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- [00:00]
Juliet Schor
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:04]
Joel
We're teaming up in Daffy's Voices for Good Charity Challenge, competing with other podcasters to see who can raise the most for charity. I've chosen Fire Undue Medical Debt and the Hope Effect to defend free speech, eliminate medical bills, and care for orphans.
- [00:19]
Matt
And I am taking the effective altruism routes by supporting GiveWell's top global health charities that save lives for just a few bucks. Donate at daffy.org voicesforgood by December 2nd to back these charities and for a chance to win a trip to the 2026 iHeartRadio Music Festival in Vegas. That's Daffy.org voicesforgood hey, it's Joel and.
- [00:41]
Joel
Matt from how to Money. I was just in Seattle, Matt, and honestly, it's one of the greatest cities in the world, particularly in the summer. I went on this run by the water. We hopped a ferry across Puget Sound. Just an unforgettable trip.
- [00:53]
Matt
That's what struck me. What seems normal to a homeowner. It can be the thing that makes a trip really special.
- [00:59]
Joel
Which is why hosting your home on Airbnb makes sense, right? Travelers are looking for those authentic, memorable spaces. And if you don't have time to manage all that well, Airbnb's Co host feature makes it easy. A local co host can help with everything from creating the listing to keeping your place running smooth.
- [01:15]
Matt
Find a co host@airbnb.com host I love entrepreneurship. I have been a small business owner for almost 20 years now, but it is tough to separate work from life. The business can be on your mind 24 7. So when you are hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. And that hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place.
- [01:42]
Joel
Here's how it works. Post your job for free or you can pay to promote share with your network. You can let your network know that you're hiring. You can even add a hiring frame to your profile picture and get two times more qualified candidates. So post your job for free@LinkedIn.com howtomoney that's LinkedIn.com howtomoney to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome to how to Money. I'm Joel and today I'm talking Work Less, Live More with Juliet Schorr. So most of us can agree that Americans are overworked and that we tend to overspend to compensate. It's also True that most of us, we're not going to hit the Tim Ferriss goal of working four hours a week. Still, John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, he predicted that we'd be working 15 hour weeks by now, but he was way off. My guest today is here to parse the modern day work details. She says that four day work weeks can lighten the load. They can be realistic and they can allow us to live more life, which sounds nice. So we're going to get into that. Juliet Shore is an economist. She's a professor of sociology at Boston College and she's best known for her research on work consumption and economic inequality. Juliet, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
- [03:15]
Juliet Schor
Great to be here.
- [03:17]
Joel
First question I ask everyone who comes on, it helps us get to know you a little bit. What do you like to splurge on? I like to splurge on craft beer. It can be quite expensive at times. What is that for you? The thing where you're like. People might say I'm crazy, but I'm happily going to spend money in this way, even while I'm trying to be smart with my money and think about my future.
- [03:35]
Juliet Schor
Ugh, I'm so embarrassed. Please don't discount all the other things I have to say on the pod. My kids think this is so ridiculous, but I like expensive hotels.
- [03:47]
Joel
Okay, so you're not staying at the Motel 6?
- [03:50]
Juliet Schor
Definitely not.
- [03:53]
Joel
And are you, are you trying to save money when you book expensive hotels? Are you just like, it doesn't even matter. I'm staying at the place I want to stay. I'm not even shopping around.
- [04:03]
Juliet Schor
No, I definitely will. I mean, there are a lot of really expensive ones I won't go to, but I just, I think it's because I, my parents took me to them as a kid. I just, I just really like to stay in the nicer places. I do look for deals. I, you know, I am, I am, you know, a little bit frugal. I guess that's not really a good word when you talk about spending three or four hundred dollars per night. I try to get value for money.
- [04:32]
Joel
Yeah. So, you know, this is reminding me of. I don't know if I've ever told this story on the podcast, but when my wife and I were getting married, I was booking a hotel in Memphis. That's where we got married. And there was one hotel I really wanted us to stay at at the Peabody, because they have, they lay out this red carpet and the ducks come walking down and it's like this really fun experience. But if I booked directly at the Peabody, it was going to be like $500 a night. And I knew on Priceline there were three hotels that could have been if I was making a bid. And I knew I could like pay half of that, but there was only a 30% chance really that I was going to get this hotel that I wanted to stay at. And I remember my mom being like, stop being cheap and just pay up. I did the Priceline bid and I, like ended up lucking out and getting the Peabody Hotel. So I got the best of both worlds. But, man, it could have gone south, it could have gone a different way. I'm glad you and I let that rule.
- [05:25]
Juliet Schor
The day, yes, we booked the Plaza, which I'd never stayed at before. That was amazing.
- [05:31]
Joel
Okay.
- [05:32]
Juliet Schor
Before, before Trump owned it.
- [05:33]
Joel
Okay. All right, so I want to get to. There's. You've been writing about some of these issues of work and how Americans spend and consume and the relationship between those two things and alongside other, other aspects of American life and economics as well. But I feel like that theme of work has been running through the output, your output for decades. Why, why has that interest you, interested you in particular so much?
- [06:04]
Juliet Schor
Well, I got into it totally by chance. I was studying, I was doing sort of labor economics and I was interested in what the factors that drove how hard people would work and kind of the conflicts between employers trying to get more work out of people and, you know, people not necessarily loving that kind of, you know, having the whip on their back, as it were. And, you know, some of that sort of conflicts in the labor market. And that through a. That got me looking at how working hours affect what people do while they're on the job. Like if they have longer working hours, are they more tied into their jobs? Do they feel more pressure to, you know, work hard and do whatever the boss says? Like the difference between having one 40 hour a week job where you're totally dependent on that job for your income, versus if you had two 20 hour a week jobs, were you more likely to tell your boss to, you know, like the Dolly Parton thing, take this job and shove it? So it was really. I got into studying working hours because I was interested in dynamics within the workplace.
- [07:18]
Joel
Well, tell me about that. Are people better off having two 20 hour week jobs than one 40 hour a week job?
- [07:23]
Juliet Schor
Well, no, but here's the thing. So my theory was, it explained why it is that if you want a short hour job, if you want to work short hours, you pay a Huge penalty for it. Because if you have a full time job, what I call a long hours job, you'll have benefits and you know, possibly a career ladder and so forth. But in order to get a job where you don't have to work those long hours, there are massive penalties, there are lower wages, there are no benefits, there's, you know, you don't have career, career pathways. And so I was really interested in sort of how employers had structured the workplace to be, you know, full of the good jobs. Were all really long hour jobs.
- [08:12]
Joel
Yeah. I have a friend who was able to negotiate with his employer to go down from 40 hours a week to 30 hours a week and reduce his salary by a quarter. But he's able to keep his benefits. And I was like that, you just struck gold there. And I think a lot of people would kill for that. But not many employers are willing to go there.
- [08:28]
Juliet Schor
Right. And you know, it is getting a little more flexible than, I mean I wrote my first book, the Overworked American came out in 1992 and at that time there was much, much less kind of decent good part time work. But the companies I'm studying now are giving people the 32 hour weeks with no reduction in pay. Yes. Keep all your benefits.
- [08:52]
Joel
Yeah.
- [08:53]
Juliet Schor
And because one of the, and people are doing as much work as they were, generally speaking, that's what we're hearing from the companies. Because one of the things, you know that a lot of people who go to those shorter schedules and take the hit on the salary say they're doing as much work as they used to, they're just getting paid less. And that's why you see some of the people who go to those salaries, they go back up because they say it's not fair. You know, I was doing the same amount. I want to get all the money.
- [09:25]
Joel
So I, I want to dig in specifically because your most recent book is, talks a lot about four, four day work weeks. And I want to dig into that a lot. I want to set the table though, and I, I want to hear maybe what trends have been like over the past decades. Like so for a long, long time, work hours declined in the United States, around the world and much of the world for since like the 1800s. Right. We were just seeing people working a lot less, having more leisure time. But it seems like there was like something that happened right around 1970 that changed that.
- [10:01]
Juliet Schor
Yes. So beginning in 1870, you, you begin to get a long period of work time reduction. The US leads the world in work time reduction. 1870 average work week was 3000 hour work year. 3000 hours a year, that's 60 hours a week. Let me just put a little pin in that for one second. The thing that most people don't realize is in the century before, so from 1770 to 1870, working hours went up a lot. So the early period of the industrialization, which the first Factories came in 1770. Ish around that you get a long period where people are working longer and longer hours, more and more days per year and kind of really getting squeezed. And it gets to the point where those kids working. Exactly the kids in the factories working 16 hour days and they're barely getting any money and they're dying of malnutrition and overwork. So you get unions, you get society do gooders, people start mobilizing to do something about it, you get that long period of work time reduction. I began looking, but I noticed that it seemed like things were stopping, that was stopping in the United States. And I began looking at trends and hours of work. And what you see is beginning around, as you say, right about 1970, we start an upward creep of hours. And my first book on this went to the end of the 80s, so 20 years. And there, there was about an average of 164 hours or what I called the extra month of work. So four 40 hour weeks on average, people putting in paid work. And a lot of that was women working more of the year and longer hours, going from sort of women as mothers, particularly part time workers, to full time workers. But then hours kept going up and we've had about a 300 hours a year increase since I first started looking at this data. And that puts us squarely in opposition to all the other countries that we were moving with before. Germany, France, the uk, Italy, you know, all these other countries continued on that path of work time reduction. When I wrote the overworked American, Japan was the workaholic country among the wealthier countries. Americans now work on average more than Japanese do.
- [12:47]
Joel
What about the pandemic? How did that shift the balance of power and the amount of time people spend working? Because it certainly, at least for a hot minute, employees had more leverage than employers totally. That didn't last long.
- [13:02]
Juliet Schor
The hot minute. Well, it lasts a little longer than people think. And in some ways I think, I mean right now it's a sort of questionable period in the labor market. You have certain, certain kinds of jobs where they're just, you know, tech is really suffering. But the pandemic changed everything in the labor market in many ways. And it's what kicked off this four day week movement that I've been studying. But what happened was people's sense of that, the, the economic concept that I developed with my advisor, we call it the cost of job loss or basically the value of a job to a worker compared to their next best alternative. And that's, that's really key. And I, we use that to study all kinds of things. It turns out it's really key in wages. It's key and how much workers go on strike. I mean you've had a lot of strikes in the last couple of years because that, the value of the job changed and it's key to central bank policy. I mean, I studied a whole range of things. So what happened was that the value of the job really fell during the pandemic. Why? Two things. One is everyone was so stressed out and work was stressing people out and so it had much more negatives with it. And number two, the government was giving people money so people could afford to quit their jobs because they had bank accounts that were way higher than the typical thing for Americans. You had that, that period, I mean, I think most of it, it's gone now, but that period where people had money in their bank accounts versus the 60% or whatever it is who are living paycheck to paycheck. So that was, that's what was really key. And the great resignation. A lot of those were low wage workers, you know, who don't typically have big bank accounts and who just like, they couldn't take it anymore. Just way too much stre. Because there was the pandemic level stress and then the stress in the workplace and the two of those together. American workers were already quite stressed out before the pandemic. Pandemic just put a lot of people over the edge.
- [15:17]
Joel
Yeah. What would you say to someone who says, well, look at the economy differences between a country like the United States and a country like France. Right. And hey, yeah, they get plenty of time off, shorter work weeks. But the economic dynamism of America is unmatched. So there are pros and cons to this, maybe workaholism or lack thereof.
- [15:43]
Juliet Schor
Okay, so there are a couple different things. I mean, you mentioned dynamism, economic dynamism. It may be matched by China at this point, but fair enough. I mean, I think a lot of the European countries, they do tend to be a little bit less, they tend to be a little bit less dynamic, but their productivity is really high. And so if you take Germany as like the lowest hours of Any of these countries, they have tremendously high labor productivity, which is what allows them to fund those hours. And people have really good standards of living. In the US we have economic dynamism, but the vast majority of it is going of that wealth is going to very small number of people. And you just have a lot of people are being, I mean, for want of a better word, exploited in the labor market. You know, they're just hardly getting any money, they're being treated poorly, etc. You just. In Europe, workers have a lot more protections, they have a lot more free time. You know, shorter working hours, vacations, income, security. You're much, much better off being an average person. From an economic point of view in those countries, you may be less likely to get rich, but think about it. I mean, how many billionaires really are there? Hardly any of us are going to get that.
- [17:07]
Joel
Yeah, you and I aren't there, Juliet? I don't see it coming anytime soon down the pike either. If given the choice, though, like, just talking from a normal American perspective, regular income earner, do you think people want more free time or do you think people want more stuff? And do you think that people are kind of making an informed choice in that regard or that the cultural tides have kind of overwhelmed us and we don't have much of a choice to make? We're kind of forced in like a square peg going into a round hole if we try to take more time off.
- [17:43]
Juliet Schor
So I addressed this in the Overworked American Book. Now that that book came out in 92. But basically what I argued there is if you, if you look at people's, you ask them about their preferences, what would you rather have more time? You know, you have your. You can get a raise or you can get more time off next year. 3% raise, 3% off, whatever. People will say they want the time off at that time pretty strongly so. But the companies weren't giving them the time off, they're giving them more money. And if you ask them a year later, they don't want to go back to what they were a year before.
- [18:19]
Joel
Yep.
- [18:20]
Juliet Schor
They might say they want.
- [18:21]
Joel
Well, that's because they already bought the new car and they've got that hefty car payment they gotta make.
- [18:25]
Juliet Schor
Exactly. So people get locked into whatever level of spending they have, either through debt or just getting habituated to. You know, I said at the beginning of the podcast, I like nice hotels, but that's, you know, I've crept up there, right?
- [18:37]
Joel
Yeah.
- [18:37]
Juliet Schor
Like, I never. It used to be I would Go to a, you know, like maybe a hundred dollar night hotel and then a 200. We get, we acclimate as we get nicer and nicer stuff. We just kind of get, you know, used to it and you know, whether it's, you mentioned a car or the size of your house or any of those things, you know, our sort of needs upscale over time with our incomes. And my book, my book the Overspent American had a lot about that. Now I think today it's somewhat different and also it really differs across the labor market. So if you get lower wage workers, they desperately need the money, so they're gonna, they're gonna take money over time. There are a lot of higher wage earning people who are going to take time over money, but they can't get it because they're in their jobs. They just have to work those long hours or they can't succeed in their jobs. And then I think in the middle you sort of alluded to the, the people in the middle. It kind of depends on who they are and also how much debt they have and what their, what their situation is. But you know, I've done polling over the years asking people, and this is where the four day week come in because I think it's different than asking, would you like a 3% increase in free time or a 3% increase in your income?
- [19:54]
Joel
It's kind of tough for us to visualize mentally. Whereas like, do you want Fridays off?
- [19:59]
Juliet Schor
Exactly. The whole day off is huge. It is huge and it is a big increase in your income. Right. Your hourly wage goes up a lot.
- [20:10]
Joel
Right.
- [20:11]
Juliet Schor
Even if your total income doesn't.
- [20:13]
Joel
Do you think just staying on, kind of maybe some of the high level stuff for just a second. Do you, do you think that the world benefits from people who work too much? I just think like I don't want to work 80 hours a week. But like the Elon Musk types who, you know, polarizing figure these days, but who he sleeps on the office floor, gets right back to it. There is something about the ability for, there's even. You see this trend ticking back up in Silicon Valley of startups being like working 6 days, 12 hour days. And this is how we're going to beat somebody else to the punch, Launch our product first, be the most successful, get the venture capital dollars. And like I don't want any part of that way of life. But aren't you kind of sort of glad that some of those people exist?
- [20:59]
Juliet Schor
Well, there might be a few. But you know, taking it, you say you Want the high level. So you take the big thing. I mean Elon Musk was making tons of mistakes. That's a big part of why he had to make be there at the factory and his people were hating on him and you know, he kind of had to be there because everything was, you know, maybe falling apart. It was a nightmare. Okay, this, his sleeping at the factory was a nightmare in the same way that his doge was a nightmare and so forth. Well, let's leave him aside. What we have a lot of startups in our research who are going to four day weeks and I'll, I'll give you the, an example of someone who contacted us recently. He's the founder of an, is a company which does agentic AI. So they're building an AI humans in the loop decision making tool. It's a pretty cool project, you know, product. And he realized that he, he, he scheduled, he wanted to talk to me about the four day week and between the time we talked and, and, and when we had our, you know, we first communicated, had our meeting, he said I just pulled the trigger. They're all on. I put everybody on a four day week now. Why the work was too mentally taxing and use the word emotionally exhausting. And this is one of the things about really creative work. I mean you do sometimes have these people who go crazy and they just, it's all they can think about and it's, you know, it's a sort of type. But I think for the vast. I think that's a really small number of people. For most of us our, we make fewer mistakes, we're more creative, we're more, we have better overall output, you know, production or you know, what we do is better if we give our time, our brains, time to rest. And you know, there's a big literature on this now. One of the guys I work with, Alex Pang on four day week stuff, wrote a book called Rest, which is about a lot of that literature and how if we're not resting our brains and giving ourself the, that like mental time where nothing's happened, we're way less creative and I know. So I don't think, I think workaholic culture leads to a lot of problems. You know, in Japan they call it death by overwork. I mean you have that too.
- [23:20]
Joel
Yeah, yeah. And just people that get so discouraged and despairing about how big of a role work is playing in their lives that sometimes they can't think of any way else to proceed but to end their lives. And it's so sad. It's devastating to see that trend.
- [23:38]
Juliet Schor
Like, I'm not advocating being a slacker. You know, I've like written six solo books. I have, you know, probably six more that I've done with other people. I have.
- [23:48]
Joel
You're not sitting on the hammocks drinking lemonade all day.
- [23:51]
Juliet Schor
Yeah. But I also understand that you have to have a balance in life, first of all, if you want to have a good life, but also if you want to do good work. I mean, many writers will tell you this. And when I write my books, get up in the morning and do your work and after about five or six hours your brain is fried.
- [24:12]
Joel
I think. I love it. I think it's a great way to really kick off this conversation and start talking about four day work weeks, how important they can be and how we might implement those, how to make them kind of normal. We'll get to more on that with Juliette Shore right after this. Foreign we're teaming up in Daffy's Voices for Good Charity Challenge, competing with other podcasters to see who can raise the most for charity. I've chosen Fire, Undue Medical Debt and the Hope Effect to defend free speech, eliminate medical bills and care for orphans.
- [24:48]
Matt
And I am taking the effective altruism routes by supporting GiveWell's top global health charities that save lives for just a few bucks. Donate at daffy.org voices for good by December 2nd to back these charities and for a chance to win a trip to the 2026 iHeartRadio music festival in Vegas.
- [25:06]
Joel
That's daffy.org voicesforgood my, how time flies 2025. It's gonna be gone before we know it. But before it's gone, there's a lot of life to live, right, including a lot of kid activities, the holiday get togethers, and a whole lot more. All this activity, though, it can cause us to put off tasks on our to do list. But juggling a million plans shouldn't mean your future doesn't make your to do list. Trust and will turns estate planning from a When I have time task into a quick, straightforward process ensuring you're protecting your family's future today. Go to trustandwill.com howtomoney to get 20% off their simple, secure and expert backed estate planning services.
- [25:48]
Matt
That's right. It makes me think. You mentioned kids, Joel. I might be done having kids at this point, but my friends, my neighbors, they aren'. I've got family members who have a fresh baby at home as well. And it is such an amazing season of life. But those changes should also bring about a reassessment of whether or not you've got your estate planning ducks all in a row. Trust and Will makes it simple and straightforward. Their easy to use website is simple to navigate and plus all your information, all your documents, they are securely stored with bank level encryption.
- [26:18]
Joel
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- [26:52]
Matt
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- [27:28]
Joel
Do not let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use code howtomoneyonark.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with code how to money. Okay, we're back. I want to talk about four day work weeks with Professor Juliet Shore who has written so much about that intersection of work and consumption. And I guess I do just want to one more big level question. There's a conundrum, it seems like, between the reality that free markets and people choosing to work as much as they want to if they start a business. Like truly, if I start a bakery and I'm open two extra hours, like I might be able to attract more customers, build up a business in a way that somebody was saying I'm, I'm not going to work on Saturdays when most of my clients would come in to buy would be able to succeed. But also that can impact, negatively impact human flourishing. How do you, how do you thread that needle? It does feel like there's a needle that needs to be thread threaded but. Right. And it's not an easy one.
- [28:32]
Juliet Schor
Yeah, well that's a great point because one of the things we see in the research we're doing and I just to, you know, I can go into more depth on it, but basically what's been going on with my team, my research team is since 2022 we've been tracking companies around the world. We have, there are about almost 400 companies now in our database or about to come into our database who have instituted four day work weeks with no reduction in pay. And these are 32 hour work weeks. These are not compressed but not 10 hour days exactly, they're 8 hour days. Many of them do have clients, some of them are 24, seven operations. But many of them are like nine to five and they are not gonna, many do close on one day, but many don't. And it depends on the nature of their business. And so if you're a bakery, you need to be open on, on, on Saturdays, maybe closing on Sundays is fine because your competitors all close on Sunday or maybe you don't. And, but they figure out how to make it work. You know, they'll, it's like, and there's so much shift work in our economy anyway and you know, there's so many companies that are not on 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, they figured out how to stay open and still, you know, their employees can have a four day week. So it, a lot is how that it depends. And the fact that you stay open doesn't automatically get you more customers. And so one of the things you know that you have to think about is what is the relationship between your operating hours and your customers. But, but a couple of the, one of the industries where we're seeing a lot of the four day week is in sort of marketing and pr. And one of the things that some of the companies tell us is they're able to sell more business to their existing customers when they go to the four day week because they have a lot more stability in their teams. Their people come up with better ideas, they know the clients better, so they're spending less of their time just out there trying to find new customers. So that's the kind of interesting wrinkle on it.
- [30:42]
Joel
Why is the four day work week the solution? And if that's a great solution, why not go down to three? Why not even two like why, why does the four day work week kind of feel like this silver bullet to you?
- [30:56]
Juliet Schor
Well, in part it's because we're at five. So I think five to three is too big. What we're seeing is that five to four companies can manage it with many of them will say, without any loss in productivity.
- [31:12]
Joel
So what's going on with those additional eight hours that people are cutting out of their work schedules? How are we just as productive working so many fewer hours in a week from a percentage standpoint?
- [31:26]
Juliet Schor
So the most common thing is that there's a lot of wasted time in meetings. So many of these, we have mostly white collar companies in our database. I mean we also have small manufacturing or restaurant healthcare. We have all kinds of things, but the vast bulk are white collar. And so they have excessive meetings. Why? Because the work week was kind of stuck at 5. A lot of labor saving technology, all this digital technology which makes many things faster to do, came in. And then what did they do with the extra time? They just expanded meetings and email overload and you know, that sort of thing. So meetings are like the number one thing that they look at. Number two, they look at distractions. And meetings are a distraction, but there are many other kinds of distractions and they create focus time. And so people actually put their heads down and get their work done much more efficiently than they did, you know, pre four day week because they don't.
- [32:30]
Joel
Have time to scroll anymore. They got to get their stuff done if they're gonna work, get it all done in four days.
- [32:36]
Juliet Schor
Exactly. And you know, we hear others there, there are lots of other things people do, like the, we have a brewery in our sample and I talk about these a lot of these cases in more depth in the book. But in the brewery, they did time and motion studies for every one of their steps. Brewing has a lot of different steps, a lot of cleaning the machinery and so forth. It turned out they were allotting way more time for some of these things than they needed. They learned how to slot one step into the kind of the dead time in another step and, and you know, like bring certain things forward to make them get done, you know, so they, they change the sequencing. One manufacturing company changed who was doing what. They figured out, okay, this guy is really efficient at this task. Why don't we just have him do that most of the time and let other people.
- [33:29]
Matt
So some of them go through specialization.
- [33:31]
Juliet Schor
All the forms that they use and figure out, like, okay, this form takes so long to fill out. Do we really need all this information or they, they sort of look at everything they're doing. Another big thing is documentation. We have a lot of tech firms that do customer service. And if you're not like really documenting everything your customer service people are trying to, they're reinventing the wheel on a lot of these calls. But not all the companies do documentation because it's kind of, people don't like to do it. It's a lot of upfront work. So they find all sorts of ways to, to save time.
- [34:10]
Joel
And you've called it. Well, like a, like a forcing function. Like when you implement the four day work week, it, it kind of forces people to get it done. It's like you got to figure it out now. And ultimately they're happy to have had that forcing function because of what it allows them in their private life.
- [34:26]
Juliet Schor
Totally, yes. And the forcing function, it's so interesting. You know, my training is in economics. In economics, the theory is that the market is the forcing function and that firms who don't get as efficient as possible drop out. But in the real world, that's, in the real world, that's not actually how it works. And, and you know, if, if for economists who just, you know, don't just think about the models, but actually look at data, you see that in every industry there's a big range of levels of productivity and efficiency, even in the same making the same products. And so, you know, I asked a lot of these companies because the, this idea that there's this, you know, it's, you know, we call it like a free lunch, like that there's efficiency gains to be had there that you're not taking advantage of. And they say, well, why did you need a four day week to do this? Because you could have changed your meeting culture without a four day week. You could have given people, you know, distress. People hate meetings. They wouldn't have minded that. Or you could have given them, you know, focused time without a four day week. And there are two things, I mean, I think one is there is a little bit of, you are asking people to kind of, you know, be a bit more intense about the work. And although we find very small increases in the pace of work and the intensity of work. But, but the other thing is they were just like, we just, we were just trying to survive. You know, we're like trying to keep our heads above water. I remember asking one woman at a tech firm, you know, I, I called it a functional company. The one that, you know, didn't have any inefficiency, said why, why didn't you achieve that level of, you know, as a functional company? And she said, have you ever seen a functional company?
- [36:17]
Joel
No, I love that. And I think you're, I think you're right. I mean I think it's a really important insight that most people, they're not going to take a hard look unless they're forced to. And this is the perfect way to force yourself to take a hard look at your processes. And at the same time, what are the biggest benefits that employees give for having a four day work week? Like what did they experience when they have a three day weekend every weekend and work takes up less of their overall time?
- [36:47]
Juliet Schor
So a bunch of different ways to answer that question. We have 20 different metrics that we well being metrics that we collect. And if you look at the things that are driving the increases in well being because some of the metrics affect other well being you know, measures. People are less tired, so fatigue is really key. Sleep is really key. People sleep more and have fewer sleep problems and they exercise more. So that's the sort of outside of work stuff that happens. And then within work there's something else really interesting. We have their self reports of their productivity. So we ask them, rate your current ability at work compared to your lifetime best, like how good or how good a worker are you compared to your lifetime best. And that goes way up from before the trial starts to six months later and then 12 months later. And people just feel so much more on top of their work. That really improves their well being. And that's something happening in work because they can recover. You know, the time off allows them to recover. They feel refreshed and ready to go back to work. Many more eager to get back to work. They don't feel like their work week is impossible.
- [38:09]
Joel
Mondays don't hit in a negative way anymore.
- [38:12]
Juliet Schor
Mondays don't hit, you know, you don't have the Sunday scaries, you don't have the hump day as it's called on the Wednesday. It just, I remember one woman I interviewed because we also do like in depth interviews and she said I used to be so anxious at the beginning of the week that I wasn't going to be able to get my work done. And she said that's totally done now. It's like people just figure out how to power through their workloads. Much better.
- [38:37]
Joel
Yeah. So what do you think the tools are for getting more companies to adopt a four day work week where you know, and for CEOs for managers to sign off on this and for, and what does it take like look like for employees to petition their boss? Is this, is this something that we, is a top down thing or should individuals be coming to their manager and saying like listen, I don't know if you're going to do this company wide but this is something that, this is something I've heard about and I'm interested in and I think I can get just as much done. Like what is it like from an implementation perspective?
- [39:15]
Juliet Schor
One thing that's important that we're finding is these are companies, most of them are small and medium size but you know, we have some really big ones, but mostly small and medium. They're doing it as a whole company and that's really good because it's, if, if it's just a few individuals doing it, they're going to get the stigma of being thought like not as committed workers and so forth. So they're, they're doing it all together. It is the, the companies in our research are pretty much, it's all top down. So it's like that guy I mentioned earlier like a CEO, a founder, a president, whatever, or maybe a head of HR who just thinks, I think this is going to work for our company, let's try it. And they all, the whole model is like a six month trial. So they're not like committing to something before they've, they know that it can work for, for them, you know. So I wrote my book in part for people to read it and either just ordinary employees who could then take it, take the information to their seniors, managers and so forth, but also the, you know, the CEOs, the founders, the presidents, whatever. So there's a lot of data research there to try and convince people. But you know, I think the most effective convincers are the companies that have done it. And I, I just, you know, a couple days ago I was in New York doing a session with two different. One is the CEO of a marketing company and the other is the head of nursing at a big hospital area actually at a cancer center that's part of a hospital, big hospital. And they gave the nurse, nurse managers a four day week. I mean these are like really high pressure jobs. And I have a, I have discussion of this case and also managers, nurses that are in our research too. And the other is marketing. And you know, just I think when people hear it from the companies that have succeeded with it, it's, that's the most powerful way. So a lot of companies are out there talking about their experiences.
- [41:27]
Joel
Yeah. And probably one of the biggest hurdles is like a cultural attachment to work and maybe like an inherited puritan work ethic or something like that where it seems almost like, and you mentioned this earlier, like I'm not lazy, I'm writing books. Like I'm not encouraging, just chilling and not doing something meaningful. But is that one of the biggest pushbacks you get? Like what do we from employers saying like oh my gosh, this is going to result in widespread laziness. How can we, how can we work less?
- [42:00]
Juliet Schor
Yeah, well, I mean there is that, that, that there is that group. I think they tend to be at some of the bigger firms that were like we have to work more and, and so forth. But I think a lot of management are understanding how stressed out their workers are and how it's just not good for them. Now one of the things that, that led many of the companies into our research, what is resignations? So like the marketing company that I just mentioned, they just had a slew of resignations. I mean they're Canadian. It was not part of the US Great resignation. But Canada was experiencing something similar. The very first company that signed up for these in this research had the same thing. They had a whole bunch of people leave and they're like we got to do something. And so I think that most of, in these, most of these companies, people understand how much stress and burnout their employees are experiencing and that, that they can help them. There's really high turnover in some kinds of jobs in the US in these marketing firms. You know, they're apparently it's like a 30% turnover and then you're spending enormous amounts of money and time replacing people and then training them and then they leave.
- [43:22]
Joel
And that, that is one of the, one of the most under considered costs of running a company is employee turnover. And so if you pay people poorly and treat them poorly, they leave quickly and then you have to find someone else to replace them. And that, that training period can be so long and costly like you've just tripped over your own feet.
- [43:40]
Juliet Schor
So true. So one of the marketing executives that I actually opened the book with her, them and she's a really visionary person and she just said she ended up putting it into the, her contracts with her clients that she would have a like a 1% turnover. The clients couldn't believe it because there's so much turnover in that, in that business and that she would get a bonus if she made that turnover figure. But she had a 57 person team and nobody left that team.
- [44:11]
Matt
Wow.
- [44:12]
Juliet Schor
After we got the four day week.
- [44:14]
Joel
One of the other hurdles that strikes me is just that the desire that people have to inflate their lifestyles, to buy more things, to buy nicer things, to stay at nicer hotel rooms, to have own nicer cars, whatever it is, bigger houses, it means working longer hours. Much of the time like that is. It's like if I work more, I can get paid more and it means I can live the lifestyle I want. Do you think that our desire to keep up with the Joneses is part of this working too much problem that we have in this country?
- [44:49]
Juliet Schor
That's certainly there for some people, but for a lot of people, their jobs dictate how many hours they work. And a lot of people, you can put in more hours, you won't necessarily get paid more. We have so many people on salary in this country. I mean, if you're talking about someone who's, they want a fancier car, they want a bigger house, etc. Chances they're on a salary.
- [45:09]
Joel
Yeah, yeah.
- [45:10]
Juliet Schor
So you might, you might be working really hard to try and get that promotion. That's possible, but that's a kind of an iffy thing. I mean, what, you know, part of what we're, we're looking at are companies that are realizing the person who's there all the time isn't necessarily the most efficient person. Right. So what is that relationship between how many hours somebody works and how good they are and therefore what they deserve? I mean, yes, companies want people who are committed, for sure. They don't. They're not going to promote slackers. But it's, you know, if you're the last. As I remember, a new famous reporter told me, journalism is notoriously long hour profession. She said, we have the last man standing culture here. Like everybody was afraid to leave the newsroom.
- [46:01]
Joel
Yeah.
- [46:03]
Juliet Schor
And it's just, it's dysfunctional. I mean my, my colleagues who I work with and the, particularly the consultants in this world, they call it, you know, what do they call it? Productivity theater where people just pretend to be productive.
- [46:17]
Joel
Yeah.
- [46:17]
Juliet Schor
That's crazy.
- [46:18]
Joel
Yeah. And if you care about your business like you care about uncovering that so that your workers are happier and that you're actually productive and not just like feigning productivity. It makes me think of just at a job. There's also this like underlying message that we get from many of our employers that we had this. We used to have these meetings once a month and people would get hundred dollars for doing things that were above and beyond. And it always involved coming in at 5am because something was on fire. And like, hey, Joe skipped his kid's soccer game on Saturday to do work. And I was like, man, I hope I never win this hundred bucks. Like, not because I don't care about my job, not because I don't care about putting out good work, but because I'm not abandoning my kids soccer game to try to come in and put out a fire. Like, I'm just not. I don't want to do that. And I think there are those subtle messages, too, that get sent from a lot of employers where, like, this is. This is your life. You know that, right? The other part of your life is fine, but this job is actually your life. And I think that's kind of insidious, too. Works its way in.
- [47:20]
Juliet Schor
We had a case before. I was doing these trials, studying these companies. I did a lot of work on gig laborers and, like, you know, Uber drivers and stuff. And we. I remember a case of a delivery driver that we interviewed, and he was. I think he was on a scooter or something. He was hit by a car. He was badly injured, and instead of going to the hospital, he found. Finished the delivery. You know, he should have just gone right to the hospital, and the company put it out on. On their Facebook page, and they gave him $100. And it was like, wow. Like, wasn't this great? And it was so horrible because this poor guy needed to get to the hospital.
- [48:03]
Joel
Yeah, that's a great example. All right, we got a few more questions I want to get to with you, Julie, including kind of how you navigate consumption in ways that we can consume more intelligently. Get to a few more questions with you right after this.
- [48:21]
Matt
Hey, it's Matt. Joel's also here, and we are fired up because we are back in another charity challenge. If you've been with us for a while, you might remember the last time Joel and I, we went head to head. I may have come out on top.
- [48:32]
Joel
Don't rub it in. All right, you did win, I'll give you that. But this year, we're teaming up in Daffy's Voices for Good Charity Challenge, competing with other podcasters to see who can raise the most for charity.
- [48:43]
Matt
Yeah, for me, that means supporting GiveWell's top global health charities, like malaria nets and vitamin A supplements that save lives for just a few bucks.
- [48:51]
Joel
And I've chosen fire, which defends free speech, undue medical debt to wipe out medical bills for families, and the Hope Effect, which is changing the way the world cares for orphans.
- [49:00]
Matt
And the best part, we are matching donations so every dollar you give gets doubled. And if you donate by December 2nd, you'll be entered to win a trip for two to the 2026 iHeartRadio music festival in Vegas. So head to daffy.org voicesforgood find our campaign and donate. That's daffy.org voicesforGood as you make financial.
- [49:23]
Joel
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- [49:46]
Matt
That's right, feel organized and confident in your finances with Monarch, an all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or on your phone. And right now, just for our listeners, Monarch is offering 50% off your first year with code how to money@monarch.com I love that Monarch is built for people with busy lives. You know, if you've been putting off organizing your finances, Monarch is for you and piggybacking off what you're saying Joel about the habits Monarch it does all the heavy lifting. You're able to link your accounts in minutes. You get smart categorization of your spending and real control over your money.
- [50:21]
Joel
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- [50:54]
Matt
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- [51:29]
Joel
Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com howtomoney that's LinkedIn.com howtomoney to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. Still talking with Juliet Shore. We're talking about working less and living more. And Juliet, you wrote a book called True wealth. And in that book you at least partially talk about like new consumer habits around like sharing that can lead to less buying and more swapping. I think you called it connected consumption and I really like that term. Is that one of those things too that can help people own less, work less and live more of the life they want? I think even think about like self driving cars and I'm like does this mean I don't have to own a car someday? That maybe this technological progress and sometimes it's not even technological progress, it's just a website that connects people that means that we don't have to buy the stuff ourselves, can save more of our money and then maybe it means we don't have to work as much as we thought.
- [52:26]
Juliet Schor
Yeah, absolutely. I mean I, I co founded an organization many years ago with a woman named Vicki Robin who you may know from the financial independence movement. I mean one of the, one of the founders of that financial. With Joe Dominguez. They wrote that book youk Money or your Life. And you know that really was all about saying you need to think about the relationship between what you spend and, and how much you have to work. And so whenever you buy something think about the number of hours that you have to work to earn the money to buy that so very much in mind. And when it, so when I wrote True wealth it was about like a vision for how people can delink from long hour jobs that they would prefer not to be in and, and have lower spending requirements so they could afford to have more freedom in terms of their work life. So maybe it's about shifting to a more satisfying job that pays less and how you can still have a satisfying and good consumer life. You know, that you're not going to have to be, you know, living in poverty in order to have a good life. So many different things. I mean less new, more long lived products, more swapping. At the time I wrote that the Internet like the sites were really just coming up where you could like get Free things or swap or buy used things. I mean there's so much that you can get now at a, at a vastly reduced price. I have students who've studied these buy nothing sites. I mean these are huge sites where people just give away all kinds of, you know, really nice and valuable things that they no longer want. So there, there is, and, and then what, what was, you know, kind of a trend at the time? That book I wrote after the, the crash, the 2008 crash. So you know, people growing their own vegetables or learning how to make and do things for themselves, which for many people is also really satisfying, hobbies and, and, and so forth, but also can reduce your need to spend income. So I think there, there are lots of ways that people can do that, but one of the key things about them is you need time. Because if you have a really long hour job, you end up not having the time to garden or to do this or that DIY or to search, you know, search for that less expensive but just as good alternative that might take you an hour or two on the Internet reading reviews and this and that. When you don't have time, you just buy something and you'll pay more because you don't have the time to figure out how to pay less.
- [55:17]
Joel
You talk in that book, one of the things that fascinated me too. You talk about navigating the post growth world that we live in and you talk about it come from a macro and from a micro economic lens. I'm curious to hear what you mean by living in a post growth era and then like what's the impact that that creates and how should individuals react if we're living in a time of like decelerating growth, which is going to impact standard of living? Sorry, that's a big question.
- [55:48]
Juliet Schor
Yeah, no, but it's a really important one. Let's put aside population growth, okay? Because your economy, you know, usually will need to grow if you have more people but just for any given amount and sort of. What about the idea that you just have the same amount of money over the next 10 years or something? I think for most of us that's kind of like we are expecting that we're going to get more money over time. But let's say we don't pretend there's no inflation so we're just kind of leveled out at a certain amount of money. I think what, you know, what we have to figure out in that case is like if you want to buy new things, you've got to then divest from other, you know, like, if you're spending all your income, but yet you, you get a new desire, like, well, what are you going to spend less on if you're just, if you're flatlined? And one thing that I think really helps, I mean, that I've seen as I've grown older, is the desire to acquire new things tends to be a lot stronger when you're younger. And when you get older, for one thing, you have more desire to divest. And it's also, I mean, maybe because you've done it. I mean, I just don't have the same desire to consume, consume that I used to. You know, I wrote the Overspent American. My husband said, oh, you wrote a book about yourself. I mean, that wasn't exactly true, but it was true that at the time I wrote that, I was much more interested in consuming than I am today. I went to shops more. I did, you know, like now I hardly ever go. I just don't, I don't shop nearly as much as I used to. I used to shop a lot. And I do think, I mean, there's the whole question of, you know, what are, what's missing in your life if you're like spending so much time at the mall. There, there is something, there's something to be said for that perspective. But I think post growth can work, but it's sort of, it's not about, you know, doing with less and less and less. I don't think that's viable for people. I think you get to a certain level and we're, you know, just like, it's enough and you just live with enough. Of course you're going to change what you're consuming. You're not always going to want to consume the same thing. But the idea that every year we have to consume more, I just think that's a, you know, that's a problem. In a world where the ecological footprint and our carbon footprint is destroying the planet. We got to, we got to deal with that.
- [58:29]
Joel
Yeah. What would you say, last question. Like, what, what would you say to people out there listening who say, I like the mantra, I want to work less, I want to live more life, I want more time for hobbies. I don't even want fancier stuff. I just do. I would love to have time to garden and I don't feel like I have it right now. And a big part of the reason is because work occludes too much of my overall, like, life efforts.
- [58:55]
Juliet Schor
Yeah.
- [58:55]
Joel
How should they proceed?
- [58:56]
Juliet Schor
Well, I think they, you know, first thing is There is this movement for a four day week. It's gaining traction, it's gaining credibility because you have all these experiences of companies who've done it successfully and you have lots of, you know, data and research. Now I'd say first thing, see if you can work that out in your own company. And if you can't, see if you can find a four day week company. Because these people who work in them, they've like dined and gone to heaven. Honestly, they are, you know, it's like it, it, it's not just life is better, it's, it's transformative, it's life changing. We've got like 15 of people say, I would never go back to a five day a week job for any amount of money. We asked them how much money they would have, more money they'd have to earn to go back to a five day week job. And you've got that. I think it's 14% over thousands of workers who are saying, no amount of money will ever get me back.
- [59:53]
Joel
Wow. Not even like double the pay. It's like, I'm not doing it, not doing it. Julie, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining me. Where can how2money listeners find out more about you and your new book, Four Days a Week?
- [60:08]
Juliet Schor
Well, just Google me or the book. I'm Most active on LinkedIn, which is the place that has, I would say, the most vibrant conversation about working hours and the four day week. But the book's available everywhere. Harper Business 2025, four days a week.
- [60:26]
Joel
Wonderful. Thank you so much.
- [60:28]
Juliet Schor
Thank you.
- [60:29]
Joel
I love talking to personal finance creators on this podcast, but I also really like talking to economists as well. And somebody like Professor Juliet Shore, who has just put in many decades of not only like personal experience into something like the four day workweek, but just so much data into how she has seen companies implement it, the impact it's had on the company itself, on individual employees at that company, the way that those companies are able to retain those employees. Like, I just, I really do think that this is the future for a lot of companies and I like that idea. Like, I really hope it succeeds and I hope that if you're out there listening right now, maybe you're even able to advocate for this. If you work at a small enough company and you're able to bend the ear of your boss and say, hey, listen to this episode. What do you think of this? Instead of getting like super preachy and demanding it, maybe you can just kind of subtly influence the culture where you're working in order to benefit you and everyone else around you. And the truth is, we didn't refer to this, but Parkinson's law is at work here. And Parkinson's law is essentially where work expands to fill the time we have available. And we as humans, if we are scheduled to work 40 hours a week, we'll find a way. We'll get our work done in 40. If it goes down to 32, we will find a way to get it done in 32. And Matt and I found this out from personal experience, like when we, I guess, I don't know, this was maybe three years ago that we went from working five days a week down to four and taking Fridays off. And just the mental clarity. And specifically my big takeaway, what Juliet mentioned was people were less tired, they got more sleep and they got more exercise. And they also said they were better at work, they enjoyed their work more. And I think all of those things were true about Matt and I when we went to working four hard days at this podcast instead of expanding it to five. And so I hope, I hope not everyone has that ability, that unilateral ability. I totally get that. But if you run your own business, you do your own thing. I think sometimes we assume if I put in more hours, like, the output is going to be significantly better. And I just, I'm not saying that's completely untrue, but I think you need to reconsider whether it is 100% true and whether or not you can accomplish similar feats in less time. And also, like, this really leads to bigger questions of what life is about and what ultimately matters. And gardening is not an economically productive activity. Running is not an economically productive activity. There are so many hobbies that you can engage in, like coffee with a friend on a leisurely two hour coffee with a friend is not an economically productive activity. But those things greatly matter to our ability to enjoy this one life that we're on earth here to enjoy. So I encourage you to wrestle with some of these things. And maybe even next time you're applying for jobs, look specifically for employers who say, actually, yeah, this is something we prioritize four hour or four day work weeks. This is, this is something that we have adopted. And then maybe those become more appealing places to work as well. And hopefully this becomes like a tidal wave of sorts where other businesses are like, gosh, just to keep pace and to keep attracting good talent, we have to go down to a four hour work week or those people aren't even going to entertain working here. So thank you as always for listening. I appreciate your time and attention. See you back here on Friday with a fresh Friday flight. Until then, best friend out. We're teaming up in Daffy's Voices for Good Charity Challenge, competing with other podcasters to see who can raise the most for charity. I've chosen Fire Undue Medical Debt and the Hope Effect to defend free speech, eliminate medical bills and care for orphans.
- [64:59]
Matt
And I am taking the effective altruism routes by supporting GiveWell's top global health charities that save lives for just a few bucks. Donate at daffy.org voicesforgood by December 2nd to back these charities and for a chance to win a trip to the 2026 iHeartRadio Music Festival in Vegas. That's Daffy.org voicesforgood and Doug, here we.
- [65:24]
Joel
Have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [65:38]
Matt
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [65:41]
Joel
Cut the camera. They see us.
- [65:42]
Matt
Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com Savings very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates.
- [65:50]
Juliet Schor
Excludes Massachusetts. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night.
- [65:55]
Joel
I'm Dr. Priyanka Wali, a double board certified physician.
- [65:58]
Juliet Schor
And I'm Hari Kondabolu, a comedian and someone who once googled do I have scurvy at 3am and on our show we're talking about health in a different way. Like our episode where we look at diabetes in the United states.
- [66:10]
Joel
I mean, 50% of Americans are pre diabetic.
- [66:13]
Juliet Schor
How preventable is type 2? Extremely.
- [66:18]
Joel
Listen to Health Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [66:24]
Juliet Schor
This is an iHeart podcast.