no third solution

Posted By David Z on July 16, 2010

Ever wonder why we’re still working 40 hours per week? As if that’s some sort of magic equilibrium between labor/leisure that has just organically emerged over the centuries? It’s insanity, really. And evidence that we aren’t free to choose. I touched on this before, commenting that all of our productivity is wasted:

The average worker is several orders of magnitude more productive than he might’ve been a half-century hence… We’ve got more more people doing more jobs, producing more things and still we’re working 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week.

And this doesn’t strike anybody as being just a little bit insane?

In a free market where you aren’t being exploited there is a continuum, a trade-off between labor and remuneration. Let’s say you figure out some way to do your job in a quantifiably better/faster/more efficient manner. Assume for this thought experiment that you are able to double your productivity.

What would happen in a free market? You could cut your work-week in half and achieve the same output for which you would expect the same remuneration. You could keep your work-week the same, in which case you would expect greater remuneration (perhaps as much as double your current pay). Or any combination along that continuum which would result in some amount of less work, and some amount of relatively (but often absolutely) greater remuneration.

What happens in practice? If you develop some brand new process which, compared to the old process, requires half as much labor, the odds are practically zero that your employer will offer you to begin working a 20-hour work week for the same rate of pay, despite the fact that by working 20 hours you produce the same quality and quantity of output. And it is equally unlikely that they will double your salary, which would justify a 40-hour week because you now produce twice as much and as good of output as before.

Probably what will happen is that some other sap will get canned. You’ll have to absorb at least part of his workload but you will not absorb any of his salary. The corporation will absorb his salary as profit. If you’re fortunate, you’ll get a small raise or spot bonus.

Generally speaking, for a job well-done, under budget, ahead-of-schedule, and to quality, the only reward is more work. We don’t get to enjoy more leisure if we produce more and better and faster, we just have to work even more. For the most part, productivity is severely penalized.

What is the alternative? I do not believe for a second, that given all of the technological advances in the last 200 years, a majority of people in the developed world would continue to work 40 hours a week, if they had any say in the matter whatsoever.  Imagine a 20-hour work week.  Imagine creativity unleashed. Imagine what would happen to progress and productivity, if only people were actually rewarded for the work that they do.

Category: Anarchy!, Economic Theory, Economics Lessons, Employment & Labor | 30 Comments »
Tags: 20-hour work week, exploitation, labor, profit

Posted By David Z on July 15, 2010

On agorism’s revolutionary superiority to other ideologies, I previously argued: “Agorism has the greatest chance of success because its proponents accept piecemeal victories, but primarily because agorists don’t succumb to the same loser-mentality as other econo-political ideologies.” Echoing these thoughts, the suburban anarchist recently echoed those thoughts, in a post suggesting that traditional anarchists can learn a few things from agorism:

The best thing that could happen to the anarchist movement as a whole, in my opinion, would be for every self-declared anarchist to start working with those around them that feel the same on building their own little vision of what society should look like

To which I reply: I think agorism as a revolutionary strategy has a far better chance of success than sit-ins and demonstrations. It re-invents the “invisible hand”. It’s micro-revolution. Incremental victory. Start by being 1% more free than you were yesterday. You can’t change the world for everyone in it. Admit that. Focus those for whom you can change the world, for whom you can make a difference.

If everyone were to start there, instead of going to some black bloc circle-jerk, I think we’d all be surprised at how rapidly we could effect real change.

Category: Agora!, Anarchy! | 12 Comments »
Tags: agorism, anarchism, revolution, strategy

Posted By David Z on July 14, 2010

The other night I noticed some people going door to door. Fortunately, we were out taking the dog for a walk. Turned out, it was our friends from the Census Bureau. They left me this:

Blargh. That means for the next “day or two” while they are trying to re-interview me, I would have to avoid them. And my dog likes barking at strange people knocking on our door. Yesterday, they returned. I just ignored them until they left, and then went outside to tend my garden. Apparently I should’ve waited a little longer, because seeing that I was outside, she returned.

Great.  They didn’t like the fact that I responded to only one question on the census form a few months ago.

Although the Census drone said that she was conducting “follow-up” interviews (not unreasonable, as a means of validating the integrity of data – we do it in market research industry all the time), I’m pretty sure she was there to “complete” (as the form indicates) an incomplete interview.  Supporting this claim, I noticed that she was not stopping at all houses, but the vacant ones (several old residents have passed or relocated leaving vacant houses behind) and the house across the street where the vagrants lived until a week ago.  So, judging by the sample of houses she stopped at, I don’t think she was doing follow-up interviews.  Maybe that’s what they told her. Or maybe that’s what they told her to tell people.  I don’t know.

I politely declined to answer any questions, stating that I had returned the form earlier this year, listing the number of occupants and that was all the information I was comfortable giving them. As a matter of fact, the only reason I returned even that much information is because I thought it would reduce the odds of them sending someone knocking.  I was mistaken.

Fortunately, she was pleasant enough not to press the issue, I get the sense she did not want to have the argument with me, because the first logic bomb I would’ve dropped on her would’ve been something about the atrocities the US government perpetrated against Japanese-Americans during the second world war, largely with information obtained from the Census Bureau.

The fact of the matter is that the government could, if they wanted to, obtain any bit of information that the Census asks for. But it’s easier and cheaper to persuade people to “voluntarily” submit these data. Well, I’m not giving it to them. If they want it, there’s nothing I can do to stop them, really. But I’m not willing to just hand it over.

Category: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
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Posted By David Z on July 1, 2010

Earlier this week it was announced that a few Russian spies had been captured operating in the U.S. That’s interesting, and I’m actually surprised that the media hasn’t made a big deal out of it.  Because it’s not. The Wall Street Journal cites a number of sources that say this story, with even as little attention as it has garnered, is still blown out of proportion.

• Philip Shenon at The Daily Beast indicates that “The Justice Department and the F.B.I. have been unable to point to a single significant piece of classified information that the so-called spies obtained during their many years in the United States; none of the suspects is accused of espionage.”
• Daniel Drezner, at Foreign Policy calls it the “lamest espionage conspiracy….ever.”

What is notable, is that these “spies” had allegedly been passing information to the Motherland in a manner that was previously only theoretically possible:

The accused spies posted the seemingly mundane photos on publicly accessible websites, but then extracted coded messages from the computer data of the pictures, according to the criminal complaint filed by the FBI. Although computer scientists have theorized about the existence of this communication technique for over a decade, this is the first publicly acknowledged use of the technique.

Off-the-cuff, you kinda have to wonder if this is some sort of pretext for the Orwellian “internet kill switch”, which would really concentrate the dissemination of information and “opinion” among the state-sanctioned media outlets, who would of course remain fair and impartial as they repeat the ruling party’s propaganda, and it would be the coup de grace for whatever vestiges remain of our freedoms of speech and information.

Category: American Politics, Legalese, Police State | 2 Comments »
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