A Rare Excursion Into Economics

A recent commenter asked:

Is it justifiable for people to be [paid for] work that doesn't actually produce anything? If Person A didn't actually contribute any more than Person B, but still worked longer, why do they deserve more?

What follows is my take on that question. I go into what I think "work" actually means, as well as some various confusions and observations regarding economy and government. And I also talk about technology a bit.

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Work isn't really about objectively "producing" stuff -- after all, even work that results in the output of some tangible widget is mostly just a matter of rearranging stuff as opposed to creating something new out of thin air. As I see it, the essence of paid work is that a person is financially compensated for performing some activity that other people have decided to value.

There is no objective list sitting in Platonic space somewhere dictating which things and activities correspond with a person's "deserving" a particular salary. Culture, not "intrinsic worth", determines how much money a person is granted for doing or producing X (where X might be a product or service).

If that weren't the case, people wouldn't pay huge amounts of money for diamonds, gold necklaces, designer clothing, etc.

And look at the entertainment industry. Look at the arts. Does a person who writes a song or throws a baseball "produce" anything? Does an artist who sells a painting "deserve" to be paid?

Objectively, this question cannot be answered. But in the context of human culture, it is answered by the people who decide to (or decide not to) compensate others for their efforts in these areas.

The same is true for business endeavors that fall outside the realm of arts and entertainment. For the sake of argument, let's say Person A and Person B are software engineers working for the same company. How much each ends up getting paid will depend on what the company (and, by extension, the employees' manager) values most. When people work, there are many ways in which they might be perceived as "contributing".

For example, say Person B only works a half day (and isn't available "after hours" at all, by phone or otherwise), but does something perceived as being tremendously useful for the company while she is at work. In this case, the company may decide that Person B is effectively "contributing" as much to the company's bottom line as someone who works a full day, and pay them accordingly.

However, it is also quite possible that Person A will be perceived as adding more of what the company values than Person B merely by working longer hours -- e.g., by being present on site, even if Person A isn't always "doing something", Person A is still there and available to do things on demand. Some companies really value availability.

So, as you can see, when companies are deciding how to pay different people (particularly when the job in question involves "intangibles" like creativity, initiative, etc., as opposed to "production of X number of widgets per day"), they almost invariably take more than one single factor into account. And when you move your vantage point from looking at "what the company values in an employee" to looking at "what potential or actual customers value in their products and services", it is clear that people take more factors than mere efficiency of widget-production into consideration when seeking goods and services.

Now, before anyone gets excited, none of the above should be taken as an endorsement of "letting the market sort things out". While I find the whole laissez-faire thing very easy to understand, conceptually speaking, and while it's hard for me to imagine how a less capitalistic system (than what we presently have in the USA) would work, I simply don't think that market forces can be trusted to bring about the outcomes proponents think they should.

I'm not going to sit here and make sweeping generalizations about the personalities of economic libertarians, because I'm well aware different people come to their economic opinions along different paths (in my case, I started out as something like an economic libertarian simply because it was the easiest system to understand). But I do -- at least based on what I've observed as of this point in time -- think there are some rather curious assumptions made by some folks who would likely class themselves as "free marketeers". I'm probably going to get myself into trouble here in even attempting to write about this (and anyone can feel free to call me "ignorant" seeing as I am rather ignorant in this area), but goshdarnit, I'm going to make an attempt anyway.

Basically, what I see "government" as ideally has nothing to do with "authority", but rather to do with a system of jobs that people are hired to perform in the interest of taking care of all the annoying logistics that would otherwise bog most other individuals down. That is, you don't elect so-and-so to be Secretary of Transportation because you feel obligated to make someone The Boss Of You when it comes to transportation-related matters, but because you figure you don't want to spend all your time dealing with all the pain-in-the-butt details of making sure the airplanes you board are safe, the roads you drive on are in good repair, etc.

I'm well aware that things don't work "ideally", and that some people do take what should be a useful and practical job and behave as if it's some sort of position of great power, and that governments do act authoritatively in areas they shouldn't as a result of all the false trappings of power that have built up like layers of grime over time in the system.

I am also painfully aware of how irritating it can be to deal with bureaucracy and paperwork and budgetary categories that make zero sense -- as an engineer, I find it mind-boggling when I'm required to get a whole slew of signatures just for the sake of acquiring a small, relatively cheap bit of hardware. When I was an intern at NASA in junior college, I remember being flabbergasted that my boss had to buy a box of picture frames even though we badly needed new computer hardware, because of the "color" of the money available. I also personally find logistical stuff of any kind, as well as most "official forms" and articles of paperwork, to be so terribly confusing that my head starts to hurt when I even think of looking at that sort of thing.

But the thing is -- I don't think that inefficiency and "bloat" are inevitable consequences of the mere existence of government, nor do I think that free-market capitalism is the remedy for the headache-inducing, frustrating situation many of us technical types and scientists find ourselves in when we want to implement or try out an idea. (I actually have a working theory that a lot of the political yelling that goes on when engineers complain about paperwork probably ties back directly, at least in a fair number of cases, to actual cognitive difficulties pertaining to logistical tasks, but I'm not guessing this theory is likely to be very popular with folks who are accustomed to thinking of themselves as Very Generally Intelligent.)

I don't claim to know what the remedy actually is, but I figure with all the creative people in the world, we have to be able to do better than choosing between "a bunch of clueless guys control everything and make anyone who wants to do anything fill out loads of complicated paperwork, with the result being that someone who wants a resistor for their widget needs 80 signatures from 10 management committees before they can acquire it" or "everyone competes in a free market environment, with the result being a kind of neverending 'social Darwinism' in which anyone who isn't cut-throat enough gets stomped into the ground."

My impression is that everyone would be better off if our interdependence were acknowledged more thoroughly, and if we somehow managed to work it out such that government was a set of practical logistically-oriented job roles as opposed to a bloated, sprawling, and altogether disappointing mess of dubious authority and excess paperwork, but in order for either of those conditions to come about, people need to stop viewing government as some kind of evil "THEM". They, after all, are us -- in the sense that nobody is forcing us to sell out our principles for corporate perks, or elect dumb tyrants, or do any number of other things we seem to be pretty good at doing over and over again.

If enough people really and truly decide that government is useless, I'm sure we eventually won't have one, but at this point I'd be willing to tout the notion of reform far and above the notion of abolishing governmental bodies altogether. I don't like paternalism much, but I sure as heck don't think issues with mass transit and environmental monitoring and public works can be adequately addressed by individuals who are generally focused heavily on other things, or by corporations who are generally focused on making something and selling it. It's not a matter of thinking private individuals or even corporations are "evil" -- it's a matter of realizing that people and companies both have limited attentional bandwidth, and literally cannot properly deal with crucial large-scale logistics to the extent that such things must be dealt with.

In my estimation, a lot of what eventually manifests as what looks like callous disregard (and even disdain) for the poor or for the various and sundry concerned folks making noise about saving the whales and the ozone layer and what-have-you probably originates not in wicked intent but in the unavoidable fact of bandwidth limitations. So what we need are people who can devote their entire working bandwidth to these things, which is where I personally see the role of government. In order to assure that everyone with a stake in a given matter actually gets heard, we need people whose job it is to consistently remind companies and individuals that no, their interests are not the only ones on the planet, and that no, none of us can afford to be short-sighted or so preoccupied with "winning the game" (whatever our particular game might be) that we forget we live in a shared, precarious, and vulnerable space.

I am not, of course, suggesting that only people with the defined logistical/regulatory jobs have a responsibility to care about the diversity of interests and vulnerabilities in the world -- everyone can and should care about such things -- but it is perfectly acceptable in the kind of scenario I have in mind for people to seek and use expert assistance in actually executing the fact that they care.

I don't know what you'd call that particular "system", if it's even a system -- I don't think in a top-down fashion when it comes to this sort of thing, just because my brain doesn't work that way (i.e., I don't think this way to be a cool political rebel, it's just a function of my cognition). But it's at least an attempt to take into consideration the valid concerns of both those whose efforts are frustrated by actually meaningless bureaucracy, and those who end up suffering needlessly in poverty or extreme precarity as a result of other people's superstitions (e.g., the notion that "helping poor people makes them lazy", and the notion that accommodating disabled/atypical people constitutes not only "resource waste" but giving such people an "unfair advantage", and other similar lines of nonsense).

Getting back to the question, though, of what it means to have a job, what it means to be working, and what it means to be "earning" one's living in the first place -- I really and truly do not think that any "level" of technology (including, say, advanced molecular manufacturing) would by itself somehow change the "work culture".

I mean, come on -- most employed people (in the USA at least) frequently get paid to sit through hours upon hours of meetings, during which time we are definitely not engaging in widget-production. Are people who anticipate impressive advances in, say, nanotech really of the opinion that meetings (and, for that matter, TPS reports) are going to disappear? Honestly, now!

Mind you, I love daydreaming about the vast possibilities things like nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing could allow people to explore. That sort of thing, as far as I'm concerned, would quite literally be magic if it were to emerge from the laboratory -- myth made manifest, alchemy poured from story into life. Humans have a long and rich history of delving into the machinations of magic, even though said magic has mainly only been metaphor and chosen narrative used to weave life and phenomenon into coherence. It's certainly no wonder that some might believe that, as magic (from classical alchemy to various sci-fi tropes, such as the "universal translator") in the context of a story tends to wrap the surrounding reality around it, transforming life in very specific ways directly traceable to the particular flavor of featured magic, the emergence of nanotechnology might similarly change actual reality.

But this to me seems unlikely. If nanotech does emerge in any significant way within the next few decades, I do not see the mere existence of the technology as something capable of altering the way people think about work. Technology doesn't exist in a vaccuum -- the ways in which new devices are used are most certainly influenced by pre-existing culture even as they in turn may come to influence that culture. In light of this, it is important to consider that, far from being a forward escape from the status quo, new widgets can actually serve to solidify the status quo by making it easier for those in power to hold onto that power. (I'm reminded briefly here of the Goa'uld -- aliens from the science fiction series Stargate SG-1 -- who use the technology they acquire to "prove" that they are as gods and deserve to be treated as such by "lesser" peoples.)

How people choose what they value, much moreso than what "level" of technology ends up being developed, is therefore far more likely to influence the work environment of the future. We've certainly seen particular widgets (such as cellular phones, laptop computers, and wi-fi modules) change the work culture to some extent, however, I'd argue that people probably work more when they have these devices, as opposed to less, seeing as they are more reliably accessible to their employers more of the time.

Individual workers may find this fact either distressing or pleasing depending on how much they like their jobs, what their jobs consist of, how much flexibility they want or need, etc., so I'm not saying that the present state of affairs is categorically good or bad, but I am definitely saying that I'm confused when people suggest that technology alone will make it so people have to work less. People might work differently, to be sure, but I'm not so certain we'll work less!