Author: Stable Genius

I am the very model of a Stable Genius Liberal.

On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens. While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

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Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

Don’t always agree with Graeber, but this is worth a read.

The Art of Not Working at Work

The Art of Not Working at Work

One Swedish bank clerk said he was only doing 15 minutes’ worth of work a day. Under these circumstances, feigned obedience and fake commitment become so central to working that a deviation from those acts can result in embarrassment for everyone. As she recalls: “One day, in the middle of a meeting on motivation, I dared to say that the only reason I came to work was to put food on the table. There were 15 seconds of absolute silence, and everyone seemed uncomfortable.

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According to repeated surveys by Salary.com, not having “enough work to do” is the most common reason for slacking off at work. The service sector offers new types of work in which periods of downtime are long and tougher to eliminate than on the assembly line: A florist watching over an empty flower shop, a logistics manager who did all his work between 2 and 3 p.m., and a bank clerk responsible for a not-so-popular insurance program are some examples of employees I talked with who never actively strived to work less.

I swear this is half the people who work in IT. I remember hearing a manager talking about an employee that watched nearly 20 hours of youtube video a week for over a six month period. When you factor other net time, it might about 75% of any given week doing non-work.

Then there are whole chunks of organizations that don’t do anything useful. An 11 person group that tracked data that was rarely ever requested because the same data was availably on the web for free much easier.

Why are there so many workers who don’t actually useful work?

What’s so new about the Islamic State’s governance?

What’s so new about the Islamic State’s governance?

of the insurgencies that provided education and health care, nearly 72 percent of insurgencies provided education to civilians, and just over 71 percent of rebel movements provided health care. In other words, if an insurgent group provides social services, they are more likely to offer these services to civilians. Once an insurgency acquired territory, nearly 49 percent would ensure that the civilian population received education or medical care, consistent with recent research on rebel governance.

ISIS thinks education and health care are roles of government.

The takeaway from six years of economic troubles? Keynes was right.

The takeaway from six years of economic troubles? Keynes was right.

Countries that took emergency measures to reduce public borrowing have mostly suffered weaker growth, as in the case of Britain from 2010 to 2012, Japan this year and the United States after the 2013 “sequester” and fiscal cliff deal. In more extreme cases, such as Italy and Spain, fiscal tightening has plunged them back into deep recession and aggravated financial crises. Meanwhile countries that ignored their deficit problems, as in the United States for most of the post-crisis period, or where governments decided to downplay their fiscal tightening plans, as in Britain this year or Japan in 2013, have generally done better, both in terms of economics and finance.

But this is the key quote:

Monetarism overturned the Keynesian fiscal consensus that prevailed from the 1930s to the 1970s, by introducing one simple assumption into the models that guided governments and central banks. The case for Keynesian fiscal stimulus in deep recessions was simply assumed away by asserting that interest rates could always be reduced sufficiently to stimulate private investment, discourage private savings and so restore growth. As a result, the private sector as a whole would never suffer for long from a shortfall in spending. Therefore government borrowing would never be needed to balance inadequate private demand.

As a result of these assumptions, interest rate decisions by central banks came to be seen as the only effective tool of macroeconomic management, while fiscal policy was relegated to a microeconomic supporting role. Tax structures and public spending levels were seen as supply-side issues influencing incentives and resource allocation, but the demand impact of government borrowing was largely ignored. Whether government borrowing expanded or contracted, interest rates would rise or fall to offset the Keynesian demand effects. Independent central bankers would manage macroeconomic demand with monetary policy, leaving governments to set taxes and spending plans to achieve political or supply-side objectives.

Worth a read.

Inflation Derp Abides

Inflation Derp Abides

Jim Rogers declared that “we are all going to pay a terrible price for all this money-printing and debt.” And I asked the obvious question: How long has Rogers been predicting a printing-press-and-deficits disaster?
The answer is, a very, very long time. Here he is in October 2008 — six full years ago — declaring that we were setting the stage for a “massive inflation holocaust.”

What I expect is that inflation will be slightly higher than normal and the people claiming inflation holocaust for the past six years will act as if they were right all along.

A $20 an hour minimum wage really would cost a lot of people their jobs

A $20 an hour minimum wage really would cost a lot of people their jobs

The good news about Denmark is that their unemployment rate is only very slightly higher than the USA’s and was lower in the recent past. The Danish economy as a whole does a good job of keeping people employed, and it also does a much better job than the American economy of delivering high living standards for the poor. But mandating high wages for fast food workers has more or less the impact you would expect — low levels of fast food employment.

The standard response to raising the minimum wage is always why not a million dollars and hour as if that’s under consideration. $20 is too hight. Much to high. That doesn’t mean that $0 is the correct answer.

What the Neoreaction Doesn’t Understand about Democracy

What the Neoreaction Doesn’t Understand about Democracy

The key conclusion to draw from the Mulligan study is that political competition doesn’t go away when you switch away from democracy; rather, it moves to the metapolitical level. Competition within political systems is a substitute for competition over political systems. When the former is stifled, the latter becomes more important, which is why nondemocratic rulers must take greater pains to prevent an overthrow of government than democracies do. There is no limit on the level of metapolitical competition under a dictatorship other than the state of technology available to the state and to its would-be usurpers.

Interesting read for those following the anti-democracy crowd.