Let Me Be The First to Second the Recommendation for Compulsory Diaperization of the GMU Economics Department

When it comes to the university classroom, the objection may be dismissed more simply – as a broad rule of thumb (though there are important exceptions), the person paying the money is the person in the position of greater power. Paying money means exchanging something with broad capabilities (for as long as money is trusted) for something with narrower capabilities. Broad capabilities are, by definition, more flexible and it is the differential in flexibility that one can use to coerce. If you are rich and hungry and the farmer is being uncooperative, you can hire some goons to go beat him up. If you are a farmer and no one is hungry, on the other hand…

Coercion can be present in classrooms, but its presence can to a large extent be seen as a function of the percentage of the costs of dispensing that education that is paid by the student. So taxpayer-funded, compulsory education has greater scope for coercion than an expensive, private university does. When neither you nor your parents are perceived as viable (future) tax payers and education is still taxpayer-funded (e.g. the case of Roma in Central and Eastern Europe), the scope for coercion increases further still. And so on.

Contracting works just fine when you depend on the contract less than your contract counter-party does. Libertarians tend to treat contracting like sports – the stronger player gets the better outcome only to the extent that he or she is stronger. Real life does not work like sports however – the stronger party (if sufficiently stronger) can always use that strength to alter the rules in his or her own favour, before even starting to play the game.

This series of posts has been really very good. The first three show how to rigorously rout libertarian pretensions and this one shows how intellectually dishonest is Libertarians’ responses to rigorous criticism.

There is a reason, though, that not just GMU economics professors but most all white-collar workers do not work under the conditions you describe. Once people become productive enough to become professors or engineers or accountants, the workers demand to have basic things like air conditioning. They also chafe under Orwellian tactics that you describe and in the end, such tactics fire back on the bosses who use them as they lose their best employees.

My fear is that CT has not really laid which employment rules they want enforced. Liberals typically argue for making unionization much easier, making firing workers much more difficult and making wages much higher. At first, employers will not change behavior right away and these rules will benefit workers. Over the long-run or even the medium-run however, consumers will demand to not pay workers wages above what they produce. Demand will go down for lower-class workers as employers find capital alternatives which are now cost-competitive with labor.

This is not idle speculation either. America had higher structural unemployment in the 70’s as very strong unions pushed wages above their market levels. From talking to some lower-class employees from the 50’s through 70’s, you had to know somebody to get into a UAW shop. Meanwhile, the non-union wages were pushed down as a result of those excluded from union shops. Furthermore, the structural unemployment was also very bad in even rich European countries like Germany and France. They only started solving their unemployment issue once they allowed temporary employment contracts for the lower-class workers.

So, however noble it is pining for workers’ rights, a heavy-handed government intervention into labor markets cannot outrun consumers demanding the highest quality for the lowest price. Anything given to workers will have to be taken from their wages. If the concessions to workers do not push down wages, then higher unemployment will result. Some concessions, such as health safety issues, should be enforced since workers cannot really judge the safety of workplaces for themselves. Other things however, like air conditioning and being able to pee, can be judged by workers themselves and air conditioned shops can in fact get workers for slightly lower wages. However, making air conditioning a requirement while expecting wages to not change at all is a fantasy.

Another data point is that, as students in public universities have come to pay more and more tuition — which means the income they represent to the university is increasingly paid directly by the student, rather than being paid on their behalf by the state — it increasingly becomes necessary to treat students as customers, with the customer-is-always-right kind of prerogative that brings with it. After all, if you were getting your education for close to free (as used to be the case), the university didn’t have to worry nearly as much about keeping you happy; nowadays, the student-as-customer model means they really, really do (I’ve seen the changes in the UC in the decade I’ve been here; they worry a *lot* about keeping their customers happy).

This is especially a problem for contingent faculty (which is to say, for the majority of instructors in higher ed), since they can be easily fired and have little effective power in their workplace, while their students need to be kept happy. I have a friend doing a four year post-doc who desperately wants a secure position not only for the usual reasons (getting out of grinding poverty, etc), but so he can finally give his students the grades they deserve; as he told me, almost every student grade complaint has to be arbitrated with a dean’s office that is strikingly unsupportive of his right to give them the grade he thinks they deserve and much more solicitous of the students’ opinion than one would expect.

“This is not idle speculation either. America had higher structural unemployment in the 70’s as very strong unions pushed wages above their market levels. From talking to some lower-class employees from the 50’s through 70’s, you had to know somebody to get into a UAW shop. Meanwhile, the non-union wages were pushed down as a result of those excluded from union shops. Furthermore, the structural unemployment was also very bad in even rich European countries like Germany and France. They only started solving their unemployment issue once they allowed temporary employment contracts for the lower-class workers.”

This is so wrong that I literally do not have the time to do a point by point response. I will simply say that unions have NEVER been strong in the United States.

Matt Waters @ 6:

The idea that white collar workers in general, or GMU economics professors in particular, are productive while those who engage in more prototypical work are not, assumes facts that are decidedly not in evidence.

“The idea that white collar workers in general, or GMU economics professors in particular, are productive while those who engage in more prototypical work are not, assumes facts that are decidedly not in evidence.”

Exactly! To rephrase what I posted in the other thread, my mechanic has successfully changed my oil every single time I have asked him to. My car, a significant capital investment, continues to run thanks to his productivity. How is he less productive them some jerk who writes poorly researched articles calling for the elimination of the minimum wage?

My first thought was that being a student is a temporary condition inflicted upon near-adults whereas being an employee is a quasi-permanent condition suffered by all adults for most of their mature years. OF COURSE these quasi-adults suffer a extra degree of coercion during that time. (Once they grow up and graduate they are perfectly free to shout “water buffalo” out their window.) And OF COURSE, coercion is a greater concern in an employment context, when there’s no (formal or informal) “loco parentis” consideration.

Anyone who truly thinks that students live in an environment that is as coercive as a workplace has never been in a workplace. Why is it necessary to respond to obvious trolling liars as if they are arguing in good faith?

The more you read Cowen the more his pretentious style grates on you. His faux reasonableness and “centrist” both sides do it bullshit are just a front for his not so hiddeb extremism.

CJColucci 07.05.12 at 4:01 pm

” I have nothing to add on the substance of Cowen’s response. What I wonder, though, is why he, and others like him, think—if they do—that such a self-evidently lame response really counts as a gotcha. Any suggestions?”

If you think of Cowen as a pundit who happens to have a Ph.D., rather than a real intellectual, then it’s clearer. And if you realize that he couldn’t get a job at a real econ department (even a right-wing one), but was only fit for Koch U, it’s even more clear.

Whether or not a GMU Economics professor or a mechanic is really more productive is beside my point.

My point is that Tyler Cowen has his wage reduced, however slightly, by working in a fairly comfortable office with air conditioning and a cleaning staff. He could, at least theoretically, go up to his department chair and say he could do without air conditioning and the department could pay him the money they now spend on electricity.

The point is less theoretical in the case of a mechanic. So let’s say your mechanic gets air conditioning. That air conditioning cost money. To stay in business, the mechanic will either need to reduce his own wage or charge his customers more. If he charges his customers more, then why wouldn’t you go to the shop across the street?

And that gets at where my main issue lies with the liberal employment arguments. According to you, the mechanic should have air conditioning because… the world owes it to him or it’s a “right” or some other moral indignation to uncomfortable working conditions. But it is also basic math that, to stay in business, the mechanic would have raise prices or cut his own wages to pay for the air conditioning.

To sustain a world where the mechanic keeps the same wages while taking on the additional expense of comfort, the government would somehow have to enter itself into the agreement between the mechanic and his consumers. The government would have to either forcibly keep other people from becoming mechanics, thereby raising prices on consumers and increasing unemployment, or by subsidizing the mechanic’s A/C through tax dollars.

So CTer’s, what are the concrete suggestions behind the moral indignation over employers not providing employees with enough rights? My fear, again, is that most of the concrete suggestions would serve to increase unemployment and lower standards of living, despite the well-meaningness of the suggestions.

@24: Similar arguments were used against the 40-hour work week, overtime, child labor laws, and worker safety laws. I would hope that we could agree that there are certain minimum standards that it is possible to envision for a civilized society. Once you accept this boundary, it’s simply a question of what constitutes a problem requiring regulation from a problem that does not. This points to a significant philosophical issue with libertarianism, at least for me: that axiomatic value systems can yield pathological results when countervailing values are excluded.

(Providing air conditioning is an odd example, as climate control is important for modern infrastructure quite apart from personal comfort. , e.g. computers don’t do well when exposed to wild temperature swings.)

Anyone who truly thinks that students live in an environment that is as coercive as a workplace has never been in a workplace. Why is it necessary to respond to obvious trolling liars as if they are arguing in good faith?

I think Henry was appropriately and forcefully rude in his critique. He doesn’t take Cowen too seriously, he just makes a serious argument for why Cowen /shouldn’t/ be taken seriously.

That comment is directed at post 24.

So let’s say your mechanic gets air conditioning. That air conditioning cost money. To stay in business, the mechanic will either need to reduce his own wage or charge his customers more. If he charges his customers more, then why wouldn’t you go to the shop across the street?

since this business was apparently making literally zero profit (because any increase in costs had to either be passed on to customers or offset exactly with another cost reduction, or the company would go out of business), why was the owner keeping it open in the first place?

Matt Waters:

Leaving aside the fact that air conditioning is a particularly odd thing to be picking on (since the health and productivity benefits of a workplace with a comfortable climate probably more than make up for the modest cost), I don’t see how the general mechanism of regulation and collective action is particularly mysterious, or how one could possibly frame the mechanism as “the government would somehow have to enter itself into the agreement between the mechanic and his consumers.”

A climate controlled workplace regulation would raise costs for a given industry more or less uniformly. And thus consumers. So, yes, it’s equivalent to a kind of de facto tax on consumers (and/or, possibly, workers). But like other taxes, it is presumably aimed at accomplishing a goal that is, while a net welfare positive, not otherwise achievable without some kind of state or collective action.

(I guess you could, potentially, try to argue that AC or other kinds of improved work conditions are NOT in fact welfare increasing, but that doesn’t seem to be where you were going…?)

It is not the case with air conditioning, where workers can clearly tell they are working somewhere without air conditioning and decide to go to a job with A/C.

Riiiiiight…

Matt Waters @ 27 and earlier

The “market failures” analysis, which you rehearse for us, is bad economics, masquerading as conventional.

First of all, the employer/manager — employee relationship is not, strictly speaking, a market relationship. So, “market failure”, per se, is irrelevant. The relationship is one of hierarchical authority, domination, supervision and dependence, in which rules and roles determine behavior. Not a “market” relationship, at all, except possibly, to some arguable extent, at the moments the relationship is initiated or terminated; in between, it is might, arguably be an economic relationship of implicit, contingent and incomplete contract, under continuous negotiation, in which case, this post is about the political norms, laws and policies, which govern that relationship. And, prattling on about the problems of market exchange is just another instance of “refusing to get the point”.

As an economic matter, the employment relationship would not exist at all, if the problems of cooperation were solely a matter of allocative efficiency; and questions such as whether to provide air conditioning in the office or factory, or how long a person should work in a given day, were subjects of unique and precise allocative optimization. Those are side issues, though. The relationship exists, because hierarchy is economically useful; hierarchy economizes in production, and it doesn’t economize by effecting superior allocative efficiency. Hierarchy economizes in technical efficiency. Not to put too fine a point on it, but telling people what to do and when to do it, and making sure they do what they are told, yields technical efficiencies in a wide variety of applications: it can be highly productive. It is also obnoxious, and political, it is perfectly sensible to argue about what the legitimate bounds on telling people what to do, should be, so that we can realize the economic gains, divide those gains fairly, and avoid unnecessary costs and decay of the employment relationship into negative-sum territory.

Arguments about the bad economic effects of workplace regulation generally assume that greater costs for air conditioners or bathroom breaks would automatically be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. That CEOs might agree to make only 399 times more than janitors instead of 400 times is evidently not an option.

Whatever you do, do not read Yglesias’ most recent post on the topic. Shield your eyes.

Matt Walters: “My point is that Tyler Cowen has his wage reduced, however slightly, by working in a fairly comfortable office with air conditioning and a cleaning staff. He could, at least theoretically, go up to his department chair and say he could do without air conditioning and the department could pay him the money they now spend on electricity.”

This is ridiculous.

Another: “What would the world look like if GMU economics professors were treated similarly to workers in low-paid jobs with little protection?”

mds: “More just?”

And much more fun – we could needle them about how there’s no such thing as involuntary unemployment………….

What you tend to find in the real world is that things like functioning air conditioning in a hot climate, or regular bathroom breaks, make your workers more productive, and in the long run, pay for themselves. The worker who is fainting from heat-stroke, or who can think of nothing but how much he needs to empty his bladder, is probably not doing a good job making widgets. Abusive managers tend to be such because they like abusing people, not because their ruthless devotion to the bottom line mandates their conduct. And because much abuse of employees is not motivated by a rational reaction to the market, expecting effective market-based solutions to to problem of employee abuse is not reasonable.

What would the world look like if GMU economics professors were treated similarly to workers in low-paid jobs with little protection?

Um, Tyler and the rest of the gang would demand better compensation or they would refuse to work there….exactly the point he’s been trying to make. What’s the problem? There seems very little in this supposed “gotcha” response. All the more so because it invokes exactly the same response originally adopted by the GMUers when they pointed out that workers have it better than surfs. The entire point here is that students have it better than workers so they shouldn’t complain. Well if students have it better than workers and workers have it better than surfs then the argument is over and both sides should stop now and take up the cause of the surfs….unless they actually have it better than some…..

Abusive managers tend to be such because they like abusing people, not because their ruthless devotion to the bottom line mandates their conduct.

Well, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? The interests of profit making and the interest of humanity, in perfect alignment. How lucky to live in such a well-ordered world. Obviously, the problem is simply that under capitalism, private enterprises are not sufficiently focused on profit-making. Good thing we have folks like Bain Capital around to fix that!

Except, weren’t you supposed to be disagreeing with libertarianism somehow?

Another thing these threads have taught me is that people who say, “You obviously have no idea how a real business works” who obviously have no idea how a real business works are hilarious.

This law would make society as a whole poorer, since there are some jobs where it really is a requirement that employees be in place at all times.

I think that’s at least dangerously close to begging the question.

A. Any real-world law designed to curtail abusive potty-related management practices would build in some flexibility. It would probably contain language such as “reasonable accommodations must be made, yadda yadda” or whatever. There’d be plenty of room to adapt the rule to the particular requirements of a given workplace or industry while remaining within the spirit of the law.

B. I strongly suspect that the situations where a worker would actually need to inform/ask permission from a manager (as opposed to, say, making eye contact with a coworker and nodding toward the bathroom), or everything grinds to a halt are rather rarer than the level your argument depends on. And I’m not sure there’s EVER an excuse for, say, timing bathroom breaks, or applying a limit of 2 per shift or whatever.

Then the workers could choose to accept lower wages in exchange for more bathroom breaks, or they could spend their extra money on a nicer house, a better school for their kids, etc.

Again, so much wrong, starting with:

A. No. Just no. I mean, I have no doubt that you could find people that sincerely believe an extra walk-in closet would make them happier than a work environment that treats them like a human being. But almost all of them are probably wrong.

B. I’m not even sure how this is supposed to work. Certainly you must be strongly in favor of collective bargaining (i.e., unions), to negotiate and enforce the potty/paycheck bargain with management, right? Elsewise, what, bathroom break fees?

He suggests in his previous post that the problem is on the side of the employees rather than the employers

If we had a society that was 100% employers everything would be great.

_I think the point that the Marginal Revolution folks are trying to make is that while it sucks to have a job where you have to ask your boss before you go to the bathroom, this is just one aspect of the more general fact that it sucks to be poor._

I note, just for the record, that this comment exemplifies the practice of representing what X deliberately does to Y as an impersonal fact of nature outside of anyone’s control.

@49

“However, there are other ways to help the workers at General Motors. We could tax the shareholders, and give the proceeds to the workers. Then the workers could choose to accept lower wages in exchange for more bathroom breaks, or they could spend their extra money on a nicer house, a better school for their kids, etc. This is the policy that I support, and I believe that it is the policy that Tyler Cowen supports.”

You believe Tyler Cowen, supports significant transfer payments from rich to poor in, say, the US?

“A defense of the welfare state, beyond the level needed to insure political stability and continued economic growth, thus requires that the current American needy be given a moral priority over future generations and over the needy in other countries.

In the current political context, a “person who cares” is assumed to identify with the interests of the current domestic poor. I have tried to show that this presumption is unwarranted. A person who cares ought to consider limiting the welfare state in the interests of the greater good of other, less visible poor persons.”

http://tylercowen.com/2000/10/14/social-philosophy-and-policy-does-the-welfare-state-help-the-poor/

James Choy: “I believe that as a society, we should try to arrange things to improve the lives of poor people. I think that Tyler Cowen believes this too. The question then becomes how we should help poor people.”

I think Tyler Cowen has a job, where he’s required to promote the interests of the Koch brothers in making rich people, richer, by making large numbers of poor people, poorer, by protecting such practices from political interference. He’s paid well, in that job, and he does it well enough, that he probably gets extra bathroom breaks thrown in as a bonus. The question is why anyone else takes him seriously.

One really important way we could make poor people better off, is by making them less poor: paying better wages, and more effectively curbing the pervasive predatory economic conduct, which characterizing the American economy.

Making Tyler Cowen get a job, where he was not engaged in propaganda on behalf of economic predation would be one positive step among many.

“My starting point would be that their theories have to be validated in the real world, or they get sacked.”

Love it. Love it so very much.

Cowen is an economist? I thought he was like the Rick Steves of food blogging. I had no idea. His modal post is a bleg for restaurant recommendations in Buenos Aires.

If an employee at General Motors leaves the assembly line for five minutes without asking, the assembly line breaks.

of course this isn’t true.

In fairness to the libertarians, at least they’ve admitted throughout that they just don’t like poor people, which is progress from the old conservative sleight of hand that forced soiling at work is just the first step to the White House.

It’s true that the cost of passing a law requiring employers to allow more bathroom breaks would be small. It’s a real cost – it would be somewhat more difficult to run the assembly line at GM; some fraction of employees would abuse the system by taking breaks every ten minutes, etc.; but in the scheme of things these costs are not large. Of course, the benefits of the law would not be large either – for most poor people, the inability to take timely bathroom breaks is relatively far down on their list of problems.

The original argument, however, is that workers are subject to 1000 other minor indignities as well. Perhaps we could pass a law to regulate away each of these indignities. But while the cost of passing one such law is small, the cost of passing 1000 such laws is large. Now the business law is too complicated for a busy small business owner to understand, so she has to hire a lawyer to figure it out for her. Even though she hires a lawyer, she probably forgets to follow one of the regulations, and the city government, influenced by the giant corporation that competes with the small business owner, can shut her down. Without the regulations guaranteeing her business, the lawyer would have become a computer scientist instead and would have invented a technology that would have benefited everyone.

Instead of passing 1000 laws each narrowly targeting 1000 different problems, wouldn’t it be better to help the poor by doing one thing that helps ameliorate (almost) all problems, namely giving them cash? The beauty of giving people cash is that it allows them to address whatever problem that is subjectively the worst for them. The workers who are seriously oppressed by their workplace rules have more bargaining power to negotiate with their employers, and more of a cushion if they decide to leave to look for a new job. The workers who don’t mind the workplace rules, but who can’t afford to buy health insurance, or can’t send their kids to a good school, can address those problems instead.

The beauty of giving cash is that it changes the question from “Should we be allowed to abuse workers? Yes/No?” to something completely different and politically impossible thus distracting from an actual, workable tactic. I put a small child to bed every night. I know the tactic when I see it.

James Choy: “I believe that as a society, we should try to arrange things to improve the lives of poor people. I think that Tyler Cowen believes this too. The question then becomes how we should help poor people.”

It is worth pointing out that this isn’t true. Tyler Cowen thinks that:
2. A rejection of health care egalitarianism, namely a recognition that the wealthy will purchase more and better health care than the poor. Trying to equalize health care consumption hurts the poor, since most feasible policies to do this take away cash from the poor, either directly or through the operation of tax incidence. We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor. Some of you don’t like the sound of that, but we already let the wealthy enjoy all sorts of other goods — most importantly status — which lengthen their lives and which the poor enjoy to a much lesser degree. We shouldn’t screw up our health care institutions by being determined to fight inegalitarian principles for one very select set of factors which determine health care outcomes.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/06/what-kind-of-mandate-should-the-right-have-supported.html
He thinks it is a the unnecessary deaths of the poors is a principle we have to accept. How, I wonder, does this indicate some commitment to making poors lives better?

Katie is leaving Tom and that obsession will settle down.

“[Cowen] thinks it is a the unnecessary deaths of the poors is a principle we have to accept. How, I wonder, does this indicate some commitment to making poors lives better?”

Tom Bach: doesn’t Cowen answer that question in the very paragraph that you quote from him?

“Trying to equalize health care consumption hurts the poor [emphasis added], since most feasible policies to do this take away cash from the poor, either directly or through the operation of tax incidence.”

@81

Only when they want to tell you it’s raining.

Gene: I’ve also worked in a call centre as a customer service advisor (and far more recently). It’s not only a tremendously inefficient workspace, but also one of the worst spaces for those kinds of coercive indignities people are talking about; the tyranny of the multiple targets is horribly stressful, especially since you know they are targets that are nothing to do with the resolution of people’s problems, which is ostensibly meant to be your job. The lack of practical knowledge or agency that you have to help any of the people who called in was also rather demoralising.

I *was* allowed to pee, but not for long (the computer notes how long you are taking), and the toilets were a fair way away across the building. However, I had an agreed upon holiday marked as if I was AWOL; when I was let go, this was talked about as if it was my fault, since slowly and continually repeating to a number of different supervisors that I needed the day off for the entire month in advance was apparently not good enough.

I for one am impressed by Comrade Cowan from the Donetsk Metallurgical Academy’s Department of Scientific Leninism’s heroic effort to integrate the insights of cognitive psychology into economics, by accusing everyone who disagrees with him of being subject to cognitive bias. I have yet to see a post of his in which he detects “mood affiliation” or “frame-switching” among his own beliefs.

Of course, Daniel Kahneman would point out that it is extremely difficult to detect one’s own cognitive biases.

James Choy: “If an employee at General Motors leaves the assembly line for five minutes without asking, the assembly line breaks. If we passed a law forcing employers to let employees go to the bathroom at any time, the assembly lines at General Motors would have to be redesigned. ”

Please note that in the real world, this actually has been handled for quite some time.
I would also request less straw; we’re in a serious fire hazard now.

You guys are being single-minded here. I’ll defend TC here…

Hummm, sorry, but I couldn’t. I really tried…

And + 1 to Alex (number 88);

I have lived in Northern Virginia before GMU was founded. My oldest son was taught upper level economics by James Buchanan at GMU and he (my son) knows less about economics than I do and I learned my college economics back in 1955. My son, for example, aparently also was taught the same myths about union job entry in the auto factories that Matt Watters repeats . The Union shop was barred by Taft Hartley in 1948 (and I learned t,hat in high school economics).

Let’s get to the nub: The GMU school of economics is the resort of last employment for right wing/libertarian faux intellectuals morons

Libertarians, like all humans, pee at will in response to favorable market prices.

No, no, we should go further. Workplaces should have a market in bathroom passes and snack breaks, which workers can trade and bid over. The manager can hold on to a reserve of potty credits and conduct open market operations if the potty break market becomes too illiquid (how appropriate).

“Markets in Everything,” as Cowen is apt to say…

Jim Henley, I just wanted to say that I’ve enjoyed your comments on these posts immensely.

Barry: Thank you!

What would the world look like if GMU economics professors were treated similarly to workers in low-paid jobs with little protection? No offices – at best open cubicles, so that a supervisor could stroll by, making sure that the professors were doing the job that they were supposed to be doing. Monitoring of computers to prevent random websurfing. Certainly no air conditioning. Compulsory random drug testing. Body searches, in case professors were sneaking office supplies back home. Monitoring – at best – of bathroom breaks, and written demerits and termination of employment for professors who took too many of them.

If the things that HF mention here were productivity unenhancing, what exactly would be the issue? Workers are losing, the firms are losing. If the government can do something about it, what exactly is the argument against it? Are there really libertarians really running around saying, let’s not eat our free lunches?

So when Rob Waters or whoever constructs a hypothetical in which one of these things is productivity enhancing, it’s not exactly of much interest to point out that it isn’t. I think there are about 40 posts upthread that are completely pointless.

So please, address and construct a hypothetical. Is it possible that bathroom break rules are productivity enhancing? I have no idea whether they are or can be, but it doesn’t seem impossible. Perhaps in the absence of such rules some workers would abuse the bathroom break privilege in various ways, to the detriment of firm output.

I understand the idea that maybe we should, as a society, ban the firm or the government from instituting these bathroom break rules, even if it reduces productivity and causes the call center wage to fall from $10 per hour to $9 per hour. Maybe some things simply can’t be traded off for money. (Also, increases in human dignity may well be long-run productivity enhancing anyway). But I think all MY and TC are saying is, which things? Are there any circumstances in which we should be willing to submit to any of the practices on HF’s list? And how should we decide?

(Obviously, if workers don’t get paid their marginal product, or if there are no conflicts between “freedom” and “productivity,” etc etc etc, I have no point here – thanks in advance).

By the way, construct the hypothetical “FedEx and the US Post Office and airlines monitor and conduct random searches of their employees.” Obviously debilitating to the freedom of the employees of FedEx and the US Post Office.

But isn’t there a third party here? Should I have the freedom to be able to send a package containing something valuable to someone else, or put my luggage on a plane, and not have it get “lost” en route? It seems to me that at some point, in some version of the real world, there’s a possibility that employee freedoms can conflict with the freedoms of other parties. Now what?

(Again, I’m offering this as a hypothetical).

“Why does the burden of proof seem to start with, “show that liberty-reducing policies are not productivity enhancing,” rather than, “show that liberty-reducing policies are productivity enhancing”?’

Because the latter is impossible?

106, consider the following hypothetical – is it possible that the worker’s average productivity in your hypothetical situation would have no bearing on his wage or the price of the product? Is it possible that an employee’s wage is simply the minimum possible amount his employer can get away with paying him? (“Get away with” is intended to capture all senses of the term: legal — above minimum wage,etc — and practical — high enough that employee doesn’t starve, get too depressed about his miserable life, revolt and form a union, etc). Is it possible that the employer’s aim is just to keep as much of the proceeds of production for himself as is possible — so that if he forces his employee to follow dehumanizing rules the increase in productivity will only be reflected in the increase in the employer’s profits, not in an increase in the employee’s standard of living, or some minute but oh-so-beneficial change in the cost of the product?

I would hypothesize that these hypotheticals are beyond your conceptual capacity, so enraptured are you by the teachings of the neoclassicists, an army of tenure-wielding nincompoops, whose aim is to give the veneer of great intellectual integrity to the practice of regarding human beings as atoms out of which as much value as possible ought to be extracted by the few human beings with power, who have made the neoclassicists feel special by paying them lots of money to give talks and run think tanks.

As for your other hypothesis, I hypothesize: if I walk into a Subway and it takes 10 minutes rather than 5 minutes to get my sandwich, because one of the employees is on a bathroom break, has my freedom not been impinged? I appreciate his freedom to go to the bathroom, but does that not interfere with my freedom to get what I want now? Ideally, prices would be so dynamic that I could pay less for my sandwich as a result of it taking 10 minutes, and the change in price could by compensated for by a change in his wages, so that the owner of that Subway franchise does not lose his ability to extract profit. Then, the employee would be free to take as many or as few bathroom breaks as he wanted.

Place bathroom breaks on an X axis. Place wages on a Y axis. Imagine a line with a negative slope. (It should be a line, not a parabola, because too many bathroom breaks SHOULD lead to a zero wage, i.e., a firing). That tradeoff — that IS freedom. (And, while we’re on the topic, it’s a full and perfect picture of the individual psychology, which is nothing but a bunch of arbitrary desires which an internal indifferent overload rationally fulfills according to their relative measure. It is this very arbitariness which constitutes freedom.)

113, in that case he would have violated my sacred freedom by ignoring the terms of the contract we signed when I placed my order. My ordered preference set happens to be such that I very much do not want fecal or urinal matter on my sandwich. (Of course EVERYTHING is a trade-off so there is some point at which I would be willing to take it — say, if you paid me a few thousand dollars. But the Subway franchise owner would likely not be happy with that arrangement!)

Since our country’s beautiful freedom is built on the freedom of all us little atoms to sign millions of contracts with each other, violation of one of those contracts is a heinous offense, a threat to the tenuous cohesion of anarchic self-interested savages that we call “society”. It is an instance of fraud, and so I would support the employee being prosecuted to the fullest extent — firing, fining, jail time, the guillotine if he’s a repeat offender.

(Note also — it so happens that my ordered preferences are such that the contracts I sign place a very high cost on bathroom matter being included on my food. But it may so happen that other atoms have ordered preferences such that they place a low cost on adding bathroom matter — only a few dollars discount — or are even willing to pay for it, in certain odd cases. These people are free to sign contracts according to those terms.)

I would hypothesize that these hypotheticals are beyond your conceptual capacity

Oh absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve never had a clue about how wages are set in the real world. Your response was time well spent. Analytically spot on. And you amused Harold!