From the article: "This should say to employers that insisting people work long hours is actually not good for your business"
Wrong! As a business, you should overwork you employees. When the dementia starts affecting performance you fire them. This way you can privatize the benefits (long hours) and socialize the losses (some else takes care of them). Anything else would not be good for profits.
You lose the knowledge your workers acquired on the job; a new hire cannot offer you that.
So this only works if you are in a franchise business where everyone works to a script and does not innovate, develop long-term relationships, or perform an important leadership function.
Alternative explanation: people whose mental skills kept declining (for some unrelated reason) worked longer hours to compensate for a loss of productivity due to such decline.
Wow. Next they'll be telling us that people who lift weights excessively are susceptible to muscle strain.
[I wish I had an eye rolling smiley to put here]
Maybe I'm just simplifying things too much but it seems to me that the average work week we have now evolved over time because it seemed to produce optimal results. Meaning pushing yourself to work extra hours would be considered excessive and would in turn adversely affect those parts of your body that you are using during your work (namely your brain).
As for the rest of the article's conclusion (shorter sleeping hours, excessive alcohol use, etc...) it would seem those would be a result of the reason behind the excessive work. People generally over work for stress causing reasons (fear of losing their job, trying to start a business, etc...) So any symptoms of stress can probably be attributed to that and not the over work (which is in itself a symptom)
Wrong! As a business, you should overwork you employees. When the dementia starts affecting performance you fire them. This way you can privatize the benefits (long hours) and socialize the losses (some else takes care of them). Anything else would not be good for profits.