The Lies of the Creative Class

I don’t get it.

Perhaps someone at a bank could develop a creative new way to deal with mortgages.

Rumor has it that the Chinese suck at it.

Tom, this scam doesn’t work without losers — as one commenter there observes, “Creativity keeps you ahead of the pack”. So by not getting it, you’re making the sacrifice we creatives require. Thanks!

@Vance, 7: “Scam”? What? Please explain what you mean about losers.

Tom, this is a vision of life — not just biological but social life — as an endless competition. The notion of a “creative class”, and the identification of this class with the winners of the competition, is perhaps new-ish, but the “social-Darwinist” vision is not. What I object to, and what I take others to be objecting to, is the valorization of this struggle, the personal acceptance of its supposed values. I suppose it’s kind of true that we’re all in competition, all that is solid melts into air, etc. But what does it mean to tell this story with such relish? Where is this rhetoric headed? Would MacLeod go so far as to say that it’s good that he must crush the faces of the less fortunate beneath his creatively-nailed boots as he scrambles to the top of the pile, new scramblers thundering along behind him to crush him in turn? If not, what precisely is the point?

Well, I’m not seeing any creativity there, except for new and creative ways to claim creativeness. I couldn’t go very deep, though, because the shoddy writing was too distracting. There may be creativity down there, lurking like oil under the sand. Wait…was the shoddy writing and the hip confidence and the offhand obscenity intentional? Was it designed to test me to see if I was worthy of admission to the creative class? Dang it!

I deserve another chance! In my world (American public education), “Creative” means “free of rigor, criticism, or hard work.” When parents tell me their children are ‘very creative’ they are really saying they’ll rake my ass over administrative coals if I am too critical. So I deserve another chance. Please?

ice

I suppose it’s kind of true that we’re all in competition, all that is solid melts into air, etc. But what does it mean to tell this story with such relish?

It means conservatives want to celebrate zero-sum competition.

Liberals want to feel guilty about it, and feel morally superior to conservatives.

What on earth? Where does MacLeod’s blog post suggest that the competition is zero sum? And he’s not telling it with relish, he’s telling it with relief that he’s finally accepted that we all have to struggle for our continued existence.

On occasion Crooked Timber features some of the best left-wing writing that the internet has to offer. This one is not CT’s finest hour.

So I have to quit my job in order to keep my job?

“Evidence that history happens the first time as a Doug Henwood book and the second time as farce.”

That’s why it’s called being re-inventive. (Heck, even his spelling of “re-invention” is reinventive. That’s how fucking inventive he is. So his job is perfectly secure. We know that much.)

I think creativity is vastly over-rated.

The art world is full of people who imagine that what they do is transcendentally important because it is ‘art’. Academia is full of assholes who think that what they call ‘science’ is similarly transcendental.

Yet when you look at what most of this ‘art’ and ‘science’ consists of it is pretty tedious stuff. Most successful artists have exactly one innovative piece in their entire career. Then they spend the rest of their life repeating it. Likewise the criteria for academic science is now publishability rather than utility.

Some science changes the world, some art changes the world. But the chances are that your science and your art (and your philosophical scriblings) are not going to and that your utility in the wider arc of society is considerably less than the ‘uncreative’ people you look down on who are the ones who actually produce stuff.

Of course this blog post is not creative at all. This sort of posts were rather popular during the dot.com boom years. Back then everybody had to be inventive and you would load down your food from the internet.

Now a post that we don’t need to creative . that most people are never creative and still happy and useful members of society, that in the good old days everybody was ashamed of new ideas and would protest that his knowledge is old and proven – that would be something.

Of course reinventing contrarianism is not that inventive either.

I like the idea of hiring other people to be creative and taking their ideas for yourself. Once they are used up or no longer creative you can just fire them and get more. There are always more aren’t there?

Blogs seem like an awfully weird example to pick. Some of the most successful bloggers are those who picked a schtick years ago and have been recycling the same small handful of tropes and topics ever since–giving readers a familiar, comfortable, predictable product. Plenty of industries work on the same model. The whole point of McDonalds is that you can walk into one basically anywhere and know you’ll get exactly what you liked five years ago on the other side of the country.

The real meaning of the article: ‘So what is your message for people who are fucked?’ ‘You are not creative’

Exactly. It’s much easier to contemplate people who could as well be you suffering for, if you can convince yourself they deserve it. Easier to rationalize your own suffering, if it comes to that, by assuming you do too.

Kind of reminds one of Adorno’s essay on astrology, how the occult becomes a system in which people can preserve the illusion of individual rationality in a world where outcomes manifestly don’t depend on individual actions.

Or, anyone remember the small-town shopkeeper in Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers, who explains his presence in the trenches of WWI by the importance of service in establishing a good reputation, that this is what you have to do to be respected by your customers? The same attempt to imagine — politics verboten — a massive social upheaval in terms of business self-help. Being well-liked being, I suppose, the 100-year-ago version of being “creative” — the mythical personal quality that will insulate you from the social dislocations around you.

Tom @34. Read the CT post on the Henwood book first, please. Henry is spot on.

Tom,

you are surprisingly obtuse (though perhaps wilfully obtuse) for one who can string more than three words together. So perhaps I can help you, given that I am not (by CT standards) especially left wing (not that CT itself (by left-wing standards) is especially left-wing).

When I , as you employer, tell you that you need to be more “creative”, or “flexible”, or something similar, what I mean is that I am about to fuck you and your mates over, but that if you are prepared to fuck your mates over as well, you might just survive until the next round of fuckings-over, though of course at reduced wages and benefits.

It is the siren-song of scabdom; the call to become a capo; the invitation to open a gap in the barricade. And I do not even say it is necessarily a Bad Thing (remember, I am not especially left-wing). But let us be honest about what it is.

Can’t remember if this is original or if I’m quoting someone else but the underlying ideology is best described as dot com Calvinism.

From his post:

Do something else. It’s your move. Nobody else’s. Sorry.

From his book, “ignore everybody,” the list of key points to being a successful creative:

7. Keep your day job

followed by advice not to quit in a huff just ’cause your job doesn’t give you a creative outlet.

I think someone might need a more coherent overarching theory…

““the only way to keep your job nowadays is to constantly re-invent it”

It’s bullshit bingo.

“Company fat cat fancypants: “And that is why this merger is going to benefit shareholder value by creating value driven content.”

Company fat cat fancypants: “You’re fired!”

…perhaps he [almost certainly he] should be glad to have a job with so little import that “creativity” (which I translate as bullshit) is paramount. Try relying on creativity if you’re fixing someone’s car, or operating on their brain.

If you’re creative enough, you’ll stop complaining about who moved your cheese!

Actually, it’s quite simple; it’s all about Looking Out for #1. A tried and true strategy is the ever-popular Winning Through Intimidation.

The same as it ever was, I’m sure.

@Delicious Pundit, 8: It sounds like what you’re saying with your “ironic quip” at the end, is that you’re going to teach your children to make friends with other children and share nice things with them.

But that’s not what the gapingvoid post says. Because the gapingvoid post envisions that other people exist primarily to measure your own success against, not as people in themselves. The way I read it, it’s saying that getting and spending are not laying waste our powers enough.

Seems like the best charity for the perplexed is a good solid clue, as Hugh offers.

28 ftw; Tom’s credulous simplicity is adorable.

The problem with the cheese story is that you’re actually the one who makes cheese. And then, when the cheese you produced disappears, you’re just supposed to say ‘oh, well, shit happens’. Very convenient for the guy who took it.

On the other hand it pretty accurately describes how self-employed people in creative fields actually work

Or think they work.

How come that last post got through the filter?

Walt, what restrictions on the labor market do you think would help?

Also, surely flexibility would be needed in a more socialist society too?

Shorter Walt: they moved the cheese.

The issue is mainly the definition of creativity as something that does not require one to create anything but the perception that you want to outcreate others, for all values of ‘create’ that are basically about earning more than those others.

Current, a better opening would be “I’m sorry for posting such a trollish comment.”

Since we’re rapidly approaching end-state socialism, where both pharmaceuticals and spam will be illegal anyway, it makes sense to update the filter.

PHB: “Oddly enough the people who cheered on market forces when it was blue collar jobs being lost suddenly change their tune when the information revolution starts to eliminate white collar jobs. ”

I’ve seen this before, from Thomas Friedman. He, of course, was one of the guys who did that cheering on, and told us to cheer it on.

The overwhelming majority of such cheering on that I’ve heard was from the spokespeople for the elites; a minority was from fools who thought that they were immune to such things.

They turned off the filter after you convinced them in the World Cup ref thread that we were better off relying on the caprices of human judgment over technology.

Certainly helps the flow of the thread, doesn’t it?

A similar kind of thing is why I don’t generally read programming blogs. So many of them are filled with queasy-making macho posturing in the guise of professional advice. In place of “here’s a tip that will help you”, it’s “people who do this should be fired”, “any programmer worth his salt will know about Y”, “if you’re not following doctrine Z and thinking about procedure X all your waking hours, I’d never hire you”. The bloggers are talking themselves up and talking everyone else down, and painting a picture of the industry as a brutal tournament in which the winners are the closest approximations to an ideal represented by the author, and all true progress is created by a tiny cadre of super-geniuses.

It’s exaggerated relative to the reality. I like to think I’m a competent programmer and I’ve been fairly successful at it, but I’d never survive in the business if it actually worked according to the standards of these programming bloggers, and most of the best programmers I’ve known wouldn’t either.

@62: “I think the filter isn’t applying to walt and I…”
Should read: “to walt and me”
You’d never write “I think the filter isn’t applying to I,” so don’t write “I think the filter isn’t applying to Walt and I.”
Sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine.

That cheese book is truly horrible. Life’s a maze, the bosses move the cheese at random and if you disagree with the system, you will be unhappy. And it is supposed to be an uplifting message? Apparently, there is even a children’s version.

This is correct. Other points against it: the argument is explicitly that you shouldn’t waste any time thinking about what might have become of the cheese, just run off looking around at random. Strikes against the first part of that ought to be obvious. And the second doesn’t sound like an effective search strategy.

A children’s version would be tantamount to child abuse.

Current, dude, is being impervious to irony your idea of a superpower? Or are you shopping a move script? A pop psych book: “Live without Irony!”?

I see what you mean, I’ve never encountered ironical Anarchism before, I wasn’t prepared.

I think I need a cheese sandwich.

all the luck in the world won’t help a creative if he/she doesn’t have the ability to be, well, creative over the course of their career.

Meet Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light.

@substance mcg:

hell, meet tenure!

Novakant, I would say there is a big difference between delivering constant good quality, and constant reinvention. At least from what I see around me, creative independents tend to do well if they have developed an attractive and reasonably predictable style, so that potential clients have an understanding what they will get. Also, most seem to have a backup of less interesting work of some kind, for when demand for their creative work is lower.

of course, styles and working fields may change over the decades, but that isn’t so deeply different from the career paths of most people.

There are also people who work in fashion-sensitive fields, who always have to worry whether they are losing their edge because the young ones are selling their turntables and buying guitars. But such fields of work have existed since Louis XIV at least.

I am not sure the rest of the economy is really moving away from experience towards year-on-year reinvention. Perhaps it really is, but there a lot of gadget manufacturers and cheese moving executives who have a stake in convincing us of it.

This presupposes, of course, that there is an objective definition of the word ‘creative’, that ‘we’ all agree on that definition, and that ‘everyone’ can instantly spot creativity and rank people (objectively and fairly) in terms of their creative output.

No, just because something has a subjective element to it, doesn’t mean that it is wholly subjective and that there are no discernible differences as far as talent, skill and quality of the output are concerned. If you or I were asked to design an evening gown, a website or a book cover, it would probably suck and people who get paid a lot of money to design such things would very likely do a much better job.

And don’t get me started on my Autumn collection of evening gowns.

So now we know why Van Gogh died penniless. He wasn’t ‘creative’ enough.

‘Back then, it helped a lot to be a young, unattached male with no familial obligations whatsoever. The boss wants you to 80+ hour workweeks for the next three weeks because the specs have changed and rollout is in 25 days? No problem!

If you’re a twenty-something male with no life outside of work except for other twenty-something males, that is.’

Quite. Despite the fantasies of some of the commentators above, most bosses/organisations value being staff who are in the office at 9AM (and who leave at 9PM) far more highly than those who exhibit ‘creativity’ (and so do most clients).

The composer Elisabeth Lutyens, who, amongst other things, did music for films, used to ask the director:

‘Do you want it good, or do you want it by Wednesday?’.

Most bosses want it by Wednesday.

There’s a really important point here, and it”s good because it gives me an opportunity to mention one of my favourite psychological theories, the theory of the Belief in a Just World. This has never really become terribly popular, even amongst psychologists, perhaps because it is too subversive. Anyway, it’s a sub-school of attribution theory, and it deals with explanations for success and failure.

Very briefly, people who believe in a Just World, believe that we live, fundamentally, in a meritocracy, that the people in charge, generally speaking, are good and clever and kind and that if you don’t succeed it’s because you are none of these things. As the key book explicating this theory puts it, this is a ‘fundamental delusion’. But it’s widely believed.

As you might imagine, belief in a just world and right wing politics go together and this (delusory) idea is particularly popular in the United States.

The classic statement of disbelief in a just world is Ecclesiastes:

‘I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.’

Hey, if it’s so ridiculously easy and all creative people are terribly overpaid, why don’t you all consider a career change – you’d be a fool not to …

Yes – one that has us for fools if we don’t want to be terribly overpaid. That quite sums it up.

It depends whether their claims actually bear much resemblance to reality, doesn’t it?

Substance McGravitas,

There’s no real argument whatsoever in what you’ve said. You’re just mudslinging.

There is an uncreative sort of post the Crooked Timber seems to specialise in recently. The process of making it goes something like this:
* Step 1: Find an idea that lefties disagree with.
* Step 2: Search the internet to find it’s most incompetent defender.
* Step 3. Make a post taking the piss out of whatever you’ve found and tar everybody else with the same brush as the incompetent defender you’ve picked.

All this moral hand-wringing over the post-industrial social benefits of creativity is just an intellectual re-hash of the industrial social benefits of productivity.

Oddly enough the people who cheered on market forces when it was blue collar jobs being lost suddenly change their tune when the information revolution starts to eliminate white collar jobs.

Having sub-consciously justified the out-sourcing of blue-collar jobs, they need to re-define the terms of the debate in order to consciously object to the out-sourcing of white-collar jobs.

@104 ejh,

It’s not really so simple. It really depends on counterfactual economic thinking. If group X are protected from uncertainty Y then is that socially beneficial? The answers aren’t immediately obvious.

Alfie?

Ah, the “so easy” bit again.

Hidari@98 – one of the complicating factors is that even if belief in a just world is wrong, it may be personally beneficial to someone to believe it. Ben Goldacre reports an interesting study suggesting that superstitious people do better at tasks because superstition ‘improves confidence, lets you set higher goals, and encourages you to work harder’. In the same way, belief that being ‘creative’ will ensure your success may promote the kind of positive attitude that does benefit workers and job-seekers (or at least help avoid the negative attitude that works against doing well).

The idea that (say) BP’s internal structures work in some magically different way from the much-demonised “inefficient bureaucracy” that Current’s “leftists” are imagined to adore so is beyond silly.

The idea that (say) BP’s internal structures work in some magically different way from the much-demonised “inefficient bureaucracy” that Current’s “leftists” are imagined to adore so is beyond silly.

My direct personal experience of BP’s bureaucracy comes some way to supporting this view. Nice bunch of chaps, though.

Ok, what’s it about then?

Mysterious Things hidden in super-secret leftist jargon that NO LIBERTARIAN CAN PENETRATE. See comments by libertarian Current above.

103: Entrepreneurs and capitalists often have to work to satisfy changing customer demands.

This, this is just hilarious beyond belief! It’s sometimes startling to realize how profoundly ignorant the most strident defenders of capitalism are about its basic principles.

No, Current, “entrepreneurs and capitalists” do not have to “work” to “satisfy” changing customer “demands”. Rather, they pay other people a fraction of their eventual profits to produce, market and eventually sideline ever more objects in order to trick people into thinking there’s something in it for them.

#116 Yes absolutely. Attributional style does have an impact on lifechoices and ‘success’. Also, cf Seligman’s ‘Learned Helplessness’ another branch of attributional theory. The key factor is ‘locus of control’: having an ‘internal’ locus of control is associated with believing in a Just World (especially if you happen to be successful yourself) in the same say that having an ‘external’ locus of control is one of the components of having a ‘depressive’ attributional style which is in turn one of the components of learned helplessness. Superstitious thinking and ‘luckiness’ can also be interpreted in attributional terms. Indeed, cognitive behavioural therapy is also best seen as another branch of attribution theory: it’s really a kind of attributional therapy in which one attempts, through therapy, to change people’s attributional style.

But….one has to be a bit sophisticated here, in a way Seligman sometimes isn’t. It’s very tempting to adopt a ‘one way’ view of attributions, in which attributions cause actions and that’s the end of it. But attributions, attributional style, didn’t arise from nowhere. People have backgrounds, histories, genders, ethnicities, social classes. And we know that one can predict attributional style from some/all of these factors. Seligman tends to see things the wrong way round, IMHO: change your attributional style and Voila! Happiness. But it probably makes more sense to see a negative attributional style as an entirely ‘rational’ response to bad life experiences, which then reinforces that sense of failure. Although I hate to use the word, one has to be ‘dialectical’ here: ‘External’ factors influence attributional style which in turn influence behaviour which in turn changes one’s life choices and standing, which then influences attributional style, and so on.

In any case, it doesn’t alter the fact that people ‘on top’ like to believe that the World is Just (hence their own success) and that people who haven’t achieved riches, power, and fame deserve what they get.

When I mentioned “self-employed people in creative fields” above, I was referring to people working in the Creative Industries. Confusing this common definition with “creative” in the emphatic sense referring to the creation of works with high artistic value is not very helpful in the context.

Have you noticed that people in

# Advertising
# Architecture
# Arts and antique markets
# Crafts
# Design (see also communication design)
# Designer Fashion
# Film, video and photography
# Software, computer games and electronic publishing
# Music and the visual and performing arts
# Publishing
# Television
# Radio

are often not creative and may not in any case have jobs that demand creativity? Or are you referring specifically to people within those industries who are supposed to have the creative ideas?

‘Zick Rubin of Harvard University and Letitia Anne Peplau of UCLA have conducted surveys to examine the characteristics of people with strong beliefs in a just world. They found that people who have a strong tendency to believe in a just world also tend to be more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and more likely to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups. To a lesser but still significant degree, the believers in a just world tend to “feel less of a need to engage in activities to change society or to alleviate plight of social victims.”
Ironically, then, the belief in a just world may take the place of a genuine commitment to justice. For some people, it is simply easier to assume that forces beyond their control mete out justice. When that occurs, the result may be the abdication of personal responsibility, acquiescence in the face of suffering and misfortune, and indifference towards injustice. Taken to the extreme, indifference can result in the institutionalization of injustice. ‘

http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v3n2/justworld.html

Have you just learned that from a book?

I meant success in this field, which to a great extent is based on talent, hard work and the ability to cope with such pressures.

Great extent?

Do me a favour.

All sorts of people succeed in those fields without possessing any noticeable talent (unless we’re engaging in the common circular argument of equating talent with succeed) and without obviously working harder than other people who do not succeed. Nor do they obviously face a struggle to reinvent themselves and stay at yer cutting edge of creativity all the time. (One reason for this, by the way, though far from the only one, is that if you make a lot of money very quickly you don’t actually have to stay at the top for very long. You can spend much of the rest of life sitting in bar and talking about how the current generation have it easy compared to you.)

Really, so much of this is myth and self-image.

> It’s magic! The theory answers all our questions for us! Hurrah!

For empirical evidence I present the USSR.

So, BP’s clusterfuck is OK ‘cuz Bolshies were badder.

when I commented

That would be here.

‘Governments don’t have to compete.’

The not have elections your part of the world, Current?

Current
your argument is wrong in so many ways I don’t really know where to start, but one of the key problems is the theory (apparently widely believed in the libertarian community) that there are two discrete entities, corporations, and ‘Government’ which have nothing to do with each other, and that all we have to do is choose between them. But the reality is that corporate power and state power are completely intertwined.

Insightful trolls would be something out of a horror movie — like the fast zombies in 28 Days Later.

OK, you’ve got me: success in the creative industries is all down to good looks and the willingness to perform sexual favours – it’s awesome!

Hidari @144: many thanks for that link. Here’s an earlier one by Jeremy Scahill in the same genre.

Then a denunciation of the Left-wing Obama Administration’s Interference with The Market ™.

Then a Declaration of Triumph, followed by a False-Bonhomie Good-bye, perhaps even of the Thanks, But I Have to Get to Work, Unlike You Elitist Academicians type.

Followed of course by A Quick Return.

John, since I’ve discussed lots of this stuff before here, why am I being accused of being a troll *now*?

Anyway, why does this blog have comments threads if it’s not interested in critical comments?

Because we’re all bureaucrats!

Current, the reason you are being teased is that your are not presenting “critical comments”. You are just waggling around the most superficial arguments right out of Glibertarianism 101.

current
“What that means is that there need to be laws that ensure that when the external effects of an accident are large the organization responsible and it’s owners pay for the external costs.”

People would rather we not destroy the entire gulf in order for companies to do what they knew they should have done in the first place. and we can’t just allow BP to fail because that would take Britain, who owns most of BP, down with it. That’s the same reason we couldn’t just let Wall Street fail, because it would have thrown us into a global depression. People would have died. People are dying now because of BP’s criminal negligence.

Individuals and companies do not exist in a vacuum. The central fallacy of libertarians is that “I” can exist free of all externalities. I am alone and sufficient unto myself. This is a delusion born of narcissism. You can no more survive on your own than one can separate out corporations from everything else. It cannot be done.

> The problem with that is there is no external measure of what they are competing for.
> Oil company X that invests in extra time, labor and equipment in the prevention of
> disasters and environmentally safe practices is at a competitive disadvantage to oil
> company Y that engages in regulatory capture. If you get to write the legislation then
> you can write it in a way that favors you or your industry.

I don’t know exactly what sort of regulation you would like for the oil industry, or any other industry for that matter. What lots of others on the left propose is stricter regulation of some sort.

I don’t think that that really solves the problem. What’s often forgotten is that the whole area of “regulatory capture” was first pioneered by some quite libertarian leaning economists. They pointed out that a regulatory agency with discretionary powers is more easily corrupted than one without because the discretion may be used as a cover. An agency with fixed rules however must explain why they are waived in particular cases.

I used to work quite a lot with FCC regulation of communications devices. That agency doesn’t suffer from the worst problems of regulators. It at least has rules that are written down. However, the interpretation is very loose. If you get a company A to ask the FCC a question about interpretation then they’ll get a different response to company B. Many of the regulations are unnecessarily complex (european regs are often better).

Rather than employing more staff for regulators and giving them more discretion governments should be moving in another direction. They need to make regulators more like normal courts. Their actions need to be more open to the public and to wider examination. The regulations or laws should be written as to minimize differences of interpretation.

I think that many of these problems don’t have a solution. Adam Smith wrote about how shopkeepers discourage city councils from having open-air markets as a ploy to reduce competition. It’s an eternal problem. But, I think that better law is a large part of the answer, not more government power.

People are dying now because of BP’s criminal negligence.

11 people died because of the negligence of BP and/or its contractors. Nobody is dying now, unless you believe that sea animals are people (mermaids, perhaps?).

Also, I don’t think it’s certain yet that leaving BP liable for all of the externality costs would have left the shareholder nothing.

Indeed, it’s almost certain that it wouldn’t. BP is big, and oil is profitable. Cleaning coastlines and compensating Americans is expensive, but not by comparison to how big BP is and how profitable oil is.

I think there is actually a fairly simple answer to the question posed by Martin@168. It all depends on what you think the function of the exhortations about creativity is, though.

His question is hard to answer if you think that they’re all about giving useful advice that will help everyone make their lives better. But I (along with at least some other people here) think that the actual function is somewhat nastier: I think these exhortations are more about making winners feel good about being winners, giving them a story they can tell themselves about how their good fortune is because they’re better people than the losers, and that they don’t have to feel any sympathy for the others. The world is just, and the unfortunate are necessarily undeserving.

If that’s the case: surely if the one crucial mark of personal virtue is something that isn’t taught, something that you have to create yourself or that’s an innate and unteachable sign of good character, then you can feel even better about yourself when you hear that you must possess such a crucial and meritorious key to success.

Be creative or be fucked is a subset of blaming workers for being insufficiently prepared for personal growth. For the last decade or two there has been a whole industry of books explaining how employment instability is really a thrill-ride of independence. Not having a pension plan is really an opportunity for financial self-direction. Insane work demands are really incentives for self-transformation…blah blah and blah.

It’s no accident that so much business-speak apes New Age gibberish. It’s Calvinism with auras and crystals. The preterite will be passed over for promotion. Spiritually advanced to the head of the line. Wheat meet chaff. The flip side is the capitalist as warrior. Recall all the business travelers reading the Book of Five Rings? Corporate retreats with rappelling (abseiling for the Teutonic) lessons?

Remember, it’s all for your own good and if not it’s your own damn fault.

‘The idea of the rich and successful that there has to be some element in their fortune than good luck is basically like people that find a piece of cheese and think they are now suddenly like Newton.’

The thing that interests me about this is the (pardon my language) ‘cognitive dissonance’ involved. Every time we turned on the TV when George Bush was President we could see that someone who was little better than an imbecile (and a thoroughly nasty person to boot) could get to be the most powerful person on earth. In other words, you had objective evidence that we do not live in a meritocracy, beamed live into your living room.

But then when you go to work you have to forget all that, and pretend that ‘if you are the best person for the job we will hire you’, that promotion is based on merit, and that if you lose your job (or can’t find one) it’s your own fault.

‘ For most of us not in the ‘top performers’ it is kind of OK to realize that lack of success is not an indicator of being an imbecile.’

Absolutely. But my point is that there is a gigantic amount of corporate and state propaganda that attempts to persuade us of the opposite: that if you are not ‘successful’ then it is because you are an imbecile, or because you are ‘lazy’, or not a ‘team player’, or a ‘subversive’ or whatever.

Indeed belief that this is the case is a crucial component of the war on the poor (AKA ‘welfare reform’).

I’m aware of Henry’s injunction at #146, but I’ll give it one last shot.

‘However, your chances of doing well in business and many other things are improved by being hard-working, intelligent, forward looking creative and reliable.’*

Do you have any evidence for this belief? More to the point, what sort of evidence could you conceivably produce to demonstrate it?

And don’t forget: ‘the plural of anecdote is not data’. I have no doubts whatsoever that you, personally, believe that this is true. But some of us require a little more, even with your personal assurance that it’s the case.

*The corolary of this, of course, is that people who are not ‘succesful’, in other words, the poor, are, generally speaking not hard working, intelligent and reliable. This is the quintessence of the right wing belief system.

“‘However, your chances of doing well in business and many other things are improved by being hard-working, intelligent, forward looking creative and reliable.’*”

“Do you have any evidence for this belief? More to the point, what sort of evidence could you conceivably produce to demonstrate it?””

Hidari (and others) – if you don’t believe that (in other words if you think that neither hard work, intelligence, forward-looking creativity [whatever that is] nor reliability improve your chances of doing well in business and many other things), why do you get up in the morning? I’m serious – if the world is either a vast conspiracy or an arbitrary mess of contingencies, why would you do anything ever?

“*The corolary of this, of course, is that people who are not ‘succesful’, in other words, the poor, are, generally speaking not hard working, intelligent and reliable.”

As Current stated it, it isn’t. The corollary would be that people who are not successful may, in some cases, be either not hard working, not intelligent,not forward looking creative [see previous disclaimer] or not reliable, or some combination of the above. Or they may be unlucky or persecuted.

I don’t think ability correlates perfectly with success at all – si monumentum requieris – but the opposite claim that it correlates not at all seems just as bogus, and just as comforting, albeit to different people.

But how do you stop them, without hard work, intelligence, reliability or FLCWTI?

And the moral of the story is, DFTT.

Why do I get up in the morning, even though I don’t think the world is meritocratic? Because I take personal pride in doing a good job, even if that isn’t necessarily rewarded.

So then you do believe that something like hard work, intelligence, forward-looking creativity and/or reliability is helpful in doing a good job at least, for whatever reason you do it? I don’t think that’s inconsistent with modern, or even old-fashioned, capitalism.

Oh, well, if we’re talking about being rewarded as opposed to being succesful, that’s a whole other kettle of fish. But Earnest’s (b) isn’t as trivial as he appears to be saying it is. If you can’t articulate convincingly why what you’ve done is important and how you’ve done it well, isn’t that a hint that you might be deluding yourself about your abilities? (Ability, note, not merit.)

#188 Ignoring the trolls for a second, I think I should be a bit more precise to my objections to the ‘you work hard, you get on’ kinda argument. It’s not really about whether or not we live in a meritocracy. It’s more about the kind of explanation I think is appropriate.

In our, ‘Western’, capitalist society, certain attributional (explanatory) styles are considered plausible or acceptable and others aren’t. For example, poverty, in the ‘West’ (especially in right wing discourse) is considered, usually, as an individualistic phenomenon. In terms of poverty (or ‘success’) one looks for factors within the individual which explain their poverty or riches (‘laziness’, ‘talent’, ‘ability or lack of it’ etc.’).

For better or for worse (probably for worse, actually) I’m part of a different tradition, the Marxist or sociological tradition, which sees things like poverty and wealth etc, as being fundamentally social issues. And so the more useful question is not ‘why is individual X poor’ but, why is there poverty in the first place? Why are certain classes of society poor? Why are certain ethnic groups (or genders) generally speaking, poorer than other ethnic groups? And so on.

That for me really is the issue, and so, even if the trolls were right it wouldn’t really matter, because for me, it would be the wrong sort of question to ask, and ‘individualistic’ answers the wrong kind of answers to give.

For example, see here.

David that’s so clever!

If you can’t articulate convincingly why what you’ve done is important and how you’ve done it well, isn’t that a hint that you might be deluding yourself about your abilities?

Only in sales and maybe politics. Otherwise, what you actually do and convincing people of things are separate skills and being bad at the latter says nothing about your ability at the former.

Articulating clearly what you did may have no effect, or even a negative effect, at convincing a layperson (which, in many cases, includes a manager) of the importance of what you did, even assuming that it’s something that can be articulated clearly in nontechnical terms.

Obviously the details depend a lot on the specifics of the field, but in many cases the people making the reward decisions are not actually well versed in the field and, thus, are not strictly speaking competent to judge the performance of the people whose rewards they are controlling. Worse, they may know and resent it, so anyone who puts technical details in their face may be met with hostility. (And that’s assuming the manager has no a priori bias against you. Not everyone is lucky enough to face that scenario.)

Also, I think Hidari’s point at 189 is an interesting one. If you look at large groups of people, individual-focused explanations seem unconvincing because individual traits should cancel out in the aggregate. So why are there aggregate differences? Either you have to postulate group differences in individual characteristics (i.e. individual members of unsuccessful minorities are more likely to be stupid and lazy — an idea with a long and unpleasant history) or you have to back away from focus on the individual as the nexus of causation and look at group effects as the cause of group outcomes.

I’ve worked in one “creative” industry and had the chance to see the workings of others, both small and large, and it looks to me like the way any other business looks: it’s neither creativity nor luck that really reliably gets one ahead, but the ability to reliably work very hard in the way that pleases one’s superiors. This is almost never deeply creative; it’s a matter of rearranging existing elements and introducing just a few that let one’s superiors feel clever themselves. American business, at least, has gotten very heavily top-down-oriented in recent decades with myths of managerial innovation, and the most successful employees are almost always those whom their bosses can portray as fulfilling the boss’s vision.

There is always a push in lots of businesses for what’s called innovation or creativity, but it’s pretty much always a matter of repackaging. This can be a valid work – figuring out how better to convey existing stuff is not dishonorable, after all. But it’s way, way far removed from all the blather about creative uber-souls routinely transforming the world.

I think the points are these:

a. whatever the precise balance between fortune and effort, far too much emphasis is put on the latter and its relative importance is vastly overstated ;

b. at a time when many people are likely to lose their jobs (or have lost them already) and the present and future conditions of many people in jobs are likely to be seriously downgraded, being told it’s all our responsibility to be 24/7 flexible creatives is somewhere between tiresome and offensive.

EJH: Yes on both, but I want to emphasize about your A that it also matters what kind of effort does or does not reliably contribute to success. There are a lot of people succeeding at things I…I don’t know where I fall sometimes on the spectrum from “can’t” to “won’t”, because I stop at the outset, finding myself unwilling to put much effort into some kinds of activity at all. But it’s not a mater of thinking that successful New Corporate Men are lazy – it’s that they’re working hard at something I don’t find worthy of respect or admiration.

the generous welfare state

Where’s my gong?

(lifted from Parapundit)
Businessweek article pertinent to the discussion.

>>Former Intel CEO Andy Grove has written a piece arguing that the US is losing a long term competitive advantage by outsourcing so much manufacturing abroad.

Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000, lower than it was before the first PC, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975. Meanwhile, a very effective computer manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers—factory employees, engineers, and managers. The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenues last year were $62 billion, larger than Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Dell (DELL), or Intel. Foxconn employs over 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Intel, and Sony (SNE) (figure-C).

Foxconn will inevitably end up doing more steps of the value generation process. Some of the companies now using Foxconn will get wiped out by Foxconn.

In an earlier era a successful American company like Apple would have generated a large number of American jobs. Nowadays a successful American company generates a large number of Chinese jobs for a different company.

Some 250,000 Foxconn employees in southern China produce Apple’s products. Apple, meanwhile, has about 25,000 employees in the U.S. That means for every Apple worker in the U.S. there are 10 people in China working on iMacs, iPods, and iPhones. The same roughly 10-to-1 relationship holds for Dell, disk-drive maker Seagate Technology (STX), and other U.S. tech companies.

You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work—and much of the profits—remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?

Plus, we make it worse by importing millions of low skilled peasants from Mexico and Central America. How stupid are we? Very stupid. Our political leadership and opinion makers are incredibly foolish.

Grove says the ratio of money spent to jobs created has soared. Silicon Valley has ceased to be a jobs creation machine for Americans. The cost of that job creation has gone from a few thousand dollars initially invested per eventual job created to $100k per job.

Grove says that we are losing the technological ecosystems needed to stay on the technological edge. The innovations for improving manufacturing efficiency end up being made abroad. Engineers in America effectively cease to be in the loop. We can’t stay on the cutting edge in design and product development or in the development of manufacturing equipment if we have no manufacturing industry. He criticizes economists who think that the work moving abroad has a low value added. Grove sees the models of economists as overly simplified and not how the real world works.
<<

I would like to emphasize one point: leave aside the manufacturing assembly that has either been directly outsourced by American companies or manufacturing processes that were never even planned to be seated in America (nor in Europe for that matter) due to the trade agreements that have permitted barely obstructed trade in manufactures, throughout the nineties and aughts in America we were subject to endless hectoring by business, political (the left as well as the right), opinion and ethnic interests that America needed to import hundreds of thousands of engineers yearly or the information technology industry would "collapse".

And so this is the result: no net gains in computer manufacturing employment in 35 years. I am sure that the software universe has grown, but not by nearly as much as free trade boosters assert. The globalists (catch-all term for those who support unrestricted trade, movement of workers and immigration) lied. They are frauds.

What we have accomplished in America since the mid nineties is the displacement of the American technology worker with imported labor, largely from India and China. And some people are just fine with that. They trot out the usual bull lines: the American worker is lazy, not hungry enough, not creative enough, not adaptable, and besides, national rights are so outdated, why they are downright fascist………….some of this has been elaborated on above. Yet, I get the sense that the Crooked Timber crowd is not at all sympathetic to the American (or European) worker in the actual case, largely because she is so wedded to globalization and utterly contemptuous of any sense of national economic rights actually accruing to the citizenry(as long as such rights apply to westerners). Puzzling? Not at all.

I believe strongly in international cooperation, but what is so wrong about putting the interests and rights of your own workers first, ahead of the interests of citizens of other countries? Isn't this a normal response? Only westerners have a problem with this. Anyway, somewhere, somehow a political force will arise that will make such rights and interests front and center. Watch out.

What I read was a man inspiring himself and others to keep going in difficult times.

That’s because you’re an idiot.

For empirical evidence I present the USSR.

The USSR is empirical evidence for your Child’s Little Golden Book notion of capitalism?

This will surprise no one.

> The USSR is empirical evidence for your Child’s Little Golden Book notion of
> capitalism?
>
> This will surprise no one.

My point was about the efficiency of bureaucracies. The USSR demonstrates the problems with them.

I’m not saying that any measure of socialism necessarily leads to something like the USSR. Or that the USSR was a democratic country and can be compared to social democratic countries.

My point was about the efficiency of bureaucracies. The USSR demonstrates the problems with them.

My point was that your pathetic notion of evidence explains why you’re a waste of space.

Hidari (and others) – if you don’t believe that (in other words if you think that neither hard work, intelligence, forward-looking creativity [whatever that is] nor reliability improve your chances of doing well in business and many other things), why do you get up in the morning? I’m serious – if the world is either a vast conspiracy or an arbitrary mess of contingencies, why would you do anything ever?

You’re making a qualitative mistake here, as well as committing the fallacy of bifurcation. There are not two alternatives – it’s all random or it’s all skill – but rather a continuum. If getting ahead is 80% skill and hard work and only 20% work, I would guess that most people would find that incentive enough to diligently beaver away if they really wanted to “get ahead”. Reverse those percentages so that it’s 80% luck as opposed to 20%, and you’ll see a different response. Note that all other things being equal you stand a better chance of getting ahead, statistically speaking, by working harder. But that really doesn’t mean a lot when placed in this context either, does it?

Popular music nailed this one some time ago:

The rising moon faces the sickening sun,
as the lights in the tower blocks go on, one by one,
A big shot, overlooking this black iron skyline–
Surrounded by his symbols of prosperity–
Sits back in his new leather chair
ripped off the back of some unfortunate beast.
I’m smiling through my teeth.
Anybody can be a millionaire,
so everybody’s gotta try
but by the laws of this human jungle
only the heartless will survive.
& down there–but for the grace of god
–go I.

Twilight of a Champion –The The

and even earlier of course:

T’ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It)

There is a tendency for people to assume that the system needs to solve one set of problems while morality demands that individuals solve another. Thus libertarian types think it is important that society allows presumably talented individuals to receive unlimited rewards but rely on morality to stop the rest of us resorting to pitch forks and tumbrels, here that means current and metamorf I think. For more left wing people society must look after the weak and morality dictates that the rest of us bear the burden. I think that is for example implicit in Hidari’s 189:

That for me really is the issue, and so, even if the trolls were right it wouldn’t really matter, because for me, it would be the wrong sort of question to ask, and ‘individualistic’ answers the wrong kind of answers to give.

As the framing suggests I don’t think either can be the whole story.

#218 No that’s not my point at all. My point was epistemological not ontological, in this particular instance.

However I can also produce a lot of empirical evidence that viewing Man as, in the ‘core of his being’ a social creature is a better way of looking at him than ‘individualistic’ approaches. (excuse the sexist pronouns).

Then I’m misreading you at 177, and I apologise.

That doesn’t preclude caring for the less fortunate

Of course!

Likewise, there’s no agreed-upon way to determine what ‘the rest of us’ contributed to the profitability of an operation.

Sure there is — it’s your salary. If you’re “ubiquitous” then you really aren’t contributing much that couldn’t be found elsewhere. But — and it’s just a suggestion — you could try distinguishing yourself by, oh, say, “creativity”? Reliability? Initiative? Judgment?

Or, you could take your own advice and try deflecting blame and sticking your nose up your boss’s ass. You can find both kinds of models.

I always think that if people wish to be measured by their money, they can talk to their money and see if it tells them how great they are. Talk to human beings though, and we may find they use rather more human criteria.

Sure there is—it’s your salary.

I had no idea Bernie Madoff was so productive!

There is a sense in which salary *in an ideal perfectly informed economy with no principal-agent problems* would reflect actual productivity, but since we don’t live in that world, salary is a very imperfect guide to value, at best.

And that’s not even getting into all the ways an individual’s productive capacity is determined by things other than that individual’s choices, and therefore isn’t earned in a moral sense. Anyone can choose to produce less than they are capable of, but they can’t choose to produce more, so how is it just to limit their rewards for reasons beyond their control?

Many people are productive because they have received scarce and valuable training, or because they are in a position that allows them to be highly productive because they are the focus of a large collaborative organization (doctors, for example, on both counts), so what does it mean to say that they are highly productive and everyone else in the organization is not? Isn’t that a rather myopic view of the causation involved?

# 230

Well I don’t know about the data about pay within companies, but it’s well known that there is little or no relationship between the performance of a company and CEO pay.

http://ideas.repec.org/p/bri/cmpowp/05-122.html

The Randroid answer to noen@160 is that the hypothetical maintenance mogul might have tried to accomplish a task requiring great personal character, organization, and leadership skills, but such an immoral person could not have succeeded.

I do recommend the cheese book, and don’t skip the reading group transcript appendix at the end, either. It’s right up there with Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.

@ 232 Chris Johnson,

> On the whole, I think they do. That’s not a claim to any sort of higher morality among
> folks I know, just my own observation. And I don’t think my observation is a unique
> or even unusual one.

I used to think that too. Now I’m much more sceptical.

Remember, what we’re really discussing here is the contribution that people make to society as a whole. What I’ve noticed amongst my friends is that the ones who are held in highest regard by others are the ones that are best at selling themselves. It’s often the ones who are most charismatic. Also, normally nobody really aims to find out what their friends do for others it’s something they only find out incidentally in the process of getting to know them. What people are most concerned with is how they are seen and how their friends will treat them.

As others have pointed out charisma and the ability to sell yourself helps with work. I’d argue that it also helps even more in social situations. Because, in normal social exchanges these days situations that require trust or judgement of it don’t crop up very often. When they do they’re often very minor in nature.

Let me try again:

Likewise, there’s no agreed-upon way to determine what ‘the rest of us’ contributed to the profitability of an operation.

Sure there is—it’s your salary. If you’re “ubiquitous” then you really aren’t contributing much that couldn’t be found elsewhere. But—and it’s just a suggestion—you could try distinguishing yourself by, oh, say, “creativity”? Reliability? Initiative? Judgment?

Oh really? So then Angelo Mozilo (Countrywide), Rick Wagoner (GM), and Richard Fuld (Lehman Bros.) demonstrated contributions to the profitability of their respective companies to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation? And you know this because their remuneration was measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars?

Isn’t that a bit, um, circular? And contrary to the facts, Given that Countrywide, GM, and Lehman Bros. collectively lost billions of dollars?

Care to elaborate on this rather odd stance of yours, perhaps fill in the gaps for the rest of us?

David, the point is I wasn’t actually agreeing with Henry. In fact, I wasn’t responding to the substance of what he wrote at all. I was just making a small joke with reference to George Orwell. Also, I don’t know who you are and I have no interest in the ‘arguments’ you have expressed in this thread or any other thread. So responding to my comment with another rendition of ‘you group-thinking librul academics Can’t Handle The Truth’ is really moronic.

Are you saying there in no correlation between ability and income? Or are you just saying that there is none for the “creative class” or CEOs? Certainly I’d like to know for those groups. But the answer to the general question in obvious. Does whether you can and do work the checkout at Tesco properly affect your income from it? Of course it does.

Um, there’s this bit to the scientific method known as “burden of proof”. And that’s on you to show the causal connections and degree of correlation. If you want to maintain both are high, well, let’s see your evidence. I take it though that you agree that for those at the very top, the system is broken, and that there is little correlation between pay and performance, or if you like, pay and ability.

Hard Facts, by Pfeffer and Sutton (which I’ve actually read) sums up most of the objective scientific evidence about how capitalism actually works. It’s available on Google Books. It demonstrates that the ‘individualist’ approach to corporate success is a lot of crap. Paying ‘good’ people more than ‘bad’ people doesn’t work because, as I pointed out, these are inherently subjective phenomena and in any case vary over time. Performance related pay is another crock of shit. Even if it did work, which it doesn’t, managers wouldn’t be the best person to administer such a system because managers are no better at spotting ‘good’ people than anyone else (au contraire: managers like people who kiss their ass). Firing people who can’t ‘perform’ is invariably a disaster for the company. Good people don’t get promoted more than ‘bad’ people in any company because these phrases have no agreed upon objective meaning. As I pointed out, in one of the few circumstances where there are objective criteria for success (the performance of a company and its relationship to CEO pay) there is no link between pay and performance. And so on.

This is one of those debates that goes round and round, though I think it obvious from recent, unpunished, spectacular failures that meritocracy does not apply at the top. Let’s look at a counter-factual. Suppose all people were about equally talented, diligent, educated, motivated, etc., for the jobs for which they were applying? Would there still be a disparity of outcomes? Of course. Due to chance? In part, but also due to the structural requirements of the system. You cannot have a competition with only winners, so maintaining a system of competition requires losers, in a pinch arbitrary losers. So even if the meritocracy is real, and I think there is some truth to it, removing it would not change the basic situation.

It is official government policy in the United States and most if not all other AIS’s to maintain unemployment, theoretically as a brake on inflation. The economy is manipulated, chiefly by central banks, to maintain this. Currently, the US and others have higher unemployment than their targets, but are declining expansionary policies sufficient of overcome it, rightly or wrongly. Given all that, it is silly to hold the unemployed responsible in a deep sense for their own plight. A competitive system requires losers, our particular system requires losers in the form of unemployed people, and current policy requires high unemployment as a means to other ends. None of that is due to the actions of the unemployed.

When I leave the house I am well advised to lock my door but there is no reason for me to be pleased about that. Or more graphically it might be good advice not to bend over in the shower if I am sent to jail but that doesn’t mean that nothing should be done about rape in prisons does it?

It is quite possible that many people will run into trouble if they carry on as they are but that is not a good thing. It is also possible that some of them, if they read enough Tom Peters books or whatever may be able to avoid that fate. Unfortunately that is no reason to believe that if all of them did whatever it is that they are supposed to do that all or even most of them would be able to succeed. Those who don’t become creovative self actuating media millionaires will still have lives to lead. Moreover all the effort put into the rat race doesn’t come for free. All the effort that would have gone into other things that would not necessarily have been invaluable.

It might be worth pausing for a moment to think who is in practice ‘ubiquitous’. Nurses are a good candidate. Should they all be desperately trying to think of something else to do?

All this talk of correlation between talent effort and success is silly. I’m sure that for most convincing measurements of such concepts there may be a correlation but I also believe that there would have been some correlation in Nazi Germany and in Soviet Russia and that there will be other correlations, perhaps with parental wealth for example.

Is it just me or has Metamorf in the worryingly numbered post 222 established that my stereotype is not an empty set? The state must provide a certain type of property law and morality means we must live within that. We can go right ahead and care about the poor but it will be through charity, trickle-down, provision of the correct incentives and possibly distribution of of appropriately bracing self-help manuals. It will however not be the duty of the state or at least not if it interferes with the main priority which is the preservation of a certain kind of property right.

Just to even things up on the popular music front: sometimes “What have you done for me lately?” is a valid question.

I’m an atheist, actually, and so I don’t beleive that there’s a divine perspective from which we can discern what any particular indiviual ought to earn in the grand scheme of things (and even if I wasn’t an atheist, I wouldn’t presume to believe I had a pipeline to such a perspective). Lacking that, the concept of “earning” comes down to the concept of what someone is willing to pay—for your goods or your services. So, since the CEO’s were willingly paid by those authorized to dispense the monies, yes, they earned their salaries. I’m not happy with that myself, but then I’m not a shareholder in their companies.

So the usual next question on the money-go-round is, why were CEO’s willingly paid those munificent sums by those authorized to dispense the moolah? ‘Just because’? Because the dispensers new these worthies were going to cost the company billions of dollars?

There’s got to be some justification for giving these chieftains so much money, so just what is it? That is what I’m getting at with rather odd stance bit.

Most ‘management’ books do nothing more than carefully stroke the ego of the reader.

in a market society this *is* creativity. Coming up with new ways to please your customer.

There’s got to be some justification for giving these chieftains so much money, so just what is it? That is what I’m getting at with rather odd stance bit.

I don’t know, Scent. A mistake? Poeple make mistakes, right? Collusion? But, barring criminal activity, that’s up to the people whose money they lost to look to. As I say, these things don’t make me any happier than you, and I don’t even own any shares.

If someone told me they agreed that power relations were everywhere, and also said that anything acquired in an exchange relationship deserves the appellation ‘earned’, well, I would be stymied. Maybe my boat is rising too fast, I get lightheaded when that happens.

Shorter Metamorf: You can’t do anything about it. So it must be okay then.

Not at all — you’ve misunderstood me. You can set your own goals and achieve things that might surprise you if you tried. So try.

Metamorf – you clearly have a view of the world that is readily comprehensible and coherent. Just one question: are you sure you get enough air, living down there in that basement all the time?

There’s got to be some justification for giving these chieftains so much money, so just what is it? That is what I’m getting at with rather odd stance bit.

I don’t know, Scent. A mistake? Poeple make mistakes, right? Collusion? But, barring criminal activity, that’s up to the people whose money they lost to look to. As I say, these things don’t make me any happier than you, and I don’t even own any shares.

I’m not asking whether the people doling out the money and willingly paying these executives millions or hundreds of millions of dollars made a mistake. I’m asking why they would want to pay these executives this much money in the first place. There’s got to be some reason more substantial than “I liked the cut of his jib”, right? Let me ask this a different way: Suppose Angelo Mozilo’s contract was up for renewal on July 1, 2008. Do the people who willingly paid him such huge sums before offer essentially the same contract again, or do they change it? And if they change it, how do they change it, and why?

Iow, if I ask someone why they are offering me $80,000 for my teaching for the 2010-2011 academic year, I don’t think that they would reply “because that’s how much we’re willing to pay you”. Agreed? Now, back to the original question, why were those executives willingly paid those munificent sums by the people authorized to dispense the money? Could we have some answer that’s not a variant of ‘because’?

My answer isn’t a variant of “because”. My answer is, I don’t know. I assume that the money was willingly paid, but if not then, as far as I can see, it could only be because there was either state or criminal involvement (or, I suppose, both)—in which case, I withdraw my claim that the money was in any way earned.

Come now. This sort of obtuseness does not become you. Are you seriously maintaining that the people who set Mozilo’s compensation had no idea why they did it? That they didn’t think that he wouldn’t benefit the company more than it cost to compensate him?

Please. Just answer the question. If you refuse, I’m going to have to go with dismissing anything else you have to say on the grounds that you’re simply not to be taken seriously.

Engels at 239 – ? I wasn’t responding to your comment at all; I was responding to Hidari’s mirroring the form of yours (pace Orwell).

There was a good article in the LRB recently about how, even in sports (where ability should be far more ‘objective’ than in business) it’s almost completely impossible to identify who is good at their job, and why, therefore, salaries don’t really bear that much relation to ability (assuming there is a static thing we possess called ‘ability’ which there isn’t). . This is because managers simply don’t understand the basic laws of probability, the reversion to the mean, the fact that ability is subjective, context specific, and varies over time, the role of blind luck in ‘success’ and so forth.

Needless to say, it’s almost certain that things are much much worse in business.

‘In the United States, there has been a lot of serious academic research – and some not so serious – into the curious phenomenon of the Hot Hand. In all sports, there are moments when an individual player or whole team suddenly gets hot, and starts performing way beyond expectations…What the research shows is that all this – the sense of destiny, the effect it has on a player’s confidence, the virtuous circle – is an illusion. Exhaustive analysis of the data has revealed that making a sequence of three-point baskets has almost no bearing on the likelihood of making the next one, which remains determined by a player’s basic skill level (some players are more likely to make the shot than others, but that is just because they are consistently better at it, not because they are intermittently Hotter). What we experience as the Hot Hand is simply a result of the random distribution of chance, which determines that some players, inevitably, will string together a successful series of shots, just as if you get enough people tossing a coin, some of them will get heads 20 times in a row. We believe these sequences reflect a kind of destiny only because we are predisposed to remember the occasions when the sequence seemed to go on for ever, and forget all those other occasions when a promising little sequence went kaput….’

Does Mourinho ‘deserve’ his (gigantic) salary? The fact is that it’s very difficult to answer that question because it’s almost impossible to separate the effects he produces that originate from him, that originate from the situation or the team or the players, and that are due simply to blind luck.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n01/david-runciman/he-shoots-he-scores

We also know for a fact that no financial forecaster (in the world, in any circumstance) ‘deserves’ their salary because the stock market is inherently unpredictable and all their predictions are all, in all circumstances, invariably worthless. Indeed, this is a classic job, not just that ‘anyone’ could do, but that ‘anyone’ could do better than the ones who actually do it. Indeed, experiments have been done that prove that children and animals can do it better than the ‘professionals’. But these people are still paid a fortune.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1235304.stm

CF also the ‘Nothing Succeeds Like Success’ thread, especially comment number 24.

Is there some sort of prize for CT Troll of the Decade? Because if there is I think we have a winner.

# 272 Yeah it’s important to not go overboard about this. For example it’s just an objective fact that Usain Bolt can run faster than me. But running is unusual in that it’s not a team sport and there is a completely ‘objective’ way of gauging ability.

But once you do go into the ‘team sports’ issue then things become a lot more complex, and when you go into even more nebulous abilities like ‘management’ then things become almost infinitely complex.

there is no objective way to rank ability.

Yet in #92 you rank your design ability above all those who are getting paid for it …

So, since the CEO’s were willingly paid by those authorized to dispense the monies, yes, they earned their salaries. I’m not happy with that myself, but then I’m not a shareholder in their companies.

But principal-agent problems in CEO pay are notorious — doesn’t that undermine the concept of “willingly” as it applies to the shareholders, just as much as it does for Madoff’s investors?

Nobody doubts that CEOs have an excellent ability to convince people to pay them (voluntarily in at least some sense) large amounts of money. But so do con artists, and you don’t consider their incomes earned. If the CEO isn’t actually contributing equivalent value to the company, but convinces the shareholders he is and/or pulls strings on the compensation committee, how is his case really different from Madoff’s?

I propose we start with getting rid of all public employees that keep in existence a system which allows CEO’s per se not to enter into unwilling exchanges of goods – and/or services for sure – with people not receiving monies anymore out of their corporations pockets ;-)

So the collective actions of shareholders are voluntary (and binding on the minority of dissenting shareholders), but the collective actions of voters aren’t?

Less so, certainly — it’s a good deal harder to leave the state than to sell one’s shares.

The people of a representative democracy voluntarily, through their elected representatives, assess taxes against themselves, enforce tax compliance against free riders among their own ranks when necessary, and voluntarily decide how to spend those tax dollars. “Simply taken from people’s pockets” is highly misleading and inflammatory language.

This is getting us back to that “Child’s Little Golden Book” level. Constitutional representative democracy is the best we’ve been able to do so far in terms of figuring out how to manage a state at all, but it’s curious to see someone so concerned with quasi-fraud in business so unconcerned with the same when it comes to an organization with a monopoly on force. “Simply taken from people’s pockets” is simply an accurate description of what actually occurs.

You really doubt that, say, firefighters in general provide any useful service in exchange for their taxpayer-funded salaries?

No, firefighters are fine. I had academics in mind.

As for “recurring mistakes based on systematic irrationalities of human psychology ” — these apply to everyone, including politicians, bureaucrats, regulators, activists, and yes, even academics. This is why the world isn’t perfect, ideal, or optimal. Market prices aren’t a measure of some Platonic notion of Value — they’re simply a measure of approximate value to the participants in the market, which is the best we can do in the real world.

Is there some sort of prize for CT Troll of the Decade? Because if there is I think we have a winner.

Indeed. If you click on Metamorf’s name, you’ll find yourself reading a post on Elena Kagan that (1) misspells her name and (2) cites Ann Althouse in order to (3) beat up on the “global warming fad.” All without scrolling down. Quite a performance.

Metamorf, what is your goal here? To prove that it is epistemologically or metaphysically possible to hold your set of views? To argue that the laws and government should be more like what your views say they should be? To argue that the laws and government are like what your views say they should be? Or what? Just to force people who disagree with you to justify their beliefs out where you can see them?

I see you weren’t blogging when Sotomayor was nominated for the Court. If you had been, the firefighter example might have triggered some kind of apparent recognition of relevance.

Once again, bianca, you ask some good questions. I don’t think I’m trying to force people to do anything — I started out taking issue with some things being said in a couple of threads, and I think it’s clear that I’m starting from a point of view quite different from the majority here. I certainly don’t have any idea of proving that point of view “is epistemologically or metaphysically possible”, though obviously I think it must be. Anyway, I see that one of my posts, at least, is “awaiting moderation”, and I take that as a sign that I’ve overstayed my welcome. I’ll leave you to your more congenial conversation, but come visit metamorphoses if you’re ever inclined.

I’m fascinated by how much more trust Metamorf freely grants to senior executives and corporate boards than to journalists. The juxtaposition is illuminating.

I keep forgetting about the wonky posting forms here. Let me try again:

That they didn’t think that he wouldn’t benefit the company more than it cost to compensate him?

Well, there you go, then—that’s why they did it. Isn’t that a reasonable reason? I don’t know myself why they couldn’t have gotten someone cheaper, but then I’m not in their shoes and don’t know what they do.

Gotcha. Iow – as you have just admitted – what they are paying for is “added value”, that supposedly discredited Commie formulation that always gets trotted out to justify executive pay. So no, even according to you, value is not defined as “what people are willing to pay for.”

What you are doing, in fact, is (deliberately) confusing the measure with the measured. It’s as if you insisted that the time is always 2:10 because the reference clock has stopped with the hands frozen at that time, or that the temperature was a balmy 72 degrees Fahrenheit because that’s what your thermometer showed . . . even after it was pointed out to you that by looking outside the window you can see two feet of snow on the ground and a ring of solid ice in the birdbath.

And this is in fact the usual idiot right-wing talking point workers are worth just that much because that is how much someone is willing to pay them – a tautology – which is then thoughtlessly tossed aside when all sorts of justifications for executive pay in the face of catastrophic failure are trotted forth.

I harp on this because this is my pet diagnosis for what’s Wrong With Everything:

The Labor Markets Are Broken.

Fix those, and I suspect that once again the United States would be a pretty comfortable place to live.

SoV: Only it is, unfortunately, not just a “right-wing talking point[s].” Liberals (the kind who won’t take their own side in a fight, the American-style not-quite-progressive but decidedly at least center-left kind of liberal, not Mrs Tilton’s British or European kind) do seem inclined often to confuse the measure with the measured, to assume that what someone is willing to pay for what you have to offer (as a proxy for how much what you have to offer is valued) is what what you have to offer is worth, and to assume things pretty much work. And that is annoying. But what the right really says, as you can see by reading Ross Douthat once in a while, is that the playing field is tilted towards the rich and the rest of play on their sufferage, true value of what you have to offer as it may be.

Maybe this is because in the US liberalism has become dominant. But in that case, when the right argues that we ought to pursue right-wing values because the dominant class has right-wing beliefs, they are incoherent. I suspect they just switch the signs whenever their logic points them in the wrong direction.

If you click on the link below you see why all this matters: rich idiots (all of whom are convinced they are geniuses and that, to coin a phrase, there is a direct and positive ‘correlation between ability and income’, and that therefore people who have gigantic incomes must therefore have gigantic abilities), to repeat, rich idiots telling other rich idiots lots of idiotic things in front of an audience of even more rich idiots, who mindlessly applaud.

And what idiotic things do these rich idiots have to say to other rich idiots? Why that people who are not-rich must be not-rich because they are stupid and lazy (but mostly lazy) and that, therefore, their benefits must be cut, whereas the main problem facing the rich is that they pay far too much in tax, and that, come to think of it, they should really be running the country.

On account of the correlation between ability and income.

Warning: this article contains the words Niall Ferguson.

http://www.salon.com/news/us_economy/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/07/07/rich_people_know_best

@246:

The second problem is that the jobs for which productivity is considered a gauge for ability have gone into a steep decline. So what if as a grocery checker you move customers through the line 40% than average and the most your drawer is ever off is five cents – that’s not going to get you a raise or put you on the track to management. contrast this with stories my dad tells me of people advancing on the strength that their brake drum assemblies were noticeably better than average.

Is it possible that the reverse could be true? That in some circumstances there is a negative correlation between ability and remuneration?

Nobody has mentioned the “Peter Dilbert Principle” yet. A good brake drum assembly worker is suited to a position in which he makes brake drum assemblies. A useless brake drum assembly worker is better suited to a middle management position where he can cause fewer class action lawsuits.

This comment makes no sense.

It makes perfect sense: claiming that there is no objective way to rank ability while ranking your own ability (“invariably better”) above that of others (“crap”) doesn’t make sense.

Sigh. There’s another word you haven’t considered that’s similar in construction to “objective”. Here’s a hint: It starts out “sub” . . .

Do you really need to be led by the hand like this? Or are you just being deliberately obtuse? There seems to be a lot of that going around lately.

Fix those, and I suspect that once again the United States would be a pretty comfortable place to live.

The United State is a pretty comfortable place to live. Most spacious housing on average in the world, sweet weather on the West Coast, the world’s best summer hideouts on Cape Cod and in the Vineyard, and so on.

Slightly off-topic: Bianca @293: when you say that “Maybe this is because in the US liberalism has become dominant”, I assume you are using “liberalism” in the European sense. But why then, “has become”? Wasn’t it always? Sure, we’ve had a little more variety in the past, but only on the margins.

Red @ 303
No, I mean “liberalism” in the American sense: more or less what Europeans call welfare state liberalism, a little less enthusiastic than progressivism and with decided differences on a few issues. The kind of liberalism that cost Michael Dukakis the election in 1988. The New Deal and Civil Rights Act are the law of the land, the idea of the “liberal media” is overblown but there is some truth to it, teachers at all levels and in most kinds of schools are liberal in a very broad sense (probably shading towards neoconservatism in a lot of a cases in the public schools, but all the same), and so forth.

@305: I’m speechless. Do you really believe that? Liberalism is dominant in the US? Liberal media? Just stunned that you buy into this.

308
You do realize that the US is the only major developed country without universal healthcare?

And is without mandatory coffee breaks for employees?
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2010/06/breaking-points

And has among the worst maternity/paternity leave policies in the developed world?
http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/parental_2008_09.pdf
http://www.inc.com/news/articles/200702/family.html

That has imprisoned a huge proportion of its male African American population?
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0881455.html

And has one of the highest levels of inequality in the developed world?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States

And executes more people than any other developed country?
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_exe-crime-executions

Almost half of which are African American?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States

And you still think you live in a country where the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act are dominant? (Though I give you more credit than most conservatives. At least you didn’t try and steal credit for the Civil Rights Act)

Like I said: What world are you living in?
I want to go there.

OK novakant
if it makes you feel better you should feel at liberty to decide my book and web design skills are non-existent ok?

ScentofViolets gets it entirely right. Whereas some skills are purely objective (the ability to run fast, for example) most are a mixture of subjectivity and objectivity. For example, it’s on objective fact that I can use DreamWeaver, but its a subjective ‘fact’ (if you want to use that phrase) that my webpages are ‘good’. I would argue that they are, but of course other people might disagree.

Right. The perception of color is definitely subjective; nevertheless, most people most of the time would agree that, say, this particular apple is green and not red. Iow, the two chief complaints of subjective ratings, a) that they are not accurate, and b) that they are not consistent don’t, upon further reflection, appear to be as decisive as all that.

Take, for example, subjective impressions of performance (which don’t seem to be that transferable across disciplines :-)

One example: Many, many years ago I had a few friends who supported themselves by essentially grading essays, critiquing them on grammar and syntax, form, style, and exposition and content, and then assigning each paper with a single numeric score (iirc, on a scale of one to six.)

Now, you’d think that being “subjective”, the evaluations of the papers would show some variance, one grader giving a particular essay a 4, another grader giving it a 3, yet another rating it as a 6, and so on. But in fact, there was very little variance. If one grader assigned a 4, the long odds were that so would the other two (not surprisingly, when there was variance, it tended to be at the extremes, 1 vs 2 paper, or a 5 vs 6 one.)

Iow, whatever one might say about the accuracy of these assessments, at least they were consistent. And, funny thing that, but as in so many other things the subjective rating of a particular student on their abilities to write clearly, concisely, and coherently seemed to be more accurate – not less – than any “objective” assessments, say of the sort where you bubble in your answers on a scantron form. The usual caveats apply of course: while these subjective assessments may be more accurate, they are definitely more expensive, and require more man-hours to administer. And of course, they are more easily abused than the other, more impersonal rating systems. Those last two seem to be the main objections of those who oppose “merit pay” in any of a number of professions.

Those last two seem to be the main objections of those who oppose “merit pay” in any of a number of professions.

I thought your line of thinking made perfect sense until I read that sentence, and alarm bells started ringing. You know, subjective evaluation much better when in high-level situations than in low-level ones. You can tell if a guy is Harvard material on a subjective level very easily, but when it comes to differentiating between UMass Amherst and UMass Boston the objective evaluation becomes very much sufficient.

I’m not sure what you’re saying here because I don’t understand the Amherst/Boston reference. If you’re talking about some sort of minimum standards, say, basic grammar and punctuation, sure, machine scoring is perfectly adequate. But that’s not the usual situation when talking about productivity or “creativity”, or so I would think.

That’s the difference between teaching and any of the other number of professions where merit pay is, well, not a meritorious method of evaluation.

Again, I’m not sure what you’re talking about here. I do know that there is a very strong consensus within the circle of people actually teaching who is good and who is not, and who is perfectly atrocious. And I also know that there isn’t a good match up between these ratings and the administration’s assessments of the exact same people.

Would it surprise you in the slightest that the “trouble makers” are rated significantly lower by the administration than their own peer’s estimations, or that the so-called “trouble makers” are often exactly those who are the most committed to their teaching and are determined that their students learn something in their classes :-(

That seems to be a very valid criticism against merit pay, at least insofar as the teaching profession is concerned. I have no doubt that there is a similar dynamic in play in most other job environments.

Bianca@308. No, I don’t want to be rude. If you believe that liberalism has become “dominant” in the US, please consider this:
tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/07/shocking-poll-55-percent-of-voters-think-obamas-a-socialist.php?ref=fpb

@cripes

This “bizniz” you speak of is remarkable for those reasons not because of “bizniz” but because of the millions of American consumers who voluntarily and happily demand their fast food, sweet SUVs, and state of the art medicine. Voluntary exchange, free markets, it’s a beautiful thing and if you don’t care for the result I suggest you change consumer attitudes that drive these consumption bundles. Or the various government/market failures that produce externalities or perverse incentives and such.

I’m tired of hearing the tired trope about government efficiency with Medicare. Yes, they can write checks very efficiently. Shocker, the government can spend a lot of money. But imagine health insurance company X: they hire an administrative team to educate their consumers about low-cost and less-invasive end of life care, market free gym memberships, educate about lower-cost health care, advise regarding better nutrition. These wouldn’t be “health care dollars” and would be considered “overhead”. At the end of the day, no one is better equipped to control health care spending than the insurance company that wants to keep that money in its wallet. Unless that’s not your goal at all…

Government isn’t bad. It does some things well (patents, defense, judicial, welfare and SS and simple transfers) and other things not so well. I prefer it sticks to the things it does well, and leave the rest up to the people to figure out.

Is this US healthcare system the one that spends twice as much per capita as other developed economies, and still racks up some of the worst figures for child health amongst those economies?

Or is it one from a parallel universe where that appalling juxtaposition doesn’t hold true?