The less number of days people are expected to work, the more advantage motivated and ambitious employees have. If everyone has to work everyday, the only thing a person can do is to work longer hours, which have a decreasing marginal gains every extra hour worked. But with a weekend, an employee now can use 2 extra days to get ahead, theoretically doing 40% more work.
With a 3 day weekend, this goes up to an eye popping 75% more work, or even just a 25% increase for one extra day.
Because of this, I contend that a 4-day work week is highly unstable and that employees are going to naturally fall into a 5 or 6 day pattern to get ahead.
For a long time, people have been talking about leveling off work hours since productivity has/will go up. But the reality is that no one doesn’t want to work. No one wants to just work 4 hours a day and be done with it. We want to word harder and do more and make more money and be more successful. That’s who we (humans) are and it’s foolish to think we can change that.
I'm down with the points you made in the first three sections but your last point ("That's who we humans are and it's foolish to think we can change that.") is needlessly cynical. Attitudes toward work have changed immeasurably in the last 500 years and they will continue to change––if you haven't read it you should check out Weber (or just read the wiki page on the Protestest Ethic lol).
Do you have a better metric in which we all can compare ourselves by? Because I know that the first thing everyone asks each other when they first meet is "what do you do?" If work doesn't matter, why does everyone ask each other that question?
Why do we need to compare ourselves based on work? When I ask people what they do it's a general question. I am data scientist yet my friends are auto mechanics, in sales, teachers, work in the veterans department at colleges etc... We don't compare ourselves based on our occupation.
With a 3 day weekend, this goes up to an eye popping 75% more work, or even just a 25% increase for one extra day.
Because of this, I contend that a 4-day work week is highly unstable and that employees are going to naturally fall into a 5 or 6 day pattern to get ahead.
For a long time, people have been talking about leveling off work hours since productivity has/will go up. But the reality is that no one doesn’t want to work. No one wants to just work 4 hours a day and be done with it. We want to word harder and do more and make more money and be more successful. That’s who we (humans) are and it’s foolish to think we can change that.