The Rockets' Red Glare
Jul. 4th, 2003 04:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueThere is something unfortunate in having wealthy parents. For the first twenty-odd years of your life, they raise you to expensive tastes -- wanting to enjoy the fruits of their own luck and labor, they can hardly indulge themselves and not their children without being uncommonly cruel. Suddenly, adulthood arrives, and the parents worry that they've done a disservice -- that the safety net of money will prevent their offspring from making a way in the world; without the motivation of hunger, they will sink into obscurity, squander their carefully cultivated potential! And so, at twenty one or thereabouts, you are left with an empty bank account, no job experience, no savings of your own, and an ingrained habit of desiring only the exceptionally fine.
Sometimes, I wonder what my parents were thinking, but then I realize they had no better way to deal with the situation, short of providing an aeternal allowance. At the same time, I am frustrated by the assumption that money is the only motivator. Certainly, it is a motivator -- there's the classic example of garbage men, who certainly wouldn't do the job on a volunteer basis. (However, I've lived in a town with no garbage men, and it runs more smoothly than any I've seen. When you port your own trash, you make less waste.) Obviously, we as a society need certain jobs done, jobs which are not intellectually transcendant but which make life run smoothly.
I say "obviously," but I think it's a bit of an excuse. I've mentioned garbagemen already, and the New England town where households sort and transport their own trash to the dump. How about waitresses, another classic low end of the service sector? Here in Japan, I've never seen one. The cook takes the order and brings the food; the cook welcomes the guest to the cook's restaraunt. You rind or find them, comes time to pay out, and as for the time-consuming business of refilling drinks, you do it yourself -- faster, easier, more efficient. School janitors? Same type of thing. At least once a week, the teacher and students set a period aside to clean the building and care for the lawn -- and you can bet there's less mess and vandalism to care for. Think further -- think of the automated check-outs popping up at grocery stores, or the automated check-in at airports.
When you think about it, a number of the "necessary" jobs seem a lot less necessary -- and not because of some great leap in technology. Why do we keep them? They're not smarter; they're not easier. They're certainly not cheaper. They don't train the worker to any higher purpose, or breed new skills. They trap people in dead-end, low-pay, unrewarding jobs. Nevertheless, if a national figure suggested dissolving these driftwood jobs, there would be a public uproar. "How will I make my living?" people would scream. "Without waiting tables, how do I make rent?"
At first, this seems a valid (if stupid) answer for why we keep these jobs. Think on the evils of corporate downsizing, the disregard for life that says one person should do eighty hours of work instead of two doing fourty. Problem is, that's not a good analogy. Corporate culture was founded only sixty years ago, and it's never quite worked. It's a business model where the big decisions are made far away from the problems by people whose only leadership qualification is money. It's a poster child for diseconomies of scale; it's fallen into its own trap of stock options, 401-Ks, and HMOs, and can't for the life of it struggle out. Moreover, it's founded on the same fallacy as the above defense for keeping the jobs I've described -- the idea that money is the same as profit.
Certainly, a high employment rate is a good thing, economically; I'll spare you a treatise on the money multiplier. But there are different kinds of unemployment, and not all of them are bad. Let me give you an example: I have hired Chad to move beans, one by one, from a pile at the front of my house to a pile at the back of my house. After that, he is to return the pile, bean by bean, to the front of my house. He is to repeat this process indefinitely. One day, I wake up and realize this bean-moving does not augment my quality of life. Even assuming I want the beans moved somewhere, why wouldn't I do it in one fell swoop?
I fire Chad. He complains a lot. Then he realizes he now has the time to pursue voice acting, which he likes better anyway. Even if he's making less money now, he has other intangible rewards, like a sense of purpose and a pleasant working environment. Moreover, he no longer has to pay for a chiropractor, or the round after round of drinks to forget work.
What I'm talking about here is opportunity cost. Let's revisit our friend the waitress. She's making a good living by refilling your drink. What is she not doing?
- She's not making pottery, so you're eating off ugly plates instead of attractive ones.
- She's not tutoring disadvantaged children, so you're too afraid of gangs to walk home.
- She's not opening her own restaraunt, so you have less choice of a meal.
- She's not reading up on the latest treasury bill, so your government is no longer accountable to the people.
In short, you are paying your waitress to diminish your quality of life! Instead of getting your own water and tithing that fifteen percent to a charitable organization or artist or struggling-but-worthwhile business, (or taking off work a few dollars early to spend time with your family,) you prefer having someone around to resent and complain about!
This problem is not as simple as I seem to make it, but the essence is unchanged: we assume that giving money away would make people lazy and unwilling to work, and the fabric of society would be torn apart. But money is a pathetic motivator -- it pushes people into unfulfilling jobs, asks them to waste their talents, and persuades us to hold onto inefficient business practices. The continued ability to eat will always outweigh questions of worth or morality . . . and we'll all spend our nights wondering why life seems so pointless. . .
Sometimes, I wonder what my parents were thinking, but then I realize they had no better way to deal with the situation, short of providing an aeternal allowance. At the same time, I am frustrated by the assumption that money is the only motivator. Certainly, it is a motivator -- there's the classic example of garbage men, who certainly wouldn't do the job on a volunteer basis. (However, I've lived in a town with no garbage men, and it runs more smoothly than any I've seen. When you port your own trash, you make less waste.) Obviously, we as a society need certain jobs done, jobs which are not intellectually transcendant but which make life run smoothly.
I say "obviously," but I think it's a bit of an excuse. I've mentioned garbagemen already, and the New England town where households sort and transport their own trash to the dump. How about waitresses, another classic low end of the service sector? Here in Japan, I've never seen one. The cook takes the order and brings the food; the cook welcomes the guest to the cook's restaraunt. You rind or find them, comes time to pay out, and as for the time-consuming business of refilling drinks, you do it yourself -- faster, easier, more efficient. School janitors? Same type of thing. At least once a week, the teacher and students set a period aside to clean the building and care for the lawn -- and you can bet there's less mess and vandalism to care for. Think further -- think of the automated check-outs popping up at grocery stores, or the automated check-in at airports.
When you think about it, a number of the "necessary" jobs seem a lot less necessary -- and not because of some great leap in technology. Why do we keep them? They're not smarter; they're not easier. They're certainly not cheaper. They don't train the worker to any higher purpose, or breed new skills. They trap people in dead-end, low-pay, unrewarding jobs. Nevertheless, if a national figure suggested dissolving these driftwood jobs, there would be a public uproar. "How will I make my living?" people would scream. "Without waiting tables, how do I make rent?"
At first, this seems a valid (if stupid) answer for why we keep these jobs. Think on the evils of corporate downsizing, the disregard for life that says one person should do eighty hours of work instead of two doing fourty. Problem is, that's not a good analogy. Corporate culture was founded only sixty years ago, and it's never quite worked. It's a business model where the big decisions are made far away from the problems by people whose only leadership qualification is money. It's a poster child for diseconomies of scale; it's fallen into its own trap of stock options, 401-Ks, and HMOs, and can't for the life of it struggle out. Moreover, it's founded on the same fallacy as the above defense for keeping the jobs I've described -- the idea that money is the same as profit.
Certainly, a high employment rate is a good thing, economically; I'll spare you a treatise on the money multiplier. But there are different kinds of unemployment, and not all of them are bad. Let me give you an example: I have hired Chad to move beans, one by one, from a pile at the front of my house to a pile at the back of my house. After that, he is to return the pile, bean by bean, to the front of my house. He is to repeat this process indefinitely. One day, I wake up and realize this bean-moving does not augment my quality of life. Even assuming I want the beans moved somewhere, why wouldn't I do it in one fell swoop?
I fire Chad. He complains a lot. Then he realizes he now has the time to pursue voice acting, which he likes better anyway. Even if he's making less money now, he has other intangible rewards, like a sense of purpose and a pleasant working environment. Moreover, he no longer has to pay for a chiropractor, or the round after round of drinks to forget work.
What I'm talking about here is opportunity cost. Let's revisit our friend the waitress. She's making a good living by refilling your drink. What is she not doing?
- She's not making pottery, so you're eating off ugly plates instead of attractive ones.
- She's not tutoring disadvantaged children, so you're too afraid of gangs to walk home.
- She's not opening her own restaraunt, so you have less choice of a meal.
- She's not reading up on the latest treasury bill, so your government is no longer accountable to the people.
In short, you are paying your waitress to diminish your quality of life! Instead of getting your own water and tithing that fifteen percent to a charitable organization or artist or struggling-but-worthwhile business, (or taking off work a few dollars early to spend time with your family,) you prefer having someone around to resent and complain about!
This problem is not as simple as I seem to make it, but the essence is unchanged: we assume that giving money away would make people lazy and unwilling to work, and the fabric of society would be torn apart. But money is a pathetic motivator -- it pushes people into unfulfilling jobs, asks them to waste their talents, and persuades us to hold onto inefficient business practices. The continued ability to eat will always outweigh questions of worth or morality . . . and we'll all spend our nights wondering why life seems so pointless. . .
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Part Two
Date: 2003-08-27 03:35 pm (UTC)I really respect what you're saying; most of my friends work in retail. Actually, ALL of my friends work in retail except for the ones who are nannies. Does that make them worse people? No, not at all. Would they rather be doing something else? Yes, without exception. Certainly, they are proud of their skills. I was (and am) proud that I could take care of eight tables at once and make sure that everyone's drinks were filled. My friend Chad, who was a gas station attendant for a while (and now works at an airport news stand), loved that he had a nocturnal job and no supervisor. I'd periodically work shifts with him, just for the hell of it (which, incidentally, he got written up for. We're not sure why.)
The thing is, everybody I know who works in the service industry does it for the money. All of them get tired of the monotony. All of them consider it a lot of work for a low yield. The majority of them really wish they were in college instead - obviously not a position I agree with, but nevertheless something they speak of continually. Sure, they'll dress it up. I'm as good as anyone at talking about good interpersonal skills, giving people a little joy and humor in their day, developing a friendly atmosphere, working on a team, keeping your cool under pressure. These are, of course, things that look good on a resume. A resume which gets you . . . another dead end job.
Yes, my friends are proud to have jobs. Yes, my friends are skilled at what they do. None of them have health coverage. None of them can tell you from week to week what hours they'll be working. None of them want to be doing these jobs in five years. If I ask what they've done at work this week, few of them can tell me specifics. I've certainly never heard any of them get excited about it . . . unless it's because they got paid more.
Which takes us back to my original point, the original point of the entry, which is . . . the welfare state. I was speaking as an economist. I know waitresses; I've been a waitress. So has my mother, who grew up very poor and worked her way through college. Obviously, I don't think poorly of waitresses. What I do dislike is the system that calls for them, which I believe I already outlined. I'm trained to program in a computer language called "Ada". I'm pretty good at it. Is it a worthwhile occupation? No, because it's a dead language; nobody uses it any more, and it wouldn't be compatible with their other code. Is that a criticism of me as a programmer? Not at all.
[continued in part three]