The link above is to a Michael Albert article responding to a critique of Parecon (particpatory economics) that raised many of the ideas against effort that have been described elsewhere in this blog. In case it doesn't show up as I planned, here it is again: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/4346.
I would like to start by questioning the premise that markets are a suitable way for a non-capitalist economy to approach economics. Markets give heavy weight to individual preferences instead of focusing on group decision making. In markets we think our individual preferences can be aggregated to discern what we as a group desire. I believe, however, that we would see a much different group desire if the system of allocation were based on a decision making process that did not privilege individuality but a group consensus. Why rely on an invisible hand when we can ask ourselves what we want to produce and how much we want to consume?
Turning to labor markets specifically, I see nothing efficient in the way current labor markets work. Jobs are not paid based on their usefulness to society, nor are wages neatly tied to the investment that one makes in preparing for the job. We have privileged intellectual work (some of which provides little societal value) over any physical labor, no matter how necessary or arduous. This in turn skews how people are supposed to choose work. Again, markets have not led to our nation filling all of its necessary jobs. Markets only focus on the financial (extrinsic) rewards for a position.
Effort, although not a perfect solution, allows for a fair system of compensation based on the nature of the work and the individual's own time and sacrifice in performing the work. It does compensate all work, however. The work must be agreed upon as socially desireable or useful (no ranking of usefulness). Jobs aren't everything, remember. If you want to put a lot of effort into something that is not agreed upon by the community, you can, but you won't be paid for it. Much like this blog which must count for who knows how many hours worth of writing.
Measuring effort is not a utopian idea. We do it regularly in schools and jobs. Besides counting hours of work we get to know, roughly, our coworkers' or classmates' strengths and abilities along with their weaknesses. We can take hours of work and the communally agreed upon difficulty of the work as a base for effort. Albert suggests that for study intensive work (like doctors) the investment should be counted during the study, for which the student would be paid. So a janitor or a construction worker might receive more pay because of the physical difficulty and sacrifice, but how many people are willing to do that work for their entire working lives compared to the work of a doctor? If you are paid to study medicine, why not take more enjoyable work at less pay? You will also likely be able to enjoy working at a reasonably similar pace for a longer time.
Effort's moral basis is up for discussion. I believe that the difficulty of one's labor should be counted instead of the marginal productivity. Production should not be a goal in itself. Our current system is run on this principle - produce more to consume more. It is not a sustainable system. Focusing on effort may shift attention to ecological concerns like finding better methods of production that are not necessarily more productive, but do not ruin local land. Although a topic for future discussions, I really believe that we need an industrious revolution whereby we work harder, more harmoniously with nature, with democratic control of our labor while producing less. An example of this can be found in sericulture in Tokagawa era Japan. Discuss amongst yourselves.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I have a couple of concerns. First, what does a group desire and how does it express that desire? I am particularly troubled by the line "we can ask ourselves what we want to produce and how much we want to consume." It seems to me like we already do this, through the informational mechanism of markets.
ReplyDeleteIf you really want to know what everyone thinks about everything, give them free choices and see what they choose (ugh, I sound like a free marketeer. Bear with me, I'll veer left eventually). Naturally, there are all kinds of protections and regulations necessary to ensure equal bargaining positions, ensure that disastrously destructive choices are restricted, and so (there we go), but overall, if I want to know how many apples people want, I put out a hundred apples at, I don't know, a dollar a pop, and see if they're still there at the end of the day. If not, then I guess people wanted at least a hundred apples.
If apple production is too damaging to the environment, then simply outlaw or limit apple production. This sort of group concensus about what is and is not okay can be laid comfortably over the top of markets through government regulation.
Hidden in that phrase we started with is also a distressingly empty "we." I don't know who this "we" is or what's motivating it. Is we a majority? A supermajority? Unanimity? A minority occupying the moral high ground? The economics department at University of Chicago?
Anyway, consensus as a conscious decision-making process is fine (sort of) for big ticket items like the selection of a political representative, but seems like it would become a little unwieldy when it gets to things like soap. How much do we need and what scents? Soap selection is not a trivial matter. For example, I know a lovely girl who was forced, through grim necessity, to use Axe brand body wash, which made her smell like a freshly laundered frat dude and caused me to have a sexually distressing pavlovian reaction when I passed the Greek section of town.
But even if you won't grant me the importance of soap, central planning for consumer products (and I'm assuming that in whatever utopia we decide on, there will still be goods consumed, even if they are sustainably produced and in accordance with whatever principles of production we agree upon) is a tough, tough row to hoe.
Let me preface this next bit with an admission that I know the analogy is only barely apt. Here we go: the Soviet Union enjoyed near miraculous success in its centrally planned development of heavy industry. What it ran into trouble with were boots. And soap. And toilet paper. Things that are necessary, load-bearing commodities in any society.
Onward to effort. We do take effort into account in the academic world, but within my experience, it's always been in the context of "effort will be considered." It provides a floor. If a student works hard and, nontheless, produces a terrible product, that student will get some reward (let's call it, heck, a minimum wage). Effort has never been the be all and end all of compensation (again, within my experience).
Finally (to the extent there was any structure in my comment so far), I think that production should still be compensated. I agree that fueling mindless consumption of environmentally or societally damaging goods is a bad thing, but the solution, to my mind, is not to shift our compensation structures so that they encourage people to spin their wheels in unproductive but strenuous ways. This is the equivalent of those farm subsidies that pay farmers to not grow things. Yes, we don't want them to grow, say, corn, but maybe rather than ask them to do nothing, we should be asking them to direct their energies in a productive but non-destructive direction. Nurturing environmentally-conscious or socially-responsible industries could provide jobs for people that would pay them AND better society.
Rather than wrack my brains for new jokes, I will follow the proud scholarly tradition of quoting my previous work:
Another concern about rewarding effort as opposed to, you know, something that provides actual societal benefits rather than existing merely as a means to secure those benefits is that rewarding effort provides a strong disincentive to efficient allocations of human labor. To my mind, it would encourage people to spend their energies on endeavors to which they personally are ill-suited, producing end results that are likely demonstrably worse for society and which for which society is paying more based on the effort that went into them. And, considering the naturally mercenary nature of a lot of humanity, the less suited one is to a job, the greater the incentive to take that job. Do we really need to pay seven hundred dollars an hour to wheelchair bound stevedores? I mean, they can press their faces against a two hundred pound crate and wheel like a son of a bitch, but in the end it's just NOT a very efficient way to unload a ship.
This has been a meandering and leaky argument I just made. Thank you.
I have not yet read the article you cite, but I will later this week. I will respond again to this post when I have read it. For now, I respond to some of your arguments point-by-point below.
ReplyDelete“I would like to start by questioning the premise that markets are a suitable way for a non-capitalist economy to approach economics.”
I do not understand socialism to necessarily mean “non-capitalist.” I think a system could very plausibly have significant elements of both socialism and capitalism, and I think the right political-economic system would involve elements of both.
“Markets give heavy weight to individual preferences instead of focusing on group decision making. In markets we think our individual preferences can be aggregated to discern what we as a group desire.”
The radically compressed income distribution I advocate would bring us much closer to a valid estimate of “what we as a group desire,” since purchasing power would be much more equally distributed. But the virtue of retaining a market mechanism is that producers’ production decisions can respond directly to consumers’ purchasing decisions without some kind of production board having to painstakingly estimate how much of everything people want or need. Such an effort would be prohibitively difficult on anything but the very smallest scale. A group of 250 people could probably not do this.
“Why rely on an invisible hand when we can ask ourselves what we want to produce and how much we want to consume?”
Because it would be too difficult to “ask ourselves” when “ourselves” gets to be more than a very, very small handful of people. If we are to produce on a larger scale to take advantage of technology, specialization, and division of labor, “asking ourselves” would amount to electing representatives to appoint bureaucrats to engage in central planning. I don’t really think that’s the way to go.
So I think the question ultimately hinges on scale. If we want to retain a mass society, use modern technology and specialization, we could not plausibly “ask ourselves.” This could only work on an extremely small scale, and such a small scale would very drastically decrease our productive capacity. I know this is a sacrifice you are willing to make, but I don’t think such a sacrifice is either necessary or warranted. More productive ability allows us to produce more of “good” things, like healthy foods, exercise equipment, medical technologies, vaccines, books, art, newer and faster forms of public transit, etc. – not just “bad” things like SUV’s and McMansions.
“Turning to labor markets specifically, I see nothing efficient in the way current labor markets work.”
No one here is advocating “current labor markets.” On the contrary, my suggestions constitute a radical departure from the current system. A 100% unionized workforce, enterprises in which labor, government, and entrepreneurs substantially share equity and control, and a guarantee of government employment for everyone would be quite a bit different from the status quo.
“Jobs are not paid based on their usefulness to society, nor are wages neatly tied to the investment that one makes in preparing for the job.”
Yes and no. As you know, jobs are paid – very roughly – on the basis of marginal productivity to the employer. Marginal productivity to the employer, plus positive externalities and minus negative externalities, is a one valid way of measuring “usefulness to society.” That is the metric I adopt.
Wages are not tied to the “investment” made in that job if such investment does not translate into higher marginal productivity. For instance, a sociology masters degree, although time consuming and difficult, would not lead to a higher rate of compensation for a construction worker. This does not offend my sense of distributive justice. After all, a construction worker does not get paid any more for having read all of Dostoevsky’s works after work each day either.
In the case of a social worker, a teacher, or a public interest lawyer, usefulness is still accurately captured by the concept of marginal productivity net of externalities. The problem is that these jobs produce high, positive externalities that the employer cannot capture. As a result, they are underpaid relative to their total social value. The judicious use of government subsidies is perfectly capable of offsetting this distortion. The same analysis works in reverse for high negative externality work.
“We have privileged intellectual work (some of which provides little societal value) over any physical labor, no matter how necessary or arduous.”
Your definition of “value” is everything here. By and large, intellectually intensive jobs produce more value, in the sense of marginal productivity plus or minus all externalities, than grunt jobs. This is why they command higher compensation. I would prefer to let this allocation operate and to subsequently correct the distributional imbalances afterward through an extremely progressive tax system.
“The work must be agreed upon as socially desireable or useful (no ranking of usefulness).”
This essentially amounts to central planning, though the planning is done by a feel-good board of representatives (or everyone? I guess it depends on how big the productive community is) instead of a big, bad bureaucracy.
As I say above, central planning could only feasibly work on an extremely small scale, and this would entail an astronomical plunge in productive capacity. I know this is something that you would be willing to accept, but I would not for reasons I mention above.
“Measuring effort is not a utopian idea. We do it regularly in schools and jobs.”
Not really. Like you said, labor markets/employers measure marginal productivity (albeit highly imperfectly), not effort. Formal education measures the level of scholastic achievement, not the amount of effort students put into their studies.
“We can take hours of work and the communally agreed upon difficulty of the work as a base for effort.”
This metric would not even approximately measure each individual’s effort. The same job will be much easier for some than others, and some people will work much harder per hour than others. This is the problem.
“So a janitor or a construction worker might receive more pay because of the physical difficulty and sacrifice, but how many people are willing to do that work for their entire working lives compared to the work of a doctor? If you are paid to study medicine, why not take more enjoyable work at less pay? You will also likely be able to enjoy working at a reasonably similar pace for a longer time.”
I seriously question your assumptions (that being a doctor is necessarily more enjoyable, and that people would generally be willing to take less pay for practicing medicine) and I think this would lead to a very serious misallocation of resources. After all, paying construction workers more than doctors means you will get more of the former and less of the latter than you would otherwise have. This doesn’t seem desirable to me at all. I think we should encourage as many high productivity, highly valuable occupations as possible.
“Production should not be a goal in itself. Our current system is run on this principle - produce more to consume more.”
Indeed it is not, and no one here is defending the “current system.” But moderate, sustainable economic growth is a good thing, and it should be encouraged to the extent it is consistent with other social priorities.
“Focusing on effort may shift attention to ecological concerns like finding better methods of production that are not necessarily more productive, but do not ruin local land.”
I don’t think this follows. If strip mining is difficult and the community decides it needs coal, then strip miners will be paid more under your system, to the environment’s detriment. Public environmental regulation strikes me as a much better tool for safeguarding the environment.
“Although a topic for future discussions, I really believe that we need an industrious revolution whereby we work harder, more harmoniously with nature, with democratic control of our labor while producing less.”
I don’t think we need to work harder. We work plenty hard enough. We need to work smarter, with more productive technologies developed by increased public reasearch investment, and use the freed up time to pursue socially valuable activities besides economic production.
With Wingo's permission I will clarify what I think I picked up on in his argument.
ReplyDeleteThere seems to be confusion as to how effort is to be rewarded. Ryan seems to think that the individual effort of the worker is a base factor that is multiplied by the amount of hours worked. What I think Wingo is suggesting is that the community (whatever that group is determined to be) will set an objective level of effort that is required to perform the job, use that as base pay, and then compensate for the number of hours worked.
Individual effort doesn't actually seem to be measured in this equation, which helps Wingo's argument in one sense, because we don't end up paying the guy who tries real hard but is awful, more than the guy to whom the job comes easily and does the job better. Still, Wingo, this in turn also hurts your argument, because shouldn't we be paying those two workers differently? They certainly shouln't be getting paid the same rate, should they?
I would also like to address something Josh said, that what we have in the U.S. is more or less a consensus system.
ReplyDeleteWhat Josh said is correct, if by "more or less" you mean "less." What we actually have in the U.S. is a numerical "might makes right" system where there is a consensus, but only a consensus of the majority. A full consensus system that Wingo proposes would have to account for the preferences of the minority. Although, I'm pretty sure in Wingo's system there are no political parties. But as we all know, no political parties can easily turn into one political party, and from there into one political party surrounded by several little political parties, and finally into one political parties as the smaller parties are outlawed and brutally repressed.
But that's neither here nor there Instead, my point is that like Ryan, I think rule by consensus is best suited to small groups, but that government by such small group is impractical. I am a strong supporter of local government, but even my home town of Voorheesville, NY, population 2,705, would have an incredibly difficult time running itself in the manner I think Wingo suggests.
I agree, Mike, that Wingo meant that there should be some kind of "reasonable man" standard for approximating effort (times hours worked). For the reasons I mentioned above, I don't think it's a very good proxy for actual, individual effort nor do I think it is a sensible principle on which to base our overall system of labor compensation. Some minimum amount of "social usefulness" is better than no social usefulness, but more is better than less.
ReplyDeleteAnd I read those articles, or at least what I could get through. Both guys are extremely long-winded and repetitive. Nothing about their exchange changes my mind regarding the administrative nightmare that "participatory planning" would represent or the drastic misallocation of resources it would create, at least if it were tried on anything but a tiny scale.
Again, I think the whole question is one of scale. If we are willing to sacrifice the better part of the last two centuries' unprecedented increase in material living standards, and to live on small agrarian communes, I think this economic vision could possibly work. I personally don't think we need to or ought to go down that path.
These comments are long, so I'll try my best to parse through quickly. I’m using most of Josh’s response as a jump-off. Ryan you may find some of what you’re questioning replied to there. I have left a couple of comments for you at the end.
ReplyDeleteGroup desire: From my limited reading on Parecon, and my infusion of my personal tendencies, group desire is the will of the people. Think democracy for economics. Not only would people have control over their own work, but over what would be produced or consumed by them. It’s similar to central planning, but doesn’t involve the politburo. It does presume that communities (I agree that this is not workable at the nation-state level as we know it) know what they need and what they are capable of producing. So I suppose the hollow we is a community rooted in a specific place.
Markets, as I tried to point out, do not involve tough decisions by the community. You decide based on your own preferences. Differences in the process of decision-making will make a difference in the outcome of the decision. Communities have made economic decisions like this before. Pre-enclosures, rural communities were able to make decisions about what was planted, when it was done, etc. Implicit in this is that there is going to be a reduction of choice of products. Indeed, I think it would call for some hard decisions about how to make ourselves more self-sufficient on even the family or individual level. I don’t think this is necessarily bad, either. Unlimited consumer choice has not brought us happiness, peace, or understanding. All it has given us is a lot of stuff in different scents, shapes, and colors while possibly diverting us from things that do make people happy like friends, family, and a sense of purpose in one’s community. Not to mention, we have lost touch with how to do a great many things because we’ve specialized our economy to such a great degree.
I also think it preferable not to result to government regulation. I qualify this as quickly as possible. Communities need to have rules on how to operate and how to make decisions. If that’s government regulation, then fine. I think its possible to see regulation in the way that we use the term as possibly creating dependency on the government and taking away a sense of our own responsibility or participation. This can be useful when dealing with actors who are not tied by responsibility or a sense of place within a community, but I think I prefer to use it as little as possible. Regulation dependency has not proved as strong as the responsibility that people have when they are engaged in the community because they seem to invite bare minimum participation and only work with extrinsic incentives (pleasure or punishment). On the other hand, is the sentiment of responsibility present in communities now? No. The hope I have is that a localization of the economy and of political and economic decision making would allow this responsibility to gather more steam. Regionalized socialism with deconcentrations of ownership and wealth could be a stepping stone in this direction.
The arduousness of the task and the hours worked could, as I said, provide a basis for effort based compensation. Peer review and self-assessments can help provide a sense of individual effort within that framework. There is room for objective and subjective measures and I don’t disagree that everyone should be allowed a certain minimum standard of living.
I think my point about more work, less production was partially misunderstood. I’m not going to go into how sericulture changed in Japan to explain it either. There’s other work to be done. Suffice to say, I think that working more industriously, in a sense, can allow us to have a better process of work while not over producing. “Smarter” work has meant, although past meanings need not apply here, how to work less to produce more without looking at what that process does to workers, the environment, etc. An industrious revolution could involve how to work more intimately (add your favorite sexual joke here) with the material. It could involve a demechanization of the process in favor of more human labor. It could involve a lot of things. I just don’t think that the way we work and how we approach work is necessarily the most fulfilling for us. Maybe it’s just me. I also understand shifting compensation structures is a way of accomplishing this. If I want non-alienating production of clothes, I could find a way to incentivize tailoring over sweatshops or line production. It may ultimately depend on whether you believe that incentives work better than more radically changing the structure of the economy through non-“governmental” measures. Again, government’s a touchy word, because particpatory community life is a governing structure, but not the kind that we think of when we say government.
I understood your previous post, Josh, on performing tasks by wheelchair-bound stevedores. Should there be a method of preventing incompetence? Yes. I guess my thought was that workers will seek to find a job that suits them better than you suggest. You could be right that people will only be financially motivated, although most who have blogged here seem to want to take that part out of society. Without disparities in wealth or the ability to accumulate a significant amount more than your neighbor, why would you work where you strain yourself and never feel like you’ve accomplished anything? I’ve always been sympathetic to Marx partially because of his views of the non-economic value of work and his belief that people like to work, produce, and own their own labor.
As to Ryan, I know you don’t divorce capitalism and socialism. I think we should and that’s why I included that in my post as well as a couple of reasons that show where I am coming from with that idea.
Even an equal wage and wealth society (which could never exist for very long without real-time redistribution) using a market system would come to a different conclusion about production and consumption, than a decision made by the members of that society as a whole and as a collective. It’s the struggle between individualism and collectivism that underlies this point. If people truly believe that we act or decide individually in the same way or with the same result that we do when we put a decision or action to a group, then my point is meaningless. I think that there could be a significant difference between the two. I’ve heard that this has been observed too by sociologists, but I can’t back it up with a study of my own.
I can’t speak to a scale of operations that would work. We’d have to test it out and see if there is a tipping point beyond which people do not accurately value or spend too much time evaluating their own consumption as a group. (Nor do I think that it is necessarily true that each community would operate isolated from other communities. You could have cooperation among communities for different projects as well as information sharing to advance certain kinds of knowledge) When you increase scale you decrease participation. If specialization and technology are more important, then that is something you seemingly have to sacrifice. I personally don’t think that we should put technology above participation. Participation in my mind is important for us as people and is more likely to improve our lives than advancements in technology. So scale might be a hinge, but I think it really comes down to what we think will most improve our lives and make us better people. I don’t have anything particularly against the good things you mention (except an unreasoning employ of them without forethought of their effects), but I would like to know if they are necessary for our improvement whether we measure it by happiness, morality, accumulation of goods, or whatever other metric you wish to use.
As to environmental responsibility, smaller production and more attention to process than production does not guarantee that wise choices will be made. Many societies have made mistakes before us and probably many more will continue to make mistakes long after us (inch’allah). In terms of probabilities, I see more localized economies being more environmentally conscientious. Primarily, if the community strip mines and ruins the land, how will they support themselves afterwards? This conversation is easier to avoid or put off the more a community is able to source out their means to live outside of where they live and the work they do.
Finally, (yes!) I apologize, but I was not trying to aim at anyone’s vision of socialism as much as offer a thought on effort compared to how we assign wages now. So my repeated look at our current capitalist economy is my basis of comparison. I did not mean to accuse anyone of endorsing it. Effort is difficult to talk about without drawing out some of my views on other things and tho the extent that these were contrary to other ideas posted here, so be it.
Passing lightly over the inevitable brawl over which is preferable, pre-modern agrarian villages or modern industrialized metropolises, I've got a bone to pick with Marx (which breaks my heart, since we were so close in graduate school). Assuming, for the moment, that we're stuck, as we are, with a population in the billions which requires mechanized agriculture, telecommunications, and technologically advanced methods of shipment and transportation (I am uncomfortable with all the avenues I can think of that would lead to the population reduction necessary for us to turn the clock back three hundred years), we are also stuck with a whole slew of fairly specialized jobs arrayed along various iterations of the production line. It is tough to derive a satisfying sense of self-worth and identity from doing one's hole-punching or nut-tightening well. This is not to say that it can't be done (for example, knowing that you're helping to build a socialist society did wonders for morale in the Soviet Union, at least for a little while, specifically in the case of the construction of Magnetogorsk, the metallurgical complex/city), but it's not going to taste just the way mother used to make it back on the small New England farm of 1721.
ReplyDeleteIf it even did then. If a community is self-sufficient, it necessarily is devoting its energies to a limited number of pursuits. Food, shelter, maybe a moment of leisure if you're lucky. Self-sufficiency takes a heck of a lot of time.
My knowledge of history is more holes than knowledge, but I can't think of a community of pre-modern farmers/peasants/serfs who didn't labor under the umbrella of some warlord. A small community that has decided to focus on kicking ass rather than farming will kick ass, and the asses it kicks will be self-sufficient asses.
Which leads me to the engineering of the human soul. If we are talking about working socialism, or some other working system, it's going to end up populated by human beings (there's no way around this; I've crunched the numbers). Human beings are flawed. For all that the contributors to this blog would like to see financial self-interest eliminated as the most reliable source of human motivation, I think we're stuck with it.
Well it seems like most of what we are arguing about just boils down to irresolvable value differences about what is most important for mankind, and that's cool. But let me just make three quick points before I leave it lie. First, I understand that markets operate on the basis of individual economic decisions. I think that there should be a balance between individual and collective economic control, a balance that favors the latter but does not altogether eliminate the former. The sort of very large government that I support would employ tons of (maybe most) people and would play a massive role in the economy. Furthermore, in my perfect world, businesses would be owned in substantial part by labor and government. So under the sort of system I support, collectively-controlled consumption and production decision-making would characterize the better part of the economy. But I would preserve a (much reduced, mind you) place for private market exchange to promote allocative efficiency and to preserve productivity incentives.
ReplyDeleteSecond, I do not advocate absolute economic equality for reasons I set forth elsewhere, so there would be no need to "redistribute in real time." The tax system could adequately do the job of drastically compressing, but not totally eliminating, differences in income and wealth.
Third, as Josh said, and as we've all discussed many times, I think a society based on very small, largely independent agricultural communes is hopelessly vulnerable to outside aggression. It would only take one effective and ruthless band of marauders to destroy everything good about the society you envision. As a result, small, defenseless communes would likely seek the protection of warlords, and the system would eventually denigrate into feudalism. This is more or less the history of medieval Europe. I can't see a compelling reason why it wouldn't happen here as well.
I agree with Josh. I'm not sure we can put the past 500 years or so back into the "yeoman's work" bottle. At least not without catastrophic suffering during the transition.
ReplyDeleteAnd then I agree with Ryan. If we even got to that point, maintaining that status quo would be incredibly difficult at best, but more likely impossible.
Although in the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I might disfavor this organization of society because of an unreasonable attachment to two-ply toilet paper and MTV's "Gauntlet"
But now we are not just talking about the US, are we?
ReplyDeleteIf such a drastically new system were to be adopted, it would have to be brought about by a global revolution.
Otherwise this whole business is just academic.
Someone made this point earlier: the one the village that decides to kick ass and steal instead of worry about self-sufficiency would make a lot of trouble for us working socialists otherwise.
I think there's a certain self-sufficiency to taking what you need to survive from others.
ReplyDeleteIf that community decided by consensus amongst themselves that what they could produce was a ton of sharp rocks and the sticks to tie them to, and what they desired was to eat without farming, and could with some effort make a day's work of looting and pillaging, when then who am I to stand in their way.
Yes but I was working under the assumption that we were not going to be going back to the dark ages and thus the sharp sticks and rocks to be feared would come more in the form of Russian tanks and nukes.
ReplyDeleteI myself would welcome our liberation from a culture with hotter girls and easier to read alphabet for word verification. "wcbdhsua?" what the fuck does that say? can't we disable this feature?
Whooaaoh slow down here, eggheads. This is a liiittle more information than I needed. All I want to know is when will my $600 check arrive in the mail? I have student loans to pay down.
ReplyDeleteMy $600 dollar check is going to be immediately withdrawn as Euros and spent on a delicious evening of German bratwurst, bier, and punkrock.
ReplyDeleteScrew your recovery package.
Save the Beervendor, Save the World
ReplyDeleteSince when did this become a blog of humorous comments?!!
ReplyDeleteI would like to take this opportunity to mention that I scrupulously reward Schneider's mom based on effort. I use an enormous complex of computers to construct a numerical index representing the distastefulness of the tasks I direct her to perform, and the extent of their dis-empowering nature. Then, I multiply that index factor by the number of hours that I direct her to perform said tasks.
It ultimately works out to about $7.50 an hour.
Wingo,
ReplyDeleteI again read the article you linked to, and I applaud any effort to improve
empowerment among workers of all kinds. But such a system, as I think you have admitted, results in huge inefficiencies. There's a reason why the saying goes "jack of all trades, mater of none."
I don't see having evoryone do multiple tasks as making anyone's life better. I think there are much better routes to empowerment. To take one of the author's excamples, working in a coal mine itself may not be high on the empowerment scale, but if a coal miner is doing the work as part of a union, under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement, can exact a good wage an benefits, that worker has a significant amount of empowerment, without any significant corresponding sacrifice in efficiency.
As to going back to the stone age, that is of course a bit of an exaggeration, but we would certainly have to go "back in time" to some degree. Reducing efficiency, for excample by having bus drivers also manage transit planning (as the article suggests) would be disastrous for technological advancement, and would require us to give up a lot.
I just don't think we could maintain existing levels of technology, infrastructure or population. This is why, just in case, I am stuffing my mattress with sharp rocks, or at least rocks that could be sharpened in a pinch.
I also concur regarding the word verification. I'm again beginning to think I am an internet spider, hired by google to infiltrate the web, but being stymied by the mighty blogspot "gibbersih box." Is that an "l" or an "i?"
I'm a jack of all trades and I have mated on more than one occasion.
ReplyDelete