December 22, 2023 • 36 mins
What if you could never have the same day off as your family and friends? Would you quit your job? What if it was the murderous dictator Joseph Stalin giving you the order?
The Soviet Union wanted its factories to run every day, all year long. And so, in 1929, Stalin killed the weekend: workers were prevented from all taking the same day off at the same time.
In this crossover episode of Cautionary Tales and The Happiness Lab, Tim Harford and Yale professor Dr Laurie Santos tell the story of Stalin's curious, calendar-reshaping experiment. They explore what it can teach us about time off even today, and why the holidays matter so very much.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm doctor Laurie Santos and I'm Tim Harford, and this
is a crossover episode of my podcast The Happiness Lab.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
And my podcast Cautionary Tales. Laurie, it's really great to
be working with you on a couple of crossover episodes.
So what did you want to cover on this one?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
I thought it'd be fun to talk about holidays and rest.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Okay, I'd better warn you that we're all about learning
from stories of catastrophe on Cautionary Tales, Laurie, So go on,
do your worst.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Sure. The Happiness Lab is all about the science of
happiness and how our minds tend to lie to us
about the sorts of things that make us happy. And
one of the biggest ways our lying minds fool us
is when it comes to our free time. The happiness
science is super clear about the well being benefits of
taking a break, but many of us still struggle to
do that. It's why I pick one day each year
(01:05):
to surprise the overloaded students in my happiness class at Yell.
When they arrive at the lecture hall thinking it's time
for class, they're handed a permission slip telling them surprise,
today's arrest day, so they need to head off and
do something fun instead. The students often look a little
shell shocked when they file out of the hall, but
many of them report back that they've loved their unexpected
time off. My students wind up hanging out with friends
(01:27):
or exploring somewhere new on campus with someone they met
leaving class. Some of them even say that this unexpected
time affluence moment was one of their most memorable days
at Yale. I think I'm teaching these young scholars a
valuable life lesson, but I've definitely gotten some pushback. Who
does Laura Santos think she is letting hundreds of students
skip class? They're paying a lot for their education.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Well, I think you're very wise, Laurie, But what I'm
hearing is a story in which they all lived happily
ever after, and that's not quite how we do things here.
On Cautionary Tales.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Tim, you promised me a cautionary tale about holidays and rest.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Indeed, did you ever hear the sad tale of Saint
Lubbock's Day?
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (02:32):
No, want to be honest now, had I until recently?
Saint Lubbock's Day was a jokey name for public holidays
in the UK. There is no Saint Lubbock. Sir John
Lubbock was the politician who in the eighteen seventies proposed
a law closing the banks for four mondays a year
in spring and summer. He knew that on these bank
(02:54):
holidays other businesses would probably close too, and if he
got his way, the British working classes would get an
extra day off to go to the beach.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
That sounds pretty good to me.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
That sounds great, although of course there were all the
objections you might expect from commercial interests. Victorian Britain, remember,
also gave us the character of Ebenezer Scrooge, the man
who grumbled on Christmas Eve to his hard working employee
Bob Cratchett. You'll be wanting the whole day off tomorrow,
I suppose. But the laws passed, the new holidays were introduced,
(03:29):
and for almost a century all was well. And then
in nineteen sixty four Lubbock's bank holidays came back to
bite the British on their backsides. The first bank holiday
of the year was damp and dismal.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
I mean, is that all that unusual in the UK?
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Not really, Lourie, but On this particular day, the bad
weather caused trouble in the small coastal town of Clacton
on Sea. The baby boomers were teenagers then, with money
in their pockets and some worried no sense of how
to behave. Unable to sunbathe on the beach, they visitors
(04:09):
decided instead to fight. The battle lines were sartorial. The
mop topped suit wearing Italian scooter riding mods took on
the greasy haired, leather clad bikers the rockers. The clashes
fed a paranoia amongst grown ups that bed sired a
generation of hooligans, spoiled, entitled and rebellious, and thanks to
(04:33):
bank holidays, able to descend en mass to normally genteel
resort towns to wreak havoc. On subsequent holiday mondays, more
riots erupted, politicians weighed up rushing through new laws. Were
detention camps the answer or punishment floggings. The newspapers were
(04:55):
in little doubt that the nation was only another bank
holiday away from anarchy. One headline almost reddished the prospect,
saying the break from work had become a day of terror.
On the final bank holiday of the summer, police leave
(05:15):
was canceled. Officers instead gathered by an Air Force base
outside London, where the Royal Air Force would fly them
to wherever violence flared next to reinforce the doubtlessly outnumbered
local police.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
I love this story, Tim, but is there a lesson
in there about how to lead more fulfilling lives?
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Uh? Not really, it was just this weird moment in history.
Everybody lost their minds about teenage fashion easters fighting on
bank holidays, and then everything was fine again.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
In that case, the story might be a cautionary tale,
but it doesn't really work for the Happiness Lab. Do
you have any other tales of disaster that actually teach
us something about being happier and less stressed?
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Yes, Laurie. Let me take you back to a Sunday
in the nineteen twenties in the Soviet Union. If you
stand outside a factory, peering through the window or pressing
your ear to the door, you see nothing and hear nothing.
The factories are empty, the tools lie idle, The machines,
(06:21):
what few machines there are, are silent. Sunday is a
day of rest for everyone. But this won't do. Russia
had been a backward nation, a poor agricultural economy full
of illiterate peasants exploited by an inbred nobility. But the
brave new Soviet Union it needed to industrialize fast. Like
(06:46):
the British and the Americans, workers were cheap, but machines
were expensive. To let them gather dust each Sunday just
seem absurd. Not that anyone wanted to abolish rest days, naturally,
not the brave Soviet laborer, whose sweat lubricated the wheels
of industrial progress, must be allowed to regain his from
(07:09):
time to time.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
So what could be done?
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Enter an economist named Yuri Laren. In May nineteen twenty nine,
Laren proposed a brilliant, bold, and extremely odd plan to
reshape the calendar. And since Laren worked for Joseph Stalin,
that brilliant, bold and extremely odd plan soon became the
(07:35):
new reality for Soviet workers. When the workers arrived at
the factory gates, each was handed a slip of colored paper, green, orange, purple, red,
or yellow. What did the color signify? It signified which
day off you'd get to take for the rest of
your working life. September twenty ninth, nineteen twenty nine, was
(08:01):
scheduled to be the Soviet Union's final Sunday. After that,
a five day working week, everyone would get a day
off every five days. The green slip workers would get
one day off together, the orange slip workers would get another,
and so on. And of course that meant that on
any given day, four out of five workers would show
(08:22):
up for work. The factories and the machines could operate
three hundred and sixty five days a year. Yuri Laren
system was named Nepreevka, the continuous workweek. Outside the Soviet Union,
newspapers published cartoons depicting Saturday and Sunday being shot.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
You can see the appeal of Naprevka, especially to a
Soviet economist in the nineteen twenties. It seems like a
great idea, as long as you stick to abstract notions
and avoid the rather gnarly specifics of real people. Before Napreva,
Soviet workers would have taken Saturday and Sunday off, but
many only got to rest on Sundays. Switching to the
(09:07):
continuous five day week made things more equal and gave
many workers even more rest days. And continuous work meant
those valuable machines and factory floors would no longer stand
idle for days at a time. They could now be
used all year long. But the problem with the idea
becomes kind of obvious when you take a second to
think about real people's lives. If everyone was resting on
(09:30):
different days, how could a sports team meet to play
a morning game or acquire get together to sing? What
if one person was a yellow and their spouse was
a green. What is there for us to do at
home if our wives are in the factory, our children
at school, and nobody can visit us, complained one worker.
What Indeed, Tim's tale of Niprevka has something important to
(09:52):
teach us about time off today. Yes, taking time to
rest and play is important, but it's also just as
important to make sure you have time off when everyone
else is resting and playing warring mods and rockers. Notwithstanding,
these days, we talk a lot about making sure we
have some meat time, but could we be undervaluing the
importance of having some wee time. We'll find out when
(10:15):
the Happiness Lab crossover with Cautionary Tales comes back from
the break.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
We're back. Yurilarin's Naprevka project seems like a historical curiosity,
but modern writers have started to pick up on the
story and to draw lessons from what was one of
the most extraordinary attempts ever made to reform the calendar.
Writing in the Atlantic in twenty nineteen, Judith Shulevitz pointed
(10:48):
to the plight of low income workers who had their
hours set unpredictably and at short notice by a capricious,
seeming algorithm. The hours might be too short to pay
the bills or exhaustingly long, but they might also be
Neprevka hours, reasonable enough when vs in isolation, but desynchronized.
(11:13):
This desynchronization makes it impossible for people to socialize with friends,
to join clubs, or participate in community activities, or even
to see their own partners. The economist Heather Boushi, in
her book Finding Time, scrutinizes the plight of these workers.
(11:34):
Although some people are compensated very well for working unusual hours,
and others find that those hours fit perfectly with their
own needs, that's not typical. The majority of workers with
a non standard schedule are making less money than average.
They're all so likely to be working in these jobs
(11:55):
not by preference, but because they couldn't find anything with
more normal hours, and the experience can be grim. You
have to show up whenever the boss says to show up,
often at short notice. If you say you're not available,
that's a mark against you, and soon enough you might
find yourself looking for another job. To see an example
(12:18):
of just how much trouble these capricious schedules can cause,
let's meet Jeannette Navarro, a Starbucks barrista. Navarro loved being
a barista. Upbeat, determined, and persistent. Navarro had charmed her
way into the job, was dealing with a three hour
commute across San Diego on the bus, and was looking
(12:40):
to provide some stability for her four year old son, Gavin.
But the hours at Starbucks just kept changing with just
a few days notice, thanks to a scheduling algorithm design
to move staff into precisely the right place at precisely
the right time. From the point of view of the business.
(13:01):
Particularly dreaded was cloaping when your shift had you closing
the Starbucks branch at nine and also opening it the
next morning just a few hours later. Tiring at the
best of times, extremely exhausting if you also have a
long commute, and if you're trying to get childcare both
(13:24):
for a late night and an early morning a nightmare.
In a powerful article in New York Times, reporter Jody
Cantor showed the unpredictable scheduling playing havoc with Jeanette's life.
She was endlessly trying to find weekend or evening childcare
for Gavin at short notice, which meant calling in favors
(13:47):
and putting relationships under strain. Jeanette was living with her aunt,
but after one too many arguments, she moved in with
her boyfriend instead. The boyfriend had been supportive, but he
too lost patience. Jeanette's need for last minute childcare was
making it impossible for him to realize his own dreams
(14:08):
of going going back to school. As for Jeannette's hopes
of completing her own degree, it was simply impossible.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Canter's piece was published in twenty fourteen. It made a
huge splash and immediately prompted Starbucks to change its scheduling policy.
But as Kanter explained in her article, almost every major
retailer and restaurant chain uses some variant of the same
scheduling software. Today, low income workers all over the Western
world are coping with scheduling that's so antisocial it makes
(14:40):
Nprevka seem positively humane in comparison. But what's even stranger
is that today there's also a group of privileged people,
folks with more autonomy over their time than ever before,
who are somehow managing to inflict a kind of Napreevka
on themselves.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Yes, a couple of years after Judith Schulevitz published her
reflections on Neprevka in The Atlantic, Oliver Berkman's book Four
Thousand Weeks pointed out that people at the other end
of the economic ladder might be trapped in an approvaca
of their own making the hybrid workers, the freelancers, and
(15:18):
above all the digital nomads of Instagram, possibly people like you,
certainly people like me. These people all had unprecedented control
over where and when they worked. They could write code
in a Bermuda beach cottage, they could handle their emails
from a summer house near Walden Pond, or on a
(15:41):
mundane level, they could take a yoga class instead of
hitting the morning commute. All very pleasant, but, as Berkmann
pointed out, if you insist on absolute freedom over when
and where you work, you risk exercising that freedom all
by yourself. When we all worked nine to five at
(16:02):
the office. We could all bond together in the canteen,
meet up for a drink after work on Friday, and
feel confident that not only would we be free on Sunday,
but that all our friends would be too. Now our
schedule is out of step with everyone else's. You can
do what you want, but good luck finding someone who
(16:22):
happens to be free to do it with you. But
maybe that's fine. After all, the digital nomad can dodge
the lines for everything from the dentist to Disneyland, avoiding
the rush hour traffic and the peak priced airfares. There's
a certain luxury in avoiding the crowds. Half a century
(16:45):
after Yurilarian's Niprevka was introduced, a very different economist in
a very different setting started musing this question. The economist's
name was Thomas Shelling. Shelling puzzled over topics ranging from
how to quit smoking to how to make nuclear deterrence credible.
(17:07):
Stanley Kubrick asked Shelling for advice before directing Doctor Strangelove,
a comedy about nuclear armageddon. Shelling was that sort of thinker.
So what did Shelling have to say about scheduling the weekend.
Well over the course of the twentieth century, Americans were
(17:27):
working gradually shorter hours. By the late nineteen seventies, it
seemed that a four day work week might one day
be commonplace. Maybe maybe not, said Shelling. But if it
did become commonplace, here's a question which day off should
we take? Should everyone take Friday off, or maybe Wednesday?
(17:52):
Or maybe we should all choose our own day. Let
me quote from his nineteen seventy eight book Micro Motives
and Macro Behavior. The day you'd prefer to have off
may depend on what days other people have off. The
weekday is great for going to the dentist, unless the
dentist takes the same day off. Friday is a great
(18:15):
day to head for the country, avoiding Saturday traffic unless
everyone has Friday off. Tuesday is no good for going
to the beach if Wednesday is the day the children
have no school. Staggered days are great for relieving the
golf courses and the shopping centers, but it may demoralize
teachers and classes to have a fifth of the children
(18:35):
officially absent from school each day of the week, and
may confuse families if the fourth grader is home on
Tuesday and the fifth grader on Wednesday, and the children
cannot very well go to school the day that the
teacher isn't there, nor can the teacher go to the
dentist on the day the dentist takes off to go
to the beach with his children. And in fact, Shelling
(18:58):
had some of the same concerns as Yuri Laren, even
though he didn't have the same affection for central planning.
While the poor workers of the Soviet Union and were
upset that they all had different rest days, Shelling was
worried that in an affluent society we might all end
up taking the same day off, probably Friday, even though
(19:21):
it would ease congestion if we were able to spread
those breaks around. Where's Uri Laren when you need him?
And actually there's some evidence that Shelling had a point.
After the pandemic, many office workers are working from home
a couple of days a week, and they're usually choosing
Friday as the homeworking day rather than say Wednesday, bah
(19:45):
wait tim.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Doesn't that make sense?
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Well, in some ways it makes perfect sense, Laurie, but
Uri Larin would be tearing his hair out. Now we
have these expensive office blocks, expensive public transit expensive roads,
and rather than spreading out our use of them, office
workers are generally coming into work on Wednesday and staying
home on Friday, which is exactly what Shelling was talking
(20:08):
about in the nineteen ten seventies. So, Laurie, I have
a question for you. What does the science of well
being tell us about taking a break? Should we be
trying to coordinate with everyone else or is there a
particular pleasure in taking a vacation while everyone else is
still at work?
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Well?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
I have lots of thoughts about that, Tim, and you
can hear all about them after the break. We're back.
I'm doctor Laurie Santos of the Happiness Lab, and this
is a crossover episode with Cautionary Tales with Tim Hartford. So, Tim,
(20:45):
you wanted to know what the evidence tells us about rest,
holidays and happiness.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
I did. I did, and in particular this idea of
whether we should all be taking a break at the
same time.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Well, sadly, there's not much research on that, but there
is a little bit. One of my favorite studies on
this came out of Terry Hartigg's lab. He's a psychologist
in Sweden and he was super interested in this question
of whether or not Swedes are happier on holidays when
everyone's taking a holiday. Swedes is an awesome spot to
study this because they get five weeks of holiday, something
that folks like me in the United States would kill for.
(21:17):
The government allows them to take it whenever they want.
They're not sort of scheduling it so that people have
to take it at certain times. And because Sweden's super cold,
many Swedes tend to take the holidays during the summer months.
And what's cool about that is that lots of Swedes
are on holiday at the same time. They're all taking
their vacation time, like in the same few months together.
And so Hardig was interested in whether or not that
affected the Swedes' mental health, and he decided to study
(21:40):
this using a pretty funny measure. He actually looked at
the government's distribution of SSRIs, these antidepression medications, during different
times of the year, and he tried to look at
the correlation between the release of SSRIs and people's vacation time.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
So what do they find.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Well, what he found is that there's this huge correlation
between when people are taking SSRIs and when they're on vacation. Namely,
they take less SSRIs when they're on vacation. The lowest
month of SSRI use is during July, when when everyone's
kind of take holiday, And their interpretation was this idea
that when everybody's on holiday together that forms this buffer
against stress. We get a lot of social connection, we
(22:18):
get to hang out with the people we care about,
and we're just kind of feeling less depressed.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
It makes sense, of course, you do wander. July in
Sweden is a lot more pleasant than January in Sweden.
I'm sure they tried to adjust for that. But I
wonder whether there are other countries that have lessons to
teach us as well.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Yeah, another one of my favorites is the lessons that
come out of Denmark. Danes have this interesting story where
over time they've developed this much shorter work week, but
it's actually pretty recent. It started after World War Two,
around the time that the Danes were getting more into
industry rather than agriculture. They actually wanted to employ more people,
but to do that they had to start employing more women,
(22:59):
who at least historically were the ones doing a lot
more of the childcare. And so the Danish government said, okay, okay,
we'll make the work week much shorter so that women
and men can get home and do more childcare. Will
kind of cut off time around four o'clock so everyone
can go home early. And that led to this really
interesting situation where the Danes wound up getting more free
(23:20):
time off, but importantly more free time off when everyone
else was having the same free time off. Everyone was
off in the afternoons, and what seemed to happen over
time is that the Danes wound up taking much more
time to be social. Historically, Danes have many more social
clubs and kind of like athletic groups than most other countries,
and that's in part because they have time to get
together around four o'clock where everybody's off of work, so
(23:42):
you can set up your choir, you can set up
your soccer club, you can kind of hang out with
one another because everybody has free time at the same time.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
And do we know how happy the Danes are compared
to other countries if those comparisons make sense.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Well, the research seems to show that the Danes overall
are pretty happy. Historically, they're often at the top of
the so called World Happiness report. Sometimes they get beat
out by Finland, but most of the time, Denmark is
pretty high at the top, and many folks have sort
of looked to Denmark is one of the happiest countries
in part because of their social practices, So I think
they might be onto something with this time off together
sort of situation.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Yeah, very interesting. Of course, the problem always with this
sort of thing is that there are all kinds of
systematic differences between countries, not just their vacation rules, but
all sorts of other things. So maybe we should be
looking at companies within the United States that have different
vacation policies. Your professor at Yale, Laurie, I don't know it. Yale,
(24:39):
the undergraduates go home for the summer, so you're all
kind of taking the same kind of break at the
same moment. And I know different corporations are experimenting with
this idea of a company holiday. Do we know anything
about whether that works?
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Well. This is the kind of thing that I think
economists are looking at a lot more these days. In fact,
in twenty twenty one was listed as the Year of
the company wide Vacation. It's the year that many of
these huge tech companies decided to try and experiment where
they gave everybody at the company time off together. So
this was places like LinkedIn and Bumble, a few very
big healthcare companies, And what people have reported so far
(25:14):
is that this experiment went pretty well. Employees really like
the fact that when they're not working, nobody else is working.
Their boss isn't working, their team isn't working, and that
means when they get back from holiday, they don't come
back to you know, a whole inbox flooded with messages
telling them the stuff that happened when they were out.
They're not getting these sort of team messages and emails
while they're on holiday, so there's no real temptation to
(25:36):
kind of check. And so from the employee's perspective, they
really liked being off when everybody else at the company
was off at the same time.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
I really like that. It makes perfect sense, I suppose.
The other thing about it is that if you are
going to say everybody in the company is going to
take the first week of August off, like everybody the
company really has to plan ahead to make that work,
whereas if you just say, oh, you know, you can
take you can take some time off, and everyone can
just go, oh, well, we'll sort of figure it out,
(26:06):
and they kind of don't figure it out, And in fact,
what happens is people in to their email from the
beach and they don't take a proper holiday and they're
not doing their job right. So maybe part of what's
going on here is just this forward planning to actually
organize to make it work.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Yeah. I think that's a big part of it. I mean,
I think when you leave and you know that that
project is done, you know because the final date that
you submitted it is there. When you know there's no
chance that somebody really needs you for something, I think
it means that people can kind of let their hair
down and relax a lot more. You're not worried that
something's happening at work that really needs your attention because
everybody's gone.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
And I suppose this tells us something about this time
of year as well, that we have in the winter,
Thanksgiving in the US, Christmas in many parts of the world,
and these are holidays where part of the point of
the holiday is everyone's doing it at the same time.
You know, it's not just a day off or week off.
(27:02):
It is this shared ritual, this shared experience. I love
Christmas I know economists are not supposed to really like Christmas.
I personally, I really I'm really into Christmas. I love it, And.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
It's partly just like everyone's into Christmas. Everyone's doing Christmas
at the same time, and that's fun. I don't know
whether there's any research on this. You know, we're all
trying to do our shopping at the same time, we're
all trying to book flights to go home for Thanksgiving
at the same time. That causes a problem, Like I
kind of feel it's worth it.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
This is a domain where I think it's really hard
to get at the happiness benefits from taking time off
together because Christmas is a complicated time for people's mental health, right.
It's a time when people are processing grief. It's a
time when we're supposed to be happy. So I'm kind
of not feeling great. It makes me feel especially bad.
I love that you love Christmas, team, but Christmas is
not necessarily one of my favorite holidays. In fact, it's
one of the times that makes me think that Shelling
(27:52):
might have been right, that maybe we shouldn't all be
flying that same week together, especially when it's sort of
cold and snowy in the US. But maybe that's just me.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Well, I suppose that one of the overarching conclusions that
we've got to draw from the research on happiness is
that there are big individual differences and you can have
a look at averages and say, oh, this kind of
thing often makes people happy, but in the end, you
also have to understand yourself and understand what works for
you as an individual.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
I think that's exactly right. Although that said, I think
there are some domains in which we really know there
are certain kinds of things that, at least based on
the data, seems to make most people happy. And one
of the big ones is social connection, right, just feeling
that you're not exactly that lonely.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
So tell me about that. I see a lot of
dramatic claims about loneliness. What does the research tell us
about that?
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Well, some of those dramatic claims is that loneliness is
really bad for our health. Some folks like the Surgeon
General and the US have quoted statistics like being lonely
is as bad as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, that
it's twice as risky as obesity for your overall health.
Some of those claims are a little bit overblown, but
my sense is that pretty much every available study in
the field of positive psychology suggests that being social is
(29:04):
pretty good for your happiness. The more you spend time
with other people, and the more you spend time, especially
with people you care about, the happier and more satisfied
with your life you tend to be.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
I'm really enjoying this conversation, Laurie. I like the fact
that I can just ask any crazy old question and
you've got the you've got the action. Let me let
me throw another one at you.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
So digital nomads, Okay, they can work wherever they like,
They can work whenever they like. Any clues as to
whether that's actually good for their mental health or whether
they're kind of fooling themselves.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Well, this, too, i think, is another domain where there's
relatively little work, but the work that's out there suggests
an interesting conclusion. I think this is some lovely stuff
by Rog Chowtery at Harvard Business School, and he's been
making this distinction between working whenever you want versus working
wherever you want. You know, when we think of digital nomads,
we think we think often of both together. Right, you know,
(29:51):
you're off working at a beach and you can do
so at any time you'd like. But Chowdy is basically
finding that really the thing that seems to matter for
happiness is the wherever part, not the whenever part. Why
is that the case, Well, if you get to choose
where you want to work, that means you can make
sure that you're living close to FAMI members or you're
living close to friends. If you get to choose where
(30:12):
you work, you can cut down on your commute time.
Often these days, when people report that they're working from home,
they're saving on average four point five hours a week
just in commuting time. And if you then use those
hours to do something social. You hang out with your kids,
you hang out with your friends, or maybe you exercise,
that can be a huge boon for people's well being.
And so I think when we start to think about
the benefits of being a digital nomad, we're really thinking
(30:34):
about location, location, location, and not timing.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Okay, so let's talk about the control that people have
over their time the autonomy. One of my favorite psychological
studies is about office design. Should you have a messy desk,
a tidy desk, a really minimalist office, or lots of
pot plants and pictures and so on, and what the
researchers who did that study found it was basically a trick.
(31:00):
None of it matters. What matters is whether you feel
you've got control, so like who actually decides whether that's
a pot plant. If you get to decide, you feel
good about the pop plants, and if someone else is
imposing this pop plant on you, you hate the pop plant.
So autonomy actually turns out to be much more important
than the things that we think are important. And I
(31:20):
couldn't help but think of that study when hearing the
story of Jeanette Navarro and her absolute lack of control
over her scheduling.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Well, the science is pretty clear on this. I mean,
I think this is really almost like a basic fact
of human psychology, which is that we like having control
over what's happening to us, and our perception of control
seems to matter a lot. Their study is, you know,
from the nineties and so many different domains, whether it's
control over what's happening in the workplace, which is what
we're talking about, but also control over your treatment and
(31:51):
medical context. Kids control over things in schools makes them
happier and more productive at schools. Our perceived control seems
to matter a ton when it comes to both our
satisfaction but also in some cases our productivity. And I
think that that's something that bosses and employers need to
be paying attention to. Just giving people a little bit
more perceived control isn't just going to make them happier
(32:12):
and more satisfied, maybe even healthier. It's probably going to
make them work better and faster too.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Starbucks and these other companies who are using these scheduling algorithms,
they're not really thinking through the costs they're imposing on
their employees. And I wonder now post pandemic labor markets
are a lot tighter. It's actually quite difficult to get
people to do a lot of jobs, and companies are
struggling to figure out how do we recruit people, how
do we minimize turnover? And I something tells me they're
(32:39):
going to start to figure this out, that hey, maybe
our algorithm should take the brunt of interruptions and uncertainties,
and it shouldn't be the employees, because the company can
actually absorb those costs more easily than the individuals.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
And I think companies don't realize how beneficial it might
be just to their bottom line to absorb some of
those unhappiness costs that come up with unpredictable scheduling. There's
this lovely paper that came out of the University of
Oxford from Yon Emmanuel Denev's group that shows that happier
workers wind up not just being more productive, but companies
that have happier workers wind up earning more. They're very
(33:15):
bottom line, you know, how much you know they're kind
of giving back in the stock market. That winds up
being determined at least in part by how happy workers are.
And so I think this is a time when companies
are going to start paying more attention to the happiness
of their workers. They're going to start realizing it matters
for their bottom line. And I think this is something
that not just companies have to start paying attention to.
I think governments should also start getting involved in this
(33:37):
unpredictable scheduling. These days in the US, we have all
these conversations about minimum wage and making sure people have
a living wage, but there are studies that show that
unpredictable hours have a worse impact on mental health than
low wages. I'd love to see the same conversations that
are happening about minimum wage, start happening about unpredictable scheduling
and the mental health costs that comes from that as well.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Thank you so much, Lourie. You have been extremely patient
with all of my questions about holidays and rest and
well being.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
But wait, Tim, I still have a question for you. Yeah,
So what happened to Neprevka in the end?
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Ah?
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Now, that is a good question. It's unclear whether the
Soviet authorities realized quite how disruptive Nepreevka would be, and
if they did, it's not clear whether they thought the
disruption was a bug or a feature, because, after all,
families were a bourgeois institution. But it wasn't long before
the problems with the system became overwhelming, and on the
(34:34):
first of December nineteen thirty one, a sixth day of
rest common to all was introduced, and in the summer
of nineteen forty the seven day week, including Sunday, was resurrected.
So even Stalin could change his mind, and I wonder
whether we can change ours. Lori Santos, thank you so
much for joining me, and.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Thanks for joining me.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Tom.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Let's do this again soon. In fact, I have an
idea I want to discuss with you, and I'm pretty
sure you probably have a cautionary tale for me on
the subject.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Oh, I usually do have a cautionary tale on any subject.
Dr Lorie sam To hosts The Happiness Lab.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
And Tim Hartford hosts Cautionary Tales. Both podcasts are productions
of Pushkin Industries and are available wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music is the work of
Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the
voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jemma
Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been
(35:54):
possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta
Cohnevital Millard, John Schnaz, Eric's handler, Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
(36:19):
tell your friends and if you want to hear the
show ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the
show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm,
slash plus
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm doctor Laurie Santos and I'm Tim Harford, and this
is a crossover episode of my podcast The Happiness Lab.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
And my podcast Cautionary Tales. Laurie, it's really great to
be working with you on a couple of crossover episodes.
So what did you want to cover on this one?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
I thought it'd be fun to talk about holidays and rest.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Okay, I'd better warn you that we're all about learning
from stories of catastrophe on Cautionary Tales, Laurie, So go on,
do your worst.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Sure. The Happiness Lab is all about the science of
happiness and how our minds tend to lie to us
about the sorts of things that make us happy. And
one of the biggest ways our lying minds fool us
is when it comes to our free time. The happiness
science is super clear about the well being benefits of
taking a break, but many of us still struggle to
do that. It's why I pick one day each year
(01:05):
to surprise the overloaded students in my happiness class at Yell.
When they arrive at the lecture hall thinking it's time
for class, they're handed a permission slip telling them surprise,
today's arrest day, so they need to head off and
do something fun instead. The students often look a little
shell shocked when they file out of the hall, but
many of them report back that they've loved their unexpected
time off. My students wind up hanging out with friends
(01:27):
or exploring somewhere new on campus with someone they met
leaving class. Some of them even say that this unexpected
time affluence moment was one of their most memorable days
at Yale. I think I'm teaching these young scholars a
valuable life lesson, but I've definitely gotten some pushback. Who
does Laura Santos think she is letting hundreds of students
skip class? They're paying a lot for their education.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Well, I think you're very wise, Laurie, But what I'm
hearing is a story in which they all lived happily
ever after, and that's not quite how we do things here.
On Cautionary Tales.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Tim, you promised me a cautionary tale about holidays and rest.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Indeed, did you ever hear the sad tale of Saint
Lubbock's Day?
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (02:32):
No, want to be honest now, had I until recently?
Saint Lubbock's Day was a jokey name for public holidays
in the UK. There is no Saint Lubbock. Sir John
Lubbock was the politician who in the eighteen seventies proposed
a law closing the banks for four mondays a year
in spring and summer. He knew that on these bank
(02:54):
holidays other businesses would probably close too, and if he
got his way, the British working classes would get an
extra day off to go to the beach.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
That sounds pretty good to me.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
That sounds great, although of course there were all the
objections you might expect from commercial interests. Victorian Britain, remember,
also gave us the character of Ebenezer Scrooge, the man
who grumbled on Christmas Eve to his hard working employee
Bob Cratchett. You'll be wanting the whole day off tomorrow,
I suppose. But the laws passed, the new holidays were introduced,
(03:29):
and for almost a century all was well. And then
in nineteen sixty four Lubbock's bank holidays came back to
bite the British on their backsides. The first bank holiday
of the year was damp and dismal.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
I mean, is that all that unusual in the UK?
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Not really, Lourie, but On this particular day, the bad
weather caused trouble in the small coastal town of Clacton
on Sea. The baby boomers were teenagers then, with money
in their pockets and some worried no sense of how
to behave. Unable to sunbathe on the beach, they visitors
(04:09):
decided instead to fight. The battle lines were sartorial. The
mop topped suit wearing Italian scooter riding mods took on
the greasy haired, leather clad bikers the rockers. The clashes
fed a paranoia amongst grown ups that bed sired a
generation of hooligans, spoiled, entitled and rebellious, and thanks to
(04:33):
bank holidays, able to descend en mass to normally genteel
resort towns to wreak havoc. On subsequent holiday mondays, more
riots erupted, politicians weighed up rushing through new laws. Were
detention camps the answer or punishment floggings. The newspapers were
(04:55):
in little doubt that the nation was only another bank
holiday away from anarchy. One headline almost reddished the prospect,
saying the break from work had become a day of terror.
On the final bank holiday of the summer, police leave
(05:15):
was canceled. Officers instead gathered by an Air Force base
outside London, where the Royal Air Force would fly them
to wherever violence flared next to reinforce the doubtlessly outnumbered
local police.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
I love this story, Tim, but is there a lesson
in there about how to lead more fulfilling lives?
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Uh? Not really, it was just this weird moment in history.
Everybody lost their minds about teenage fashion easters fighting on
bank holidays, and then everything was fine again.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
In that case, the story might be a cautionary tale,
but it doesn't really work for the Happiness Lab. Do
you have any other tales of disaster that actually teach
us something about being happier and less stressed?
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Yes, Laurie. Let me take you back to a Sunday
in the nineteen twenties in the Soviet Union. If you
stand outside a factory, peering through the window or pressing
your ear to the door, you see nothing and hear nothing.
The factories are empty, the tools lie idle, The machines,
(06:21):
what few machines there are, are silent. Sunday is a
day of rest for everyone. But this won't do. Russia
had been a backward nation, a poor agricultural economy full
of illiterate peasants exploited by an inbred nobility. But the
brave new Soviet Union it needed to industrialize fast. Like
(06:46):
the British and the Americans, workers were cheap, but machines
were expensive. To let them gather dust each Sunday just
seem absurd. Not that anyone wanted to abolish rest days, naturally,
not the brave Soviet laborer, whose sweat lubricated the wheels
of industrial progress, must be allowed to regain his from
(07:09):
time to time.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
So what could be done?
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Enter an economist named Yuri Laren. In May nineteen twenty nine,
Laren proposed a brilliant, bold, and extremely odd plan to
reshape the calendar. And since Laren worked for Joseph Stalin,
that brilliant, bold and extremely odd plan soon became the
(07:35):
new reality for Soviet workers. When the workers arrived at
the factory gates, each was handed a slip of colored paper, green, orange, purple, red,
or yellow. What did the color signify? It signified which
day off you'd get to take for the rest of
your working life. September twenty ninth, nineteen twenty nine, was
(08:01):
scheduled to be the Soviet Union's final Sunday. After that,
a five day working week, everyone would get a day
off every five days. The green slip workers would get
one day off together, the orange slip workers would get another,
and so on. And of course that meant that on
any given day, four out of five workers would show
(08:22):
up for work. The factories and the machines could operate
three hundred and sixty five days a year. Yuri Laren
system was named Nepreevka, the continuous workweek. Outside the Soviet Union,
newspapers published cartoons depicting Saturday and Sunday being shot.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
You can see the appeal of Naprevka, especially to a
Soviet economist in the nineteen twenties. It seems like a
great idea, as long as you stick to abstract notions
and avoid the rather gnarly specifics of real people. Before Napreva,
Soviet workers would have taken Saturday and Sunday off, but
many only got to rest on Sundays. Switching to the
(09:07):
continuous five day week made things more equal and gave
many workers even more rest days. And continuous work meant
those valuable machines and factory floors would no longer stand
idle for days at a time. They could now be
used all year long. But the problem with the idea
becomes kind of obvious when you take a second to
think about real people's lives. If everyone was resting on
(09:30):
different days, how could a sports team meet to play
a morning game or acquire get together to sing? What
if one person was a yellow and their spouse was
a green. What is there for us to do at
home if our wives are in the factory, our children
at school, and nobody can visit us, complained one worker.
What Indeed, Tim's tale of Niprevka has something important to
(09:52):
teach us about time off today. Yes, taking time to
rest and play is important, but it's also just as
important to make sure you have time off when everyone
else is resting and playing warring mods and rockers. Notwithstanding,
these days, we talk a lot about making sure we
have some meat time, but could we be undervaluing the
importance of having some wee time. We'll find out when
(10:15):
the Happiness Lab crossover with Cautionary Tales comes back from
the break.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
We're back. Yurilarin's Naprevka project seems like a historical curiosity,
but modern writers have started to pick up on the
story and to draw lessons from what was one of
the most extraordinary attempts ever made to reform the calendar.
Writing in the Atlantic in twenty nineteen, Judith Shulevitz pointed
(10:48):
to the plight of low income workers who had their
hours set unpredictably and at short notice by a capricious,
seeming algorithm. The hours might be too short to pay
the bills or exhaustingly long, but they might also be
Neprevka hours, reasonable enough when vs in isolation, but desynchronized.
(11:13):
This desynchronization makes it impossible for people to socialize with friends,
to join clubs, or participate in community activities, or even
to see their own partners. The economist Heather Boushi, in
her book Finding Time, scrutinizes the plight of these workers.
(11:34):
Although some people are compensated very well for working unusual hours,
and others find that those hours fit perfectly with their
own needs, that's not typical. The majority of workers with
a non standard schedule are making less money than average.
They're all so likely to be working in these jobs
(11:55):
not by preference, but because they couldn't find anything with
more normal hours, and the experience can be grim. You
have to show up whenever the boss says to show up,
often at short notice. If you say you're not available,
that's a mark against you, and soon enough you might
find yourself looking for another job. To see an example
(12:18):
of just how much trouble these capricious schedules can cause,
let's meet Jeannette Navarro, a Starbucks barrista. Navarro loved being
a barista. Upbeat, determined, and persistent. Navarro had charmed her
way into the job, was dealing with a three hour
commute across San Diego on the bus, and was looking
(12:40):
to provide some stability for her four year old son, Gavin.
But the hours at Starbucks just kept changing with just
a few days notice, thanks to a scheduling algorithm design
to move staff into precisely the right place at precisely
the right time. From the point of view of the business.
(13:01):
Particularly dreaded was cloaping when your shift had you closing
the Starbucks branch at nine and also opening it the
next morning just a few hours later. Tiring at the
best of times, extremely exhausting if you also have a
long commute, and if you're trying to get childcare both
(13:24):
for a late night and an early morning a nightmare.
In a powerful article in New York Times, reporter Jody
Cantor showed the unpredictable scheduling playing havoc with Jeanette's life.
She was endlessly trying to find weekend or evening childcare
for Gavin at short notice, which meant calling in favors
(13:47):
and putting relationships under strain. Jeanette was living with her aunt,
but after one too many arguments, she moved in with
her boyfriend instead. The boyfriend had been supportive, but he
too lost patience. Jeanette's need for last minute childcare was
making it impossible for him to realize his own dreams
(14:08):
of going going back to school. As for Jeannette's hopes
of completing her own degree, it was simply impossible.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Canter's piece was published in twenty fourteen. It made a
huge splash and immediately prompted Starbucks to change its scheduling policy.
But as Kanter explained in her article, almost every major
retailer and restaurant chain uses some variant of the same
scheduling software. Today, low income workers all over the Western
world are coping with scheduling that's so antisocial it makes
(14:40):
Nprevka seem positively humane in comparison. But what's even stranger
is that today there's also a group of privileged people,
folks with more autonomy over their time than ever before,
who are somehow managing to inflict a kind of Napreevka
on themselves.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Yes, a couple of years after Judith Schulevitz published her
reflections on Neprevka in The Atlantic, Oliver Berkman's book Four
Thousand Weeks pointed out that people at the other end
of the economic ladder might be trapped in an approvaca
of their own making the hybrid workers, the freelancers, and
(15:18):
above all the digital nomads of Instagram, possibly people like you,
certainly people like me. These people all had unprecedented control
over where and when they worked. They could write code
in a Bermuda beach cottage, they could handle their emails
from a summer house near Walden Pond, or on a
(15:41):
mundane level, they could take a yoga class instead of
hitting the morning commute. All very pleasant, but, as Berkmann
pointed out, if you insist on absolute freedom over when
and where you work, you risk exercising that freedom all
by yourself. When we all worked nine to five at
(16:02):
the office. We could all bond together in the canteen,
meet up for a drink after work on Friday, and
feel confident that not only would we be free on Sunday,
but that all our friends would be too. Now our
schedule is out of step with everyone else's. You can
do what you want, but good luck finding someone who
(16:22):
happens to be free to do it with you. But
maybe that's fine. After all, the digital nomad can dodge
the lines for everything from the dentist to Disneyland, avoiding
the rush hour traffic and the peak priced airfares. There's
a certain luxury in avoiding the crowds. Half a century
(16:45):
after Yurilarian's Niprevka was introduced, a very different economist in
a very different setting started musing this question. The economist's
name was Thomas Shelling. Shelling puzzled over topics ranging from
how to quit smoking to how to make nuclear deterrence credible.
(17:07):
Stanley Kubrick asked Shelling for advice before directing Doctor Strangelove,
a comedy about nuclear armageddon. Shelling was that sort of thinker.
So what did Shelling have to say about scheduling the weekend.
Well over the course of the twentieth century, Americans were
(17:27):
working gradually shorter hours. By the late nineteen seventies, it
seemed that a four day work week might one day
be commonplace. Maybe maybe not, said Shelling. But if it
did become commonplace, here's a question which day off should
we take? Should everyone take Friday off, or maybe Wednesday?
(17:52):
Or maybe we should all choose our own day. Let
me quote from his nineteen seventy eight book Micro Motives
and Macro Behavior. The day you'd prefer to have off
may depend on what days other people have off. The
weekday is great for going to the dentist, unless the
dentist takes the same day off. Friday is a great
(18:15):
day to head for the country, avoiding Saturday traffic unless
everyone has Friday off. Tuesday is no good for going
to the beach if Wednesday is the day the children
have no school. Staggered days are great for relieving the
golf courses and the shopping centers, but it may demoralize
teachers and classes to have a fifth of the children
(18:35):
officially absent from school each day of the week, and
may confuse families if the fourth grader is home on
Tuesday and the fifth grader on Wednesday, and the children
cannot very well go to school the day that the
teacher isn't there, nor can the teacher go to the
dentist on the day the dentist takes off to go
to the beach with his children. And in fact, Shelling
(18:58):
had some of the same concerns as Yuri Laren, even
though he didn't have the same affection for central planning.
While the poor workers of the Soviet Union and were
upset that they all had different rest days, Shelling was
worried that in an affluent society we might all end
up taking the same day off, probably Friday, even though
(19:21):
it would ease congestion if we were able to spread
those breaks around. Where's Uri Laren when you need him?
And actually there's some evidence that Shelling had a point.
After the pandemic, many office workers are working from home
a couple of days a week, and they're usually choosing
Friday as the homeworking day rather than say Wednesday, bah
(19:45):
wait tim.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Doesn't that make sense?
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Well, in some ways it makes perfect sense, Laurie, but
Uri Larin would be tearing his hair out. Now we
have these expensive office blocks, expensive public transit expensive roads,
and rather than spreading out our use of them, office
workers are generally coming into work on Wednesday and staying
home on Friday, which is exactly what Shelling was talking
(20:08):
about in the nineteen ten seventies. So, Laurie, I have
a question for you. What does the science of well
being tell us about taking a break? Should we be
trying to coordinate with everyone else or is there a
particular pleasure in taking a vacation while everyone else is
still at work?
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Well?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
I have lots of thoughts about that, Tim, and you
can hear all about them after the break. We're back.
I'm doctor Laurie Santos of the Happiness Lab, and this
is a crossover episode with Cautionary Tales with Tim Hartford. So, Tim,
(20:45):
you wanted to know what the evidence tells us about rest,
holidays and happiness.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
I did. I did, and in particular this idea of
whether we should all be taking a break at the
same time.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Well, sadly, there's not much research on that, but there
is a little bit. One of my favorite studies on
this came out of Terry Hartigg's lab. He's a psychologist
in Sweden and he was super interested in this question
of whether or not Swedes are happier on holidays when
everyone's taking a holiday. Swedes is an awesome spot to
study this because they get five weeks of holiday, something
that folks like me in the United States would kill for.
(21:17):
The government allows them to take it whenever they want.
They're not sort of scheduling it so that people have
to take it at certain times. And because Sweden's super cold,
many Swedes tend to take the holidays during the summer months.
And what's cool about that is that lots of Swedes
are on holiday at the same time. They're all taking
their vacation time, like in the same few months together.
And so Hardig was interested in whether or not that
affected the Swedes' mental health, and he decided to study
(21:40):
this using a pretty funny measure. He actually looked at
the government's distribution of SSRIs, these antidepression medications, during different
times of the year, and he tried to look at
the correlation between the release of SSRIs and people's vacation time.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
So what do they find.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Well, what he found is that there's this huge correlation
between when people are taking SSRIs and when they're on vacation. Namely,
they take less SSRIs when they're on vacation. The lowest
month of SSRI use is during July, when when everyone's
kind of take holiday, And their interpretation was this idea
that when everybody's on holiday together that forms this buffer
against stress. We get a lot of social connection, we
(22:18):
get to hang out with the people we care about,
and we're just kind of feeling less depressed.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
It makes sense, of course, you do wander. July in
Sweden is a lot more pleasant than January in Sweden.
I'm sure they tried to adjust for that. But I
wonder whether there are other countries that have lessons to
teach us as well.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Yeah, another one of my favorites is the lessons that
come out of Denmark. Danes have this interesting story where
over time they've developed this much shorter work week, but
it's actually pretty recent. It started after World War Two,
around the time that the Danes were getting more into
industry rather than agriculture. They actually wanted to employ more people,
but to do that they had to start employing more women,
(22:59):
who at least historically were the ones doing a lot
more of the childcare. And so the Danish government said, okay, okay,
we'll make the work week much shorter so that women
and men can get home and do more childcare. Will
kind of cut off time around four o'clock so everyone
can go home early. And that led to this really
interesting situation where the Danes wound up getting more free
(23:20):
time off, but importantly more free time off when everyone
else was having the same free time off. Everyone was
off in the afternoons, and what seemed to happen over
time is that the Danes wound up taking much more
time to be social. Historically, Danes have many more social
clubs and kind of like athletic groups than most other countries,
and that's in part because they have time to get
together around four o'clock where everybody's off of work, so
(23:42):
you can set up your choir, you can set up
your soccer club, you can kind of hang out with
one another because everybody has free time at the same time.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
And do we know how happy the Danes are compared
to other countries if those comparisons make sense.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Well, the research seems to show that the Danes overall
are pretty happy. Historically, they're often at the top of
the so called World Happiness report. Sometimes they get beat
out by Finland, but most of the time, Denmark is
pretty high at the top, and many folks have sort
of looked to Denmark is one of the happiest countries
in part because of their social practices, So I think
they might be onto something with this time off together
sort of situation.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Yeah, very interesting. Of course, the problem always with this
sort of thing is that there are all kinds of
systematic differences between countries, not just their vacation rules, but
all sorts of other things. So maybe we should be
looking at companies within the United States that have different
vacation policies. Your professor at Yale, Laurie, I don't know it. Yale,
(24:39):
the undergraduates go home for the summer, so you're all
kind of taking the same kind of break at the
same moment. And I know different corporations are experimenting with
this idea of a company holiday. Do we know anything
about whether that works?
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Well. This is the kind of thing that I think
economists are looking at a lot more these days. In fact,
in twenty twenty one was listed as the Year of
the company wide Vacation. It's the year that many of
these huge tech companies decided to try and experiment where
they gave everybody at the company time off together. So
this was places like LinkedIn and Bumble, a few very
big healthcare companies, And what people have reported so far
(25:14):
is that this experiment went pretty well. Employees really like
the fact that when they're not working, nobody else is working.
Their boss isn't working, their team isn't working, and that
means when they get back from holiday, they don't come
back to you know, a whole inbox flooded with messages
telling them the stuff that happened when they were out.
They're not getting these sort of team messages and emails
while they're on holiday, so there's no real temptation to
(25:36):
kind of check. And so from the employee's perspective, they
really liked being off when everybody else at the company
was off at the same time.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
I really like that. It makes perfect sense, I suppose.
The other thing about it is that if you are
going to say everybody in the company is going to
take the first week of August off, like everybody the
company really has to plan ahead to make that work,
whereas if you just say, oh, you know, you can
take you can take some time off, and everyone can
just go, oh, well, we'll sort of figure it out,
(26:06):
and they kind of don't figure it out, And in fact,
what happens is people in to their email from the
beach and they don't take a proper holiday and they're
not doing their job right. So maybe part of what's
going on here is just this forward planning to actually
organize to make it work.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Yeah. I think that's a big part of it. I mean,
I think when you leave and you know that that
project is done, you know because the final date that
you submitted it is there. When you know there's no
chance that somebody really needs you for something, I think
it means that people can kind of let their hair
down and relax a lot more. You're not worried that
something's happening at work that really needs your attention because
everybody's gone.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
And I suppose this tells us something about this time
of year as well, that we have in the winter,
Thanksgiving in the US, Christmas in many parts of the world,
and these are holidays where part of the point of
the holiday is everyone's doing it at the same time.
You know, it's not just a day off or week off.
(27:02):
It is this shared ritual, this shared experience. I love
Christmas I know economists are not supposed to really like Christmas.
I personally, I really I'm really into Christmas. I love it, And.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
It's partly just like everyone's into Christmas. Everyone's doing Christmas
at the same time, and that's fun. I don't know
whether there's any research on this. You know, we're all
trying to do our shopping at the same time, we're
all trying to book flights to go home for Thanksgiving
at the same time. That causes a problem, Like I
kind of feel it's worth it.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
This is a domain where I think it's really hard
to get at the happiness benefits from taking time off
together because Christmas is a complicated time for people's mental health, right.
It's a time when people are processing grief. It's a
time when we're supposed to be happy. So I'm kind
of not feeling great. It makes me feel especially bad.
I love that you love Christmas, team, but Christmas is
not necessarily one of my favorite holidays. In fact, it's
one of the times that makes me think that Shelling
(27:52):
might have been right, that maybe we shouldn't all be
flying that same week together, especially when it's sort of
cold and snowy in the US. But maybe that's just me.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Well, I suppose that one of the overarching conclusions that
we've got to draw from the research on happiness is
that there are big individual differences and you can have
a look at averages and say, oh, this kind of
thing often makes people happy, but in the end, you
also have to understand yourself and understand what works for
you as an individual.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
I think that's exactly right. Although that said, I think
there are some domains in which we really know there
are certain kinds of things that, at least based on
the data, seems to make most people happy. And one
of the big ones is social connection, right, just feeling
that you're not exactly that lonely.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
So tell me about that. I see a lot of
dramatic claims about loneliness. What does the research tell us
about that?
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Well, some of those dramatic claims is that loneliness is
really bad for our health. Some folks like the Surgeon
General and the US have quoted statistics like being lonely
is as bad as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, that
it's twice as risky as obesity for your overall health.
Some of those claims are a little bit overblown, but
my sense is that pretty much every available study in
the field of positive psychology suggests that being social is
(29:04):
pretty good for your happiness. The more you spend time
with other people, and the more you spend time, especially
with people you care about, the happier and more satisfied
with your life you tend to be.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
I'm really enjoying this conversation, Laurie. I like the fact
that I can just ask any crazy old question and
you've got the you've got the action. Let me let
me throw another one at you.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
So digital nomads, Okay, they can work wherever they like,
They can work whenever they like. Any clues as to
whether that's actually good for their mental health or whether
they're kind of fooling themselves.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Well, this, too, i think, is another domain where there's
relatively little work, but the work that's out there suggests
an interesting conclusion. I think this is some lovely stuff
by Rog Chowtery at Harvard Business School, and he's been
making this distinction between working whenever you want versus working
wherever you want. You know, when we think of digital nomads,
we think we think often of both together. Right, you know,
(29:51):
you're off working at a beach and you can do
so at any time you'd like. But Chowdy is basically
finding that really the thing that seems to matter for
happiness is the wherever part, not the whenever part. Why
is that the case, Well, if you get to choose
where you want to work, that means you can make
sure that you're living close to FAMI members or you're
living close to friends. If you get to choose where
(30:12):
you work, you can cut down on your commute time.
Often these days, when people report that they're working from home,
they're saving on average four point five hours a week
just in commuting time. And if you then use those
hours to do something social. You hang out with your kids,
you hang out with your friends, or maybe you exercise,
that can be a huge boon for people's well being.
And so I think when we start to think about
the benefits of being a digital nomad, we're really thinking
(30:34):
about location, location, location, and not timing.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Okay, so let's talk about the control that people have
over their time the autonomy. One of my favorite psychological
studies is about office design. Should you have a messy desk,
a tidy desk, a really minimalist office, or lots of
pot plants and pictures and so on, and what the
researchers who did that study found it was basically a trick.
(31:00):
None of it matters. What matters is whether you feel
you've got control, so like who actually decides whether that's
a pot plant. If you get to decide, you feel
good about the pop plants, and if someone else is
imposing this pop plant on you, you hate the pop plant.
So autonomy actually turns out to be much more important
than the things that we think are important. And I
(31:20):
couldn't help but think of that study when hearing the
story of Jeanette Navarro and her absolute lack of control
over her scheduling.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Well, the science is pretty clear on this. I mean,
I think this is really almost like a basic fact
of human psychology, which is that we like having control
over what's happening to us, and our perception of control
seems to matter a lot. Their study is, you know,
from the nineties and so many different domains, whether it's
control over what's happening in the workplace, which is what
we're talking about, but also control over your treatment and
(31:51):
medical context. Kids control over things in schools makes them
happier and more productive at schools. Our perceived control seems
to matter a ton when it comes to both our
satisfaction but also in some cases our productivity. And I
think that that's something that bosses and employers need to
be paying attention to. Just giving people a little bit
more perceived control isn't just going to make them happier
(32:12):
and more satisfied, maybe even healthier. It's probably going to
make them work better and faster too.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Starbucks and these other companies who are using these scheduling algorithms,
they're not really thinking through the costs they're imposing on
their employees. And I wonder now post pandemic labor markets
are a lot tighter. It's actually quite difficult to get
people to do a lot of jobs, and companies are
struggling to figure out how do we recruit people, how
do we minimize turnover? And I something tells me they're
(32:39):
going to start to figure this out, that hey, maybe
our algorithm should take the brunt of interruptions and uncertainties,
and it shouldn't be the employees, because the company can
actually absorb those costs more easily than the individuals.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
And I think companies don't realize how beneficial it might
be just to their bottom line to absorb some of
those unhappiness costs that come up with unpredictable scheduling. There's
this lovely paper that came out of the University of
Oxford from Yon Emmanuel Denev's group that shows that happier
workers wind up not just being more productive, but companies
that have happier workers wind up earning more. They're very
(33:15):
bottom line, you know, how much you know they're kind
of giving back in the stock market. That winds up
being determined at least in part by how happy workers are.
And so I think this is a time when companies
are going to start paying more attention to the happiness
of their workers. They're going to start realizing it matters
for their bottom line. And I think this is something
that not just companies have to start paying attention to.
I think governments should also start getting involved in this
(33:37):
unpredictable scheduling. These days in the US, we have all
these conversations about minimum wage and making sure people have
a living wage, but there are studies that show that
unpredictable hours have a worse impact on mental health than
low wages. I'd love to see the same conversations that
are happening about minimum wage, start happening about unpredictable scheduling
and the mental health costs that comes from that as well.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Thank you so much, Lourie. You have been extremely patient
with all of my questions about holidays and rest and
well being.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
But wait, Tim, I still have a question for you. Yeah,
So what happened to Neprevka in the end?
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Ah?
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Now, that is a good question. It's unclear whether the
Soviet authorities realized quite how disruptive Nepreevka would be, and
if they did, it's not clear whether they thought the
disruption was a bug or a feature, because, after all,
families were a bourgeois institution. But it wasn't long before
the problems with the system became overwhelming, and on the
(34:34):
first of December nineteen thirty one, a sixth day of
rest common to all was introduced, and in the summer
of nineteen forty the seven day week, including Sunday, was resurrected.
So even Stalin could change his mind, and I wonder
whether we can change ours. Lori Santos, thank you so
much for joining me, and.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Thanks for joining me.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Tom.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Let's do this again soon. In fact, I have an
idea I want to discuss with you, and I'm pretty
sure you probably have a cautionary tale for me on
the subject.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Oh, I usually do have a cautionary tale on any subject.
Dr Lorie sam To hosts The Happiness Lab.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
And Tim Hartford hosts Cautionary Tales. Both podcasts are productions
of Pushkin Industries and are available wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music is the work of
Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the
voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jemma
Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been
(35:54):
possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta
Cohnevital Millard, John Schnaz, Eric's handler, Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
(36:19):
tell your friends and if you want to hear the
show ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the
show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm,
slash plus
Host
Tim Harford
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