most of your employees are at-will & salaried. The company is probably running at 80% or less of it's actual needed workforce, even accounting for the fact everyone is working 100 hour weeks. Part of this is culture, part of it is because of hiring overhead and attempting to keep your burn rate down. The work itself tends to be characterized by hard (or percieved hard) deadlines, and you already don't have enough people. So the perception is that if Joe leaves for a week, other overworked people have to pick up Joes work that week, because it won't wait.

This is probably wrong, and the company would probably get more done if they had an enforced break for everyone, but that is probably too global an optimization to make. As a local optimization, everyone needs to be percieved as pulling their own weight.

47: In some industries particularly, this is confounded by people not taking the vacation they are given, as a rule. But you're right on the money about the relative utility.

18: Besides, vacations are expensive, and who can afford them if you haven't gotten a raise in years?

Semi-OT, but this reminds me of how I'd really like to take a vacation at home. Maybe see a little more of certain friends instead of just seeming them every other weekend, maybe catch up on the scary pile of mail (I'm pretty sure no bills stay there for longer than a week but the challenge is deciding what to do about everything else), maybe get to know my own somewhat-relatively-new community instead of visiting yet another set of cousins in a different time zone, whatever. Well, note to self: time management good, World of Warcraft bad. And in another year or two I'll have enough vacation time in one year (not because I'm saving it up, but because I haven't been here long enough for "full" benefits to have kicked in) that I don't have to choose between time for myself and time for family, and by that time my uncle probably won't have any more frequent flyer miles to give me. Still, it's annoying. You know how people talk about having "working vacations"? I'd like to have a "sleeping in your own bed vacation."

48: Man, I've spent the last 8 years working at smallish tech start-ups in California. I've always had generous (by American standards) vacation pacakages, and never had any problems taking vacations when I felt like 'em.

In my workplace, they recently renegotiated the contracts for all the technical staff. Those staff lost 7 days of holiday a year as a result.* They were compensated by a reduction in their working hours and a pay rise. They all made a slight net gain both in terms of their total working hours per annum and their income. *Everyone* (give or take) would have preferred the extra 7 days of holiday time. Pretty much a textbook instance of the sort of suboptimality discussed above.

* they had 7 days a year more than everyone else because of a deal negotiated some time in the 1970s which had to do with seasonal working hours for gardeners(!)

My last employer started out giving a fairly generous amount of PTO (vacation + sick), but then cut it back, along with two other changes: they gave everyone an extra paid week off between Christmas and New Year's Day, when most of the company was taking time off and/or not getting any work done anyway; and they gave a bonus week of PTO to anyone who was under 80 hours at the end of the year.This was at a tech company where there were a lot of workaholic engineers who never took vacations and let their time rack up.

This worked out well for all involved, except possibly the workaholic engineers: the company didn't have to carry nearly as much time on the books, which was expensive to them, and many employees who actually wanted to use their time off ended up with more of it than under the old system.

The key to it working was that the company actually encouraged you to take the time off; managers would ask at the beginning of the summer what your vacation plans were and would start pestering in earnest in September or October. (Of course, whenever I went on vacation, 90% of my work was saved for me for when I got back, but overall the vacation situation was much better than most places.)

I like the idea of forcing employers to pay out for vacation time they don't let you take, but that assumes they're giving you vacation time in the first place. If there were a mandated payout but not mandated vacation, I could see a lot of companies (like LB's firm) deciding to cut vacation benefits out altogether; after all, they're not going to let you take it anyway, and those payouts are expensive.

And the solution for all but the smallest firms is, just hire more fucking people. If you can't cover four weeks holiday a year for every employee, you don't have enough employees.

48: Glad to hear it's not universal. The last start up I worked at, my boss was starting to get flack for not having taken more than a couple of days (total) in 5 years. When I was last in the middle of that (98 ish) nobody I knew took more than a couple of days of their 2 or 3 weeks, and this was probably across 20 companies or so.

And all this isn't to say that there aren't places which will bust your balls over vacations. My roommate worked at such a place for a while (interestingly, they at one point told him they were going to have to deny his vacation request, and he told them that if they did, he'd quit. They backed down, and his career there never seemed like it was in any trouble -- he got promoted, they worked with him when he relocated, etc.)

But, frankly, the fact that this isn't the Great Depression any more works two ways -- if your employer is a dick, quit your job and find a new one. It's not impossible, and if the culture at your current place of work is one of "squeeze every last drop of blood from our workers even if it's economically stupid for us," frankly, it'll never be a fun place to work and probably it won't do very well as a business. You don't want to hitch yourself to that wagon unless the labor market for your job is awfully bad.

But, frankly, the fact that this isn't the Great Depression any more works two ways -- if your employer is a dick, quit your job and find a new one.

Now here is where it benefits employers when the social safety net/unemployment insurance/universal health insurance doesn't exist.

if the culture at your current place of work is one of "squeeze every last drop of blood from our workers even if it's economically stupid for us," frankly, it'll never be a fun place to work and probably it won't do very well as a business. You don't want to hitch yourself to that wagon unless the labor market for your job is awfully bad.

Amen!

56: I don't think it's that simple. I know people who have *happily* worked crazy hours with no breaks for a while (until they became very unhappy and realized how stupid it was) . It's largely a culture thing, and people don't neccessarily think of it as their employers being dicks if they think of it as `normal'. But then they crash & burn out. The thing is, startups can be very rewarding of this behaviour, sometimes.

Startups are funny though, so we probably shouldn't concentrate on them as a model for anything general.

if your employer is a dick, quit your job and find a new one

The thread in general and this comment in particular remind me why, despite substantial financial and social cost, I work at home. Alone. In the rain.

Of course, if you've signed on to one of those employers, chances are you'll find out they're dicks the hard way. And if you luck into too many of those companies and find yourself quitting a lot of jobs over dickishness, you'll look like a bad long-term prospect and many companies won't want to hire you. Advantage: dickish employers.

One thing I found out about during my wretched career was the value of portable skills. Most of what I knew at my last few jobs was site-specific, so even though I was productive I could be abused because I couldn't move. Five years of misery.

60: I work at home. Alone. In the rain.

Is that what we call it now?

Seriously, I envy you that. My brother-in-law works for no one but his-self. Totally freaking stressful at times (going stretches of a year without significant income), but he calls the shots. And he makes it work. He certainly doesn't worry about vacation time.

Eh. Buck works for himself and I have to use a Taser on him to make him take time off. But he has a hard time delegating anything.

yeah, plenty of self-employed folks can't or won't take time off either.

if the culture at your current place of work is one of "squeeze every last drop of blood from our workers even if it's economically stupid for us," frankly, it'll never be a fun place to work and probably it won't do very well as a business.

Like law firms?

I didn't notice above if you're specifically advocating against mandatory vacation laws, but this line of argument reminds me of the "it's unviable and bound to die out Real Soon Now" argument used about slavery, with another generation as the Friedman Unit. In reality, bad practices can reinforce and perpetuate themselves, even without economic incentive.

In reality, bad practices can reinforce and perpetuate themselves, even without economic incentive.

It's almost as if people don't consistently identify and act in accordance with their enlightened self-interest!

It's almost as if people don't consistently identify and act in accordance with their enlightened self-interest!

Yeah, I can't figure it at all.

64: I'm in a situation similar to Buck's in that respect, and I haven't really had anything I can call 'time off' -- which I've come to define as time that I'm not under deadline -- for at least two years. But there's some advantage in being responsible for my own misery (I have a wee problem with authority).

67: how can this be!

Startups are funny though, so we probably shouldn't concentrate on them as a model for anything general.

But we should try not to fatally wound that culture in the name of slightly improving everything else.

71: also true. it could probably use a bit of help too, though.

But we should try not to fatally wound that culture

Really? I'm not sure it would be such a terrible thing if "startup culture" was wounded, even fatally. Startups, with a few notable exceptions, suck. They suck to work for, they suck to invest in, and they suck to buy from.

Minivet in 66 & 67: I think that there should probably be a Godwin's law corollary to comparing J. Random Practice you dislike to chattel slavery. Slavery is a uniquely bad institution, and most other economic practices can not be usefully reduced to slavery comparisons.

74: Yes, on reflection it's tarring, but I think it's the arguments that are similar, rather than the institutions they're supporting.

Oh, wait. Am I banned now?

And, I should add, it's an anti-interventionist rhetorical technique in any number of contexts. Status quo getting you down? Don't worry, it'll fix itself!

73: Problem is, they come up with a lot of good stuff. I'd like to think there is a way to fix what doesn't work, but I think Jake's point was that some of the things we are talking about could kill it with no sort of viable alternative in sight.

Mmm. There's a real question (and one to which I do not purport to know the answer, but I've got a strong guess) as to whether you could kill 'startup culture' without killing what's useful about startups.

I've never banned someone! Minivet is banned!

I think my point is that there really are things which do die out on their own, and, in fact, slavery may have been one of them, but it was too odious to be allowed to die out on its own time. It had to be killed.

That slavery was one such institution does not mean that any other particular institution either a.) will not die out on its own or b.) is so odious that it must be stamped out rather than allowed to live out its lifespan.

More to the actual point, while there have been some blithe comments in this thread about how Europeans get lots of vacation and they do fine, y'know, youth unemployment in France certainly does suck. Is youth unemployment in France the sole result of French vacation policies? Of course not. But even granting a basically liberal outlook in which we want to use government intervention to hopefully improve the lives of The People, I think that a Northern European approach of just cutting people checks is preferable to getting the government involved in every little detail of how people structure their work lives.

Basically, I have some sympathy for people who are really at the mercy of their employer because they're easily replaceable and have no negotiating power. I have tons less sympathy for people who are empowered, sought-after workers who just don't want to have to confront their bosses or think about the trade-offs themselves.

I admit, I've only been skimming this thread, so I should probably go look more closely, but is the concern that increasing vacation and mandating that employees actually take their vacation or get paid for it would kill startup culture and, therefore, the wonderful things that come from startups? Color me skeptical.

What's your guess?

Having worked at a bunch of startups (four) and a few big companies (three, one via acquisition of a startup), I'll observe that the people who really thrive at startups tend to do really poorly at big companies. Spectacularly so, in some cases.

I'm probably just being a prick when I mention that I get five weeks off a year.

But I think I'm allowed to be a prick right now, since I've got a Baltimore cop staying in the house for the next week. Has there ever been a cop who wasn't authoritarian? I think not.

Also, I'm pretty sure California mandates that employees get paid for vacation they don't take. I know that every time I quit I get a big check for all my unused vacation.

79: There is certainly less sympathy for economically empowered workers --- but that really isn't the problem and doesn' t describe a huge percentage of the US work force.

I think I agree almost entirely with Epoch on this thread. I will be having his baby shortly.

I don't think there's actually a lot of disagreement going on in this thread.

86: I disagree.

87: yeah, but you would on principle.

You won that round, sz, but there's always tomorrow.

83: I know that every time I quit I get a big check for all my unused vacation.

I don't know if this is actually Federal, but it's pretty widespread. What might be more to the point, though, is what happens if your company has a cap on the amount of vacation you can accumulate, and you're set to accumulate more. In any company I've dealt with, the excess vacation evaporates, without turning into money. It seems to be pretty common to say that you aren't allowed to have more vacation stashed away than you would accumulate in one or two years (one year where I am now). In that situation, you can quickly get neither the vacation nor the money.

84: What do you mean by a "huge percentage" of the US work force? Like 20%? Or 80%?

81: My guess is that the innovation we get from startups isn't strongly dependent on the peculiarities of late 20thC/early 21stC startup culture.

85: My mother is going to be super-excited.

90 is key in a lot of cases

84: well, the median *household* income is less than $45k/year last I heard, and that doesn't add up to a lot of leverage.

81: Agreed. I think the largest obstacle to change is the current role the VC plays is pretty much dominant. They have the majority of the financial gain, while successfully offloading a lot of the risk. These are pretty much teh largest players and do well with the status quo, so they aren't looking to change anything. However, absent other methods of funding pretty speculative work, nobody else is going to do it.

92: the innovation we get from startups

Which innovations would these be? </cheapshot>

94: I don't think that household income is a good proxy for negotiating power. Unemployment rate seems like a better one. The threat is not, "I'll leave and get a job that pays substantially more," (in which case you'd probably do it anyhow), it's, "I can find another job just like this one, but where they don't treat me like shit."

95: This and this and this and even this.

I think that a Northern European approach of just cutting people checks is preferable to getting the government involved in every little detail of how people structure their work lives.

I agree with this. The dirty secret is that the US could eliminate poverty in the US just by giving poor people money. It wouldn't be all that expensive in the big picture.

94: Neither of them are really good proxy's, really. What we care about is the (percieved) risk which has to include things like debt load and dependents.

I'm inferring that someone earning $21k/yr (roughly median single income) isn't going to be blase about finding a new job, but you are right, that's not the whole story. My impression is that `i can find another job just like this one, but where they don't treat me like shit' really does not describe most peoples situation, but I can't back it up with numbers or anything. I believe this is at least well established in, say, the lower quartile or quintile of the economy, but I'm not sure where it tails off.

98: Except that it doesn't (AFAIK) describe anything actually 'Northern European'. I'm pretty sure all the actual Northern European countries mandate paid vacation.

(Oh, I'm also all for income transfers, but mandated vacation isn't just some freakish French thing.)

99: In any monetary range of the economy, there are probably people who are just bad employees, who have little negotiating power because their employers are basically unhappy with their job performance to begin with. I don't know how many of those people there are, but I suspect that it's a pretty significant number -- maybe 5-10%? Maybe even more. We haven't been focusing on those people in this thread, but they're actually probably pretty important in the grand scheme of things. I confess I have almost no idea what the "right" answer is for those people.

For people who really are basically good (or at least average) workers in the kinds of jobs that they're well-suited to, in the current economy, I suspect that the overwhelming majority actually have a fair degree of negotiating power, even at the poorest ends of the economy. But still, 70-80% is an overwhelming majority, but it leaves a lot of people out.

101: There is also, as I understand it, a significant number of people who will not leave their current employer because of health insurance. We haven't considered them, either.

100: Sure, but you can have this exact conversation with pretty much any other workplace benefit slotted in instead of "vacation." I can't think of literally any point that has been made here which has anything uniquely to do with vacations.

And Northern European countries do, to my understanding, intrude themselves way, way, way less into work life and hiring/firing practices than does France.

103: From what I've read, France, Germany, and the Netherlands are all pretty similar on that count. Not sure if the Netherlands counts as a northern European country, though.

101: I think there are all manner of things that make the picture more complicated, including location, out of work commitments, etc.

105: Homeownership. Dramatically increases the cost of moving, and I think has been shown to be correlated with unemployment.

Threads like this weird for me because they simultanously make me appreciate my job and make me frustrated with it.

I will add, in response to 101, that people that don't live in big cities have fewer options for other jobs in their field that don't require moving.

I live in a medium size city (for which I feel a strong sense of attachment) and there aren't that many people hiring computer programmers. Plenty of people who need network administrators, but that isn't the job I want.

Right. I suspect a significant amount of job-lock is attributable to factors outside of work. That makes legislation in these areas harder because your constituency starts breaking up in weird ways. There are lots of good things to be said about the sort of employment regime that Epoch is gesturing at, but I suspect those good things are more likely to be distributed to people with certain characteristics.

All of which is to say that Epoch and I may well change our minds on these matters once the baby arrives.

107: I'm always tentative about about things like job mobility, because I know I'm an extreme case.
I don't have any kids, I don't have any debt, I don't own a house, I'm quite hireable (at least, I've been led to believe that), I already live impractically far away from pretty much everyone I care about, I've got good health coverage and no worries about being about to get it again, and I've got enough savings to tough it out for quite a while without a job, if need be (sure, it would suck to eat up your savings that way, but it's not scary in the same way that losing your house is, etc). So if I were to walk away from here tomorrow, absolutely nothing horrible is going to happen to me.

I can only try and imagine what it must be like to be really constrained, and can't infer anything from my own situation. All of my own job related angst revolves around getting the right one, not `how am I going to feed my kids if I leave this one', which puts it all into perspective, I guess.

Trust me, it's an extremely tense feeling, and one I'm staring at as we speak.

re: 92

Yeah. There are all kinds of models for innovation. Whether it's the lone inventor, the corporate research unit, the academic department, groups of government boffins battling the odds to invent better and more British ways of killing people (Nazis! Godwin!), etc.

That sucks. On the hopeful side, there are probably fewer than 50 non-private practice jobs on this island that would be good fits for me professional and that pay enough to support us in the style to which we've become accustomed, and one of the very best of them came open within a year or two of when I really started watching for one. It's always darkest just before the dawn, always look on the bright side of life, platitude platitude masturbate platitude.

112 to 110.

Mmm. The thing is, I'm on an inside track for a job that I'd like quite a lot, but for which the money will be very very tight, with nothing else on the horizon and a strong desire to get out of where I am. It's a slow process, so I've probably got months to think about it, but I'm feeling very very conflicted about making a choice that means, e.g., not a lot of saving for college and heavy student loans for Sally and Newt vs. trying harder to make a go of this hellhole. I'll manage, whatever happens, and it's a very First World problem, but I'm a little wrecked these days.

114: Yeah, I can see how that would be stressful. Not, as I said, from personal experience, but I have watched it happen for several friends. If it helps at all, every one of the people I know that have made such a change said it was definitely worthwhile. Of the ones in the other direction (trading income for more hellish work) all but one told me they've regretted it. As you say, it's a very first-world problem, and it depends on so many variables and your own baseline expectations that I don't know how much other peoples experience helps.

Yeah, that's the general impression I've gotten from people who've done that sort of thing. It's just that trading off my comfort against my kids' security gives me the screaming willies.

Ouch. Liking your job quite a lot is a very big deal, but money is useful stuff too. I have a fair bit of experience with the trying hard to make a go of the hellhole thing. It didn't work for me, and my hellhole was a lot less hellish than yours. OTOH I did pass up a thing or two that I was excited about because the money would have been too tight (aka my wife put her foot down). But FWIW, a hell of a lot can change between now and when your kids go to college, and some of the fear is probably a consequence of spending way too much of your time in a place that makes you feel miserable and inadequate.

116: Is there anyone you can talk to who is making a go of it on $newsalary? Sometimes it looks a lot more managable with tangible evidence. Of course I know nothing about your situation or your targets.

I'm also probably overly optimistic about kids needs because a) I don't have any and b) my parents never had any money to help with that sort of thing (which I later found out was a deep regret of my fathers) but I made out ok, I think. This is largely due to scholarships, etc. which you really can't count on.

It's just that trading off my comfort against my kids' security gives me the screaming willies.

That isn't the right way to look at the problem. This is not about you being unreasonable and selfish.

I am the strongest possible believer that kids are better off without college money from their parents. Full stop, but probably double-especially so if that lack of college money means a parent is a happier person throughout their childhood. Definitely go for it, LB.

also, again no inference about your personal situation LB, but it isn't like a parent being miserable with their job, etc. is neccessarily not going to have an impact on their kids, which can't make the decision making easier.

I wouldn't give my kids any money for college if I won $100m in the lottery. I'm completely serious.

120: I would be completely behind this idea if the whole college tuition and student loan system were more reasonable (imo, naturally).

You're smoking crack, Brock. I got a free ride through college and it didn't do me a lick of harm, and I saw friends get fucked over by dealing with erratic and cruelly fucked up financial aid processes. (One friend couldn't ever use the library in the first month of term, because her loans were always late. In a ten week quarter, that can hurt you.)

But globally thanks for the support, and I really wasn't asking for advice because the situation's all too individual for anyone to have much to say, but I do appreciate people saying kind things. I was mostly just whimpering. It's a raw spot these days.

It's just that trading off my comfort against my kids' security gives me the screaming willies.

Ugh. But you (or your children) can always borrow money when they go off to college, but they can't borrow the experience of happy parents when they were growing up.

122: I wouldn't give my kids any money for college

Are you getting at pushing the kids out the door, fostering independence, etc?

123: it is completely fucking unfair, but it's also what most people in this country have to deal with. And I think it's good for people to have to experience that. And in the end, they'll of course be fine. Kids whose parents can afford to pay their way through college have almost certainly already received far more than their fair share of privileged advantages.

I wouldn't give my kids any money for college if I won $100m in the lottery. I'm completely serious.

Really? I thought the "borrow as much money as you can, don't get a job, and after four years you're on your own" works out pretty well. Depends on how much time they're looking at spending in school getting advanced degrees, of course, but...

I worked 2-3 jobs throughout college (and through most of law school). You learn to deal with it.

'cause I have mixed feelings about having most of my college costs covered by my parents. Mostly anecdotal, of course, but my best year of school was when I was covering all the costs myself (loans and saved money).

But FWIW, a hell of a lot can change between now and when your kids go to college, and some of the fear is probably a consequence of spending way too much of your time in a place that makes you feel miserable and inadequate.

This matches my experience. During the times when I am most frustrated with work I can get trapped into thinking in the short-term, because it's just to painful to imagine a longer time horizon. When I'm happier I'm more patient.

129: The only problem with this is the fact that beyond a certain relatively small amount of time (10 h a week or so?), you just become a poorer student than you could be. This part I don't want to inflict on people if it's avoidable. The alternative of crippling debt isn't any good either, and I have trouble with the idea of tellilng people to only study things that pay well.

If I had your hypothetical $100M, I'd think of ways to foster independence, etc. But I'd probably give my kids (and pretty much anyones else I was close to) any education they could qualify for, wherever. I doubt I'd give them any money, though.

For what it's worth, I worked my way through undergrad, too. I saved up before hand, and I took 5 years instead of 4, and worked (mostly co-op) alternate terms with studying, and had some small scholarships. By the time I hit grad school, though, I had good scholarships. There aren't enough of those to go 'round, though.

132: Sure, I was undoubtedly a poorer student than I could have been. I'm not sure whether I was a poorer student than I would have been, however... I'd say there's a reasonable chance that if I'd been working less I'd just have spent more time drunk. Which is an important part of college, no doubt, but still.

And I think it's good for people to have to experience that. And in the end, they'll of course be fine. Kids whose parents can afford to pay their way through college have almost certainly already received far more than their fair share of privileged advantages.

I think this is wrong. To each his own, of course, and all that. But the single best way to get ahead in life is to take advantage of unfair advantage. And no small part of the social capital that the "elite" have is precisely that knowledge. Note for example the advantages that accrued to GWB and Magic Baby Cheney: not dead, now doing pretty well, and considered courageous warriors. I genuinely think it's wrong to teach people that they should, at a personal level, forgo advantage for some global (or national, or national once restricted to income, etc.) sense fairness. The only people who take such a lesson to heart are the people you most wish became a part of the elite. The rest--the tools--know better.

I saved up before hand, and I took 5 years instead of 4, and worked (mostly co-op) alternate terms with studying

Antioch!

(Traditionally the Antioch degree required Students to spend 5 years alternating between studies and co-op jobs).

A various combination of factors basically meant that I got a free ride through school, but I know people who attributed their whole motivation to do well in school to their parents' refusal to pay for them. In particular, one of my roommates in undergrad confided to me that she was basically pathologically obsessed with scholarships in high school because of this. On one hand, fear of never being able to pay off her student loans was apparently the only reason she forced herself to struggle through to graduation. On the other, she chose a major that was supposed to be lucrative but which she hated, and she still had a ton of debt years after graduating, and felt tied to a career she loathed and wasn't even that good at.

On the third hand, she suffered from anorexia/bullemia and may have been pre-disposed towards putting too much pressure on herself, but her folks were basically completely unsympathetic assholes, and I spent a year being really uncomfortable whenever they invited me to dinner.

135: Tim, I would of course agree that if your primary goal is to make your children "elite" then surely you ought to pay their way through college, if at all possible. I don't know what to say other than that have other goals.

137: remember when traci flick's mom says 'maybe if you had just made a few more posters, dear'

Brock, no complaining when they put you in the home.

i'd say its a better idea to not pay for your kids college, or only pay as much as they need to get into a better college. Then when they are 26 and out of grad school buy them a house with the money instead.

139: Don't get the reference, sorry.

But no, A's mom would not have even been that sympathetic. They were spectacular assholes, I hated them, and in the end she got out of her sucky situation by marrying a very sweet and supportive man in the same field, who happened to both love his work and be quite a few steps up the social class ladder, and then going back to school in something else completely.

The whole "I would never pay for my kids even if I couldn't!" thing kind of freaks me out, both because of seeing what happened to A, and because being able to take care of my education through undergrad was something very important to my dad and something he is/was ridiculously proud of, specifically because both he and his father were basically sent to school by collective effort of their extended families/communities. I'm convinced that if necessary, my dad would have sold his organs on the black market to fund my education, it's that important to him. Actually, he probably would have sold his organs on the black market to fund the educations of my cousins, and enlisted me to help, too.

Err, ignore the blatant self-negation in 142, please.

Oh.

You really really should watch Election, the movie.

I second yoyo in 144. Sideways was a very good movie, Citizen Ruth was a terrific movie, but Election is a wonderful movie, and Tracy Flick the last great film character of the 1990s. She's also a necessary point of reference.

I also come down on the Tim side of the Great Tim-Brock debate in 135-138. You should work to level the playing field, but don't go all Harrison Bergeron on your own kids.

Someone should say this explicitly.

Part of the point of protecting workers' rights and privileges via legislation is that competent but unimpressive, not especially bright, not especially charismatic, and otherwise un-glorious citizens also deserve decent treatment. The whole point is that the system shouldn't just shine for the top 5 or 10 or 25% - it matters to the health of our society that people who have not been given great gifts by nature and nature nonetheless have an opportunity to enjoy reasonable health, safety, and comfort.

This is what social service is about. It's a safe bet that the really smart, clever, multi-talented fast learners will find some way to come out okay. It is by no means a given that someone who is of mediocre intelligence (or worse), raised in an un-nurturing environment, taught mostly badly, and otherwise disadvantaged at the outset will ever catch up to the stuff that others glide into. They're not entitled to everything the best and the brightest get, but ont he other hand, they don't necessarily deserve to get shit on some more so that their misery makes a prettier frame for other people's success, either. It is very much about securing decent conditions for those who do not and will not ever "deserve" their breaks in the sense that would apply to, for instance, many of the folks posting here - it's about what losers and shlubs deserve, too.

It seemed like we were collectively being a little coy about that.

If workers, on average, think that two weeks of leisure increases their utility by more than employers think it costs them, but transaction costs (cultural factors, whatever) keep them from bargaining for that outcome,

Markets should prevent this from happening, there's a strong incentive for employers to figure out the lowest cost way to compensate their workers. (Which would involve taking into account the utility of various forms of compensation to their workers).

This could get screwed up if there are aspects of worker industriousness that are not visible to employers, and by giving low vacation they screen out lazy workers. For example, law firms might have an up or out policy with low vacation, and by the time people make partner you have screened out all the non-workaholics. Seems to be working with LB.

I, myself, am too lazy to read all the 146 comments above me and figure out how many times I've been totally pwned on this point. Probably more than once, though.

146 is crazy-talk.

114:

college loans did not scar me, and to the extent that they were harmful, it was partly because no one sat me down & said, "look, really, take the unpaid internship one summer if you want to do journalism; you're not going to have trouble making your payments."

I am cheap cheap cheap and have been shacking up shacking up shacking up since college, so that helped, and then there's the way in which law school loans dwarf everything. But still--before I decided to go to law school, when my husband was in grad school & I earned less take home than his stipend, I was making prepayments.

Now, work study was a pain, & dealing with the fin. aid office during school was truly, truly miserable at times. But the main reason why is that my parents were divorcing, & they sort of screw over one-parent families--they just do not respect the additional cost of living. And then you have the various family tsuris that lead to the parents maybe not making tuition the highest priority.

I don't really buy that "it built character" stuff--I'd trade places w/ my husband, whose parents have been able to be very helpful financially. And I went to rich schools, it may be worse at other places. And obviously I don't know the specific details of your situation. But to me, the main thing that wealthy parents & no student loans get you is an increased ability to try to find a job you love instead of something that makes you miserable to pay the bills. And to force yourself to make the bad trade indefinitely to forestall a chance that your kids would have to make it for maybe a few years, doesn't make sense to me.

147: markets don't work this way. There is no legal or cultural mechanism holding employers to promises about hours & vacation time for salaried employees, so employees can't trust them. So employees who would gladly trade salary for more sane hours cannot actually do so.

The settings where you actually CAN trust an employer about vacation time & hours are often gov't and nonprofit jobs. In the legal field at least, those jobs are much, much harder for young attorneys to get than firm jobs at much, much higher salaries (Of course, the actual work is often more rewarding & interesting too).

Yglesias presumably doesn't think Econ 101 applies perfectly in practice when it comes to min. wage laws, so why would it when it comes to vacation? In theory, the market maximizes everyone's utility, but that's because the theory is based on assumptions that we know aren't actually true.

Amen, brother. One of the most irritating things about these sorts of debates (eg as seen at Yglesias's and Ezra's) is that some tool always pops up and says "If they want more vacation time, let 'em go freelance, or start their own company" or something similar. But this presupposes that everyone is above average - ie that everyone is talented enough to not only run their own company, but to be so successful at it that they can take 4-6 weeks off a year. I won't even go into how comedic that last part of that assumption is; it's the first part that gets to me. This fucking meritocratic notion that vacation or health care or whatever else is something that you only get if you deserve it through being well above average, rather than something that all workers deserve. Thankfully, Europe isn't ruled by tools who believe this. Too bad the US is.

And fah on Yglesias's tawdry little Econ 101 interpretation of the issue. He should be ashamed.

151 to 146.

122 124

I agree with LB, 122 is ridiculous not to mention illegal in some states. Which is not to say your kids have to go to Harvard.

Illegal?? On what basis? In what states?

154

See here . This generally only comes up when the parents are divorced and may not apply if they are married and agree not to pay college expenses although I don't see why there should be a distinction.