Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - When Stalin Killed the Weekend (with The Happiness Lab)

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

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. For a full list of sources, visit timharford.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Dr. Laurie Santos. And I'm Tim Halford. And this is a crossover episode of My Podcast, The Happiness Lab. And my podcast, Corsion Retails. 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? I thought it'd be fun to talk about holidays and rest. Not okay.

I better warn you that we're all about learning from stories of catastrophe on cautionary tales, Laurie, so go on, do you worst? 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 to surprise the overloaded students in my happiness class at Yale. When they arrive at the lecture hall thinking it's time for class, they're handed a permission slip, telling them, surprise, today is a rest 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 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 Laurie Santos think she is, letting hundreds of students skip class? They're paying a lot for their education. 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 a cautionary tale about holidays and rest. Indeed, did you ever hear the sad tale of St. Lubbock's Day? Uh, no. Well, to be honest, I've had I until recently. St. Lubbock's Day was a joking name for public holidays in the UK. There is no St. Lubbock. Sir John Lubbock was the politician who, in the 1870s, proposed a law closing the banks for four Mondays a year in spring and summer.

He knew that on these bank 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. That sounds pretty good to me. It 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 hardworking employee Bob Cratchit. You'll be wanting the whole day off tomorrow, I suppose. But the laws passed, the new holidays were introduced, and for almost a century, all was well. And then, in 1964, Lubbock's bank holidays came back

to bite the British on their back sides. The first bank holiday of the year was damn pundismal. I mean, is that all that unusual in the UK? Not really, Laurie, but on this particular day, the bad weather caused trouble in the small coastal town of Clactodon 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, the bank holiday visitors decided instead to fight. The battle lines were sartorial. The mock-topped, suit-wearing Italian scouter riding mods took on the greasy-haired leather clad bikers, the rockers.

The clashes fed a paranoia amongst grown-ups that fed sired a generation of hooligans. Spoiled, entitled and rebellious. And thanks to bank holidays holidays able to descend on 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 flogging,

the newspapers were in little doubt that the nation was only another bank holiday away from Anarchy. One headline almost relished the prospect, saying the break from work had become a day of terror. On the final bank holiday of the summer, police leave was cancelled. Officers instead gathered by an Air Force Base outside London, where the Royal Air Force would fly them to wherever violence fled next, to reinforce the doubtlessly outnumbered local police.

I love this story, Tim. But is there a lesson there about how to lead more fulfilling lives? Er, not really. It was just this weird moment in history. Everybody lost their minds about teenage fashionistas fighting on bank holidays, and then everything was fine again. In that case, this 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?

Yes. Laurie, let me take you back to a Sunday in the 1920s 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, 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 in-bred ability. But the brave new Soviet Union, it needed to industrialize fast like the British and the Americans. Workers were cheap, but machines were expensive, to let them gather dust each someday just seem absurd. Not that anyone wanted to abolish rest days, naturally not. The brave Soviet labourer, whose sweat lubricated the wheels of industrial progress, must be allowed to regain his strength from time to time. So what could be done?

Enter an economist named Yuri Lauren. In May 1929, Lauren proposed a brilliant, bold, and extremely odd plan to reshape the calendar. And since Lauren worked for Joseph Stalin, that brilliant bold and extremely odd plan soon became the new reality for Soviet workers. When the workers arrived at the factory gates, each was handed a slip of coloured paper, green, orange, purple, red or yellow. What did the colour signify? It signified which day off you'd get to take for the rest of your working life.

September 29th, 1929, was 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 up for work. The factories and the machines could operate 365 days a year. Yuri Larrin's system was named N Privka, the continuous work week. Outside the Soviet Union, newspapers published cartoons depicting Saturday and Sunday being shot. You can see the appeal of Neh Privka, especially to a Soviet economist in the 1920s. It seems like a great idea, as long as you stick to abstract notions

and avoid the rather gnarly specifics of real people. Before Naprevia, Soviet workers would have taken Saturday and Sunday off, but many only got to rest on Sundays. Switching to the 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 different days, how could a sports team meet to play a morning game, or acquire get together to sing? If everyone was resting on different days, how could a sports team meet to play a morning game or acquire a 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 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 me time, but could we be undervaluing the importance of having some wee time? We'll find out when the happiness lab crossover with cautionary tales comes back from the break. We're back. Yuri Larrin's Niprevka 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 2019, Judith Schulovitz pointed 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, in a pre-vicar hours, reasonable enough when viewed in isolation, but desynchronized. This desynchronization makes it impossible for people to socialise with friends, to join clubs or participate in community activities, or even to see their own partners. The economist Heather Booshe in her book Finding Time scrutinizes the plight of these workers, 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 also likely to be working in these jobs, 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 of just how much trouble these capricious schedules can cause, let's meet Jeanette Navarro, a Starbucks barista. 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 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 designed to move staff into precisely the right place at precisely the right time. From the point of view of the business, particularly dreaded

was clopping when your shift had you closing the Starbucks branch at night 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 child care both for a late night and an early morning and nightmare. In a powerful article in New York Times, reporter Jodie 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 favourites 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 of going back to school. As for Jeanette's hopes of completing her own degree, it was simply impossible. Cantor's piece was published in 2014. It made a huge splash, an immediately prompted Starbucks to change its scheduling policy. But as Cantor 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 so anti-social, it makes Niprevka 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 niprevka on themselves. Yes, a couple of years after Judith Schulovitz published her reflections on Niprevka in the

Atlantic, Oliver Birkman's book, Four Thousand Weeks, pointed out that people at the other end of the economic ladder might be trapped in an n imprevoker of their own making, the hybrid workers, the freelancers, and 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 mundane level, they could take a yoga class instead of hitting the morning commute, all very pleasant. But as Birkman 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 9-5 at the office, we could

all bomb 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 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 after Yuri Larrin'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.

Stanley Kubrick asked Shelling for advice before directing Dr. 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 20th century, Americans were working gradually shorter hours.

By the late 1970s, 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? Or maybe we should all choose our own day. Let me quote from his 1978 book, Micromotives and macro behavior. The day you're preferred to have off may depend on what days other people have off. A weekday is great for going to the dentist, unless the dentist takes the same day off. Friday is a great 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

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 had some of the same concerns as Yuri Lauren, even though he didn't have the same affection for central planning. While the poor workers of the Soviet Union 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 it would

ease congestion if we were able to spread those breaks around. Where's Yuri Lauren 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 home working day, rather than, say, Wednesday. But wait, Tim, doesn't that make sense? Well, in some ways, it makes perfect sense, Laurie. But Yuri Lauren 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 about in the 1970s. 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? Well, I have lots of thoughts about that, Tim, and you can hear all about them after the break. We're back. I'm Dr. Laurie Santos of the Happiness Lab, and this is a crossover episode with cautionary

tales with Tim Hartford. So Tim, you wanted to know what the evidence tells us about rest, holidays, and happiness. I did. I did. And in particular, this idea of whether we should all be taking a break at the same time. 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 Hartig'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.

Sweden is an awesome spot to study this because they get five weeks of holiday, something that folks like me and the United States would kill for. The government allows them to take it whenever they want. They're not 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 Harding was interested in whether or not that affected the Swedes' mental health. And he decided to study this using a pretty funny measure. He actually looked at the government's distribution of SSRIs, these anti-depression 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.

So what do they find? Well, he found that there's a 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 everyone's kind of taking 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 get to hang out with the people we care about. And we're just kind of feeling less depressed. It makes sense. Of course, you do wonder, you know, 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. 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 II. 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, 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. We'll 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 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 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. And do we know how happy the Danes are compared to other countries if those comparisons make sense? 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 as one of the happiest countries, in part because of their social practices. So I think they might be on to something with this time off together sort of situation. 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.

You're a professor at Yale, Laurie. I don't know. Yale, the undergraduates go home for the summer. So, you're all kind of taking the same kind of break at the same moment. I know different corporations are experimenting with this idea of a company holiday. Do we know anything about whether that works? Well, this is the kind of thing that I think economists are looking at a lot more these days. In fact, in 2021 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, if you've had a big healthcare companies. And what people have reported so far 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 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 kind of check. And so from the employees perspective, they really liked being off when everybody else at the company was off at the same time. 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 gonna 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 can take some time off, everyone can just go, oh, well, we'll sort of figure it out. And they kind of don't figure it out. And in fact, what happens is people log 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. 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. 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. And it's not just a day off or a week off. 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 it's partly just like, 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. 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 if I'm kind of not feeling great, it makes me feel especially bad. I love that you love Christmas, Tim, but Christmas is not necessarily one of my favorite holidays. In fact, it's one of the times that makes me think that shelling 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. 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. I think that's exactly right. Although that said, I think there's 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. So tell me about that. I see a lot of dramatic claims about loneliness. What does the research tell us about that?

Well, some of those dramatic claims as it alone lead us is really bad for our health. Some folks like this urgent general in the US have quoted statistics like it's being lonely as bad as smoking 15 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 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. 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, let me throw another one at you. Okay, 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.

Well, this too I think is another domain where there's relatively little work, but the work that's out? 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 Raj Chaudhary 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 often of both together, right? You know, you're off working at a beach and you can do so at any time you'd like. But, Chaudery 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 family members or you're living close to friends. If you get to choose where 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 4.5 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 about location, location, location, and not timing. 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 tied 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. None of it matters. What matters is whether you feel you've got control. So like, who actually decides whether there's a pot plant? If you get to decide, you feel good about the pot plant, and if someone else is imposing this pot plant on you, you hate the pot plant.

So, autonomy actually turns out to be much more important than the things that we think are important. And I couldn't help but think of that study when hearing the story of Jeanette Navarro and her absolute lack of control over her scheduling. 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.

There's studies, you know, from the 90s in 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 in a 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 gonna make them happier and more satisfied, maybe even healthier. It's probably gonna make them work better and faster too. 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, lab 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 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. 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 Yann Emanuel Denebs 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 bottom line, you know, how much 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 unpredictable scheduling. These days in the US, we have all of 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.

Thank you so much, Laurie. You've been extremely patient with all of my questions about holidays and rest and wellbeing. But wait, Tim, I still have a question for you. What happened to Nuprethka in the end? Ah, now that is a good question. It's unclear whether the Soviet authorities realized quite how disruptive Nuprevka 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 1st of December, 1931, a 6th day of rest, common to all, was introduced. And in the summer of 1940, the 7-day week, including Sunday, was resurrected. So even Stalin could change his mind. And I wonder whether we can change ours. Laurie Santos, thank you so much for joining me. And thanks for joining me, Tim.

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. Oh, I usually do have a cautionary tale on any subject. Dr. Laurie Santos hosts the Happiness Lab. And Tim Hartford hosts cautionary tales. Both podcasts are productions of push-in industries and are available wherever you get your podcasts.

Corsionary Tales is written by me, Tim Hartford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Finds with support from Marilyn Rust. The story is about the first time a couple of years ago that's been a part of the story of the story. The story of the first time a couple of years ago Corsionary 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 Weiss.

Sarah Nick's edited scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guthridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohn, Vitale Moulade, John Schnarrs, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Corsary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardaw Studios in London by Tom Berry.

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