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Chandler, Alfred Dupont. The Visible Hand. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. ISBN 0674940512, Page 14
Little institutional innovation occurred in American business before the 1840s. Why was this so? As long as the processes of production and distribution depended on the traditional sources of energy—on man, animal, wind power— there was little pressure to innovate. Such sources of energy simply could not generate a volume of output in production and number of transactions in distribution large enough to require the creation of a large managerial enterprise or to call for the development of new business forms and practices. The low speed of production of the slow movement of goods through the economy meant that the maximum daily activity at each point of production and distribution could be easily handled by small personally owned and managed enterprises.
Grant, Neil. The Industrial Revolution. United States of America: 1973. ISBN 0531008088, Page 64
The astonishing expansion of U.S. manufacturing after the Civil War can most briefly be indicated by a few more figures. In 1850 capital invested in manufacturing totaled $533 million; in 1880 it totaled $2,790 million. In the same thirty years, the total value of products increased from $1,019 million to $5,370 million; the number of wage earners from less than one million to 2.7 million. By 1913 the United States accounted for 35.8 percent of the world total of manufacturing production. Germany, its nearest rival, had 15.7 percent; Britain (including Ireland), third largest, had 14 percent.
Slater, Robert, Leadership -- Get Better Or Get Beaten, U.S.A.: 1994. ISBN 078630256, Page 99
There is something about speed that transcends its obvious business benefits of greater cash flows, greater profitability, higher share due to greater customer responsiveness and more capacity from cycle time reductions.
Speed exhilarates and energizes ... This is particularly true in business, where speed tends to propel ideas and drive processes right through functional barriers, sweeping bureaucrats and their impediments aside in the rush to get to the marketplace.
Miller, Fred J. “Prevention of Wastes in Industry.” Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 43 (1921): 1097-1103. Page 1097, cited in Knoedler, Janet T., “Veblen and technical efficiency.” Journal of Economic Issues, Dec97, Vol. 31 Issue 4, p1013, 16p
Those who would be supposed to have the greatest incentive for the prevention of industrial wastes are found to be responsible for the major portion of the wastes that occur.... they, the owners and directors of industries, are the ones and the only ones, who can adopt effective means to stop these wastes.
Elmar Altvater, The Future of the Market. New York: Verso 1993. ISBN 0860914259
Page 183
Market efficiency has been achieved by drawing upon nature’s reserves as if they were limitless, as if people did not have to be sparing with both inner and outer nature. A ‘positive feedback mechanism’ may thus be set up between the economic system and nature. Interest-rate signals force the production of a surplus through the overexploitation of natural resources. The degraded natural basis of production and consumption then makes it more difficult to achieve profits commensurate with the rate of interest. The debt crisis has negative ecological effects, while the degradation of nature intensifies the debt crisis. If tight management of flows then leads to a reduction in stock levels, the traditional models break down and the transition to ‘positive feedback economics’ becomes unavoidable.
Economic behaviour is blind to its natural bases as long as these do not make themselves felt as economic limits—that is, as a cost burden within the economic system. The social ties between human beings, mediated by commodities and money, involve the ‘nature-blindness’ of behaviour. For the mirroring of human sociality as a natural property of the things people produce—that is, the ‘fetishism of the commodity’—also entails the screening out of the natural conditions of social behaviour. The individual commodity (and qua commodity every thing is individual) does not make visible the conditions attending its production and consumption. For example, advertising gives the details about a car’s horsepower, maximum speed, acceleration, comforts, optional extras, retail price, and so on; it attracts customers by playing on prestige or convenience value. But it says nothing about the using up of the countryside for highway construction; it remains silent about the inevitable victims of road accidents, or the vast quantities of water and energy used in the process of production. In the individual thing social relations are only imperfectly reflected, as in a magic mirror which blanks out the ‘celestial constraint’ of the thing’s production and consumption. The commodity is narcissistic: it sees only itself reflected in gold. In the first chapter we observed that reified socialization, stemming from the fetish character of commodities, has a disinhibiting effect which speeds up the evolution of society. But now we need to discuss whether the very reification of social relations - whereby people relate to each other with money and commodities on the market - does not cause the natural constraints on production and consumption to disappear from the consciousness of society. It would appear that nature again becomes relevant only when it imposes additional costs, or when its destruction lastingly disrupts the conditions of human life. Then a flash of lightning makes it clear even to reified consciousness that economic compulsions - such as those brought to bear in the servicing of debt - interfere with the natural conditions of business activity. But when the destruction of nature eventually ‘makes itself felt’ in economic categories (costs), it is often too late for any alternatives, especially since the processing of ecological problems into economic calculation does not move beyond the reification that resulted in the ‘forgetting of nature’.
Interferences between economy and ecology do not come into the field of vision so long as the former is seen in principle as a balanced system, and so long as time and space are not given explicit significance (as causal elements of transaction costs) within production and consumption, the exchange process and the sphere of distribution. In an economy without spatial or temporal constraints, economic analysis can perfectly well dispense with the transformation of raw materials and energy, leaving this to other branches of science. Once it is assumed, however, that all economic processes have a spatio-temporal location, the analyst’s attention turns not only to the instabilities of the market (which have been discussed in Part II above) but also to the explicit significance for economic theory of the transformation of materials and energy.
The question immediately arises how it is ever possible to do this, without spiriting away the initial problem that the transformations of materials and energy are defined as monetized processes in which their special natural quality is disguised. For with the category of money, economics manages to banish time and space from its system, given that the future is ‘discounted’ in the present and spatial distance is levelled in arbitrage speculation. The ‘resource economics’ approach, based on Hotelling’s classical rule, has not been lost for answers. Solow, for example, compares (a) the currently discounted net proceeds from the exploitation of a resource over the period between today and some future date, with (b) the market rate of interest obtainable on money assets, and assumes that the value of the resource also increases over time. But such a market-centered comparison contains a number of implication that make it rather questionable. First, it presupposes that the market rate of interest defined the rate of exploitation of exhaustible resources and hence an optimal path of resource use. As we have seen in the chapter on financial instabilities, however, the market rate of interest offers no guarantee of optimal allocation. Second, it assumes that between present and future there will be economic growth of the same order as the rate of interest— and in any case that new resources will be used. For growth could not take place if the level of exploitation of the one resource involved in decision-making were already fixed. This suggests that resources are, in Hirsch’s words, essentially ‘positional goods’ whose individual use-value depends upon the use-value properties of other resources. Yet if the Hotelling rules are applied in such a way as to take account of the interference between different resources, they are unable to yield any unambiguous results. Third, the rules posit a (privately owned) isolation of resources, and hence a splitting of complex ecosystems which simplifies them into legally definable and economically tradeable property rights. Fourth, if the decision-making calculus is built around the rate of interest, the forward vision of economic actors will become increasingly ‘short-sighted’ the higher the interest rises. Fifth, it is necessary to act as if future markets and the preferences of future individuals were already known, so that the present generation lives ‘vicariously’ for those to come. Here at the latest it becomes clear ‘that there is no way of escaping an ethical choice, sometimes hidden away in the assumptions of the model’.
Wheelwright, Steven. C. Revolutionizing Product Development. New York: 1992. ISBN 0029055156, Pages 4 and 5
Rigorous international competition, the explosion of market segments and niches, and accelerating technological change have created a set of competitive imperatives for the development of new products and processes in industries as diverse as medical instruments and automobiles, textiles, and high-end disk drives. Exhibit 1-1 identifies three of these imperatives -- speed, efficiency, and quality – and suggest some of their implications. To succeed, firms must be responsive to changing customer demands and the moves of their competitors. This means that they must be fast. The ability to identify opportunities, mount the requisite development effort, and bring to market new products and processes quickly is critical to effective competition. But firms also must bring new products and processes to market efficiently. Because the number of new products and new process technologies has increased while model lives and life cycles have shrunk, firms must mount more development projects than has traditionally been the case utilizing substantially fewer resources per project. In the U.S. automobile market, for example, the growth of models and market segments over the last twenty-five years has meant that an auto firm must mount close to four times as many development projects simply to maintain its market share position. But smaller volumes per model and shorter design lives mean resource requirements must drop dramatically. Effective competition requires highly efficient engineering, design, and development activities.
Being fast and efficient is essential but not enough. The products and processes that a firm introduces must also meet demands in the market for value, reliability, and distinctive performance. Demanding customers and capable competitors mean that the ante keeps going up –requirements of performance, reliability, ease of use, and total value increase with each product introduction. When competition is intense firms must attract and satisfy customers in a very crowded market. More and more this means offering a product that is distinctive; that not only satisfies, but also surprises and delights a customer. Moreover, attention to the total product experience and thus to total product quality is critical.
More, more, more, store, store, store
By Clayton Collins | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Daniel Chisca knew he had witnessed a bargain one day last year when he saw $400 land an Atlanta man a Hewlett-Packard, Pentium 4 computer with flat-screen monitor - along with a desk, two big color televisions, and $2,000 worth of scuba equipment.
Mr. Chisca is neither a law-enforcement official nor a black marketeer.
He runs storageauctions.org, a website on which the managers of self-storage facilities - those sprawling road-side complexes into which Americans can cram possessions for a few months or much longer - can announce sales of the contents of units on which rent has gone unpaid.
If the self-storage phenomenon seems a glaring paradox in what's often called a throwaway society, there can be no denying its growth.
Facilities numbered about 8,000 in the mid-1980s, and experts now put the total at between 40,000 and 50,000, most consisting of hundreds of units averaging 100 square feet each.
Today, in a twist, some forms of self-storage might be considered just one more example of waste. Auctions such as the one Chisca attended in Atlanta now quietly empty as many as 120,000 abandoned and forfeited units a month nationwide, he says - freeing up space that's in voracious demand in a cycle of store and ignore.
Credit the continued interest in self-storage to a confluence of factors, experts say.
More late-life marriages mean more households with redundant furnishings. Many in a mounting wave of new retirees appear content to store, rather than unload, accumulated belongings unwanted by their already goods-laden offspring. Add to that what one social observer calls the prevailing American culture's "treadmill acquisitive behavior."
"Storage units are a symptom of a much deeper malaise," says Peter Whybrow, director of the Neuro- psychiatric Institute at UCLA and author of "American Mania: When More Is Not Enough."
"Where there's no clearly defined social hierarchy other than money, the acquisitive nature gets maximized by the need to create one's own social standing," he says. "[So] you keep what you want to flaunt and you put the rest away - because you can't bear to give it away."
Keeping it can mean paying $100 a month or more for the privilege. Powering right through recession and recovery, self-storage (or ministorage) has become a $15 billion industry with enough current capacity to add $2 billion more, says Mike Scanlon, president and CEO of the National Self-Storage Association in Springfield, Va.
Small businesses stowing extra equipment and inventory account for about one-third of rentals, experts say. But individual middle-class stuff-keepers make up the majority of renters, even though the size of the average new single-family home has more than doubled since 1950, and family size has declined.
"It's a $17 billion-a-year business devoted entirely to finding a place to store our abundance," says Daniel Pink, an author and culture watcher. "It's bigger than the motion picture production industry."
"Americans are very much junk collectors," says Chisca. "Look at the average garage."
Storage-facility managers protect the privacy of their clients, often declining to discuss what they have observed. In fact, rented space generally enjoys the same legal protection as do homes - a warrant is required for entry.
That makes buying at auction a highly speculative affair.
Look, don't touch
"People show up, the doors are thrown open, and you look from outside," Chisca says, adding that auctions are not widely attended, because few consumers know to seek them out. A few weeks back, he says, U-Haul auctioned the contents of 110 units at 70 locations.
For those who do show up, there is no opening boxes, no rooting around.
Chisca knows of one buyer who bid $500 on the contents of a garage-style unit, having glimpsed a new ride-on lawn mower inside. Later, the man found five more under some tarps. "These were models that retailed for $1,300 to $1,500 each," Chisca says.
That's fairly unusual, though, even at high-end facilities, such as Locker USA in Danvers, Mass., where Bruce Hoffman presides over one of the industry's increasingly popular variants: the high-tech, high-security, all-indoor facility.
The colossal building resembles a Spartan, clean shopping mall in the eerie, after-hours quiet. It has restrooms and vending machines. Freight elevators provide access to upper levels, where 600 new units are being built.
In the lobby, a bank of video monitors displays the loading areas. An electronic locator map helps renters find their respective places in the hive.
Many of the renters are retirees housed in the assisted-living home just down Route 1.
"The elderly have a tough time," Mr. Hoffman says. "They think they're going to pare it all down, but then they find they're not wanting to give things up."
When rents here go unpaid on abandoned units, he adds, they seldom turn out to be treasure chests. "It's nothing real fun."
Despite experiences such as Chisca's - he spent a few hundred at an auction several months ago and acquired an $8,000 slab of marble - that tends to hold true nationally.
Contents rarely exciting
"Most of the guys tell me that what's left in these things when there's an auction is usually very unspectacular, almost to the point of being worthless," says Mr. Scanlon.
The recognition of that worthlessness often dawns only after rents have become a deep financial drain, and renters perform a little cost-benefit analysis. Buying new furniture can turn out to be less costly than moving the old things across the country.
"People put [items] in for a couple a months, then a year goes by, and they're still paying $100 a month," Chisca says. "Finally, they just say, 'Forget it.' Why go through the motions of moving it out when you can just leave it behind?"
Brian Tokar, Earth for Sale. Boston: South End Press, 1997. ISBN 0896085589
Page 195
“Market efficiency has been achieved by drawing upon nature’s reserves as if they were limitless,” Altvater argues, explaining that:
A “positive feedback mechanism” may thus be set up between the economic system and nature. Interest-rate signals force the production of a surplus through the overexploitation of natural resources. The degraded natural basis of production and consumption then makes it more difficult to achieve profits commensurate with the rate of interest. The debt crisis has negative ecological effects, while the degradation of nature intensifies the debt crisis.
Page 255
47. Elmar Altvater, The Future of the Market (London and New York: Verso, 1993) p. 183 ff.
A California-based school of “socialist ecologists” has also demonstrated the anti-ecological nature of capitalist economics and capitalist society. Under the theoretical leadership of political economist James O’Connor, they have shown that environmental pollution and resource depletion are necessary consequences of capitalist accumulation.
Their Marxist political orientation, however, has restrained their full acceptance of an ecological
orientation that acknowledges the natural world as more than an “external factor of production,” or human
society as capable of being organized around anything but its economic activity. See, for example, James
O’Connor, “Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, no. 1,
fall 1988, pp. 11-38
Katherine Barkley and Steve Weissman, “The Eco-Establishment,” Ramparts magazine, May 1970, vol. 8, no. 7, 50, 54
Like the original conservation movement it is emulating, today’s big business conservation is not interested in preserving the earth; it is rationally reorganizing for a more efficient rape of resources ... and the production of an ever grosser national product.
Welsh, Jack, General Electric’s CEO quoted in Janet Lowe’s Jack Welsh Speaks Wiley, New York, 1998 ISBN 0471242721, Page 108
“Productivity is the belief that there is an infinite capacity to improve anything.”
You Need to Get to Work!
By Daniel McGinn
Newsweek March 19, 2007 issue –
…In offices across America, we seem to be at a moment of get-organized-now hysteria. Time-management gurus have been preaching their work-more-efficiently systems since the days of Benjamin Franklin ("Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions"). But more people are searching for new techniques to speed through tasks. In the electronic, gadgetized age of e-mail, BlackBerrys and ever-more-sophisticated desktop software—all designed theoretically to manage digital information efficiently—we've become overwhelmed. That's where the productivity industry comes in. The question is, however, whether this newfound emphasis on productivity is helping—or just making us crazier.
A new and highly publicized book, "A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder," actually argues in favor of chaos. Coauthors Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman write that neatness has become wildly overrated. The authors cite successful book and hardware stores with no rhyme or reason to the layout of merchandise, as well as inventors and scientists whose big breakthroughs came because of nonsystematic, improvisational experimenting….
Zack Edison, an Apple consultant in northern California, constantly hears colleagues exchanging efficiency techniques. "It's like everybody who's overweight is always talking about diets," he says. Both buyers and sellers of this advice attribute its growing popularity to the same causes. Companies have downsized, piling more work on fewer employees. More people are self-employed or telecommuting, giving them more discretion over how to spend their time. Workplace distractions are epidemic—especially as e-mail, once a blessing, has turned into an endless time-suck. A few years ago, discussions of work-life balance focused mostly on programs like flex-time; today, workers realize that no matter how flexible their employers are, most of us still can't go home until our work is done….
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17522665/site/newsweek/
Robert J. Samuelson, “Productivity’s False Facade,” Newsweek, March 24, 2003. Page 46
It’s tempting to believe that productivity—especially improved technology—will rescue the economy. The grounds for skepticism start with history. In the Great Depression some industries experienced rapid productivity gains, as economic historian Michael A. Bernstein of the University of California, San Diego, has pointed out. Food marketing was one. Small grocery stores gave way to new supermarkets; there were 300 in 1935 and almost 5,000 by 1939. Refrigerator sales boomed—from about 800,000 in 1930 to 2.3 million in 1937. Electrification raised light-bulb sales sharply. But these and other gains couldn’t overcome otherwise dismal economic conditions.
We also need to remember that economic statistics are just numbers. Their significance depends on what causes them to move. Productivity—the statistic—is simply a bit of arithmetic. Total output is divided by the hours people work. If output rises faster than work hours, productivity increases. This is what usually happens and it suggests better technology, better management and better workers. It’s a beneficial process that promotes economic expansion.
With lower costs, companies can increase wages and profits.
Higher incomes then drive higher spending.
But productivity—the statistic—also increases if work hours drop while output only sputters. That’s what actually occurred in both 2001 and 2002. Americans in private businesses (excluding government and nonprofit organizations) worked 187.61 billion hours in 2002, which was 2 percent less than in 2001. In turn, employment hours in 2001 were 1.3 percent less than in 2000. There was more unemployment; people with jobs worked slightly fewer hours. Since 1947, there have been only 15 years when employment hours have dropped and only three other instances of consecutive annual-declines in 1957 to '58, 1970 to '71 and 1991 to '92).
Burroughs, Edgar Rice. The Efficiency Experts. Missouri: 1966. Page 45
“What do you have to know to be an efficiency expert?” asked the girl.
“From what I saw of the bird I just mentioned the less one knows about anything the more successful he should be as an efficiency expert, for he certainly didn’t know anything. And yet the results from kicking everybody in the plant out of his own particular rut eventually worked wonders for the organization.
If the man had had any sense, tact or diplomacy nothing would have been accomplished.
From G.R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: a Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899-1914, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971, Page139
Lord Roseberry was a most wonderful man,
He had every species of scheme on his shelf.
But ‘efficiency’ still formed the gist of his plan,
And ‘efficiency’ meant nothing else than himself.
Luther H. Gulick, M.D. The Efficient Life New York, 1907, Page 8
The conditions for efficiency in the case of the ordinary day labourer are not complex. His work is that of a coarse machine, turning out, like a grain thresher, a great amount of production relatively low in grade. His efficiency is but little disturbed by constant feeding upon indigestible victuals, by frequent carousals, by a dirty skin and bad air. Low-grade production does not need a high-grade organism.
Tichi, Cecelia. Shifting GearsTechnology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. University of North Carolina Press. 1987. ISBN 0807841676, Page 9
For the intellectual center of Taylorism was not the worker, but the mastermind. It was not the rank and file but the engineer whose formulations would prevail and endure.
Shuman, Michael. Going Local. New York: Free Press, 1998. ISBN 0684830124 Page 48
Efficiency, economists argue, requires specialization. The narrower the range of tasks an individual performs, the better he or she becomes at it. But, as any person who has sweated on an assembly lone knows, a job reduced to the turning of a screw does little to satisfy the soul or self-esteem. Real people are not satisfied with the role of Chaplinesque automatons that economists have assigned them, and they look for more from a job than just a paycheck. They seek a challenge, pride, and respect. And, if given the choice, many people will gladly choose a more exciting job with less take-home pay....
Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil, New York: 1995 ISBN 0385419937 Pages 74, 75
Past generations of millwrights, blacksmiths, and machinists are almost gone. Theirs was a real workplace, of forges, lathes, and anvils. Nothing virtual about a diesel engine or hydraulic press. They built iron horses with muscles of steam, skyscrapers with brick and rivet and lime. We’re fast replacing their hard mechanical world with a gossamer network of fibers. Our is one of artificial reality, software tools, and expert systems. There’s nothing to touch; no inner workings to admire. The pendulum clock from sixty years ago attracts more attention than today’s more accurate quartz watch. Makes me wonder what history we’re leaving behind. Footprints across an artificial reality are as evanescent as data on the Ethernet.
Today, gone is craft, replaced by career. Instead of workers on our feet, we’ve become sedentary professionals, entering data into computers. As the analog world of our parents gives way to the digital universe of our children, I compare the tools of these two environments. Handwriting is replaced by word processing, mail by e-mail, accounting books by spreadsheets, rotary dials by Touch-Tones, drafting by CAD. Efficient improvements, yes, but one thing saddens me. I sense little love for this technology, and even less appreciation for the wonders of this digital age. Once, kids read of Tom Swift’s adventures in electric cars and high-speed aeroplanes. Today, there’s a blase acceptance of instant global communications and microelectronic wizardry. These are impressive accomplishments, deserving of curiosity, awe, and praise. For all my ambivalence about the barrenness of technoculture, I’m blown away by the devices themselves. Once, you brought a six-transistor radio to the beach. Now, there’s a half million transistors in every cellular phone.
Johann Kepler needed six years to analyze the motion of Mars; my pocket calculator can do this in a minute.
Yet despite the footsore cliche of an information revolution, I rarely hear genuine esteem for the internal workings of today’s technologies. Hardly anyone takes apart a computer just to admire the designers’ work. Kids don’t disassemble VCRs to figure out how they work—I wish they would! There are no Heathkits to let you solder your own modem. Indeed, it’s a rare hobbyist that wires his PC into an experiment. I guess today’s experimenters build things in software, without ever touching a soldering iron. The hocus-pocus is inside the program. It’s cleaner this way—nothing to burn or zap, and you don’t need a voltmeter.
What happened to home-brewed and breadboarded circuitry? Where’s the joy of mechanics and electricity, the creation of real things? Who are the tinkerers with a lust for electronics? We’ve become a nation of appliance operators, who take pride in what we own, rather than what we build. Remind me, in an odd way of my fortune cookie from The Great Wall Chinese Restaurant: “Work to become, not to acquire.”
Stewart, Thomas A. Intellectual Capital. New York: 1997. ISBN 0385482280, Page 40
More and more people spend their working day in the realm of information and ideas. Overall, according to calculations by Stephen R. Barley, professor of industrial engineering and industrial management at Stanford University, the share of the American labor force whose jobs primarily involve working with things (farmworkers, operators and laborers, craftspeople) or delivering nonprofessional services (hotel and restaurant workers, distribution workers, retail clerks, domestic servants, barbers and beauticians, health aides, etc.) will have fallen by more than half by the turn of the century, from 83 percent in 1900 to an estimated 41 percent; those who work chiefly with information (in sales, managerial and administrative, professional and technical, or clerical jobs), were 17 percent of the workforce in 1900 and will be 59 percent as the new century dawns.
Stephen L. Talbott, The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending The Machines In Our Midst; Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly and Associates; 1995 ISBN 1565920856, Pages 5 and 50
Where freedom once required the fateful exercise of an enlightened, heart-warmed will, it is now enough to play with clickable choices on a screen.... All the talk about individual empowerment through electronically accessible information really has more to do with the differential advantage for a few players early in the game than it does with any fundamental social change. It’s rather like the pyramid scheme: those who are quickest off the mark win big; the rest must hope eventually to climb back to the break-even point in a game that is now speeded up and very likely more demanding than it was before.... Every new leap of technology simply cranks up the speed of the game another notch. What improves my efficiency does the same for the millions of other players.
Shenk, David. Data smog : Surviving the Information Glut. San Francisco: Harper; ISBN: 0062515519 1997.
Page 23
I can vaguely recall a phone conversation with a college girlfriend shortly after graduation, which she complained about her office fax machine, yet another appliance sweeping the nation. It wasn’t that her fax didn’t work, but rather that it was working too well. Because it transmitted information across the country and world so quickly, she said, it had actually altered the expectations of work time, becoming a kind of taskmaster that insisted on faster and faster work.
Page 30-1
In 1971 the average American was targeted by at least 560 daily advertising messages. Twenty years later, that number had risen sixfold, to 3,000 messages per day. In the office, an average of 60 percent of each person’s time is now spent processing documents. Paper consumption per capita in the United States tripled from 1940 to 1980 (from 200 to 600 pounds), and tripled again from 1980 to 1990 (to 1,800 pounds). In the 1980s, third-class mail (used to send publications) grew thirteen times faster than population growth. The typical business manager is said to read 1 million words per week. As of 1990, more than 30,000 telemarketing companies employed 18 million Americans, and generated $400 billion in annual sales.
Page 35
Today, the vultures still feed, occasioning a billion-dollar market for antacids like Tagamet and Pepcid AC. For all of our abundance, ours is also an age of unprecedented stress, strain, headaches, and digestive problems—so much so, in fact, that tension has become one of our most vibrant industries. Three out of four Americans complain of chronic stress. Two out of every three visits to the family doctor are thought to be stress-related, and the three top-selling prescription drugs are for ulcers, depression, and hypertension.
Stress is also partly to blame, psychologists say, for the startling 300 percent increase in depression over the course of this century.
Page 86
Millions of recently “downsized” Americans, rendered obsolete and jobless by technology, would not contest Seawick’s assessment. Neither would U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who has made worker-retraining a personal crusade, warning that in today’s economy everyone can expect to change jobs an average of seven or eight times in their lifetime. Job stability, Reich says, is a thing of the past.
There is also a social cost to upgrade mania that cannot be measured in dollars. The blistering pace of life today, driven by technology and the business imperative to improve efficiency, is something to behold. We often feel life going by much, much faster than we wish, as we are carried forward from meeting to meeting, call to call, errand to errand. We have less time to ourselves, and are expected to improve our performance and output year after year after year. If life were a cartoon, as it sometimes seems to be, we would be the breathless Wile E. Coyote, forever chasing the Road Runner but never concluding the chase (<beep beep>).
Page 94
(In this way, technology brings with it yet another internal contradiction: As it speeds up our world in the name of efficiency and productivity, it also constricts rational thinking.)
Page 124
For the sake of this did everything else become indifferent to me... This is our postmodern refrain. Professional specialization and consumer nichification encroach upon our common culture. Rather than a healthy swirl of communication among citizens of different backgrounds and perspectives, we are left with a hyper-efficient communications infrastructure that not only highlights social distinctions; it fortifies them.
Page 125
Specialization makes sleepwalkers of us all; the global village predicted by the seers of the 1960’s is being replaced by electronic cottages populated by isolated dreamers. We do not know our neighbors. If we are financial experts, we are speechless in the presence of research chemists; if we are scholars, we cannot make out the grimaces of merchants. We are a nation of lonely molecules.
From Earl Shorris, A Nation of Salesmen
The Paper Chase
The paperless office is still a distant dream. In the interim, we should be recycling more and developing alternatives to wood-based paper.
By Jim Motavalli
While many futurists predicted that we?d be enjoying the paperless office around this time, Americans are still at the epicenter of a paper blizzard. Were you under the impression that the electronic age would free us from all that? According to The Myth of the Paperless Office, a company?s use of e-mail causes an average 40 percent increase in paper consumption. The demand for ream after ream of white paper is putting a huge strain not only on America?s forests, but the world?s. And it?s forcing the environmental movement to consider the alternatives.
The U.S. currently gobbles up some 200 million tons of wood products annually, with consumption increasing by four percent every year. The pulp and paper industry is the biggest culprit. U.S. paper producers alone consume one billion trees?or 12,430 square miles of forests?every year, while producing 735 pounds of paper for every American.
The U.S. has less than five percent of the world?s population, but consumes 30 percent of the world?s paper. Only five percent of America?s virgin forests remain, while 70 percent of the fiber consumed by the pulp and paper industry continues to be generated from virgin wood. While logging controversies most often center around the Pacific Northwest, most of the wood pulp used for paper in the U.S. actually comes from southern forests, currently home to some of the greatest biodiversity in the continental U.S. (see sidebar).
Worldwide, global consumption of wood products has risen 64 percent since 1961. The industry expects that demand will double by 2050, keeping pace with population growth. Recycling has helped, but has not yet made an appreciable difference. ?Recycling has yet to dent the world?s appetite for virgin-fiber pulp,? says the Worldwatch Institute.
In Indonesia, the pulp and paper industry is destroying rainforest so quickly that it will run out of wood by 2007, according to a report by Friends of the Earth. An area the size of Belgium is wiped out annually. Only 10 percent of the trees cut down for paper in Indonesia are farmed, although the industry had supposedly committed to replanting its clear-cuts with fast-growing acacia trees.
Globally, pulp for paper and other uses is taking an increasing share of all wood production, from 40 percent in 1998 to nearly 60 percent over the next 50 years. In the same time span, easily accessible and inexpensive sources of wood are disappearing. Because of the rapid consumption of virgin forests in places as far apart as Canada and Southeast Asia, forest restoration has not been able to keep pace with the demand for wood products.
Toxic Pollution and Waste
Loss of forests isn?t the only issue. Deforestation has released an estimated 120 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), the major global warming gas, into the atmosphere. The pulp and paper industry is the third-largest industrial polluter in both Canada and the U.S., releasing more than 220 million pounds of toxic pollution into the air, ground and water each year.
Much of that pollution is the byproduct of the three million tons of chlorine used annually to bleach wood pulp white. Chlorine bleaching is a major source of the potent carcinogen dioxin, which is routinely discharged into rivers and streams with wastewater. As a result, dioxin is now ubiquitous in our environment, found throughout the world in air, water, soil and food. Every woman alive today carries some trace of dioxin in her breast milk. Dioxin is considered one of the most toxic substances ever produced, and has been known to cause cancer, liver failure, miscarriage, birth defects and genetic damage in laboratory animals.
The U.S. paper industry has been aware of the dioxin problem since at least 1985, but has been very slow to act on alternatives (see sidebar). In Europe, chlorine bleaching is being phased out. That has only been proposed in the U.S., despite the fact that the American Public Health Association strongly supports a phase-out. In Sweden, pulp mills have to meet stringent standards, and were required to reduce chlorine content by 90 percent as early as 1993. When they have to, American companies such as Proctor and Gamble can go virtually chlorine-free: The Pampers exported to Sweden, for example, are made without a chlorine-bleaching process, unlike those wrapping U.S. babies.
Paper is also the dominant material in solid waste. And in the United States, paper-producing companies are the third-largest energy consumer, with a pace that keeps quickening.
It’s not surprising that, given all these environmental negatives, the paper industry would wrap itself in a green mantle. International Paper, for instance, issued a Sustainability Report in 2002 that cites its role as among the largest owners of sustainably managed private forestland in the world. Its raw material is trees, the report says, the world’s greatest renewable resource.? It participates in forest certification programs and voluntary partnerships and strictly adheres to environmental regulations. And according to the American Forest and Paper Association, U.S. papermakers recycle enough paper every day to fill a 15-mile-long train of boxcars. Since 1990, the recovered paper would fill 200 football stadiums to a height of 100 feet.
While some of this is undoubtedly greenwashing, Michael Klein, a spokesperson for the American Forest and Paper Association, asserts that the industry is currently using all the recycled paper it can get. ?I have a problem with activists who say we have to demand more recycled content,? Klein says. ?Instead, they should demand that people recycle more. One hundred percent of the paper and boxed fiberboard people put on the curb is used. Paper activists point out, however, that a significant amount of U.S.-generated recyclable paper is actually exported. Nearly a quarter of the recovered paper in the U.S. is shipped to Mexico, Canada, Asia and Europe rather than being recycled here, reports Conservatree.
Tree-Free Paper: Great Expectations
There is vast potential for a “green” paper industry, including recycled and natural fibers, that could not only spare trees but also produce paper with minimal environmental impact overall, but it needs an infusion of both public interest and research funding. It is presently, at best, a $20 million sales niche in a $230 billion U.S. industry, asserts the San Francisco-based Fiber Futures, which lobbies for expanded use of agricultural residues and other tree-free materials for paper. A plan by the Natural Resources Defense Council to open a paper recycling plant in the Bronx, New York ended tragically because of labor
opposition and last-minute political maneuvering, which thwarted financing. Many small and medium-sized paper mills that handled tree-free papers have closed because of industry consolidation and the
economic downturn, sending many paper manufacturers overseas for sources
Dear EarthTalk: What happened to the "paperless office" that computers were supposed to create, and what is the environmental impact of our paper usage?
-- Michelle Barnes, Virginia Beach, VA
The paperless office does appear to still be a distant dream. A recent University of California-Berkeley study found that, worldwide, the amount of printed matter generated between 1999 and 2002 not only did not decrease--it grew by 36 percent. The quantity of information we now store electronically is growing in leaps and bounds. And while we're using less paper as a percentage of total data output, we're still using more paper. "Contrary to notions of paperless offices floated by futurists in the late 1980s and early 1990s," the report said, "the consumption of office paper has gone up substantially in recent years."
Not surprisingly, the United States is the biggest paper consumer, accounting for 33 percent of all printed material. U.S. paper producers alone consume one billion trees--or 12,430 square miles of forests--every year, while producing 735 pounds of paper for every American. Only five percent of America's virgin forests now remain, while 70 percent of the fiber consumed by the pulp and paper industry continues to be generated from virgin wood.
Besides consuming trees and habitat, processing paper generates tons of industrial pollutants. The pulp and paper industry is the third-largest industrial polluter in both Canada and the U.S., releasing more than 220 million pounds of toxic pollution--including dioxin, a cancer-causing byproduct of the chlorine-bleaching process--into the air, ground and water each year. Paper is also the dominant material in solid waste. And in the U.S., paper-producing companies are the third-largest energy consumer.
In recent years, advocates for ecologically sustainable paper, like the San Francisco-based Conservatree, have grown more vocal in support of both increasing the use of recycled paper and developing alternatives to wood-based paper. As a small step, they have succeeded in persuading large paper retailers like Staples, Kinko's and Office Depot to offer higher amounts of recycled content in the paper they sell.
Alternatives to tree-based paper include various kinds of agricultural wastes, like corn and rice husks, a plant called kenaf, and hemp. One agricultural waste paper is made from 100 percent bagasse fiber, left over from sugar cane production. Kimberly-Clark uses bagasse in some of its paper towels and tissues. But many consider kenaf, a relative of okra and cotton, and hemp, to be the most promising alternatives, especially for office papers. Kenaf, which originated in the East Indies and is now grown in the U.S., Thailand and China, is making inroads as a wood-based paper substitute. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has deemed kenaf "the best option for tree-free papermaking in the U.S."
Hemp is a very strong fiber, making it excellent for paper processing, and it is easily bleached without chlorine. Beginning in 1840, American-grown hemp was used to make manila paper. Hemp cultivation has been illegal in the U.S. since the end of World War II, because it is a relative of the plant grown for marijuana. But the strain of hemp grown for paper does not contain enough quantities of psychoactive chemicals for it to be used as a drug--and its cultivation is encouraged in 29 countries around the world.
CONTACTS: Conservatree, (415) 721-4230, http://www.conservatree.com; Kimberly-Clark, http://www.kimberly-clark.com; USDA Agricultural Research Center, (301) 504-5664, http://www.usda.gov. From E-Magazine – week of 6/6/04
Tenner, Edward, Why Things Bite Back : Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences New York: Vintage Books, 1996 ISBN 0679425632, Page 188
According to one study by the economist Stephen Roach, investment in advanced technology in the service sector grew by over 116 percent per worker between 1980 and 1989, while output increased by only 0.3 percent to 1985 and 2.2 percent to 1989. Two other economists, Daniel E. Sichel of the Brookings Institution and Stephen D. Oliner of the Federal Reserve, have calculated the contribution of computers and peripherals as no more than 0.2 percent of real growth in business output between 1987 and 1993.
Architecture Magazine December, 1999
Number of sheets of paper each U.S. worker uses per year: 5,400.
Percentage of “stuff” stored in workplaces never used or referred to: 30
Percentage of workers who say they are chronically angry on the job: 25.
Average number of people murdered in U.S. offices each week: 20
“Fax Inefficiency Plagues Corporate America” Facilities Design & Management, July 1994, Page 14
“Lack of awareness concerning fax telephone costs continues to plague most U.S businesses,” says Meredith Fischer, vice president marketing, Pitney Bowes Facsimile Systems. “The majority of fax users don’t connect expanding department telephone costs with increased fax traffic. Since they don’t get the bill, it doesn’t register.” The study reports that more than 60% of fax transmissions are sent long distance; less than 5% of respondents send fax transmissions during the evening or night when it is most cost-efficient; 40% of the respondents do not bill back or do not know if they bill back charges to a client, their department, or themselves; and fewer than 30% of respondents have ever used time-saving fax features, such as multi-tasking, sequential broadcasting, and relay broadcasting.
Bottom line Insights
A 1993 Gallup study reports fax volume has jumped 44% at Fortune 500 companies in the last year.
J.D. McClatchy, The Vintage Book Of Contemporary World Poetry New York: 1996 ISBN 0679741151, Page 431, Translated from the Chinese by Carolyn Kitzer
“Assembly Line”
Yes, I’m numb to my own existence
As if, like the trees and stars
perhaps just out of habit
perhaps just out of sorrow,
I’m unable to show concern
For my own manufactured fate.
London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. Stylus Publishing. Chapter 17: Inefficiency, ISBN 0745314155, Page 2
Without going further into the argument, this man on the Mile End Waste pointed the moral that when two men were after the one job wages were bound to fall.
When there are more men than there is work to be done, a sifting-out process must obtain. In every branch of industry the less efficient are crowded out. Being crowded out because of inefficiency, they cannot go up, but must descend, and continue to descend, until they reach their proper level, a place in the industrial fabric where they are efficient. It follows, therefore, and it is inexorable, that the least efficient must descend to the very bottom, which is the shambles wherein they perish miserably.
A glance at the confirmed inefficients at the bottom demonstrates that they are, as a rule, mental, physical, and moral wrecks. The exceptions to the rule are the late arrivals, who are merely very inefficient, and upon whom the wrecking process is just beginning to operate. All the forces here, it must be remembered, are destructive. The good body (which is there because its brain is not quick and capable) is speedily wrenched and twisted out of shape; the clean mind (which is there because of its weak body) is speedily fouled and contaminated. The mortality is excessive, but, even then, they die far too lingering deaths.
Here, then, we have the construction of the Abyss and the shambles. Throughout the whole industrial fabric a constant elimination is going on. The inefficient are weeded out and flung downward. Various things constitute inefficiency. The engineer who is irregular or irresponsible will sink down until he finds his place, say as a casual laborer, an occupation irregular in its very nature and in which there is little or no responsibility. Those who are slow and clumsy, who suffer from weakness of body or mind, or who lack nervous, mental, and physical stamina, must sink down, sometimes rapidly, sometimes step by step, to the bottom. Accident, by disabling an efficient worker, will make him inefficient, and down he must go. And the worker who becomes aged, with failing energy and numbing brain, must begin the frightful descent which knows no stopping-place short of the bottom and death.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society: an Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life. 1990. ISBN 0803990766, Page 123
Although the forces of McDonaldization trumpet their greater efficiency, they never tell us whom the system is more efficient for. Most of the gains in efficiency go to those who push rationalization. People need to ask: Efficient for whom? Is it efficient for consumers to push their own food over the supermarket scanner and then bag it themselves? Is it efficient for people to pump their own gasoline? Is it efficient for them to push numerous combinations of telephone numbers before they speak to a human voice? Most often, people will find that such systems are not efficient for them.
Similarly, rational systems impose a double standard on employees. Those at the top of an organization impose rationalization on those who work at or near the bottom of the system—the assembly-line worker, the counterperson at McDonald’s. The owners, franchisees, top managers, want to control subordinates through the imposition of rational systems. However, they want their own positions to be as free of rational constraints—as non-rational— as possible. They need to be free to be creative, but not their underlings.
Subordinates are to follow blindly the rules, regulations, and other structures f the rational system. Thus, the goal is to impose efficiency on subordinates hire those in charge remain as creative (and often as inefficient) as possible.
"Sociology Corner." McDonaldization website www.sciology.net/mconald/efficiency.html.
With the salad bar, you are not limited by what the cook wants to put in the salad, and ATMs allow you to do your banking any time you want, unhindered by inefficient bank hours. However, keep in mind, that both of these serve to reduce the level of human interaction. Consumers are forced to deal with computers or salad bars and not people, training them to be better workers for the McDonaldized society.
Bob Black, “The Abolition of Work”
As Adam Smith noted in Wealth of Nations, “The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”
Anonymous Swiss folk tale
Once, long ago, deep in the Black Forest, lived a monk. He was a cobbler and it was his job to make and repair shoes for the neighboring monasteries. He knew all the feet of all the monks in the land and sang all day long. Then one day it was decreed that he should count all his costs for each and every shoe. He counted all the nails, all the pieces of leather, all the threads, and accounted for all his time. His joy left him and he sang no more.
Dewey, John. Democracy and Education, Macmillan, 1916, Chapter Nine: “Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims”
Translated into specific aims, social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial competency. Persons cannot live without means of subsistence; the ways in which these means are employed and consumed have a profound influence upon all the relationships of persons to one another. If an individual is not able to earn his own living and that of the children dependent upon him, he is a drag or parasite upon the activities of others. He misses for himself one of the most educative experiences of life. If he is not trained in the right use of the products of industry, there is grave danger that he may deprave himself and injure others in his possession of wealth. No scheme of education can afford to neglect such basic considerations. Yet in the name of higher and more spiritual ideals, the arrangements for higher education have often not only neglected them, but looked at them with scorn as beneath the level of educative concern. With the change from an oligarchical to a democratic society, it is natural that the significance of an education which should have as a result ability to make one's way economically in the world, and to manage economic resources usefully instead of for mere display and luxury, should receive emphasis.
There is, however, grave danger that in insisting upon this end, existing economic conditions and standards will be accepted as final. A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of competency to choose and make its own career. This principle is violated when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents. As a matter of fact, industry at the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt changes through the evolution of new inventions. New industries spring up, and old ones are revolutionized. Consequently an attempt to train for too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose.
Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor Reactor : A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology . University of Chicago Press: 1988. ISBN 0226902110, Page 116
The point of many applications of microelectronics, after all, is to eliminate social layers that were previously needed to get things done. Computerized bank tellers, for example, have largely done away with small, local branch banks, which were not only ways of doing business, but places where people met, talked, and socialized. The so-called electronic cottage industry similarly, operates very well without the kinds of human interactions that once characterized office work. Despite greater efficiency, productivity, and convenience, innovations of this kind do away with the reasons people formerly had for being together, working together, acting together. Many practical activities once crucial to even a minimal sense of community life are rendered obsolete. One consequence of these developments is to pare away the kinds of face-to-face contact that once provided important buffers between individuals and organized power. To an increasing extent, people will become even more susceptible to the influence of employers, news media, advertisers, and national political leaders. Where will we find new institutions to balance and mediate such power?
Time July 27 1998, “Milestones,” Page 19
40 Years it took radio to gain 50 million domestic listeners.
13 Years it took television and cable to gain 50 million domestic viewers.
4 Years it took the World Wide Web to get 50 million domestic users.
Doors of Perception Conference 4 - SPEED - Speaker Transcript - Stephen Kern: “The Culture of Speed “ Updated 19-12-1996 www.doorsofperception.com/doors/revamped_frameset.html
But there were also critics. In English the word ‘phoney’ came from early descriptions of artificial sound of voice on the phone and by implication the artificiality of what was said without the enrichment of face-to-face encounters.
Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, Page 297
The electronic media have shown what a heavy price must be paid for even the simulation of multi-dimensioned intercourse. In genuine communication every agent has its own role to play: the visible gesture, the direct spoken word, the written message, the painting, the printed book, the radio, the phonograph record, the tape recorder, television. Instead of replacing these varied multi-media by television, radio and the computer alone, a mature and efficient technology would strive to keep them all in existence, each for the performance of its appropriate function in the chosen situation. As with the transportation system, which cannot dispense with the free-moving and autonomous pedestrian without producing clotted urban congestion or equally baffling suburban dispersion, so with an efficient communications system. What is needed is a technology so varied, so many-sided, so flexible, so responsive to human need, that it can serve every valid human purpose. The only true multi-medium remains the human organism itself.
Collins, Jim. “Talking To Your Hand, Or Is That Your Phone?” US Airways Attache February 1998.Page 33-4
By the end of today, 30,000 new people will join the ranks of cellular phone owners; by this time next year, the American army of users alone will have grown by close to ten million. No electronic product has ever been accepted more quickly or bought more eagerly: not the fax machine, not the color TV, not the VCR. In high-school hallways and on city sidewalks, at poolside and in airport restaurants, in commuter lanes and on remote mountain peaks, the cell phone has become the symbol of the ‘90s. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that the “cellular” technology was ready for prime time. By then, the Federal Communications Commission had decided how the industry should be structured and regulated. The FCC divided the country into 306 metropolitan and 428 rural “markets,” designated by counties, and issued licenses corresponding with frequencies. In 1983, Washington, D.C., and Chicago became the first U.S. cities to offer cellular service. Fifteen years after those original two systems, the FCC has licensed more than 1,500 systems. Wireless phone service is now available to 75 percent of U.S. population, across 80 percent of the Lower 48 land mass.
“Study Predicts E-Commerce to Double by End of 1998.” Survey Monitor Page 6
According to a survey of 120,000 North American consumers conducted by Forrester Research, Inc., Cambridge, Mass., the number of households that shop and invest online—a high-income, technology-optimistic elite—will double from 5 percent to 10 percent by the end of 1998. On-line connections and PC ownership will soon broaden to include low-income households, generating the next of e-commerce-ready consumers. Data is drawn from Forrester’s Technographics ‘98 Field Study of North American consumers, conducted with NPD Group in the fall of 1997.
Noble, David F. Forces of Production. New York: Knopf 1984. ISBN 0394512626, Pages 231 and 342
Numerical control technology appeared to offer management several prospects. First, it promised greater control over production, while reducing dependence upon the work force. By making possible the separation of conception from execution, of programming from machine operation, Numerical Control appeared to allow for the complete removal of decision-making and judgment from the shop floor. Such “mental” parts of the production process could now be monopolized by managers, engineers, and programmers, and concentrated in the office. And once decisions had been made and performance and production standards had been set, detailed orders would be sent to the floor, not only to the people there, by means of planning sheets and the like, but also directly to the machines....
Of course, formal (written) justifications of capital expenditure may make elaborate comparisons of productivity, capital costs, payback periods, etc., between, for instance, alternative new machines. These justifications were used frequently, according to most accounts, as the basis of decisions on choice of technology in many of the case study firms. But it is probably safe to say that in no instance could it be demonstrated that in practice the new technology met the measured expectations of the production engineer practice the new technology met the measured expectations of the production engineer who ‘justified’ the technology, or of the machinesupplier who advertised it. Besides, measures of the actual economic returns of new processes were invariably in the form of ‘two or three times more output per man’, or ‘it paid for itself in about two years’, rather than the pounds and pence, and hours and minutes, of the pre-implementation assessment. In practice then, there was simply no accurate measure of
productivity gains or of comparative improvements in efficiency.
Cohen, Nevin. "Designing for a Digital Economy." Architecture December 1999, Page 119
Although e-commerce promises waste reduction, the truth is that, at least in the short term, surges in consumption of certain resources can be expected. Ironically, one such side-effect of online shopping has been an increase in gasoline consumption. The average American household makes more than 500 trips to the store by car each year. As consumers do more shopping online, some trips may be avoided. But if they insist on overnight delivery to replicate the instant gratification of in-person shopping, fuel consumption could actually skyrocket. Patagonia, the outdoor-clothing company, found that if it sent a product via overnight mail, transportation alone accounted for over a quarter of the energy required to manufacture and deliver it.
Doors 4 - SPEED - Speaker Transcript - Susan George: “When I was growing up...” Updated 22-11-1996www.doorsofperception.com/doors/revamped_frameset.html
Financial capital is pure speed and pure, immaterial profit. It makes instantaneous judgments on the values of national policies. If it doesn’t like what it sees, it leaves, at the speed of bytes, leaving catastrophic consequences in its wake. In December 1994, billions of dollars were removed from Mexico in a matter of hours. The peso collapsed, interest rates were put sky high, over a million small businesses failed, unemployment is rampant, widespread hunger and malnutrition have returned, crime rates are alarming and kidnappings routine. It can happen in rich countries too. George Soros made a billion dollars in a couple of days speculating against the British pound and in July 1993 the French Central Bank lost the totality of its reserves overnight in a desperate attempt to prop up the franc against the onslaught of speculative capital. Like a supersonic fighter plane, financial capital can accelerate from zero to Mach three in a matter of seconds.
Shellenbarger, Sue. “Work & Family.” Wall Street Journal 23 September 1998. Page B1
Unscheduled absences rose 25% in the past year to seven-year highs, says CCH Inc., a Riverwoods, Ill., human-resource information concern, in a 401-company survey set for release today. The increase is concentrated among the small and medium-size companies that employ about 70% of all payroll workers. The findings echo an Aon Consulting survey of 1,800 employees showing an 11% rise since 1995 in time lost from work, including unscheduled absences for all reasons and time spent at work on personal matters.
The reasons would horrify the Organization Man of old. For the first time since the annual CCH survey began in 1991, “family issues” were cited as the No. 1 cause of unexpected absences, accounting for 26%, compared with 22% for personal illness. Personal need, “entitlement mentality” and stress together accounted for 52%. Stress and personal matter were also the fastest-growing causes of missed time in the Aon survey.
Maggie Jackson, Associated Press. “Be honest: Did you cheat at work yesterday?” The Philadelphia Daily News, Saturday, April 5, 1997
Study finds about half of employees confess to illegal, unethical acts. Nearly half of workers engaged in unethical or illegal acts, or both, in the last year, according to a survey to be released Monday. The atmosphere at many workplaces may be to blame, according to the Ethics Officer Association and the American Society of Chartered Life Underwriters and Chartered Financial Consultants, which conducted the survey of 1,324 workers. Faced with the demands of overtime, balancing work and family and downsizing, workers said they felt more stress than five years ago, as well as more pressure to act unethically. “Daily pressures are extreme, and it’s those pressures that may be driving unethical practices,” said John Driskill, vice president of the society of underwriters and financial consultants.
Kuttner, Robert, Everything For Sale, New York, 1996: ISBN 0394583922, Page 64
Market theory conceives of economic relationships as purely instrumental. All transactions are at arm’s length, and there is no room for sentimentality. The theory construes long-term commitments as implicit contracts, since the contract epitomizes the economic concept of a free, voluntary exchange by calculating, rational individuals, where opportunism is convenient and worth its nominal cost, the theory commends opportunism. In Law and Economics School theory, there is even a doctrine of “efficient breach.” If it is cost-effective for one party to a contract to break it, that party should ignore the contract and pay the price. However, society pays a heavier price if norms of commitment and trust are casually breached. It saves incalculable time and money if we can assume that most people are trustworthy most of the time; that every transaction does not require endless haggling.
Marino, Sal. “Straight Talk.” Industry Week December 7, 1998, Page 22
The survey was conducted in June by the Lutheran Brotherhood, an organization that provides financial services, insurance, and various other programs for its more than 1 million Lutheran members. The study was conducted among 1,000 working American adults. The good news is that 76% of the respondents said they never had been asked (or ordered) to do anything they considered unethical pertaining to their work. The bad news is that 24% confessed that they have been asked (or ordered) to do something they considered unethical. And the really bad news is that 41% of those asked actually did the dastardly deed that was requested of them without objecting.
Kanigel, Robert. The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency. New York: 1997. ISBN 0670864021, Page 534
Scientific management was degrading. In reducing work to instructions and rules, it took away your knowledge and skill. In standing over you with a stopwatch, peering at you, measuring you, rating you, it treated you like a side of beef. You weren’t supposed to think. Whatever workmanly pride you might once have possessed must be sacrificed on the altar of efficiency, your role only to execute the will of other man paid to think for you. You were a drone, fit only for taking orders. Scientific management, then, worked people with scant regard not only for the limitations of their bodies but for the capacities of their minds. In the great Taylorist equation that spat out the Good News of high wages, high profits, and low prices, the quality of those eight or ten hours on the job itself had been banished from the calculation.
Not So Fast
Scientific management started as a way to work. How did it become a way of life?
by Jill Lepore October 12, 2009 A Critic at Large The New Yorker
Efficiency experts like Frank Gilbreth sought to revolutionize the workplace. His wife, Lillian, brought the revolution home.
Related Links
Audio: A discussion about the pioneers of scientific management.
Blog: Archival footage from the Gilbreth family.
Keywords
Management consulting;
“The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong” (Norton; $27.95);
Matthew Stewart;
Frederick Winslow Taylor;
Scientific Management;
Louis Brandeis;
Businesses
Ordering people around, which used to be just a way to get things done, was elevated to a science in October of 1910, when Louis Brandeis, a fifty-three-year-old lawyer from Boston, held a meeting at an apartment in New York with a bunch of experts who, at Brandeis’s urging, decided to call what they were experts at “scientific management.” Everyone there—including Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, best known today as the parents in “Cheaper by the Dozen”—had contracted “Tayloritis”: they were enthralled by an industrial engineer from Philadelphia named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who had been ordering people around, scientifically, for years. Speedy Taylor, as he was called, had invented a new way to make money. He would get himself hired by some business; spend a while watching people work, stopwatch and slide rule in hand; write a report telling them how to do their work faster; and then submit an astronomical bill for his services. He is the “Father of Scientific Management” (it says so on his tombstone), and, by any rational calculation, the grandfather of management consulting.
Whether he was also a shameless fraud is a matter of some debate, but not, it must be said, much: it’s difficult to stage a debate when the preponderance of evidence falls to one side. In “The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong” (Norton; $27.95), Matthew Stewart points out what Taylor’s enemies and even some of his colleagues pointed out, nearly a century ago: Taylor fudged his data, lied to his clients, and inflated the record of his success. As it happens, Stewart did the same things during his seven years as a management consultant; fudging, lying, and inflating, he says, are the profession’s stock-in-trade. Stewart had just finished a D.Phil. at Oxford in philosophy when he took a job rigging spreadsheets to tell companies whose business he barely understood how to trim costs, and he feels sullied by it. This gives his acerbic account an edgy urgency, but you begin to wonder, given how he felt about it, why he stuck with it for so long (the money, the money). Anyway, now he’s blowing the whistle, telling entertaining and slightly shocking stories, like the one about how his boss taught his twenty-something trainees—Stewart reports that one in six graduating seniors at élite colleges is recruited to work in management-consulting firms—how to conduct a “two-handed regression”: “When a scatter plot failed to show the significant correlation between two variables that we all knew was there, he would place a pair of meaty hands over the offending clouds of data points and thereby reveal the straight line hiding from conventional mathematics.” Management consulting isn’t a science, Stewart says; it’s a party trick.
Some party. Modern-day management consulting may be precisely nine-tenths shtick and one-tenth Excel, but that doesn’t explain the appeal of scientific management for Louis Brandeis, who wasn’t easily duped. Brandeis, born in Kentucky in 1856, was just twenty when he finished Harvard Law School, with the highest grades anyone there had ever received; Charles Eliot, the university’s president, had to waive a minimum-age requirement to allow him to graduate. He swiftly earned a reputation as a hardheaded and public-minded reformer, the “people’s attorney.” The man who wrote “The Curse of Bigness” earnestly believed—and plainly, to some degree, he was right—that scientific management would improve the lot of the little guy by raising wages, reducing the cost of goods, and elevating the standard of living. “Of all the social and economic movements with which I have been connected,” Brandeis wrote, “none seems to me to be equal to this in its importance and hopefulness.” Scientific management would bring justice to an unjust world. “Efficiency is the hope of democracy,” he avowed.
Brandeis gathered Taylor’s disciples—Taylor, busy man, sent his regrets—at that 1910 meeting because he was in the process of arguing, in hearings before the Interstate Commerce Committee, that railroad companies shouldn’t be allowed to raise their freight rates. He had read at least one of Taylor’s books, “Shop Management” (1903), and he thought that the railroads, rather than raising rates, should cut costs by Taylorizing: hire a man like Taylor, have him review their operations, and teach them to do everything more efficiently. Taylor often called what he did “task management.” The Gilbreths dubbed their system the “one best way.” Brandeis wanted, for the whole shebang, one best name. At that October meeting, someone suggested calling it, simply, “efficiency,” the watchword of the day, but in the end the vote was unanimous in favor of “scientific management,” which does have a nice ring to it, just like “home economics.”
Scientific management promised to replace rules of thumb with accurate measurements. At the I.C.C., Brandeis began by establishing that the railroads had no real idea why they charged what they did. When he questioned Charles Daly, the vice-president of a New York railroad, Daly said that setting prices came down to judgment and, when Brandeis asked him to explain the basis of that judgment, Daly fell right into his trap. “The basis of my judgment,” he began, “is exactly the same as the basis of a man who knows how to play a good game of golf. It comes from practice, contact and experience”:
MR. BRANDEIS: I want to know, Mr. Daly, just as clearly as you can state it, whether you can give a single reason, based on anything more than your arbitrary judgment, as you have expressed it.
MR. DALY: None whatever.
MR. BRANDEIS: None whatever?
MR. DALY: None whatever.
Brandeis next set about demonstrating that freight rates could be determined, scientifically, by introducing, as evidence, Taylor’s work at the Bethlehem Steel Company. Before Taylor went to Bethlehem, a team of seventy-five men loaded ninety-two-pound pigs of iron onto rail cars at a rate of twelve and a half tons per man per day. By timing the workers with a stopwatch, Taylor showed that a “first-class man” could load pig iron at a rate of forty-seven and a half tons per day, if he would only stop loafing. Ironworkers, Taylor thought, were as dumb as dray horses, and ought to be dealt with accordingly. To Taylor, the wealthy son of Philadelphia aristocrats, most of them were also altogether foreign, something he made sure to underscore. He told the story of managing a man he called Schmidt:
“Schmidt, are you a high-priced man?”
“Vell, I don’t know vat you mean. . . .”
“You see that car?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if you are a high-priced man, you will load that pig iron on that car tomorrow for $1.85. Now do wake up and answer my question. Tell me whether you are a high-priced man or not.”
“Vell, did I got $1.85 for loading dot pig iron on dot car to-morrow?”
“Yes, of course you do. . . .”
“Vell, dot’s all right.”
(“Who is this Schmidt?” journalists asked, “and what ever happened to him?” Taylor hedged.)
Brandeis’s star witness turned out to be Frank Gilbreth, who, with his wife, specialized in motion study. Where Taylor dissected a job into timed tasks, the Gilbreths divided human action into seventeen motions, which they called “therbligs”—it’s an eponymous anagram—in order to determine the one best way to do a piece of work. Where Taylor used a stopwatch, the Gilbreths used a motion-picture camera. On the stand, Gilbreth, a burly former bricklayer and consummate showman, grabbed a stack of law books, pretended they were bricks, and built a wall, explaining how to eliminate wasted motion. The commissioners, mesmerized, craned their necks and leaned over their desks to get a better view. “This has become sort of a substitute for religion for you,” one of them said, awed. Gilbreth could only agree. (In his diary, Gilbreth once wrote about plans to write a book called “The Religion of Scientific Management.”) At one point, Brandeis hushed the room by making an astonishing claim: with scientific management, the railroads could save a million dollars a day. A million dollars a day! Suddenly, those theretofore obscure I.C.C. hearings seized the nation’s attention. Brandeis won the case, and Taylor became a household name. In 1911, Taylor explained his methods—Schmidt and the pig iron, Gilbreth and the bricks—in “The Principles of Scientific Management,” whose argument the business über-guru Peter Drucker once called “the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers.” That’s either very silly or chillingly cynical, but “The Principles of Scientific Management” was the best-selling business book in the first half of the twentieth century. Taylor always said that scientific management would usher in a “mental revolution,” and it has. Modern life is Taylorized life, the Taylor biographer Robert Kanigel observed, a dozen years back. Above your desk, the clock is ticking; on the shop floor, the camera is rolling. Manage your time, waste no motion, multitask: your iPhone comes with a calendar, your car with a memo pad. “Who is Schmidt?” journalists wanted to know, a century ago. Vell, ve are.
In 1908, Edwin Gay, a Harvard economics professor, visited Taylor in Philadelphia. Gay had been frustrated in his efforts to start a business school at Harvard: “I am constantly being told by businessmen that we cannot teach business.” After meeting Taylor, Gay declared, “I am convinced that there is a scientific method involved in and underlying the art of business.” If scientific laws, deducible from observation, govern the management of business, then business, as an academic discipline, was a much easier sell. Harvard Business School opened later that year, with Gay as its dean. Taylor went to Cambridge and delivered a series of lectures, which he repeated every year until his death.
Taylor is the mortar, and the Gilbreths the bricks, of every American business school. But it was Brandeis who brought Taylor national and international acclaim. He could not, for all that, have saved the railroads a million dollars a day—the number was, as a canny reporter noted, the “merest moonshine”—because, despite the parade of experts and algorithms, the figure was based on little more than a ballpark estimate that the railroads were about five per cent inefficient. That’s the way Taylorism usually worked. How did Taylor arrive at forty-seven and a half tons for Bethlehem Steel? He chose twelve “large, powerful Hungarians,” observed them for an hour, and calculated that, at the rate they were working, they were loading twenty-four tons of pig iron per man per day. Then he handpicked ten men and dared them to load sixteen and a half tons as fast as they could. They managed to do it in fourteen minutes; this yields a rate of seventy-one tons per man per ten-hour day. Taylor inexplicably rounded up the number to seventy-five. To get to forty-seven and a half, he reduced seventy-five by about forty per cent, claiming that this represented a work-to-rest ratio of the “law of heavy laboring.” Workers who protested the new standards were fired. Only one—the best approximation of an actual Schmidt was a man named Henry Noll—loaded anything close to forty-seven and a half tons in a single day, a rate that was, in any case, not sustainable. After providing two years of consulting services, Taylor billed the company a hundred thousand dollars (which works out to something like two and a half million dollars today), and then he was fired.
Brandeis, like many Progressives, believed Taylor, and believed in him. What shocked him was that the unions didn’t. Brandeis had long been a labor hero. Convinced that lawyers, by taking the side of capital, had “allowed themselves to become adjuncts of great corporations,” he had campaigned for an eight-hour day and deftly arbitrated labor disputes, including the New York garment workers’ strike of 1910. But, early in 1911, while delivering a speech called “Organized Labor and Efficiency” before the Boston Central Labor Union, he was heckled. “You can call it scientific management if you want to,” a woman shouted, “but I call it scientific driving.”
Brandeis, ever hopeful, pressed on. The following year, he wrote the foreword for Frank Gilbreth’s “Primer of Scientific Management,” attempting to explain, once again, why the unions should embrace it. “Under Scientific Management men are led, not driven,” he insisted. By then, Taylor had come under the scrutiny of Congress, which formed the House Committee to Investigate Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management. In the last months of 1911, the committee took testimony from sixty witnesses—workers and experts alike—and, in January, 1912, called Taylor. Facing the committee chairman, William Bauchop Wilson, a Democrat from Pennsylvania who had gone down into the coal pits at the age of nine and joined the union at eleven, Taylor didn’t offer up Schmidt and the pig iron—he had trotted out that story too many times, and people were getting suspicious—but he did tell another of his favorite yarns, the one about the science of shovelling. “The ordinary pig-iron handler” is not suited to shovelling coal, Taylor said. “He is too stupid.” But a first-class man, who could lift a shovelful weighing twenty-one and a half pounds, could move a pile of coal lickety-split. “You have told us the effect on the pile,” an exasperated committee member said, but “what about the effect on the man?” Wilson wanted to know what happened to workers who weren’t “first-class men”:
THE CHAIRMAN: Scientific management has no place for such men?
MR. TAYLOR: Scientific management has no place for a bird that can sing and won’t sing. . . .
THE CHAIRMAN: We are not . . . dealing with horses nor singing birds, but we are dealing with men who are a part of society and for whose benefit society is organized.
Taylor knew that he had performed badly. Asked to proof the transcript of his testimony, he ordered a lackey to steal Wilson’s copy of “The Principles of Scientific Management.” Taylor had the idea that he could lift passages from his book and dump them into his testimony—replacing what he had actually said, under oath—but then he worried that the switch would be too risky if Wilson had the chance to compare the transcript with the book. He didn’t get away with it. Speedy Taylor had met his match. The next year, the President appointed William Bauchop Wilson the Secretary of Labor. But, by then, Taylorism had permeated the culture. So had therbligs: Life published a cartoon about the fifteen unnecessary motions of a kiss.
About half of “The Management Myth” is an exposé of management consulting (the emperor has no clothes); the rest is Stewart’s exploration of his erstwhile profession’s checkered past (the emperor never did), although the kind of business book people have been buying for, oh, the past half century is instruction (you, too, can be an emperor!). Tom Peters’s “In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies” is in its gazillionth printing. Still, if the economy takes another turn for the worse there’s surely money to be made selling books that decry the making of money. Frederick Winslow Taylor makes a great villain, but Stewart needs him to be ridiculous, which makes it difficult to appreciate Brandeis’s argument: there was waste, there were inefficiencies, and Taylorizing did improve the standard of living, at least as measured by consumption. Whatever has happened since, Ford Motor Company did once pay its workers well, build good cars fast, and sell them cheap to people who, suddenly, could afford them.
Much of Stewart’s account is devoted to following the anti-Taylor and neo-Taylor theories that have determined the curriculum at business schools in the course of the past century. He pays special attention to human-factors science and follows through several chapters the work of Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter, whose early books “Competitive Strategy” (1980) and “Competitive Advantage” (1985) launched a field known as strategic management. (I should perhaps mention that, in the late eighties, Porter was my boss. His phone rang off the hook, and I, a temporary secretary, had the job of answering it.) To Stewart, strategic management is scientific management, without the stopwatch. And, along with much else taught in business schools, and everything that goes on in management-consulting firms, “it contributes to a misunderstanding about the sources of our prosperity.”
Business schools have been indicted before. Earning an M.B.A. has been found to have little correlation with later business success. Business isn’t a science, critics say; it’s a set of skills, best learned on the job. Some business schools, accused of teaching nothing so much as greed, now offer ethics courses. Stewart argues that this whole conversation, about people, production, wealth, and virtue, is a conversation about ethics, and is better had within a liberal-arts curriculum. His howl of frustration, after all those years spent living in hotels, peddling nonsense, and profiting by it, is loud and angry. It’s also only half the story.
Scientific management didn’t just change businesses and business schools. Speeding up production meant that workers came home knackered. Some Bethlehem ironworkers were so wrecked after a Taylor-size day’s work that they couldn’t get out of bed the next morning. In 1914, Henry Ford announced a five-dollar, eight-hour workday—generous terms, at the start—but, after that, salaries froze even as the speed of production increased, and, meanwhile, Ford kept reducing his workforce. Edmund Wilson, in “American Jitters,” later quoted a Ford worker saying, “Ye’re worked like a slave all day and when ye get out ye’re too tired to do anything.” Brandeis hoped that this autoworker might spend his evening at a lecture or a political rally, but, more likely, he went home and collapsed on the couch while his wife, who, quite possibly, had put in eight hours at Ford, too, made dinner and got the children ready for bed—efficiently! For lots of people, particularly the growing number of working women, speeding up at work, which you might think would mean slowing down at home, enjoying that promised land of leisure, meant just the opposite: home got sped up, too. No one knew that better than Frank Gilbreth’s wife, who had a lot to say on the subject of exhaustion, and who understood, better than Taylor and Brandeis did, that scientific management isn’t the kind of thing you can leave at the office.
Lillian Gilbreth was pregnant with her fifth child when she attended that meeting with Brandeis in New York, in October of 1910. Taylor taught efficiency; Brandeis championed it; Gilbreth lived it. Born in Oakland in 1878, she graduated from the University of California in 1900 and married Frank Gilbreth four years later. They agreed to have twelve children, six boys and six girls, and to raise them by the most scientific methods, as Jane Lancaster relates in a 2004 biography, “Making Time.” In an era of rapidly shrinking family size, the Gilbreths’ household, a laboratory of efficiency, would show the world what economies of scale were all about. Between 1905 and 1922, Lillian gave birth thirteen times, at fifteen-month intervals; one child died, at the age of five, of diphtheria. She breast-fed every baby. The wonderful zaniness of the Gilbreths’ family life was recorded by two of their children in “Cheaper by the Dozen,” published in 1948. The Gilbreths held weekly Family Council meetings. Once, one of the boys made a motion to get a puppy. Seconded, and opened for discussion: “He could eat scraps of food,” another of the boys piped up. “He would save us waste and would save motions for the garbage man.” Called to a vote: ten in favor, one abstention (Lillian), and one opposed (Frank). They named the dog Mr. Chairman. In 1950, the book was made into a film starring Myrna Loy as Boss, which is what Frank called his wife. Lillian disliked and was embarrassed by both the book and the film, not least because they ignore the fact that, during those years, she ran a business, became the first pioneer of scientific management to earn a doctorate, and wrote many books.
Admittedly, it’s hard to see past all those pregnancies. In 1906, after the San Francisco earthquake, William Randolph Hearst offered a hundred dollars to anyone who had a baby in his emergency hospital. Frank, who was in the city courting building contracts, wrote to his wife, ribbing her, “I think there is a chance for you if you hurry.” He named their summer place the Shoe, after the woman with too many children, who lived in one, and didn’t know what to do. Once, when he told a colleague, “Lillie always feels better when she is pregnant,” the other guy shot back, “How the hell can she tell?”
Frank considered postpartum bed rest to be wasted time (“Dear Boss,” he wrote, “MOTION IS MONEY”), so Lillian used the weeks after childbirth to edit her husband’s books, most of which she also co-wrote, or, as several scholars believe, wrote entirely, even when her name didn’t appear on the title page. (Lillian’s prose is distinctively “gabby,” as Frank put it.) In 1911, she edited “Motion Study,” after giving birth to Frank, Jr., and it was likely Lillian, not her husband, who wrote “The Primer of Scientific Management.” The following year, the Gilbreths moved to Rhode Island so that Lillian could enroll in a Ph.D. program at Brown, where she studied psychology, something that she thought was missing from Taylorism. In Providence, the Gilbreths lived so close to campus, Frank joked, that Lillian “could go to class and if a child fell out of the window, catch him before he landed on the ground.”
Meanwhile, Taylorized workers kept complaining about being bone-tired. In 1911, molders at an arsenal in Watertown, Massachusetts, refused to work under the eye of a timekeeper. Pouring a mold and making a gun carriage usually took fifty-three minutes; Taylor’s timekeeper told the molders to do it in twenty-four. During an investigation into the ensuing strike, it came out that Taylor had told his timekeeper not to bother too much with the stopwatch—better simply to make “a rough guess.” In a petition to their boss, the molders wrote, “This we believe to be the limit of our endurance. It is humiliating to us, who have always tried to give the Government the best that was in us. This method is un-American.”
Taylor, plagued by controversy, grew ill. He sometimes sent Frank Gilbreth to deliver lectures in his place. Increasingly, though, the Gilbreths had misgivings about Taylorism. In 1913, when Frank was substituting for Taylor in Chicago, Lillian went along, with a three-month-old nursling. Onstage, Frank was challenged by Emma Goldman. He was pointing to a chart illustrating the hierarchical relationship between the foreman and the worker. “There is nothing in scientific management for the workman,” Goldman shouted. “The only scheme is to have the workman support the loafers on top of him.” Lillian leaned over and whispered something to Frank, who cheerfully turned the chart upside down. That was just a stunt, of course, but Lillian had an argument to make, which she put forward in “The Psychology of Management,” published in 1914: “The emphasis in successful management lies on the man, not on the work.” And maybe even on the women and children, too.
Gilbreth defended her dissertation in June, 1915. Three months later, she fell down a flight of stairs, went into labor, and gave birth to a stillborn baby. Taylor had died earlier that year. After reading in a fawning biography how much Taylor loved the workers, Frank Gilbreth scrawled in the margin, “But none came to his funeral, nor to his memorial service.” Brandeis was there, though, and delivered a speech that was later printed in Harper’s under the title “Efficiency by Consent.” Brandeis’s considered ideas about management were actually far closer to the Gilbreths’ than to Taylor’s. Taylor thought that men were mules. Brandeis advocated industrial democracy: workers must have a voice in how a business is run. The Gilbreths favored putting a suggestion box in the workplace. Taylor took nothing from the Watertown Arsenal strike except that it might be better “not to try to hurry task work too fast.” Brandeis insisted that, if workers were to enjoy sufficient leisure to participate in a democratic society, productivity had to be increased, but he also worried that, without unions, workers would be pushed past the limits of human endurance. That’s why unions, he believed, ought to consent to efficiency. Gilbreth, Inc., made a policy of requiring contracts to be signed by both shop bosses and representatives from organized labor.
The year after Taylor died, Brandeis was nominated to the Supreme Court. It was one of the most controversial nominations in the Court’s history. The reason for the controversy, Brandeis observed, was that he “is considered a radical and is a Jew.” Much of the opposition had to do with his support of unions. One member of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, “The real crime of which this man is guilty is that he has exposed the iniquities of men in high places in our financial system. He has not stood in awe of the majesty of wealth.” The president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, circulated a petition opposing Brandeis’s nomination, but, when Lowell’s predecessor, Charles Eliot, sent a letter of support, Brandeis’s law partner boasted, “Next to a letter from God, we have got the best.” Brandeis took a seat on the Court in June, 1916.
That year, Lillian Gilbreth checked the galleys of a book called “Fatigue Study” while recovering from the birth of her ninth child. Taylor had studied fatigue, too, but Gilbreth had a different kind of knowledge of what it meant to be at the limits of physical endurance. She also shared Brandeis’s view that profit wasn’t everything. The whole point of efficiency, she said, was to maximize “happiness minutes.” Happiness minutes? For Lillian Gilbreth, scientific management wasn’t just a business practice; it was a habit of mind and a way of life.
In 1918, she was invited to lecture about motion and fatigue at M.I.T. She must have been practicing the presentation at home. One night, the children invited her to play a game of charades. “What do you think the first one was?” she wrote to Frank. “Well, it was ‘Fatigue Survey.’ How is that for breathing it in?” On the day of the lecture, she got five children ready for school, nursed her four-month-old, handed the two toddlers over to the housekeeper, and caught a ten-o’clock train. In Cambridge, she talked for twenty minutes and showed thirty-six slides (reporting to Frank that she tried very hard to talk like a scientist, and “not like a Lady”), but, when asked to stay late, she told her host that she had eight children to get home to. (“That seemed to interest him a lot.”) She made it back to Providence for the 6:30 P.M. nursing.
In 1919, in childbed after delivering baby No. 10, Lillian proofread galleys of “Motion Study for the Handicapped.” (The Gilbreths had worked with soldiers who had lost limbs; aiding the disabled was a long-standing Gilbreth specialty.) Five years later, Frank Gilbreth died, at the age of fifty-five, leaving his wife with eleven children under the age of nineteen. She was determined to send them all to college, but she didn’t have much money. She tried, desperately, to drum up business. She studied the relationship between menstruation and fatigue among factory women, and got hired by Johnson & Johnson to conduct market research on sanitary napkins. But many clients, after discovering that the president of Gilbreth, Inc., was a woman, simply dropped their accounts. Scrambling, she decided to reinvent herself as an expert in a subject about which she knew next to nothing: housekeeping.
The American Home Economics Association was founded in 1909 (the year before Brandeis coined the term “scientific management”), after some debate over whether the field should be called “home science.” For a while, housekeeping, like business, aspired to be an academic discipline. In that effort, Gilbreth seems an unlikely figure. Her husband had always endorsed a three-man plan of promotion. There’s the guy at the bottom, studying to be the guy in the middle, and the guy in the middle, studying to be the guy at the top. “Don’t waste your time on housework, Boss,” he told his wife. “You’re studying for my job.” Lillian, who loved parenting, couldn’t cook or clean or do laundry. About kitchens, one of her sons wrote, “Stoves burned her, ice picks stabbed her, graters skinned her, and paring knives cut her.” Her handyman and, later, housekeeper, an Irishman named Tom Grieves, did all the cooking. Gilbreth knew how to make exactly one meal, which she served on Grieves’s days off: creamed chipped beef. Her children called it D.V.O.T.: Dog’s Vomit on Toast.
In the nineteen-twenties, she engineered model kitchens—one was called the Kitchen Efficient—and purported to eliminate, for instance, five out of every six steps in the making of coffee cake. To make a lemon-meringue pie, a housewife working in an ordinary kitchen walked two hundred and twenty-four feet; in the Kitchen Efficient, Gilbreth claimed, it could be done in ninety-two. (If you have an island in your kitchen, or a rolling cart, or if you think about a work triangle, you’ve got Lillian Gilbreth to thank.) The increasingly strange study of fatigue went on without her. In 1927, by which time Gilbreth was a chief consultant for American universities’ new departments of home economics, the Harvard Business School opened a Fatigue Laboratory: professors put students on treadmills until they dropped. (Later, a team from the Fatigue Laboratory went to Mississippi, to measure the sweat of sharecroppers living in Benoit—a town of “colorfully dressed, happy, and well-behaved negroes”—against the exertion of mules.)
At around the same time, Gilbreth published “The Home-maker and Her Job.” A housewife should make a study of the science of dishwashing, in order to find the one best way: “In washing dishes, Mary may have the best posture, Mother may move her eyes and head least, Johnny may move his feet least, Sarah may make the best use of her hands.” The trick was to combine the best of everyone’s methods, and then Mary, Mother, Johnny, and Sarah could spend more time doing something other than washing the dishes.
In 1935, Lillian Gilbreth, who did not wash dishes, accepted a professorship at Purdue. Her academic appointment was divided between the university’s School of Home Economics and its School of Management. Home economics and business management have Lillian Gilbreth in common, and a lot more besides. Scientific housekeeping, with its standards of spotlessness and shininess, was founded on no less a fudge than the forty-seven and a half tons of pig iron. Tom Grieves was Gilbreth’s Schmidt. “You know what a Motion Study is, Frankie-boy?” Grieves once asked Frank, Jr. “You study how to get somebody else to make all your motions for you, for Christ sake.” He refused to work in the Kitchen Efficient; he rejected even a refrigerator; he was unwilling to give up the daily, sociable visits of the iceman, who was a good friend of his. Reporters who wanted to profile Gilbreth couldn’t go into her actual kitchen. They had to visit the fake one.
Gilbreth tried to teach people to save time for joy, but not everyone wants to hurry a pie. Sometimes the best part of making a pie is the mess, and rolling the dough too thin so you’ve got some extra for jam tarts, and for playing with. In the Taylorized world, something has been lost and, until it’s found, adding a few case studies to the curriculum at Harvard Business School probably isn’t enough. Neither unions nor businesses have lived up to Brandeis’s optimism. “If the fruits of Scientific Management are directed into the proper channels,” he wrote, “the workingman will get not only a fair share, but a very large share, of the industrial profits arising from improved industry.” Lately, that share has been going to shareholders and C.E.O.s. Home and work, separated since the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, have been growing back together again: BlackBerry on the nightstand, toaster in the photocopy room. Efficiency was meant to lead to a shorter workday, but, in the final two decades of the twentieth century, the average American added a hundred and sixty-four hours of work in the course of a year; that’s a whole extra month’s time, but not, typically, a month’s worth of either happiness minutes or civic participation. Eating dinner standing up while nursing a baby, making a phone call to the office, and supervising a third grader’s homework is not, I don’t think, the hope of democracy.
Lillian Gilbreth died, of a stroke, in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1972, at the age of ninety-three. She was cremated. The Times ran an obituary headed “Dr. Gilbreth, Engineer, Mother of Dozen.” She had always believed that the world needed “a new philosophy of work.” She never did manage to write it. ♦
The Myth Of Efficiency
Leadership – Forbes Magazine
Adam Hartung, 10.16.09, 12:30 PM ET
Everyone talks about the need for innovation these days, but they especially talk about why businesses are so bad at it. Procter & Gamble recently reduced the washing power of Tide, labeled the new version "Basic," and trumpeted it as an innovation. If that's the best we can do, no wonder there's such concern. A recent report from the Doblin Group claims that 96% of innovation resources are focused on incremental improvements. The best-selling book Blue Ocean Strategy claims that only 14% of innovations are "radical," and that those few radical innovations produce 61% of profits.
Most organizations embrace the creation of new ideas and the fun exercises that surround "ideation." Then they hope they can somehow develop the momentum to roll out those ideas. As if that were what organizations do. We all know that organizations are not designed to create and implement new ideas. To the contrary, they usually exist mainly to manage legacy businesses, to defend and extend them. Organization leadership focuses on order and control. Thus a recent spurt of articles across the business press bemoans the problem of business "inertia," as the management expert Gary Hamel calls it.
If business leaders truly want innovation and recognize the organizational problems in achieving it, why don't they do something about it?
To seek an answer, reach back to Fredrick Winslow Taylor and the theory of "scientific management" he developed in the first decades of the 20th century. What we do today was set in motion long ago.
Taylor sought to precisely measure the movements of factory workers and their timings to make them as efficient as humanly possible. This made him beloved by executives and detested on the factory floor, and it also made him one of the world's first management consultants. In a recent article in The New Yorker, "Not So Fast," the historian Jill Lepore takes a hard look at Taylor and his claims for scientific management. According to new research, he was a better salesman than consultant. Many of his facts were made up, and most of his results never materialized. We now know that Lillian Gilbreth, an early proponent of scientific management, had serious doubts about the movement she helped proselytize.
All this is important because Taylor, with his system of scientific management, was the father of efficiency. From scientific management we get the lust for efficiency in business. It became part of the dogma of business schools, almost none of which existed before his time. Business schools from their earliest days have promoted efficiency and the handling of business as something like industrial engineering. From operations to finance, from marketing to sales, business school education has focused on narrowing problems, identifying resources and working to get the most out of the least.
Whether this is a proper focus for business education is being openly challenged by thought leaders such as Harvard's Clayton Christensen, whose books on innovation include The Innovator's Dilemma, and Rakesh Khurana, also of Harvard, author of From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession.
When you take a hard look at efficiency, you can see that it's never a good source of higher returns. As appealing as cost cutting sounds, it can't improve returns except within the shortest time frame. Why? First, most cost cutting is easily matched by competitors, thus offering little or no competitive advantage. Second, most cost cutting is simply distributed to customers through lower prices, in a fight to maintain revenue and stay ahead of fast-moving competitors. Price wars break out as a business spirals into lower margins and declining growth.
Most leaders think of costs saved as "hard dollars." But they are not hard dollars, for they are rarely captured for investors. Even more rarely are they captured for reinvestment into new products and services. They are often mythical. Too often, claims that "this will improve throughput by 8%" never materialize, because customer satisfaction drops, leading to lower customer demand, not a growth in transactions handled effectively.
Then there is the simple notion that cost cutting must be good, because it makes for greater efficiency, and efficiency is good. Thank you, Mr. Taylor.
We know that the return on innovation is very high. As I mentioned earlier, it has been shown in many industries that investment in new products and services creates substantially higher returns. Why? Because real innovations are harder for competitors to match and keep up with, especially the more radical or disruptive they are. Also, genuine innovation prompts more customers to buy, increasing sales. Innovation grows a business. And since it leaves competitors behind, it generates higher margins.
The next time you consider a decision between doing something new--innovating--and cutting costs, think about why your gut wants you to choose the latter. Is it because of any rational analysis of changing markets and shifting customer needs? Or are you simply assuming that efficiency, belt tightening, is good? If you're operating on such an assumption, and if the source of that assumption is faulty, then it's probably time you contemplated how you make decisions. Your business may rely on it.
Adam Hartung lives in Chicago and is a partner in Vector Growth Partners, a growth strategy consulting firm in suburban Washington, D.C. He is author of Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition. Learn more at AdamHartung.com.
Matthew Stewart The Management Myth: why the “experts” keep getting it wrong. W.W. Norton, New York, 2009. ISBN 978-0-393-0653-4
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Taylor's father was a prosperous man of leisure, the kind of Philadelphia gentleman of whom it might have been said he was "born retired." His mother belonged to the Winslows, a New England family that had made its fortune in whaling and could trace its ancestry to the Pilgrims. Frederick, born in 1856, showed at an early age that he was different. "It did not seem absolutely necessary that the rectangle of our rounders court should be scientifically accurate, and the whole of a fine sunny morning should be wasted in measuring it off," said one old playmate, reminiscing about Fred's distinctive approach to playground sports.' To the delight of future detractors, 12‑year‑old Fred's first invention was a special sleep harness fitted with nails to prick him awake whenever he turned over in bed. Its purpose was to prevent the nightmares that were thought to strike whenever he slept on his stomach.
As a young man from the right family and with an able mind, Frederick easily secured a place at Harvard. A lifetime of minimal exertion beckoned like a wide‑open sea; but following a nervous breakdown of some sort, he took a job as an apprentice in a machine shop instead. To the consternation of family and friends, he put on overalls, took up swearing, and learned how to cut metal. The noisy lathes and drills of Taylor's first working days left a deep impression on his ideas about management. In his first workplace experiments, Taylor aimed to establish the optimum speed for operating lathes. It was in the course of seeking these mechanical improvements that he came to see the human component on the factory floor as something comparable to the machines, with properties that could be manipulated in the same way as those of a lathe. Scientific management as he presented it in the Boxly years was the extension of the logic of the machine shop into the human world. it rested on a freighted analogy between the technology of machines and the technology of human organization.
Pages 47 - 53
Frederick Winslow Taylor told the pig‑iron story so often and so well that for more than half a century after his death, critics and sympathizers alike simply assumed it was true. But it was not."
The trouble begins at the beginning. In 1899, Bethlehem Steel did not employ a gang of 75 pig‑iron handlers, as Taylor had suggested, but rather kept a couple dozen or so men on hand who were periodically sent to take care of pig‑iron loading and other chores. According to market records, the price of iron did not go up in the spring of that year, so it could not have motivated the grand experiment in pig‑iron handling, as Taylor had claimed. Most important, Bethlehem's stores of pig‑iron bars did not amount to the 80,000 tons Taylor had cited, but to a much less daunting 10,000 tons.
Although we can't know why Taylor slipped an extra 70,000 tons into the pile, it is worth pointing out that, taking his numbers as given, the maximum theoretical savings from the new pig‑loading program was about 5 cents per ton, or $50 per thousand tons. Yet Taylor charged $40 per day for his time, and billed smaller (but still princely) sums for each of his associates, who numbered about half a dozen during the course of his years at Bethlehem. Had he limited his work to the actual 10,000 tons, his listeners might have come to the unfortunate conclusion that the entire savings from his efforts would have been consumed by consulting fees long before the project was over.
The really serious trouble with Taylor's pig‑iron story begins with the 47½‑ton benchmark he set for daily pig‑iron loading. From notes left behind by his associates, it seems that the all‑important time study began with a dozen workers, picked at random and assigned to load a pile of pig‑irons for about an hour. Over that hour, the gang achieved a rate that worked out to 23.8 tons per man per day‑on the dubious assumption that they could have kept up the same rate for the entire day. On the next day, Taylor's. associates rounded up 10 "large powerful Hungarians," on the scientific grounds that they looked pretty husky, and, in exchange for a bonus, challenged them to load a stack of 16½ tons as fast as they could. Keen to impress their apparent benefactors, the burly eastern Europeans accomplished the feat in under 14 minutes. Over a 10‑hour day, that worked out to 71 tons per man. For reasons unclear, Taylor decided to up the theoretical maximum to 75 tons, not 71.
To have suggested that the workers could sustain such a rate throughout the day, every day of their pig‑iron lifting careers, of course, would have been about as fatuous as estimating a marathon runner's time by extrapolating from the results of a 100‑meter dash. Even Taylor recognized that the men needed rest time and bathroom breaks. So he adjusted the figure approximately 40% downward. Why 40%? He made some noises about a "law of heavy laboring" that required certain ratios of rest to work. But on closer inspection, the "law" in question is transparently less germane to the pig‑iron question than even the great Hungarian pigiron race. In his congressional testimony, Taylor acknowledged that in other experiments he had made comparable adjustments ranging from 16% to 70%. In other words, the 47½‑ton benchmark was the result of multiplying an irrelevant and uncontrolled experimental observation with a great big blob of fudge.
It was not just Taylor's method of calculation but his very approach to the problem that was deeply unscientific. A crucial feature of any activity that aspires to the name of science is verifiability: independent observers must be able to reproduce experiments and thereby confirm results. This is why journals are such an integral feature of scientific disciplines. In his pig‑iron escapades, however, Taylor never supplied the data or the methods that would have allowed others to reproduce and verify his results. Instead of science, Taylor offered a kind of parody of science. He confused the paraphernalia of research‑stopwatches and long division‑with actual research.
The number was the number, however‑in Taylor's mind at least‑so the next item on the agenda was to put it into practice. The 47½‑ton piece‑rate plan was first proposed not to Henry Noll‑a.k.a. "Schmidt," as Taylor suggests in his published account‑but to the very Hungarians who had allegedly demonstrated its feasibility. When they understood they were being asked to nearly quadruple their workload in exchange for an extra 70 cents, however, the Hungarians howled with indignation and refused the assignment. The next day, unbeknownst to Taylor, the regrettably unscientific management team at Bethlehem allowed the Hungarians to return to work under the old day‑rate plan. When Taylor discovered that the men had escaped the unalterable demands of science, he became incensed and insisted that they be fired. After talking up a storm at headquarters‑it was a matter of instilling proper respect for authority, he fumed‑he succeeded in depriving the Hungarians of their jobs. Two weeks passed in quiet bitterness, with no progress on the science of pig‑iron lifting.
With a line firmly drawn in the muddy yard of Bethlehem, Taylor's associates corralled seven men from a different gang‑this one composed of Irishmen and Dutchmen who had no social ties to the peeved and unemployed Hungarians. Five of seven showed up for trials the next morning. They lifted an average of 32 tons per man from a single pile, after which "they appeared fatigued." On the following day, two of the men were too exhausted to report to work. The remaining three were set to lifting individual piles, protected from the surly eastern European crowd by 200 feet and a cordon of Taylor's associates. By early afternoon, two more of the men proved too feeble to continue and dropped out of the race. At the end of the day, Henry Noll stood alone, the sole survivor of a brutal process of natural selection. He had loaded 45¾ tons ‑ close enough to the magic number, in Taylor's view, for the "experiment" to count as a magnificent victory for scientific management.
Taylor's much‑touted "scientific selection of the workman"‑ the conscientious investigations of history, character, and aptitudes of which he writes so passionately in his Principles of Scientific Management ‑never happened. A search through the local press from the time provides no evidence to support Taylor's claim that the community took any interest in events in the pig‑iron fields or in the search for first‑class men. Although Taylor intimated in the dialogue with "Schmidt" that the workers' actions through the day were to be monitored and controlled down to the individual pig, with scientifically allocated rest breaks along the way, the notes from his associates indicate that in fact the men were simply shepherded before their piles and set to work without further guidance and without breaks. Given the sequence of events, it is all but certain that Taylor's purported dialogue with Schmidt was a fiction.
Taylor's ultimate fabrication concerns the outcome of his program. It appears that a handful of laborers were able to match Noll's prodigious output over brief periods‑but always under the proviso that they could return to the old plan whenever they chose, which they did frequently. The new organization of the pig‑iron industry, with its high office of "scientific pig‑iron manager," existed only in Taylor's theoretical imagination. There is no evidence that Bethlehem Steel realized any significant benefit from the experience. On May 1, 1901, two years after the revolution began, Bethlehem ordered Taylor to cease all work on its behalf, and it scrapped all of his various programs. Neither Bethlehem nor any other concern has since taken up the celebrated science of pig‑iron handling. Taylor, on the other hand, walked away with a total of $100,000 in consulting fees (about $2.5 million in today's money). When it came to studying other people's work, Taylor was a champion of the principle of accountability; with respect to his own, it seems, he operated entirely free from any such constraint.
Taylor's fictionalization of the pig‑iron case, sad to say, was hardly an aberration. In the margins of a transcript of one of the Boxly sessions, where Taylor regaled his audiences with some of his other tales about shoveling and wheelbarrowing and the like, one of his more devout associates, Carl Barth, had scribbled, "This whole page is absolutely nothing but fiction." On another page, Barth had written, "One of the worst distortions of a story told by Mr. Taylor that I have ever come across." And then, "I am fully convinced that a lot of the foregoing is fiction, but as I was not present.. . I can't say how much ... From here on, there is a semblance to the facts, but they are badly mixed up."
There is little reason to think that Taylor's non‑pig‑related studies were of any greater scientific merit. To be sure, in some of his earliest research on the operation of metal‑cutting lathes, in which he meticulously recorded the effects of cutting different metals under different conditions at different speeds, Taylor did provide some verifiable results concerning the use of certain kinds of machines‑results that were soon rendered moot by the advance of machine technology. Taylor's invention of a new, high‑speed cutting device‑an invention that made him a‑ rich man‑also clearly represents a triumph of applied science. But his work on shovel size, wheelbarrows, and in general everything that involved human beings suffered from the same flaws as his work on pig‑iron handling. In place of verifiable data and reproducible methodologies, he provided only anecdotes, embellished with speciously precise numbers and arcane formulas of indeterminate provenance.
When Carl Barth reviewed the range of material that Taylor had left behind at Bethlehem in hopes of incorporating it into his own projects, he found he could not reproduce the data and was forced to discard it all as unusable. In 1908, before Taylor made the front pages, a consultant and management thinker named Alexander Hamilton Church wrote an article titled "Has Scientific Management Science?" The answer he gave was a clear no. Apart from "a collection of procedures involving stopwatches," he noted, "there is nothing tangible behind it.""
The stunning lack of accountability evident in the finale of the pig‑iron tale, too, seems to have characterized Taylor's work as a whole. Although a number of factories adopted or claimed to have adopted the "Taylor system," the advocates of the program failed to provide convincing or comprehensive evidence that it did any real good. Indeed, it was difficult even to get agreement on exactly what the system was in the first place. In a 1914 study of 35 plants said to have adopted the Taylor system, Robert Hoxie concluded that "no single shop was found which could be said to represent fully and faithfully the Taylor system as presented in the treatise on 'Shop Management' . . . and no two shops were found in which identically or even approximately the same policies and methods were established and adhered to throughout." just as the science wasn't a science, it seems, the system wasn't really a system.
Taylor's own responses to challenges concerning the scientific merit of his work, on the whole, served more to illustrate the peculiarities of his personal style than to advance the debate. When gently questioned by a factory owner who had applied some of his ideas, Taylor fired back, "It may be true, as you say, that there are one or two elements relating to scientific management which are not based on full and exact knowledge ... The fact is, however, that 999 out of 1000 of the elements which under the old system of management were the owner's judgment and opinion are now matters of exact knowledge or science."
Taylor's influence, of course, ultimately depended not on his specific results in the field of pig‑iron lifting and shoveling and so forth, but on his generalizations about the science of management. He became famous for the idea of what he was supposed to have achieved‑not for what he actually achieved. The particular cases he offered were intended as instances of a general science of management. It is in this general idea, however, that Taylor invested some of his most consequential errors. And it is to these general errors that one should ultimately attribute the many missteps and fabrications that afflicted his individual studies‑and those of his successors.
Embedded in Taylor's idea of scientific management are some telling misconceptions about the nature of science and the nature of management. Taylor failed in the first instance to distinguish clearly between a scientific attitude and science itself. Inasmuch as we mean by a scientific attitude a disposition to test hypotheses against facts through controlled observation, then it is perfectly possible and arguably very desirable to bring such an attitude to bear on issues arising out of management, as well as on all sorts of other activities. One can go grocery shopping with a scientific attitude. But it does not follow that there is a science of grocery shopping, or, in general, that there is a body of knowledge that deserves the name of science associated with every possible object of a scientific attitude.
Of course, Taylor intended to do more than advocate a scientific attitude toward management. His goal was to establish a universal science of efficiency. Such a universal science would apply to businesses as diverse as making hot dogs and taming lions. In Taylor's conception, the pigiron case stands for the universal laws of this science of management in the same way that an apple falling from the tree stands for Newton's universal law of gravity. It is this kind of science, at any rate, to which the Harvard Business School's first Dean, Edwin Gay, referred when he said, "We believe that there is science in business"‑ that is, a body of knowledge that will systematically relate "inputs" to "outputs."' But is there such a universal science? Is pig‑iron lifting the same thing as hotdog making and lion taming?
In fact, there is no such universal science of efficiency. In the absence of any specification of the kinds of activities that it will govern, any attempt at such a science will produce only platitudinous reaffirmations of the definition of efficiency. And indeed, it turns out upon inspection that the so‑called laws and principles that Taylor attempts to pass off as, the theories of his universal science of efficiency are for the most part nonfalsifiable propositions. In the best case, they are maxims‑along the lines of, say, "work smarter, not harder!" or "a stopwatch a day keeps the banker away!" Mostly, they boil down to tautologies: "An efficient shop is more productive than an inefficient shop!" Such "principles" are unscientific not because they are false, but because they are too true. As Karl Popper points out, scientific theories are interesting because they could be wrong. They are falsifiable; and this is why science as a whole is corrigible and progresses. By always insisting that he was incontestably right, Taylor inadvertently acknowledged that his science isn't a science.
Taylor's idea for a science of management also involves some misconceptions about management. Most people can agree with Mary Parker Follett ‑ one of the most thoughtful of the management theorists in the period just after Taylor‑that management understood in a general sense is "the art of getting things done through people."' Stopwatches, incentive pay schemes, and quantitative metrics are no doubt potentially useful tools for getting things done through other people. But they hardly represent the totality of such tools, much less the entire task of management. Even in the humble business of pig‑iron loading, as the sorry experience in Bethlehem shows, the challenges of management could not be reduced to a time‑and‑motion study. Scientific management was not a valid generalization from particular instances of management experience to universal laws, but a spectacular act of metonymy‑of confusing a part for the whole of management.
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To be sure, a truly free market in management services‑one where judge, jury, and advocates are embodied in distinct individuals‑is a fine ideal. The problem with the shareholder‑value model is that it achieves by stipulation what is often not achieved at all through decades of concerted effort. The model works only on the supposition that the market for managerial services is highly liquid and efficient. But markets are not born free; they are made free. As economists such as Joseph Stiglitz have pointed out, in an imperfectly knowable world markets achieve the level of freedom and efficiency described in classical economic theory only when a number of restrictive conditions are met‑conditions that in many cases must be established through government intervention, in the form of laws and regulatory bodies.
The managerial market, where information is almost by definition imperfectly distributed, is very far from a free and efficient market. In 65% of large, public corporations in America, the CEO is also the chairman of the board! There probably isn't a major US corporation that does not have the CEO or former CEO of another corporation on its board. The consultants and auditors that managers and board members hire to provide a putative outside check report to the same people they are supposed to be checking on. If someone does catch the board members in a mistake, in any case, the universal use of directors' liability insurance means that they need never worry that they will have to pay for malfeasance. As in Taylor's vision of a scientifically managed world‑or in Plato's republic, for that matter‑the people who play the game are the same ones who write the rules. We should hardly be surprised that they almost always turn out to be the winners.
Perhaps the costliest error built into the shareholder‑value model taught at business school is the misunderstanding that it fosters about the sources of economic prosperity. The reigning dogma assumes that economic success is entirely a property of individuals‑superhero, business school‑trained managers who can step into a large organization and make it sing. But in fact, although individuals do differ in their managerial abilities, many of the factors that produce managerial success are the properties of collectivities, not individuals.
Tolman, William H. Social Engineering. New York: 1909. Page 2
In modern business there is little room for sentiment; the ordinary employer demands a cash equivalent for each dollar paid out. The situation is reflected by the commercial proverb, beginning to realize that investment in manhood pays; that improved men for improved machines have economic value, because a more vigorous man can do more work, a more intelligent man will do more intelligent work, and a more conscientious man will do more conscientious work.
Dalton, Francie. "Efficiency at What Cost." Plant Services magazine, May 2000, Page 22
As a small business owner, I can't afford to pay folks (and resent any implication that I should pay folks) to conduct personal business on my time and on my dime. Using the computer for personal business during lunch hour is the same as using any other business resource for personal business during lunch hour. It's a resource that costs me money. I pay for the Internet service provider; I pay for the utilities; I pay for the person-hours -- including salary, rented space, benefits and taxes. The computer is a resource purchased for my business -- not for the entertainment of my employees.
Francie Dalton, Dalton Alliances, Pasadena, Maryland
Poulton, E. C. Environment and Human Efficiency. Illinois: 1970. ISBN 0398015155, Page 279
Old people are often diseased as well as old. If so, they are likely to be at a greater disadvantage. Even a mild disease can reduce efficiency in old age. A scientist’s most creative years usually lie between 30 and 40 (Figure 72).
If only the very best work is considered, the peak may come between 25 and 30 years.
Old people cannot think as well as young people can. They have a smaller memory span. They find it difficult to switch their attention from one thing to another. Reaction times are longer, especially when the decision is complex (Figure 73). Healthy old people do better on tests of verbal ability than young people do. But they cannot see or hear quite as well. They have a slower alpha rhythm.
Old people need aids to help their memory. They are more efficient when they can do one thing at a time. They should not be rushed. They may be better than young people at jobs in which they can use their past experience.
Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man, U.S.A., 1964: ISBN 0807014176, Pages 9 and 144
We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man’s mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to this society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced....
In the social reality, despite all change, the domination of man by man is still the historical continuum that links pre-technological and technological Reason. However, the society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the “objective order of things” (on economic laws, the market etc.). To be sure, the “objective order of things” is itself the result of domination, but it is nevertheless true that domination now generates a higher rationality—that of a society which sustains its hierarchic structure while exploiting ever more efficiently the natural and mental resources, and distributing the benefits of this exploitation on an ever-larger scale.
Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor : A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology . University of Chicago Press: 1988. ISBN 0226902110, Pages 47-8
With the passage of time the cornucopia of modern industrial production began to generate some distinctive institutional patterns. Today we can examine the interconnected systems of manufacturing, communications, transportation, and the like that have arisen during the past two centuries and appreciate how they form de facto a constitution of sorts, the constitution of a sociotechnical order. This way of arranging people and things, of course, did not develop as the result of the application of any particular plan or political theory. It grew gradually and in separate increments, invention by invention, industry by industry, engineering project by engineering project, system by system. From a contemporary vantage point, nevertheless, one can notice some of its characteristics and begin to see how they embody answers to age-old political questions—questions about membership, power, authority, order, freedom, and justice. Several of the characteristics that matter in this way of seeing things—characteristics that would certainly have interested Plato, Rousseau, Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson—can be summarized as follows.
First is the ability of technologies of transportation and communication to facilitate control over events from a single center or small number of centers. Largely unchecked by effective countervailing influences, there has been an extraordinary centralization of social control in large business corporations, bureaucracies, and the military. Second is a tendency for new devices and techniques to increase the most efficient or effective size of organized human associations. Over the past century more and more people have found themselves living and working within technology-based institutions that previous generations would have called gigantic....
Third is the way in which the rational arrangement of socio-technical systems has tended to produce its own distinctive forms of hierarchical authority.
Legitimized by the felt need to do things in what seems to be the most efficient, productive way, human roles and relationships are structured in rule-guided patterns that involve taking orders and giving orders along an elaborate chain of command....
Fourth is the tendency of large, centralized, hierarchically arranged sociotechnical entities to crowd out and liminate other varieties of human activity. Hence, industrial techniques eclipsed craftwork; technologies of modern agribusiness made smallscale farming all but impossible; high-speed transportation crowded out slower means of getting about....
Fifth are the various ways that large sociotechnical organizations exercise power to control the social and political influences that ostensibly control them. Human needs, markets, and political institutions that might regulate technology-based systems are often subject to manipulation by those very systems. Thus, to take one example, psychologically sophisticated techniques of advertising have become a customary way of altering people’s ends to suit the structure of available means, a practice that now affects political campaigns no less than campaigns to sell underarm deodorant or Coco-Cola (with similar results).
Lely, Barea. “A Wise Consistency.” Inc. Tech Industry Week 1998, No. 3 May 3, 1994, Page 38
Even though she’s been going for 14 hours straight, the strain doesn’t show on her face until the cell phone, which for their pre-bedtime attention. Lely Barea calls for the check. Here are some of Barea’s tricks for staying on top of things:
1. Keep it Uniform. She’s an apostle of standardization (her corporate idols are Walt Disney and McDonald’s), so the Bareas have designed their stores to be identical, right down to the location of the pink highlighter pen on each cash register.
2. Travel Light. Barea refuses to waste time looking for things, so she’s minimized the number of places those things can be. She has no home office; and since she spends so much time tooling around Miami, she keeps the files she needs each day in the car. A master delegator; she is proud of her ability to push much of the paper work off her plate. And everything that can be stored electronically goes into her Zaurus, which she sometimes takes to bed with her to catch up on the day’s activities.
3. DO IT NOW. One reason Barea is able to travel light is that she refuses to let things accumulate.
Talbot Page, Conservation and Economic Efficiency: An Approach to Materials Policy Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977
Page 10
The rule “deplete up to the rate where the growth in scarcity value equals the interest rate” is an efficiency condition of today’s market and a condition met more or less automatically by the market. Whether or not the future is damaged by today’s depletion is another question entirely. The answer depends on whether there is enough growth in technology, substitutes, and discoveries to “renew” the resource base. The increasing prices that result from growing scarcity value encourage technological and other substitutions without guaranteeing renewability of the resource base....
While technology is ultimately the only way of renewing “nonrenewable” material resources, it adds to the legacy of risk to be bequeathed to the next generation. Technical solutions are not inevitable. As the flows of nonrenewable” resources become larger for the United States and increasingly so for other countries, our dependence on technological fixes becomes greater. The power of technology becomes greater, with uncalculated and perhaps unmanageable side effects....
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The efficiency criterion cannot decide between efficient allocations because the choice of the initial distribution of income is logically prior to the workings of efficiency. The best distribution of income is a social question and not one for an economist alone to decide.
Kalle Lasn Adbusters Magazine June/July 2000, Page 17
Time Warner swallows up CNN. AOL swallows up Time-Warner. BCE snaps up Canada's premier television broadcaster CTV. he media mergers keep coming and the conventional wisdom says that they are good. They wake up snoozing CEOs, shake up company boardrooms and most importantly, they marry industries like broadcasting, telecommunications and computers into efficient new digital age corporations.
The downside, of course, is that with each merger, media power is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer corporations. We know what it means when tow companies (Coke & Pepsi) dominate the world's soft drink market, or when one corporation (Microsoft) has a near monopoly on the world's operating systems, or when half a dozen companies (Exxon, Chevron, Texaco, BP, Total Fina and Shell) control the bulk of the global oil supplies. But what does it mean when a handful of media corporations gain control of the world's news, entertainment and information flows?
It means cultural homogenization. It means the same hairstyles, catchphrases, music and action-hero antics perpetrated ad nauseum around the world. It means a world in which dissenting voices that challenge corporate interest and profitability are increasingly filtered out.
In all systems, such homogenization is poison. Lack of diversity leads to inefficiency, stagnation and failure. Just as this is true for physical systems, lack of infodiversity spells disaster for mental systems too. The loss of a language, tradition or cultural heritage – or the censoring of one good idea -- can be as big a loss to future generations as a biological species going extinct.
Infodiversity is a word you'll probably keep hearing the years ahead. Infodiversity is analogous to biodiversity. Both are bedrocks of human existence, and both are currently plummeting at alarming rates.
Thirty-five years ago Rachel Carson's Silent Spring evoked a future in which birds no longer sing. This book shocked us into realizing that our natural environment was dying, and catalyzed a wave of environmental activism that changed the world. What we need now is a Silent Spring of the mental environment -- a book, a film, a charismatic media reformer who warns of a future in which corporations do the talking and dissenting voices no longer speak back.
Berry, Wendell. “Conserving Communities”. Resurgence Magazine, Number 170, Page 8
The great, centralized economic entities of our time do not come into rural places in order to improve them by “creating jobs”. They come to take as much of value as they can take as cheaply and as quickly as they can take it. They are interested in “job creation” only so long as the jobs can be done by humans more cheaply than by machines. They are not interested in the good health economic or natural or human—of any place on this Earth. And if you should undertake to appeal or complain to one of these great corporations on behalf of your community, you would discover something most remarkable: you would find that these organizations are organized expressly for the evasion of responsibility. They are structures in which, as my brother says, “the buck never stops”. The buck is processed up the hierarchy until finally it is passed to “the shareholders”, who characteristically are too widely dispersed, too poorly informed, and too unconcerned to be responsible for anything. The ideal of the modern corporation is to be (in terms of its own advantage) anywhere and (in terms of local accountability) nowhere. The message, in other words, is: Don’t expect favours from your enemies.
“Toplines.” Don’t Bring Me Down American Demographics February 1999, Page 14
High cholesterol, poor eating habits, and drinking lots of booze may be bad for you, but a new economic study finds that stress and depression rack up more in employee medical costs.
Workers who reported being depressed had medical expenses that were 70 percent higher than non-depressed workers, and racked up some $3,189 dollars in health-care costs. Workers who said they were under constant stress had medical expenditures that were 46 percent higher than their stress-free peers, or $2,287 a year. And people who said they suffered from both psychological and social problems had medical costs that were 147 percent higher than the risk-free crowd.—AD Staff
Jennifer Tanaka, Focus On Technology Newsweek, April 28, 1997, Page 85
Psychologists say they increasingly hear from patients who complain about stress but who aren’t making the connection between feeling burned-out and the fact that they take their cell phones to the golf course. Steven Berglas, a Boston psychologist who counsels high-level executives, tells his patients to consciously cut back on access. “It’s just like controlling eating,” he says. “You have to count calories.”
Norman, Donald A. Things That Make Us Smart, U.S.A.: 1993: ISBN 0201-581299, Page 14
Efficient, routine operations are fine for machines, not for humans. The body wears out—“repetitive stress syndrome,” we call it today. Just as the body can wear out, so too can the mind—the syndrome called “burnout” wearing out the ability to create, to innovate, or even simply to care about the work being produced. A worn-out mind leads to a demoralized worker, to someone who no longer cares about the job and who is apt to leave. Every time an employee leaves, the result is added cost and aggravation for the company; more cost to hire new people, costs for training, but costs that are not figured into the normal analysis of the engineer. Worse, the machine-centered approach to the design of a job leads to an uninspired society, where mental creativity is much reduced. None of this was planned: It is an accidental by-product of the age.
Hornaday, Ann. “How Do You Know When It’s Time to Go?” Handbook of the Business Revolution Page 34
Barely half said they liked their job enough that they don’t want to leave it.
Kuttner, Robert. “The Limits of Markets.” The American Prospect March – April 1997. Page 7
The saga of banking regulation raises the question of contending conceptions of efficiency. The efficiency prized by market enthusiasts is “allocative.” That is, the free play of supply and demand via price signals will steer resources to the uses that provide the greatest satisfaction and the highest return. Regulation interferes with this discipline, and presumably worsens outcomes. But in markets like health care and banking, the market is far from free to begin with.
Moreover, “allocative” efficiency leaves out the issues that concerned John Maynard Keynes—whether the economy as a whole has lower rates of growth and higher unemployment than it might achieve. Nor does allocative efficiency deal with the question of technical advance, which is the source of improved economic performance over time. Technical progress is the issue that concerned the other great dissenting economic theorist of the early twentieth century, Joseph Schumpeter. Standard market theory lacks a common metric to assess these three contending conceptions of efficiency.
Coleman, Richard M. The 24-hour Business. New York: 1995. ISBN 0814402402, Page 5
Because of inertia and lack of awareness of alternatives, the principle of continuous improvement is rarely applied to work scheduling. We have found that most businesses that stick with traditional schedules are really accepting built-in hidden costs, such as these:
- Reduced productivity
- Low capital utilization (too much downtime)
- Excess capital purchases
- High overtime and idle time
- Poor integration of maintenance/operations
- Inefficient relief systems
- Poor communication between and integration of day workers/shift workers
- Skill imbalance
- Low training efficiency
- Lack of a shift work team concept
- Difficulty matching changing workload
- Low employee morale
- Constant bidding out of shift work
- Reduced alertness, health, and safety
- Management/labor strife
- Excessive start-ups and shutdowns
Melbin, Murray. Night as Frontier. New York: Free Press, 1987. ISBN 0029209404 Page 15
A land frontier is turned to for what can be extracted from it, nighttime for what can be produced in it. The underlying motive is the same, an incentive to exploit the region for economic gain. The great surge into the night began in manufacturing plants. Recognizing the idle capacity in their factories, entrepreneurs inaugurated the industrial expansion once gas lighting was developed and recruited large numbers of people to be active then. By running available equipment in those hours, the total volume of materials handled was multiplied, as were the goods produced. They already wanted to use the invested capital, but it remained dormant after midnight until the shop floor could be lit. Among the ways of achieving profits by using the night, one of the most popular is by reducing costs. The more expensive the machines and equipment, the stronger the stimulus to operate them more in order to amortize heir expense. An investment might be so steep that it will be profitable only if the equipment is kept in use all the time.
Gray, John. False Dawn. The New Press New York: 1998. ISBN 1565845218, Page 3
Even though a global free market cannot be reconciled with any kind of planned economy, what these Utopias have in common is more fundamental than their differences. In their cult of reason and efficiency, their ignorance of history and their contempt for the ways of lie they consign to poverty or extinction, they embody the same rationalist hubris and cultural imperialism that have marked the central traditions of Enlightenment thinking throughout its history.
Russell, Cheryl. The Master Trend How the Baby Boom Generation Is Remaking America New York: Perseus 1993. ISBN 0306445077, Page 32
With the rise of factories and mass-produced goods in the nineteenth century, economies shifted from agrarian to industrial. Money and the market economy replaced barter and personal relationships in economic transactions. Villages grew into cities as people sought a more efficient way to exchange goods. In the cities, hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of people crowded together. The few long-term economic relationships of farm societies gave way to numerous and fleeting monetary transactions between strangers. The anonymity of modern economies makes it possible for people to pursue their own interests at the expense of others. The satisfaction of the other party in an exchange is much less important because buyer and seller are not likely to meet again.
In this environment, those who act cooperatively, in the common spirit of the past, are at he mercy of those out to get the best deal for themselves. The meek will be pushed to the end of the line, whether they’re trying to get a good job, decent pay, or a nice house. They will lose social and economic status to those who are more competitive. In this kind of society, parents teach their children to think for themselves and to compete with others. As their children grow up, the social norms and values of society shift away from communalism toward individualism, away from cooperation toward competition.
Page 56
The agricultural economy was based on the production and distribution of food and hand-crafted products. The industrial economy was based on the production of mass-produced products. The personalized economy is based on the production of customized products for individualistic consumers. This new economy demands a new way of life. In an agricultural economy, people’s roles are unchanging. Their position in life, both socially and geographically, is determined by their family circumstances. Their success depends entirely on their skill at getting along with others.
In an industrial economy, people’s position in life is less static, but they’re trapped in elaborate social and economic bureaucracies, which are a byproduct of the massive production and distribution systems of industrial society. While people can better themselves, to do so means following the bureaucratic rules. They have to attend the right schools, wear the right clothes, work for the right company, go to the right neighborhood.
In the personalized economy, customized goods, designed for individualistic consumers, are the basis of the economy. This makes information about customers and their needs the key resource of the personalized economy. Because of rapid technological advances in computing and communications technologies over the past twenty years, the information that forms the basis of the personalized economy is inexpensive and readily available to those with the skills to use it. With the building blocks of the economy at hand, people can escape the bureaucracies. They become much more anonymous and independent.
This is an environment where entrepreneurs can quickly become multi-millionaires, like Steve Jobs (Apple Computer) and Bill Gates (Microsoft). As increasing numbers of people operate independently of one another, the bureaucracies of industrial society break down, economic transactions speed up, and the pace of life increases in exponential terms.
Page 57
Success in the personalized economy demands different strategies than success in the industrial economy. The personalized economy rewards innovation more than loyalty, instant action more than careful analysis, and short-term gains more than long-term goals. These new economic strategies created free agents, who in turn became the eager market for the personalized economy, creating a personalized culture in the process…. The technology of the personalized economy gives free agents greater control over their environment. The more control they have, the more they want. Business have responded to this demand with a multitude of products that offer ever greater control.
Page 65
Baby boom women know their chances of divorce are greater than their chances of celebrating a fiftieth wedding anniversary. They need the economic independence of a job. Among all women, 58 percent are in the labor force, up from 43 percent in 1970. among women aged 25 to 44, 75 percent are in the labor force, up from 48 percent in 1970. The most rapid climb in labor force participation rates has been among mothers with infants. Over half of married women giving birth in 1990 were back at work before their baby celebrated its first birthday, up from fewer than one-third in 1976. In the personalized economy, women must be breadwinners, homemakers, and mothers.
Page 115
With working parents pursuing careers and with children attending day care or signing up for sports and after-school activities, each family member follows a different daily schedule. Integrating all these activities makes each family’s schedule as unique as a fingerprint, says social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. It is little wonder that families rarely get together for meals or that neighbors hardly know one another. One family’s schedule rarely meshes with that of other families. These different schedules split communities apart. When family schedules were more uniform in the past, neighborhood parents did the same things at the same time, supporting one another in their proximity. Children played together, men carpooled to work together, women got together for coffee. Today, it’s as though every family, and every person within the family, operates in a separate time zone, just as the many small towns of the United States did until Congress created standardized time zones at the end of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, no congressional Act can do a similar favor for American families.
Many millions of Americans are exhausted by the pace of modern life. Thirty-eight percent report constantly feeling under the gun. Seven out of ten say they want to slow down and live a more relaxed life, according to pools. This enormous desire to slow down is a consequence of the chaos of family life. Juggling work and family schedules is the principle source of stress in American families today, says Bronfenbrenner. Often, this kind of stress can lead to divorce, and divorce can devastate children.
Goldman, Debra. "Art & Commerce." Adweek, March 13, 2000, Page 15
Typical victims of Sudden Wealth Syndrome are successful entrepreneurs and middle managers whose vested stock options have vaulted them into the ranks of the rich. Symptoms include feelings of guilt and unworthiness on one hand and invincibility on the other. Sufferers find themselves compulsively thinking about money, the one worry from which their wealth should set them free. They fall victim to anxiety attacks and fears of losing control. Then there are those dark nights of the soul when the hapless multimillionaire wakens and realizes anew he never has to work again -- thus plunging into existential despair.
According to the Money, Meaning & Choices Institute of Kentfield, Calif., these tortured souls need to confront their issues "like an alcoholic facing his drinking problem." With Silicon Valley producing 64 new millionaires a day, I can't blame the local shrinks for trying to get in on the action. It is just like our therapeutic society, however, to classify normal reactions to a rather drastic change in lifestyle as a disease.
Jorge, Antonia. Competition, Cooperation, Efficiency, and Social Organization. New Jersey: 1978. ISBN 0838620264, Pages 14 and 25
Economic optimization in the abstract is, to say the least, a not very useful concept. In any case, even to the extent that intertemporal and interspatial comparisons could be established, it can be demonstrated that there is no single institutional, organizational, or motivational path to attain optimization. The essence of productivity and efficiency can be incorporated into differing social arrangements.
The essential thing, though, is man’s total development. Economic systems must serve as a tool to that end and should not be viewed as ultimate realities in themselves. Economic efficiency must be blended with other variables necessary to human growth in a composite index those value we should continually seek to
maximize....
This holds true, of course, even assuming that the trusts or combines that would result from the agglomeration of firms in each industry would enjoy perfect freedom. Of course, if they are not going to engage in competition for economic resources against one another, or grow lax in the absence of internal prodding for efficiency, or if buyers (consumers and producers) will not try to maximize, there is no sense in which we can speak of a competitive (efficient) price system. On the other hand, dealing with questions of economic efficiency would be much diminished in such a society. Seeking efficiency would tend to take place in a physical-technological sense rather than in what would tend to be the alien context of purely economic considerations. Competition with is necessary to make for economic efficiency and to facilitate growth in resource productivity.
Asbell, Bernard. The New Improved American. 1965 Page 188
Each system of production has a way of producing people appropriate to it, in approximately the numbers it needs them. The Indian way produces people who act like Indians and a few who act like slaves and, at an appropriate time in history, a few who acted like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas. Similarly, the sharecropping system, the farm migrant system, the independent artisan system. And finally, our system of mass production on a beltline, mass addition and subtraction clerking in cheerlesss offfices, has produced, by the millions, people trained to dull their psyches, anesthetize their dreams, and passively submit their working lives to drudgery with no practical hop e of escape from it.
The cause of unemployment today is not the lack of work to do. Not even a lack of economic means to put every man, woman, and child to work at useful tasks and still have a labor shortage. Far from it. The cause of today’s unemployment is that we are emerging from a system of production—in the factory and on the farm—that required and produced millions of people of such inferior capability, such limited horizons, such faint ambitions, that they are too retarded to assume the more sophisticated tasks demanded of them today. The tasks will get more sophisticated all the time. Which means our new system— called automation—by its nature will require us to produce more sophisticated people all the time.
Yet we deplore it. In condemning machines as the cause of unemployment, we imply that progress is in the direction of going back to dumb, old-style men harnessed to dumb, old-style machines.
As you read through these pages about some of the consequences of robots and computers, you are asked to lay aside a passion so deeply ingrained it is almost instinctual. You are asked to suspend the fear of unemployment as the worst of economic fates. Just for a while. By doing so, one is freer to consider, perhaps for the first time, the fearful consequences of what men have been employed to do. This is an attempt to take a fresh look at the familiar as thought it were a strange land.
Ogilvy, David. “ Efficiency ” From website www.ogilvy.com/memorial/html/t_six.htm
In the best establishments, promises are always kept, whatever it may cost in agony and overtime. To keep your ship moving through the water at maximum efficiency, you have to keep scraping the barnacles off its bottom. It is rare for a department head to recommend the abolition of a job, or even the elimination of a man; the pressure from below is always for adding. If the initiative for barnacle-scraping does not come from management, barnacles will never be scraped. It is the inescapable duty of management to fire incompetent people.
Frantz, John P. “Market ordering versus statutory control of termination decisions: A case for the inefficiency of Just Cause Dismissal Requirements”Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Winter97, Vol. 20 Issue 2, p555, 49p
Since the start of the twentieth century, the majority of employment relationships in the United States have been governed by the common law employment-at-will presumption. This rule permits both employers and employees to terminate their relationship at any time with or without cause, in the absence of a contractual provision to the contrary.[1] Thus, employees whose contracts incorporate the at-will presumption have no legal recourse against their employers if they are terminated without cause….
Given the extraordinary diversity of employment relationships in the United States, it is difficult to believe that any one discharge rule can produce optimal results in every case. Most often, parties to employment contracts are likely to have more accurate information about their preferences and better incentives to reach efficient results than legislators, judges, or arbitrators. The key question is whether a blunt legal rule should be used to correct the few errors that do occur. Given the staggering costs likely to be imposed by a just cause requirement, errors are better left to the corrective devices inherent in the functioning of a well-working market. Freedom of contract should be guaranteed, and the at will rule maintained.
Gordon, David M. Fat and Mean. New York: 1996. ISBN 0684822881, Page 59
Surveys conducted by the American Management Association in 1994 highlight the superficial and shotgun character of most corporate “downsizing” efforts. Only a third of corporations reported that their downsizing efforts had actually resulted in productivity gains; fully 30 percent reported that productivity had declined. A vast majority of companies surveyed reported that their restructuring efforts had placed a high priority on changing corporate culture, but less than a quarter reported that these results were “very successful.” Far from generating uniform improvements in performance, one of the surveys concluded, “the surest after-effect of downsizing is a negative impact on employee morale”; 83 percent of corporations which had downsized between 1989 and 1991 reported that “employee morale had declined in 1994.”
Survey quote from Smith, Rethinking America, p. 411; results on morale from “Corporate Surveys Can’t Find a Productivity Revolution,” p. 32.
“Demo Memo.” American Demographics magazine September 1998, Page 47
(Average daily employees working as temps, 1990 and 1997)
1990............................................1.17 million
1997............................................2.54 million
Source: National Association of Temporary and Staffing Services.
Louis Uchitelle and N.R. Kleinfield, “On The Battlefields Of Business” The New York Times, March 3, 1996
Page 1
Nearly three-quarters of all households have had a close encounter with layoffs since 1980, according to a new poll by The New York Times. In one-third of all households, a family member has lost a job, and nearly 40 percent more know a relative, friend or neighbor who was laid off. One in 10 adults - or about 19 million people, a number matching the adult population of New York and New Jersey combined—acknowledged that a lost job in their household had precipitated a major crisis in their lives, according to the Times poll.
While permanent layoffs have been symptomatic of most recessions, now they are occurring in the same large numbers even during an economic recovery that has lasted five years and even at companies that are doing well.
In a reversal from the early 80’s, workers with at least some college education make up the majority of people whose jobs were eliminated, outnumbering those with no more than high school educations. And better-paid workers—those earning at least $50,000 -- account for twice the share of the lost jobs than they did in the 1980’s.
Roughly 50 percent more people, about 3 million, are affected by layoffs each year than the 2 million victims of violent crimes. But while crime bromides get easily served up—more police, stiffer jail sentences—no one has come up with any broadly agreed upon antidotes to this problem. And until Patrick J. Buchanan made the issue part of the Presidential campaign, it seldom surfaced in political debate.
Yet this is not a saga about rampant unemployment, like the Great Depression, but one about an emerging redefinition of employment. There has been a net increase of 27 million jobs in America since 1979, enough to easily absorb all the laid-off workers plus the new people beginning careers, and the national unemployment rate is low. The sting is in the nature of the replacement work. Whereas 25 years ago the vast majority of the people who were laid off found jobs that paid as well as their old ones, Labor Department numbers show that now only about 35 percent of laid-off full-time workers end up in equality remunerative or better-paid jobs.
Compounding this frustration are stagnant wages and an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth. Adjusted for inflation, the median wage is nearly 3 percent below what it was in 1979. Average household income climbed 10 percent between 1979 and 1994, but 97 percent of the gain went to the richest 20 percent.
Why Factory Jobs Are Disappearing -- All Over, Robert B. Reich, NPR Marketplace November 5, 2003
America has been losing manufacturing jobs to China, Latin America, and the rest of the developing world. Right? Well, not quite. It turns out that manufacturing jobs have been disappearing all over the world. Economists at Alliance Capital Management in New York took a close look at employment trends in twenty large economies recently, and found that since 1995, more than 22 million factory jobs have disappeared.
In fact, the United States has not even been the biggest loser. Between 1995 and 2002, we lost about 11 percent of our manufacturing jobs. But over the same period, the Japanese lost 16 percent of theirs. And get this: Many developing nations are losing factory jobs. During those same years, Brazil suffered a 20 percent decline.
Here’s the real surprise. China saw a 15 percent drop. China, which is fast becoming the manufacturing capital of the world, has been losing millions of factory jobs.
What’s going on? In two words: Higher productivity.
All over the world, factories are becoming more efficient. They've installed new equipment and utilized new technology. And that often means fewer jobs. Market reforms have also played a role. In China, new modern factories are replacing large, inefficient state-run plants. The result is that even as China produces more goods than ever before, millions of factory workers have been laid off.
Manufacturing is following the same path as agriculture. As productivity rises, employment falls because fewer people are needed. In 1910, almost third of adult Americans worked on farms. Now, fewer than 3 percent do. But American agriculture is the most productive in the world.
Similarly, global manufacturing output is rising -- since the mid-90s, up 30 percent-- even as worldwide manufacturing employment has been dropping. The two trends are directly related.
So next time you hear a politician complain that American manufacturing jobs are fleeing to low-cost countries like China or to Latin America, watch your wallet. Everyone’s losing factory jobs.
The issue we really ought to be talking is what jobs Americans, and everyone else, will be able to find when machines are able to do just about everything.
Stan Sewitch Unintended consequences of efficiency Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Marshall McLuhan offered a truly innovative way of understanding the impact of any given message: The impact is determined by the method of delivering that message.
Some of you as old as I might remember the famous line, "The medium is the message." McLuhan meant that the content of the message is secondary to the form which it takes, in terms of how the receiver "digests" or understands that message. How the receiver might behave as a result of receiving the message is therefore largely determined not by the content, but by the form.
There is no right or wrong to this hypothesis, now largely accepted as fact after decades of research have provided so much support. It is simply the way humans work.
I have had to apply this principle over and over again in my job as a business psychologist, in order to help companies improve how they function. In one company, the interpersonal relationships had deteriorated to a point where the company was on the brink of bankruptcy or dissolution. In searching for a cause, I noted that the organization was comprised mostly of very talented scientists and engineers, the company's product was outstanding and new, the company had strong financial backers who believed in the technology, and that if the company could pull it together, it would be able to hit a huge milestone with targeted dates, thus ensuring the anticipated public stock offering would be tremendous.
So what was wrong? It took exactly 30 minutes to determine the cause of dysfunction, and I didn't have to talk to anyone. I walked through the company's well-appointed halls, roving from office to office, cubicle bay to bay, and everywhere I went I saw the same thing: lots of people working quite close to each other, using the phone and e-mail to communicate with people that they could see, no more than 20 feet away.
People had come to rely on e-mail, primarily, and then the telephone to talk to each other. It was a matter of gradually developing a habit that allowed a minimum of physical movement. While it appears logical and efficient, it was nearly disastrous. Because here's where McLuhan comes in. Since they were using media of communication that minimized the sensory input during transmission, the receiver applied additional information that could not be obtained from the sender. This additional information was sound, body language, environmental cues, physical proximity, etc. And while the phone is better than e-mail, (it has a couple of modalities that the written word doesn't), the phone is far less effective than personal delivery in conveying what the sender intends.
I've found over the years that if a written document can be interpreted negatively, it is most likely that it will. And if a clearly negative message is included, it will most likely be received 10 times more negatively than intended. The first response to such an event is usually to compose a written response, rather than go talk to the person. A perceived attack evokes fight or flight responses. Most people counter with the safest approach, i.e., counter-attack impersonally, in document form. So the cycle escalates and people get more entrenched in their distances.
Once I explained to my client how "efficiency" was literally splitting his company apart, he shut off e-mail for two months, for six hours out of every work day. It was turned on for one hour at 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. After two months, people understood the dynamics involved, mended their conflicts and went on with business. Their stock performed pretty well for the next few years.
Stan Sewitch is CEO of SuperLab, an investment firm focusing on the acceleration of business growth for innovation-based companies. SuperLab provides both expertise and financing, toward the goal of improving the chances for business success. Comments regarding this column can be sent to editor@sddt.com. All letters are forwarded to the author.
Downs, Alan, Corporate Executions, New York: ISBN 0814403077, Pages 11, 12 and 27
Some of the strongest codemning layoffs comes from Wyatt and Co., one of the most respected organizational survery firms in the country. A survery of 1,005 corporations that had recently participated in a downsizing program found the following. Only one-third said that profits increased as much as they had expected after the layoff. Fewer than half said that their cuts had reduced expenses as much as expected over time—an understandable result, considering that four out of five of these same managers reported rehiring for the positions that were laid off. Only a small minority reported a satisfactory increase in shareholders’ return on investment as a result of the layoff....
As if those results weren’t eye-opening enough, Wyatt and Co. released a follow-up study a year later that extended these earlier findings and prompted editorials in both The Wall Street Journal and Money. In this study, 531 large corporations were surveyed, and more than three-quarters reported having cut their payrolls. Of those, 85 percent sought higher profits from the layoff, but only 46 percent saw any measurable increase. Fifty eight percent of this same group sought higher productivity, but only 34 percent reported even a slight increase. Sixty-one percent wanted an improvement in customer service, but only 31 percent achieved it….
This is a corporate paradox of the 1990s: Organizational rhetoric revolves around teamwork, shared values, vision, total quality, and empowerment, but high-level executive decisions are often contrary to these principles. In fact, it is common for someone in the chain of command to discover that he or she can use these programs as a means for personal advancement. Subtly, the program moves from employee involvement to employee manipulation, a manifestation of the singular, self-interest value in the culture of narcissism.
Womack, James P. Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996, ISBN 0684810352
Page 18
Few firms are aggressively promoting this definition of value because the airlines and airframe builders start their thinking with extraordinarily costly assets in the form of large aircraft; the engineering knowledge, tooling, and production facilities to make more large aircraft; and massive airport complexes. Old-fashioned “efficiency” thinking suggests that the best way to make use of these assets and technologies is to get larger batches of people on larger planes and to do this by sending ever more passengers through the expensive sorting centers. This type of efficiency calculation, focused on the airplane and the hub—only two of the many elements in the total trip— loses sight of the whole. Much worse from the standpoint of value for the passenger, it simply misses the point.
Page 19
The end result of fifteen years of this type of thinking in the United States is that passengers are miserable (this is not what they meant by value!), the aircraft producers make little money (because the airlines can’t afford new planes), and the airlines (excepting Southwest and a few other start-ups pursuing the more sensible strategy of flying point-to-point, although still using large aircraft) have flown a decade-long holding pattern in the vicinity of bankruptcy. Europe and parts of East Asia are not far behind.
Page 22
Recently, one of us performed a simple experiment with his daughters, ages six and nine: They were asked the best way to fold, address, seal, stamp, and mail the monthly issue of their mother’s newsletter. After a bit of thought their answer was emphatic: “Daddy, first, you should fold all of the newsletters.
Then you should put on all the address labels. Then you should attach the seal to stick the upper and lower parts together [to secure the newsletter for mailing]. Then you should put on the stamps.” But why not fold one newsletter, then seal it, then attach the address label, and then put on the stamp? Wouldn’t that avoid the wasted effort of picking up and putting down every newsletter four times? Why don’t we look at the problem from the standpoint of the newsletter which wants to get mailed in the quickest way with the least effort?” Their emphatic answer: “Because that wouldn’t be efficient!”
What was striking was their profound conviction that performing tasks in batches is best—sending the newsletters from “department” to “department” around the kitchen table—and their failure to consider that a rethink task might permit continuous flow and more efficient work. What’s equally striking when looked at this way is that most of the world conducts its affairs in accord with the thought processes of six-and nine-year-olds!
Page 44
The simplest way to think about this situation is that a can of cola is very small and cola is consumed by the individual customer in small amounts, yet all of the apparatus used to make cola and get it to the customer is very large, very hard to change over, and designed to operate efficiently at very high speeds. The boats, warehouses, and processing machines we have been describing are truly massive and we can see that the primary objective of technologists in the beverage industry has been to scale up and speed up this equipment while removing direct labor, in a classic application of the ideas of mass production.
However, what appears to be efficient to individual companies along the stream -- for example, purchase of one of the world’s fastest canning machines, operating at fifteen hundred cans per minute, to yield the world’s lowest fill cost per can—may be far from efficient when indirect labor (for technical support), upstream and downstream inventories, handling charges, and storage costs are included. Indeed, this machine may be much more expensive than a smaller, simpler, slower one able to make just what the next firm down the stream needs and to produce it immediately upon receipt of the order rather than shipping from a large inventory.
For the moment, let’s just reemphasize the critical leap in embracing value stream thinking: Stop looking at aggregated activities and isolated machines— the smelter, the rolling mill, the warehouse, and the can filling machine.
Start looking at all the specific actions required to produce specific products to see how they interact with each other. Then start to challenge those actions which singly and in combination don’t actually create or optimize value for the customer.
Mishra, Karen E., Gretchen M. Spreitzer, and Aneil K. Mishra. “Preserving Employee Morale during Downsizing.” Sloan Management Review Winter 1998. Page 84
The promised payoffs of downsizing have been mixed at best. One study found that (1) a 10 percent reduction in people resulted in only a 1.5 percent reduction in costs, (2) the average downsized firm’s stock price rose 4.7 percent over three years as compared to 34.3 percent for matched firms that did not downsize, (3) profitability was up in only half the firms that downsized, and (4) the results on productivity were not conclusive. The financial costs often incurred by downsizing firms explain some of the mixed findings.
Honeywell, Annual Report 1995, Page 30
Work force reduction costs primarily include severance costs related to involuntary termination programs instituted to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
Neuberger, Doris: University of Rostock, Germany; doctoral dissertation 1989 and Habilitation 1993 supervised by Professor Neumann in , Dennis C. Mueller, editor. Competition, Efficiency, and Welfare. Essays in Honor of Manfred Neumann. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1999. ISBN 0792382935, Pages 181 and 183
Empirical studies about bank mergers in the US show that the potential for cost efficiency improvements from mergers are generally not realized. Event studies on the short-term reaction of the merging banks" share prices to the announcement of the merger find only small positive or even negative effects. Compared to the results from event and outcome studies for industrial mergers, this points to significant negative long-run effects of bank mergers….
Merger control in European banking markets has to take into account that banks of different size compete in different product and geographic markets. Mergers of large universal banks with nationwide branches may affect the concentration in local retail banking markets as do mergers of small banks which are restricted to these areas. Market power effects are most likely to arise in markets with regulatory or natural entry barriers, especially in retail banking. An efficiency defense should consider that efficiency improvements by mergers depend on firm size and the size of the branch network: the potential for economies of scale is highest in small banks and in overbranched markets, whereas improvements in output efficiency are more likely to be achieved by mergers of large banks. To evaluate the effects of the current large mergers in European banking markets, more empirical research is needed.
Accenture Pursues Efficiency
With outsourcing growth soaring, firm taps Mercury as one tool in delivering services more effectively
By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek May 3, 2004
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=19400003
Outsourcing is Accenture’s fastest-growing business, increasing at more than a 30% clip over the past year. With that growing demand, the company decided to standardize the portfolio-management tools it uses to help manage clients’ projects and report on its service-level performance.
Accenture recently signed a multimillion-dollar deal for about 30,000 of its employees to use Mercury IT Governance Center portfolio-management tools from Mercury Interactive Corp. to help manage the client projects that Accenture’s outsourcing-services business handles. The software is one of several enhancements the company is making as its outsourcing business grows.
Accenture’s outsourcing deals typically involve detailed service-level agreements and measurements. Clients may ask for daily, weekly, or monthly reports on these metrics, he says. “This software provides us with tools that allow us to do this” more quickly and efficiently, says James Hall, Accenture’s managing partner of technology, alliances, and solutions.
Accenture has used the software in some outsourcing-business areas, along with portfolio-management tools from other vendors, but the company decided to standardize on Mercury’s software as part of its overall focus on consistency within its operations, Hall says. The company also is considering standardizing on the program for its systems-integration business, Hall says.
Standardizing on Mercury’s IT governance software lets Accenture more quickly “hit the ground running with [new] clients,” Hall says, because it provides an information-gathering and -reporting framework for service measurements.
Mercury’s software can help Accenture quickly move its new clients to outsourced models such as running their enterprise-resource-planning and other systems, says Mercury chief marketing officer Christopher Lochhead.
Accenture is betting its business on being able to efficiently deliver outsourcing. In the second quarter of this fiscal year, ended Feb. 29, Accenture’s outsourcing revenue accounted for 39% of company sales. The $1.3 billion in outsourcing revenue is an increase of 46% in U.S. dollars and 37% in local currency from a year ago. That’s helped make up for slow growth in traditional consulting and integration work, which rose 4% in U.S. dollars to $2.0 billion in the quarter but fell 5% as measured in local currency.
The pattern looks likely to continue near-term: Accenture in the second quarter booked new business worth $2.9 billion in consulting and $4.8 billion in outsourcing.
Wim Zweers and Jan J. Boersema, Ecology, Technology and Culture : Essays in Environmental Philosophy Great Britain: Paul & Co Pub Consortium, 1994; ISBN: 1874267111
Page 194
The ideology of the infinity of human needs (satisfied to a continually greater extent by economic activity) stands opposed to a reality of ever more rapid expansion of wants relative to the possibilities of satisfying them—the ‘means’. It is evident that this type of dynamics turns the process of accumulation into a process of hopeless but ever accelerating growth, with increasing environmental pressure as a consequence.
Page 202
‘Doing more with less’, one of the main slogans of Our common future, could, after a shortlived profit, lead to long term accelerated destruction of both humanity and nature....
Page 233
It seems to me to be undeniable that the technological lifestyle poses an increasing threat to its own preconditions for existence, both physical and mental, and that ultimately it may even destroy them. This is most noticeable as far as the physical environment is concerned. In the public debate there is hardly any doubt there being a crisis in this respect, although the extent of the threat does not seem to have sunk in yet, judging by most people’s behaviour. This is even less the case as regards social reality, which relies on understanding between people, on trust and at least decency, and furthermore on a common cultural tradition which brings about recognition in the world, and on a social climate in which people feel at home; in short on the ‘gentle forces’ within human society being intact. Because of their nature, these do not lend themselves to a socio-technical approach in terms of counting, measuring or controlling, but on the one hand they create the preconditions for such a ‘hard’ organizational and managerial approach, and on the other hand they are increasingly eroded by it. This then leads to relationships between people becoming ever more impersonal, to an increasingly chilly atmosphere in our institutions which are being dominated more and more by ‘business’ viewpoints such as efficiency. The result is, not surprisingly, a sharp rise in the number of dropouts, people unfit for work and psychiatric patients, especially among people under 35. This is highly alarming, as people who have their entire future still ahead of them and given their age should be hardy, are cracking up before life has actually got going.
Zeldin, Theodore, Philosophical Anthropology, New York: 1994, ISBN 006017160X, Pages 247, 469
In the past, hospitals seldom employed physicians, so long as they were essentially alms-houses. An apprentice surgeon might examine new entrants, but only to exclude those who were unsuitable, because too sick. The nurses concentrated on feeding the patients, for that was what the poor seemed most in need of. However, in the late eighteenth century doctors protested that overeating was not necessarily the way to recover strength, and it was from this time that they gradually began taking over control of hospitals, transforming them into facilities for medical research, concerned with the technical cure of diseases, rather than with the spiritual needs of the patient. In the end hospitals became institutions which had to be above all financially viable. When technology became more prestigious than bedside care, administrators got the upper hand. Compassion did not disappear, but it was subordinated to efficiency.
Worster, Donald. The Wealth of Nature. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1993. ISBN 0195076249, Page 179
Any suggestion that nature has an intrinsic order that must be preserved has been viewed by many industrial leaders as a serious threat. They have had another, rival order to create—an economic one. Industrialism has sought not the preservation but the total domination of the natural order and its radical a transformation into consumer goods. The environment has been seen to exist mainly for the purpose of supplying an endless line of those goods and absorbing the byproducts of waste and pollution. Whatever has not been produced by some industry and placed on the market for sale has had little value. It has been viewed, in the most negative word that industrial culture knows, as “useless.” Since the only way industrialists can use nature is to disorganize it, in order to extract the specific commodities they value, typically they have regarded as most useless of all those very qualities of stability, harmony, symbiosis, and integration that characterize the living world in the composite. They have tended to devalue both the services that natural systems provide people, like a forest regulating stream flow, and the aesthetic satisfaction that contemplating such order affords.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: 1982. ISBN 0521262208, Page 20
Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face but alacrity in his heart. And while the late steamer “Big Missouri” worked and seated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents. There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat and a string to swing it with—and so on, and so on, hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had, beside the things before mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jewsharp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-nob, a dog collar—but no dog—the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange peel, and a dilapidated old window sash.
He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while—plenty of company—and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it! If he hadn’t run out of whitewash, he would have bankrupted every boy in the village.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Time Bind : When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. ISBN 0805044701
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The ascendancy of the corporation in its battle with the family has been aided in recent years by the rise of company cultural engineering and, in particular, the shift from Frederick Taylor’s principles of scientific management to the Total Quality principles originally set out by Charles Deming. Under the influence of a Taylorist worldview, the manager’s job was to coerce the worker’s mind and body, not to appeal to his heart. The Taylorized worker was deskilled, replaceable, cheap, and as a consequence felt bored, demeaned, and unappreciated.
Using more modern participative management techniques, companies now invest in training workers to “make decisions” and then set before their newly “empowered” workers moral as well as financial incentives. Under Taylor’s system, managers assumed that workers lacked the basic impulse to do a good job. Under Total Quality, managers assume workers possess such an impulse. Under Taylorism, the worker was given no autonomy and is drawn further into the world of work by the promise of more.
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The Total Quality worker is invited to feel committed to his company. When, in Modern Times, a speedup finally drives the Taylorized Charlie Chaplin crazy, he climbs into a giant complex of cogs and belts and is wound around a huge wheel. He has become part of the machine itself. How could he feel committed to a company that had turned him into a machine part?
Under Total Quality at Amerco, the worker is not a machine; he’s a believer. This became clear to me when I witnessed a “Large Group Change Event,” held in a high school cafeteria one summer morning in 1992. The event, Amerco’s response to losing customers to a growing competitor, was staged somewhat like a revival meeting. Its purpose was to convince each worker to renew his commitment not to his spouse or church but to his workplace. It was one of a series of such events held at underproducing plants in the valley. Two banners hanging at the entrance said, “Show Our Commitment.” Four hundred workers, most of them white men between the ages of twenty and forty, were assembled eight to a table. they tended to sport tee-shirts, blue jeans, and baseball caps worn back to front. One young man in sunglasses casually lifted his leg over the back of his chair as if mounting a horse and sat down to join his group. “What’s frustrating about your job?” the group leader asked.
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If Total Quality called for “reskilling” the worker in an “enriched” job environment, capitalism and technological developments have long been gradually deskilling parents at home. Over time, storebought goods have replaced homespun cloth, homemade soap and candles, home-cured meats and home-baked foods. Instant mixes, frozen dinners, and take-out meals have replaced Mother’s recipes. Daycare for children, retirement homes for the elderly, wilderness camps for delinquent children, even psychotherapy are, in a way, commercial substitutes for jobs a mother once did at home. If, under Total Quality, “enriched” jobs call for more skill at work, household chores have over the years become fewer and easier to do.
Sartwell, Crispin. Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality. New York: 1996. ISBN 0791429075 Pages 110-11
The master not only shackles and exploits the slave, he also protects the slave: The classic argument in favor of slavery is that these dolts, when out of our control, will be defenseless. What stands in need of protection is weak; what offers protection to the weak is strong. We, evolution’s crowning achievement, are charged because we are powerful with protecting the earth by our power from our power....
“Watch the ashes, don’t smoke, you’ll stain the curtains. Watch the goldfish bowl, don’t lean your head against the wallpaper; your hair may be greasy. Don’t spill liquor on that table: it has a delicate finish. You should have wiped your boots; the floor was just varnished. Don’t, don’t don’t ...” That is crazy ... You live in prisons you have built for yourselves, calling them “homes, offices, factories.”
Notice that Lame Deer conceives this not only as a technology of animal husbandry or of the lived environment but above all of the self; one comes, in a process I’ve discussed, to regard oneself as the role one performs. Lame Deer continues:
Americans want everything sanitized. No smells! Not even the good, natural man and woman smell. Take away the smell from under the armpits, from your skin. Rub it out, and then spray or dab some nonhuman odor on yourself.... “B. O.,” bad breath, “Intimate Female Odor Spray”—I see it all on TV. Soon you’ll breed people without body openings.
Robert W. Fogel, The Moral Problem of Slavery Penguin Books, Canada: 1989 ISBN 0393018873 Page 411
In and of itself, economic or technological efficiency is neither moral nor immoral. The virtue of an efficient technique depends exclusively on its moral values, rather than economic, political, or scientific achievements, are the supreme guides for human behavior. When we celebrate such technological advances as the blast furnace, electricity, and medical surgery it is not because they are intrinsically good but because they have usually served well the great ethical goals of humankind. Nevertheless, each of these innovations has been used at various times for demonic ends. Slavery was a somewhat different case. It was intrinsically evil because its productive efficiency
arose directly out of the oppression of its laborers. The efficiency of slavery seemed paradoxical not because an intrinsically good or a morally neutral technology was made to serve an evil purpose, but because an intrinsically evil technology was so productive. Discarding the assumption that productivity is necessarily virtuous resolves the paradox.
Sikorski, Wade. Modernity and Technology: Harnessing the Earth to the Slavery of Man, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993, Pages 9, 125 and 135
Never stopping, never collecting itself, never asking why, reason jumps from one solution to the next, forever seeking more effi-cient or economical equations, just because they are more “effi-cient” or “economical.” It is the exclusive mark of our age, the source of its progress and its mastery over everything....
The slave is but a tool, a mere means evoking no such emotions. To be free, then, is to be not governed by the necessities of the instrument, to be not a means beyond the care of love, and to be spared the doom of utility. Good husbandry, good housewifery, each in its own way, is a calling to care for the dwelling place and the people that dwell there.
Unlike the household, the factory is governed entirely by a highly rational economy of means, a technology that knows only the truth of efficiency and rationality and none of the household’s truth of care and nurturance. Inputs, and labor is just one among many, must be minimized against the maximum output.
Shorris, Earl. A nation of Salesmen. New York. 1994. ISBN 0393036723 Pages 18 and 232
Advertising, I said to anyone who would listen, is not immoral, except as waste is immoral, for advertising is no more than a waste of time, effort, and money by people who might otherwise produce useful or even beautiful work. Advertising is largely useless, I said, an inefficient way to pay for the daily newspaper. It is closer to bad art than to good business. When critics argued that advertising caused people to buy things they didn’t want or need, I laughed, and pointed out to them that the best sales job the advertising business had ever done was to convince its clients and critics that advertising could control people’s desires. In my best Socratic fashion, I asked whether hungry people would desire food if it were not advertised….
For the salesman any number will do, as long as some number can be generated. Once he has the number, the salesman has gotten past the problem of reality. Numbers have no reality; they are merely information, language, not even nouns, but adjectives intended to describe the world, like photographs, film, or the paper, plastic, or pasteboard covering foodstuffs. A number is a package in which reality can be hidden, like a soapbox, a soup can, or complexity.
Nothing about a number is absolute, not even in a mathematician’s dreams. The seductive surface of a number can be attached to anything. Given such a relative thing, an adjective with limitless range, the quantity of deaths, the quantity of births, the possibility of war and the likelihood of love, the measure of sweetness and the strength of light, the salesman finds himself, at last, in control.
Every set of adjectival numbers is a language of its own, attached only to the language that produced the information that generated the numbers.
Jeremy Seabrook, The Myth Of The Market Black Rose Books, New York: 1991 ISBN 1895431085, Page 188
If it had been the purpose of humanity on earth to bring to the edge of ruin the planet itself, no more efficient mechanism could have been invented than the market system itself, with its prodigious use of energy and materials in the sublime mission of replacing as much of human activity with commodities and the monetary transactions that attend them.
Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy, New York, 1976: ISBN 0195073460, Page 207
Practically every innovation that raised productivity and contributed to economic development did so by removing one more need to exercise human skill -- and one more opportunity to derive satisfaction from its exercise.
Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America, New York: 1970 71117689, Page 27
Soon after Americans began their experiment in a new community, the assumptions upon which the nation was based were threatened by the rise of two powerful forces, worldwide in influence: the competitive market economy and scientific technique. The forces came as benefactors (as in large part they were), offering men in all countries the possibility of liberation from static toil. The market system transforms all men into competitors in order to get them to be more aggressively productive; it does this by defining man’s labor, his environment, and his culture as commodities which can be valued in money and exchanged for money, and by permitting “successful” competitors to accumulate “profit” and “surplus” in return for the exploitation of labor and resources. Scientific technique is a philosophy concerned with the basic values of life; it asserts that all activities should be carried on in that manner which is scientifically or technically “best” and “most efficient.” It is technique which dictates specialization of labor, the use of machinery, systems of organization, and mass production. These forces threatened the most fundamental aspects of the American dream; the physical-human environment that made possible the pursuit of happiness, and the form of government that rejected arbitrary power. But these were not merely the triumphs of certain successful individuals over their fellow men. From a longer perspective we can see that the seizure was also a triumph of impersonal forces—the forces of organization, efficiency, technology, planning; the forces—the forces of modern rationalism and scientific management. John D. Rockefeller was as impersonal as a mathematical formula—he was the embodiment of technique, efficiency, and, above all, of economic planning. He was the apostle of collectivism, ending individualism in the oil industry and replacing it with a centralized, planned, collective enterprise. Of course he and others were also rapacious, ambitious, ruthless; but these qualities—and even more so the individual buccaneering and piracy that characterized the great age of robber barons—obscured the longer-range thrust of the times. The cold and calm Rockefeller, a true business scientist, expresses what was happening far better than some frontiersman-turned-millionaire who kept his vitality and his largely irrational ways.
Christopher Plant and Judith Plant, Putting Power In Its Place, New Society, Philadelphia: 1992. ISBN 1550921584, Page 12
One of the assumptions underlying the logic of a globalized economy is that a global system which is free from humanly-made impediments to business activity will be maximally efficient in its use of human labor and materials. Global competition puts added pressure on corporations to increase the efficiency of their operations because competition is, in the absence of national boundaries, greatly increased by the presence in the market of producers from all over the world—not merely from within the country in question. This competition puts additional pressure on corporations to reduce their costs of production and/or expand their markets. This can be done in a limited number of ways: reduce wages; replace labor with technology—as in the B.C. forest industry; reduce monies spent on addressing the environmental and social costs of production; locate or relocate to wherever labor and other costs are minimal (the Maquiladora region of Mexico, for instance, where wages are US$4.00 a day on average); develop new products; create new consumer needs and meet them; capture markets from competitors. All of these measures have serious environmental and social implications.
Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, Pages 127 and 178
No one questions the immense benefits already conferred in many departments by sciences efficient methodology: but what one must challenge is the value of a system so detached from other human needs and human purposes that the process itself goes on automatically without any visible goal except that of keeping the corporate apparatus itself in a state of power-making, profit yielding productivity. What is now called ‘Research and Development’ is a circular process….
What automation has done is to funnel its local energy-economics into long-distance transportation, advertising, higher salaries and profits, and further investments in plant expansion to the same ends. The desired reward of this magic is not just abundance but absolute control.
Philadelphia Inquirer: Opinion ,Saturday, July 26, 1997 “Do not believe that less is more --The big squeeze of the consumer is on. But we all know good businesses” By Donella H. Meadows
I don’t travel by air all that often, so I can’t get used to the squeezed-in seats. Every time I get in a plane, it seems they’ve shaved another half-inch from the seat width and the rows are an inch closer together. When the person in front of you leans back these days, his or her head ends up right in your lap. The only time I watch TV is when I stay in hotels, which is about as often as I fly, so I am surprised by the rising ratio of advertising to program. Recently, I tried to watch a movie, but it was more than half ads.
The squeeze constricts everything it touches, most recently health care. A friend of mine, one of many caring practitioners still valiantly trying to maintain quality, was just told that her patients will now be scheduled not every half-hour, but every 15 minutes. The squeeze, the squeeze, the money-making squeeze, taking up more space in our lives, filling it with less worth. The shrinking chocolate bar. The appliance without an on-off switch. (You have to plug and unplug it -- saves themanufacturer at lea st a buck a unit.) The new shoes that fall apart one month sooner than the old ones did.
Banks charge for talking to a live teller, the telephone company for information, gas stations for road maps, all of which used to be free. Pensions and health insurance, if they exist at all, are less generous than they used to be. Half-pound packages contain 7_3/4 ounces. I don’t know how long it’s been since 2-by-4s actually measured 2 by 4.
I don’t think the eternal squeeze is necessary to business, only to a certain size and type. Plenty of companies still pride themselves on the quality of their products and their relationships with clients. When you do business with them, you don’t feel squeezed. Around me are family farmers who sell flowers, vegetables or milk to folks who live nearby. They’re content to do good work and make enough to support the family. They wouldn’t shrink the size of a pint box of strawberries just to make a few cents more.
Stonyfield Yogurt is a medium-sized company still dedicated to pure product, decent treatment of workers, and premium prices to dairy-farmer suppliers. The Interface carpet tile company is a billion-dollar company going to great expense to reduce the environmental impact of its operations.
I know a guy who has a restaurant in San Francisco that serves inexpensive, colorful, healthy food, lovingly prepared. He always has a waiting list for reservations.
“You know,” he told me, “if I charged 25 cents more per meal, I could pay off my start-up costs in 18 months instead of three years.”
“Why don’t you?” I asked.
“Well, I make a fair profit,” he said, “and I don’t want to have that kind of relationship with the people who eat here.”
I think our love/hate relationship with business derives from our regular encounters with two different kinds of businesses: our friends and neighbors, doing good work and hoping to make a buck, and the players in the big leagues, where they play a different game—Disney and Wal-Mart, for example, once lovable companies.
General Motors, Nike, Microsoft, Texaco, Dow, Sears and Delta at some point had to stop competing on the basis of quality, and start competing on the basis of lower costs, attained by squeezing suppliers, customers, workers, resources, regulators and competitors -- especially small competitors still trying to run a heartfelt business.
The 500 largest corporations account for one-fourth of the world’s economic output, but employ only one-fourth of 1 percent of the world’s workers. When they talk at us about the importance of creating jobs, encouraging private enterprise, freeing t he market, they’re trying to get favors for the big guys by tapping into our respect for the little ones. That’s just one more example of the squeeze.
John McKnight, “Valuable Deficiencies” Co-Evolution Quarterly, Fall 1977, Page 38
A served society is the sum of the deficiency that “enables” people to be clients. If we are unable to free ourselves from the ideology of service, we will die of our dependence on deficiency. A nation of (clients) cannot conceive of a democratic possibility, much less act in behalf of the common good. A nation of clients will accept the central premise of serving systems, i.e., “I will be better because my servers know better.” This premise, embedded in any culture, is the basic foundation for totalitarian rule.
David Mayes, Christopher Harris and Melanie Lansbury, Inefficiency In Industry, New York, 1994: ISBN 0745008674, Page 23
Inefficiency is a dynamic rather than a static concept. At any point in time a firm may appear to be inefficient in comparison to others in the industry if its productivity, using identical resources, is below its competitors. At any particular moment some firms will be more, or less, efficient than others, but this ranking will vary over time. External shocks within an industry will affect firms in different ways; firms will differ in their adjustment to shocks and they will differ in their speed of reaction to and preparation for shocks.
Hence, looking at a snapshot of efficiency in an industry, a firm may appear to be inefficient relative to its competitors. However, if by not producing at maximum capacity it is more flexible and can adapt more quickly to external shocks in the economy then, over time, it will be more efficient. Efficiency as a dynamic concept reflects the speed of adjustment; a firm that does not react to shocks as quickly as it is able and is not using its resources in the best way is an efficient firm.
Michael Treacy, Fred Wiersema, The Discipline Of Market Leaders, 1995 ISBN 0201406489, Pages 49, 58
Ford maintained a very narrow product line. He didn’t introduce a variant of the Model T until millions of units of the basic model had been produced. As for variety in color, he left posterity his legendary remark: “Any color you want as long as it’s black.” Operationally excellent companies reject variety, because it burdens the business with cost. They produce no-frills products for the middle of the market where demand is huge and customers are more interested in cost than in choice.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, “There’s No Place Like Work” The New York Times Magazine, April 20, 1997, Page 52
More mothers of small children than ever now work outside the home. In 1993, 56 percent of women with children between 6 and 17 worked outside the home full time year round; 43 percent of women with children 6 and under did the same.
Meanwhile, fathers of small children are not cutting back hours of work to help out at home. If anything, they have increased their hours at work. According to a 1992 national survey conducted by the Families and work Institute in New York, American men average 48.8 hours of work a week, and women 41.7 hours, including overtime and commuting. All in all, more women are on the economic train, and for many—men and women alike—that train is going faster.
Phil Lemmons, “You Can Be Home Again” PC World, April 1997, Page 17
November/December 1996 issue of the Harvard Business Review. In an article entitled “The Hollow Ring of the Productivity Revival,” Roach writes:
“Laptops, cellular phones, wireless modems, and fax machines may changes the work environment for many professionals, but they don’t alter the thought processes that ultimately lead to breakthroughs. What those tools have done, however, is help to extend the working day.” Roach goes on to say,” ... generating more output by working longer hours fails the test of meaningful productivity growth.
Fruchter, Jill. At Our Leisure. New York: 1997. ISBN 188574711X, Page 7
Legal gambling in the U.S. generated record revenues of $44.4 billion during 1995, but he increase of $4.6 billion, or 11.4% over 1994, indicates a slowdown in the growth of wagering, says a Christiansen/Cummings Associates study, cited in The Wall Street Journal. Revenues were generated from $550.3 billion wagered on all forms of legal games in the U.S. that is also a record, and an increase of $67.6 billion, or 14% from 1994. The rate of revenue increase from 1994 to ‘95 slipped for the first time in recent years, signaling that the boom has begun to stall for the time being.
Source: Christiansen/Cummings Associates survey, for International Gambling & Wagering Business magazine, reported in The Wall Street Journal July 29, 1996.
Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club, New York: 1996 ISBN 0916366847, Page 123
I use a computer. This enables me to be highly efficient. Suppose, for example, that I need to fill up column space by writing BOOGER BOOGER BOOGER BOOGER BOOGER. To accomplish this in the old precomputer days, I would have had to type “BOOGER” five times manually. But now all I have to do is type it once, then simply hold the left-hand “mouse” button down while “dragging” the “mouse” so that the “cursor” moves over the text that I wish to “select; then release the left-hand “mouse” button and position the “cursor” over the “Edit” heading on the “menu bar;” then click the left-hand “mouse button to reveal the “edit menu;” then position the “cursor” over the “Copy” command; the click the left-hand “mouse” button; then move the “cursor” to the point where I wish to insert the “selected” text, then click the left-hand “mouse” button; then position the “cursor” over the “Edit”heading on the “menu bar” again; then click the left-hand “mouse” button to reveal the “edit menu;” then position the “cursor” over the “Paste command; then click the left-hand “mouse” button four times; and the, as the French say, “voila!” (Literally, “My hand hurts!”) If you need this kind of efficiency in your life, you should get a computer.
-- Dave Barry
Page 147
We are increasing the sophistication of deception faster than the technology of verification.
Dertouzos, Michael L, Information Society: How The New World Of Information Will Change Our Lives, New York, 1997: ISBN 0062514792, Page 271
Paul Strassmann, for many years the chief of information at Xerox and more recently director of information at the Pentagon, conducted an ambitious study of 630 different companies, asking precisely this question. In his book The Business Value of Computers, he attempted to relate each company’s profitability to various indicators of computer intensity like the information technology budget and the number of PCs per employee. His many charts show no correlation at all—until he splits the companies into two groups, according to whether they are well managed (in his words, have a high return on management) or not. On average, the well-managed firms with high computer intensity do worse than the ill-managed firms without it.
Philadelphia Inquirer: Business Opening eyes to problems of workplace computers, By Kathleen Donnelly, Knight-Ridder News Service Thursday, 28-Aug-97
Millions of Americans who work in front of video-display terminals have symptoms of what the American Optometric Association calls “computer-related vision syndrome”: tired, irritated eyes; sore necks, backs and shoulders; headaches ; blurry or double vision; and difficulty focusing after long days in front of the screen.
The association estimates 12 million people a year visit eye doctors for computer-related problems. That makes eyestrain and vision complaints by far the most common health problems reported by computer users, said James Sheedy, a clinical professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of professional development at Sola Optical in Petaluma, Calif. Sheedy has estimated that in 1993, computer users spent $1.15 billion on eye exams and special glasses for computer work.
Landauer, Thomas K, The Trouble With Computers, U.S.A.: 1995 ISBN 0262121867, Page 75
Service managers thought that buying computers would set straight the imbalance in capital support for work—that computers would do for service productivity what the assembly line and fertilizer had done for tangibles. They were misled. IT made it possible to do more work but not to do work more productively. Usually each added dollar’s worth of IT capital produced just a dollar’s worth of output before it was retired. The new workers produced about the same amount of added value each day as did the old. The total new output from services just about equaled the total new input in IT equipment and the labor hours it required.
Twitchell, James B. Lead Us Into Temptation. New York: 1999. ISBN 023111518
Page 12
What sets American culture of the late twentieth century apart is not avarice, but a surfeit of machine-made things. What is clear is that most of these things in and of themselves simply do not mean enough. So we have developed very powerful ways to add meaning to goods. This is a chicken-and-egg situation, to be sure. For it is American production and marketing techniques (advertising, packaging, branding, fashion, and the like) and our eagerness to embrace them that have produced surplus. Consumption of things and their meanings is how most Western young people cope in a world that science has pretty much bled of traditional religious meanings.
Page 53
Machines do two things with amazing ease. They produce identical objects and they tend to produce them in mass quantities. As a way to work off those surpluses, as well as differentiating what are essentially interchangeable objects, capitalist had to create a new signifying system or they would glut themselves on their own overproduction. Advertising was that system.
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This interpretation is true enough. Think only of how consumer debt was merchandised until it became an accepted habit, not an abhorred practice. Think only of how shame was transformed from consuming too much to consuming too little. Think only of how the concept of shine and "new and improved" replaced the previous value of patina and heirloom. Naming something differently was often a prima facie case for renewed consumption. You never questioned whether this merited buying more, just as you supposedly never questioned if Jumbo was larger than Giant, or exactly what Premium or Super meant. Creating a massive consumer class with semantic aphasia was the necessary accomplishment of supply-side capitalism.
Page 286
It would be nice to think that greater material comforts will release us from racism, sexism, and ethnocentricism, and that the apocalypse will come as it did at the end of romanticism in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, leaving us "Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed... Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless... Pinnacled dim in the intense inane."
But it is more likely that the globalization of capitalism will result in the banalities of an ever-increasing, worldwide consumerist culture. Recall that Athens ceased to be a world power around 400 B.C., yet for the next three hundred years Greek culture was the culture of the world. The Age of European Exposition ended in the mid-twentieth century; the Age of American Markets -- Yankee imperialism -- is just starting to gather force. The French don't stand a chance. The Middle East is collapsing under the weight of dish antennas and Golden Arches. The untranscendent, repetitive, sensational, democratic, immediate, tribalizing, and unifying force of what Irving Kristol calls the American Imperium need not result in a Bronze Age of culture, however. In fact, who knows what this Pax Americana will result in? But it certainly will not produce what Shelly had in mind.
We have been in the global marketplace a short time, and it is an often scary and melancholy place. A butterfly flapping its wings in China may not cause storm clouds over Miami, but a few lines of computer code written by some kid in Palo Alto may indeed change the lives of all the inhabitants of Shanghai.
We have not been led into this world of material closeness against our better judgment. For many of us, especially when young, consumerism is our better judgment. And this is true regardless of class or culture. We have not just asked to go this way, we have demanded. Now most of the world is lining up, pushing and shoving, eager to elbow into the mall. Woe to the government or religion that say no.
Getting and spending has been the most passionate, and often the most imaginative, endeavor of modern life. We have done more than acknowledge that the good life start with the material life, as the ancients did. We have made stuff the dominant prerequisite of organized society. Things "R" Us. Consumption has become production. While this is dreary and depressing to some, as doubtless it should be, it is liberating and democratic to many more.
Lynch, Merrill. “Human Achievement.” Hertz System Inc. 1999.
WE LOVE TECHNOLOGY. It’s new and it’s shiny and it inspires a certain awe, like the great pyramid of Cheops or a tiny new human being. Technology is good at the heavy lifting. People are good at the heavy thinking. Bits and bytes and ones and zeroes fly around the planet, but only at our discretion. The computer has a role model, and it is us. Computers are plastic and metal and sand. People are brilliance and discernment and vision. Admire machines. Worship their inventors.
M. M. Kirsch, How to Get Off The Fast Track, New York, 1991, Page 13
It is not difficult to understand why so many bought into a version of success that promised little in the way of self-worth and accomplishment. Television, magazines, and billboards on every corner work to convince us that making money is the single road to success. But the media is only partially to blame. religious and intellectual traditions have been replaced by short-order entertainment and comforts that do nothing to feed the soul.
At home and in much of our education, we most likely were offered little discussion of the real nature of humanity and the world. Young people thus are left with little to guide them concerning the possibilities of their lives.
Academic vocationalism long ago replaced the liberal education meant to give students the means to examine who they are and appraise their unique potentials. The works of the great writers have been shelved in favor of business, engineering, and science texts that can assure one of a secure livelihood, making lots of money.
Stumpf, Bill. The Ice Palace That Melted Away. New York: 1998. ISBN 0375402217, Pages xii and 35
All these years I’ve been observing a change in American life that the optimist in me (designers have to be optimists) describes not as a decline, but a roller-coaster search for comfort. Not comfort as in “the lush life” or “creature comforts,” but comforts as defined by William Gass: “a lack of awareness.” If your shoes are truly comfortable, you aren’t aware that you have them on....
At the world’s biggest shopping mall, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, play or any form of gratuitous difficulty in the exchange of goods and services has been replaced with computer-driven efficiency. This is no place to have a prolonged conversation with a salesclerk over the qualities of the merchandise. This is no place to exchange pleasantries with a beggar or street musician. This is no place to strut along the street in your finest attire. This is no place to lurk in dark passageways or transact a pound of flesh. There is no time for connoisseurism at the Mall of America, of finding a shopkeeper who knows everything about cigars, or golf clubs, or cosmetics, or shoes, or books. Here is a triumph of stereotypes, a monocultural and antiseptic boredom. Serendipity need not apply....
Mander, Jerry, and Edward Goldsmith. The Case Against The Global Economy. SanFrancisco: 1996. ISBN 0871563525, Page 25 and 355
Contrary to the claims of ideologies who preach a form of corporate libertarianism, markets need governments to function efficiently. It is well established in economic theory and practice that markets allocate resources efficiently only when markets are competitive and when firms pay for the social and environmental impact of their activity—that is, when they internalize the costs of their production. This requires that governments set and enforce the rules that make cost internalization happen, and, since successful firms invariably grow larger and more monopolistic, governments regularly step in to break them up and restore competition...
While we sit at our PCs editing our copy, sending our e-mail, and expressing our cyberfreedoms, the transnational corporations are using their global networks, fed by far greater resources. They are able to achieve not only information exchange but concrete results that express themselves in downed forest, massive infrastructural development, destruction of rural and farming societies, displacement, destruction of rural and farming societies, displacement of millions of people, and domination of governments. In a symbiotic embrace with other technologies of rapid economic development, they operate on a scale and at a speed that makes our own level of cyberempowerment pathetic by comparison. speaking in traditional political terms, the new telecommunications technologies assist the corporate, centralized, industrialized enterprise (the “right”?) far more efficiently than the decentralized, local, community-based interests (the “left”?), which suffer a net loss.
Huber, Peter W. “Reverend Malthus, Meet Doctor Faustus. ” Commentary magazine, November 1998, Page 33
The fact is that, although skeptics have good answers to neo-Malthusian arguments about our predicament, and although they understand that efficiency and complexity are not enemies but partners, that does not really dispose of the matter.
For one thing, efficiency itself, especially in the form of energy conservation, hardly precludes "cancerous" consumption. Our ceilings today are insulated twice as well as they were twenty years ago, our walls 40-percent better, our floors four times as well. New furnaces, air-conditioning units, heat pumps, refrigerators, water heaters, furnaces, washers, dishwashers, and cars use much less energy than their predecessors. Nobody can dispute the real gains that have been made in this realm, any more than one can dispute the gains made with sweeteners that deliver no calories.
Alas, those gains are all around us. For years, Americans have been consuming more and more low-cal and low-fat substitutes, and, diet sodas in hand, they have grown steadily fatter. The diet refrigerators they have built to hold their diet sodas have resulted in still more gains:
more power plants, and more coal mines, too. In 1975, the United States consumed 71 quadrillion BTU's of energy; two decades later, the number stood at 91 "quads" - a gain of a quad a year, the arrival of all that wonderful efficiency notwithstanding. As for electricity, over the course of the 1990's the average American has increased his annual consumption by about 2 megawatt hours -- a bit more than the increase over the course of the 1980's.
Part of the steady rise can be blamed on our growing population (from 215 million to 263 million in the same twenty-year period), and putting things in per-capital terms may make the numbers look a bit less dispiriting: the rate of growth of our overall per-capita energy consumption has indeed slowed a bit. But much of that is attributable to demographic change, an aging population in particular. And the slight slowing in the rate of growth provides an illusory sense of progress. If you were to gain five pounds a year every year, your "rate of growth," calculated as a percentage of your current weight, would also shrink; but you never know it from your waistband.
The real point, however, is that, as Malthus himself predicted, population increases to consume the resources available -- and efficiency expands resources. At the turn of the last century, electrical generators operated at about 1 percent of their theoretical limits; today's generators produce 50 times as much electricity from the same amount of fossil fuel. But overall, they also burn 50 times more fossil fuel. However unlikely it may seem, the individual consumer ends up consuming more, not less, when all his motors and engines becomes more efficient.
Why? First of all, more efficient almost always means much less expensive. Since refrigerators are a lot more efficient, people can now buy bigger ones, and they do. And better ones: frost-free units with ice makers, which gobble up almost all the energy saved by the superefficient compressor at the back. It is the same with planes and cars: more efficient engines mean cheaper travel, so you travel more. And it is the same with just about everything else: today's soda cans contain one-fifth the aluminum they did three decades ago, but the number of cans purchased has grown by an even larger multiple.
Second, and much more important, is the wealth effect. At some point people may grow tired of refrigerators, but they always want more money, and they will find ways to spend it. With the money saved by your efficient new gas furnace in the basement, you can fly to Aspen for a weekend in the snow. "Efficient," in short, has nothing to do with "frugal." Our atavistic appetites, our genes themselves, remember famine too well to be fooled by Nutrasweet. However plentiful our plenty, we will hunt and gather more.
It may not be good for us, and it may not be good for the environment, but nothing stops it: not efficiency, not politics, not even war. That, indeed, is why the neo-Malthusians are right to have replaced Malthus's emblematic worry about starvation with metaphoric opposites" obesity and cancer. Malthus said we would famish when we ran out of land; it now appears that if we run out of land, it will be because we gorge.
Postrel, Virginia I. The Future and its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress. New York: The Free Press, 1998. ISBN 0684827603
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Running for reelection in 1996, Bill Clinton and Al Gore promised again and again to build a "bridge to the twenty-first century." The slogan cast them as youthful builders and doers, the sort of people with whom forward-looking voters would identify. It contrasted nicely with Bob Dole's nostalgic convention pledge to build a bridge to a better past.
But a bridge to the future is not just a feel-good cliche. It symbolizes technocracy. Regardless of its destination, a bridge is a quintessentially static structure. It goes from known point A to known point B. Its construction requires big budgets and teams of experts, careful planning and blueprints. Once completed, it cannot be moved. "A bridge to the twenty-first century" declares that the future must be brought under control, managed and planned by experts. It should not simply evolve. The future (and the present) must be predictable and uniform: We will go from point A to point B, with no deviations. Fall off that one bridge -- let alone jump -- and you're doomed.
Technocrats are "for the future," but only if someone is in charge of making it turn out according to plan. They greet every new idea with a "yes, but," followed by legislation, regulation, and litigation. Like Schlesinger and Attali, they get very nervous at the suggestion that the future might develop spontaneously. It is, they assume, too important and too dangerous to be left to undirected evolution. "To conceive of a better American future as a consummation which will take care of itself -- as the necessary result of our customary conditions, institutions, and ideas -- persistence in such a conception is admirably designed to deprive American Life, published in 1909.
Technocracy is the ideology of the "one best way," an idea that spread from Frederick Taylor's "scientific management" techniques to encompass the regulation of economic and social life. Turn-of-the-century technocrats, notes the historian John M. Jordan, used images of engineering to promise efficiency and order amid social and economic change: "In an era when the term progressive connoted a steady, teleological, restrained pace of improvement, efficiency implied change while at the same time suggesting security. The smoothly humming social machine envisioned by these reformers promised harmonious eradication of social problems.... This peculiarly American paradox of kinetic change made stable appears to have contributed to the pubiquity of efficiency claims in this era." By design, technocrats pick winners, establish standards, and impose a single set of values on the future. Only through such uniform plans can they hope to deliver "kinetic change made stable."
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Consider this statement from a CNN interview: "As the president said, we need a comprehensive system, one that's been worked out, that's affordable and has national standards." Is this a legislator discussing national health insurance? A governor promoting education reform? An environmentalist proposing recycling mandates? The speaker is, in fact, a magazine editor talking about child care, but the prescription would fit just about any subject. To technocrats, institutional forms must be uniform and "comprehensive"; goals must be established once and for all; behavior must be molded to the proper pattern. In his 1998 State of the Union address, for instance, Bill Clinton denounced "untargeted tax cuts,' which would reduce rates regardless of how taxpayers choose to spend their money, and he bragged about the complex "targeted tax cuts" passed the previous year.
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Even technocracy's remaining true believers have become cynical, if not about their ideals, then about the people who administer them. Consider Ross Perot, the purest technocrat in recent American politics. With his desire to get the best experts, put aside differences of politics and ideology, and just work things out, Perot sounds like William Henry Smyth. And his political movement has been driven by disappointed technocrats, who, like their leader, believe that society can be rationally managed through effective leadership and expertise. They are both discomfited by dynamism and suspicious of the system that promised to control it.
These disappointed technocrats crave predictability and order -- not the ancient stability of peasant villages but the apparent efficiency of Galbraithean big business. They idealize not the self-sufficient agrarian but the old-time Organization Man, the clean-cut manager with a clear career path. "Our real problem," Perot told ABC's Barbara Walters in 1992, "is our giant companies, like IBM, are downsizing. General Motors is downsizing. We want them growing. If they aren't -- if America's future isn't as a "real Industrial Nation" but as "emergent, complex messiness" -- then something is wrong. The leaders entrusted with managing the nation's affairs have failed the people. They are wither incompetent or, more likely, corrupt.
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Technocrats' governing assumptions, while sometimes disinterested, can never be neutral. "Efficiency" implies objectives, values to be optimized. The optimization problem is a technical question. The values are not. The FDA's product approval process, while usually scientifically rigorous, is strongly biased against risk taking. The Consumer Products Safety Commission similarly considers only safety, not fun, in evaluating toys. The federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, on the other hand, weigh only miles per gallon, ignoring auto safety. Old-style telephone regulation emphasized "universal access" at the expense of variety and product innovation.
Such values may change over time. Urban planners once wiped out neighborhoods to promote "renewal"; today, they are more likely to oppose new construction and building renovation to preserve "quality of life." Zoning once segregated businesses, apartments, and single-family homes, regardless of their occupants' preferences; today, the "new urbanism" does precisely the opposite. The Army Corps of Engineers once built subsidized dams in the name of progress; now it blocks private development to preserve wetlands. The power of reactionaries lies in their ability to alter the values enforced through technocratic structures, or to create new technocratic agencies devoted to reactionary purposes. They turn the tools of technocracy toward their own vision of the one best way.
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In their quest for efficiency and expertise, technocrats too assume a sort of omnicompetence. Although they may draw on "the best experts," they presume that someone in charge can assimilate all relevant information. They issue prescriptions that depend on their own imagined "topsight" (the term is David Gelernter's) -- the notion that everything important can be seen from above. So, for instance, Charles Ferguson and his high-level contacts assumed they could engineer the microelectronics industry to function more efficiently. Addressing the Reform party's 1996 convention, Ross Perot envisioned "a [Perot] White House, a House, and a Senate carefully, thoughtfully, and rationally working to solve our country's problems....
I've spent the last 40 years designing, engineering, testing, and implementing complex systems and making them work successfully in a cost-effective manner. So without realizing it, I have been training for this job" of president. Nor, for all his egomania, is Perot the only politician who trusts his own universal expertise. In our technocratic system, that assumption is ubiquitous.
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What confuses the critics both of play and of order is that play is unpredictable and open-ended. Although governed by rules, it is incompatible with determinism or stasis. Play," writes Huizinga, "only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos.
That influx of mind is what gives us fashion's X-factor, Eugen Fick's contact lens experiments, and 1,001 uses for Post-it notes. It creates the infinite series. If combinations explain the near-infinite supply of new ideas, play explains where those combinations come from. In Bell's view, among others,' capitalism and technology are driven by obvious, inescapable laws. Their results are inevitable: "The nature of change in the techno-economic order is linear in that the principles of utility and efficiency provide clear rules for innovation, displacement, and substitution. Progress operates as a machine, requiring no human agency. No influx of mind is necessary.
But innovations don't in fact appear by some deterministic process. They are neither as predictable nor as predestined as technocrats imagine. They have to come from somewhere. Without variation, there can be no evolution. Selection -- the weighing of utility and efficiency (hardly simple, unitary concepts themselves) -- happens later. First, you have to have the ideas. You have to let people play.
Sachs, Wolfgang. Planet Dialectics. New York: Zed Books, 1999. ISBN 1856497003
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Twenty years ago, 'limits to growth' was the watchword of the environmental movement worldwide; today the buzzword of international ecology experts is 'global change'. The messages implied are clearly different. 'Limits to growth' calls on homo industrialis to reconsider his project and to abide by nature's laws. 'Global change', however, puts humankind in the driver's seat and urges it to master nature's complexities with greater self-control. While the first formula sounds threatening, the second has an optimistic ring: it believes in a rebirth of homo faber and, on a more prosaic level, lends itself to the belief that the proven means of modern economy – product innovation, technological progress, market regulation, science-based planning -- will show the way out of the ecological predicament.
The cure for all environmental ills is called 'efficiency revolution'. It focuses on reducing the throughput of energy and materials in the economic system by means of new technology and planning. Be it for the light-bulb or the car, for the design of power plants or transport systems, the aim is to come up with innovations that minimize the use of nature for each unit of output. Under this prescription, the economy will supposedly gain in fitness by keeping to a diet that eliminates the overweight in slag and dross. The efficiency scenario, however, seeks to make the circle square: it proposes a radical change through redirecting conventional means. It confronts modern society with the need to reduce drastically the utilization of nature as a mine for inputs and a deposit for waste, promising to reduce the physical scale of the economy. Conversely, it holds out the prospect of achieving this transformation through the application of economic intelligence, including new products, technologies and management techniques; in fact, this scenario roposes the extension of the modern economic imperative, that is, the optimization of the means-ends relationship, from the calculation of money flows to the calculation of physical flows. 'More with less' is the motto for this new round in the old game. Optimizing input, not maximizing output, as in the post-war era, is the order of the day, and one already sees economists and engineers taking a renewed pleasure in their trade by puzzling out the minimum input for each unit of output. The hope that goes along with this strategic turnabout is again concisely stated by the World Bank: "Efficiency reforms help reduce pollution while raising a country's economic outputs.'
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No doubt an efficiency revolution would have far-reaching effects. Since natural inputs were cheap and the deposition of waste mostly free of charge, economic development has for long been skewed towards squandering nature. Subsidies encourage waste, technical progress was generally not designed to save on nature, and prices did not reflect environmental damages. There is a lot of space for correcting the course, and Agenda 21, for example, provides a number of signposts that indicate a new route. But the past course of economic history in the East, West and South -- though with considerable variations -- suggests that there is little room for efficiency strategies in earlier phases of growth, whereas they seem to work best, and are affordable, when applied after a certain level of growth has been attained. Since in the South the politics of selective growth would be a much more powerful way to limit the demand for resources, to transfer the 'efficiency revolution' there wholesale makes sense only if the South is expected to follow the North's path of development.
Even for the North skepticism is in order. Those who hail the rising information and service society as environment-friendly often overlook the fact that these sectors can grow only on top of the industrial sector and in close symbiosis with it. The size of the service sector in relation to production has its limits, just as its dependence on resources can be considerable for such sectors as tourism, hospitals or data-processing. Even commodities without any nature content -- for example patents, blueprints or money -- derive their value from the command over a resource base they provide. More specifically, gains in environmental efficiency often consist in substituting high-tech for energy/materials, a process that presupposes the presence of a resource-intensive economy. In short, the efficiency potential that lies in well-tune engines, bio-technological processes, recycling technologies or systems thinking is indigenous to the Northern economies. But the efficiency obviously plays into the North's hands: this way they can again offer the South a new selection of tools for economic progress, at a price that will scarcely differ fro that paid in the decades of technology transfer.
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Environmentalists who refer exclusively to efficient resource management concentrate social imagination on the revision of means, rather than on the revision of goals. Their ingenuity lies in advocating a strategy that emphasizes what business has always been best at, and their strength is to propose a perspective that is far from putting the growth imperative into question. But the magic works 'resource efficiency' have a shady side, and staring at them for too long leads to blindness in one eye. Many environmentalists have already succumbed to this malady. In praising 'resource efficiency' alone, they obscure the fact that ecological reform must walk on two legs: scrutinizing means as well as moderating goals. This omission, however, backfires, and threatens the ecological project. An increase in resource efficiency alone leads to nothing, unless it goes hand-in-hand with an intelligent restraint of growth. Instead of asking how many supermarkets or how many bathrooms are enough, one focuses on how all these – and more --- can be obtained with a lower input of resources. If, however, the dynamics of growth are not slowed down, the achievements of rationalization will soon be eaten up by the next round of growth. Consider the example of the fuel-efficient car. Today's vehicle engines are definitely more efficient than in the past, yet the relentless growth in number of cars and miles driven has cancelled out that gain. And the same logic holds across the board, from energy saving to pollution abatement and recycling, not to mention the fact that continuously staving off the destructive effects of growth in turn requires new growth. In fact, what really matters is the overall physical scale of the economy with respect to nature, not only the efficient allocation of resources. Herman Daly has offered a telling comparison: even if the cargo on a boat is distributed efficiently, the boat will inevitably sink under too much weight -- even thought it may sink optimally! Efficiency without sufficiency is counterproductive; the latter must define the boundaries of the former.
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However, the rambling development creed impedes any serious public debate on the moderation of growth. Under its shadow, any society that decides, at least in some areas, not to go beyond certain levels of commodity-intensity, technical performance or speed appears to be backward. As a result, the consideration of zero-options -- that is, choosing not to do something that is technically possible -- is treated as a taboo in the official discussion on global ecology, even to the point of exposing some agreements to ridicule. Take, for example, Agenda 21's (Chapter 9) section on transport: although the 'population' of cars grows at the present rate four times faster than the population of humans, Agenda 21's authors were incapable of suggesting any strategies for avoiding and reducing traffic, or, of course, any option for low-speed transport systems. There are many reasons for this failure but, on a deeper level, it shows that the development syndrome has dangerously narrowed the social imagination in the North as well as in the South. As the North continues to set its sight on an infinite economic future, and the South cannot free itself from its compulsive mimicry of the North, the capacity for self-mobilized and indigenous change has been undermined worldwide. Politics that choose intermediate levels of material demand remain outside the official consensus; the search for indigenous models of prosperity, which de-emphasize the drive for overdevelopment, has become an apostasy. Clearly, such a perspective would in the first place be at the expense of the wealthy, but without a politics of sufficiency there can be neither justice nor peace with nature.
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Under the new prescriptions economies are supposed to 'work out' until they reach overall fitness instead of simply putting on more muscle until they break some record, as in the decades after the war. Optimizing, nor maximizing, is the order of the day, and both engineers and economists take renewed pleasure in their trade puzzling out the minimum input for each unit of output.
Yet disregard for the first alternative -- the consideration of an enlightened restraint of supply-oriented demands -- traps the world watchmen into the economic world view. In such a perspective, each society puts production highest on its list of values and seeks the good life through expanding and accelerating the economic apparatus. As the reports rarely question the predominant position of the economy in society, they implicitly take for granted that the world's cultures converge in the steady desire for more material production. This prejudice bars the way to examining closer -- even for the over-industrialized countries of the North -- a politics of intelligent self-limitation, which attempts to adapt level, volume, structure and velocity of production/consumption to society's overarching goals. In their failure to do that, the reports seem to consider less commodity-intensive, less professionalized, less speedy societies inherently deficient. Since they are unable to imagine diverse cultures that intentionally live on intermediate levels of material demand, they cannot but make the economic outlook appear as the natural mode of human living. Consequently, the view on the globe they propose continues (in the tradition of 'development') to assume that all circumstances have first to be judged according to the imperative of production, be it even environmentally rational production. But ecological policies that take the steady growth in demand for granted, and limit themselves to propagating efficient means, fall into the trap of
pushing, in the name of ecology, for the further rationalization of the world.
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A resource is something that has no value until it has been made into something else. Whatever its intrinsic value, it fades away under the claim of superior interests. For more than a hundred years the term 'resource' has been used to survey the world for useful inputs into industry. Consequently, perception has been trained to look at forests and see lumber, at rocks and see ore, at landscapes and see real estate, at people and see human resources. To call something a 'resource' means to place it under the authority of production. The old-fashioned synonym for 'resources' reveals clearly how language can impart destiny: what can you do with 'raw materials' except finish them in a manufacturing process? But not just any productive use can make something a resource. While the peasant in Gujarat may use cow dung to fertilize his plot, it becomes a resource only in the framework of national production. It is in national (or global) accounting books that resources are specified, measured and assessed according to their relative productivity; it is the capacity to boost GNP that constitutes a resource. Calling something a resource endows it with the availability to be exploited for the national interest.
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When environmentalists speak about resource productivity, they often oscillate between these two meanings. On the one hand, resource productivity can be read in the substantive sense, referring to the type of satisfaction gained form a given amount of materials and energy. On the other hand, it can be used in the formal sense, indicating the ratio between a given output and the amount of materials and energy utilized. It is immediately obvious that the formal meaning prevails in the discourse on sustainability, as it does in the rhetoric of economics in general. In its common usage it is synonymous with efficiency, a term that arose at the end of the nineteenth century in the context of thermodynamics, comparing the quantities of different fuels required for producing a given amount of heat. Whenever the discussion on sustainability is dominated by the formal meaning of productivity, the environmental predicament becomes redefined as a problem of efficient resource allocation. Framed in this way, resource productivity serves as a conceptual instrument for analysing the relationship of natural inputs to other factors of production such as labour, technology or capital, and calls for rebalancing this relationship to minimize the amount of nature used. However, by focusing all attention on the means-ends relationship this approach provides no conceptual tools for assessing the outputs produced -- it addresses the 'how'. but not the 'what'. Unequipped as it is to consider the quality of outputs, the formal notion of resource productivity tends to leave the outcomes of production unquestioned -- it takes the goals and desires of society for granted and confines itself to better managing the means to achieve them.
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In the last 15 years, some of the best and the brightest environmentalists have tried to reformulate environmental policy as the modernization of economic growth. Striving to leave the legacy of "Limits to Growth" behind, they concentrated on devising concepts and strategies to enlist market forces in the battle against environmental decline. From this perspective, ecology and economics appear to be compatible, and the pursuit of both is expected to be a positive-sum game. In fact, it has been this innovation that has done the most to propel environmentalism into mainstream thought. At the core of this approach lies the aspiration to find, on the level of companies, an overlap between economic efficiency and ecological efficiency; this overlap will then create circumstances where it will pay to bring down resource use (e.g. Schmidheiny 1992; Fussler 1997). This represents nothing less than a call for a new management philosophy aimed at steering the course of a company in a direction that will reduce the overall input of nature per unit of output. Following the imperative of higher eco-efficiency, business strategies usually centre on product design to enhance durability and recyclability; on production processes to reduce resource flows; and on strategic orientations to replace some output with services. Further-more, new business strategies are expected to be supported by new generations of resource-saving technologies. It is hoped that if technological progress shifts direction from increasing labour productivity to increasing resource productivity, then all will be in place to inaugurate an age of sustainable capitalism.
The fascination with eco-efficiency springs from the many examples, proven or anticipated, that demonstrate what is often possible when inertia and the power of conventions give way to reinvention and the power of imagination. However, the fallacy of eco-efficiency stems from this same source, because the many examples of greater eco-efficiency, big and small, do not necessarily add up to drastically reduced overall volume of resource consumption -- the stated objective of the 'Factor 10' approach. Eco-efficiency sometimes raises the prospects of enormous efficiency gains, but fails to account for the long-term effects of economic change. Confusing, the macro level with the micro level, efficiency enthusiasts often infer from impressive business examples a decreasing resource intensity of the economy on the whole. However, numerous cases of less resource use on the micro level do not automatically translate into less resource use on the macro level -- at least not along the axis of time, if the economy is ruled by a dynamics of expansion.
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Three effects -- rebound, volume and growth -- can be distinguished. All of them counteract the specific resource reductions achieved on the level of products or companies. Rebound effects are those that arise directly from efficiency gains stimulating new expansion. For example, a more fuel - and cost-efficient heating system may induce people to utilize more heat, since it can be had at the same price. The mobile phone, decreasing time and effort involved in calling, causes telephone contacts to increase. and the amount of paper consumed has grown in tandem with the ease of printing out and copying documents; there has never been so much paper used as in the much-hyped 'paperless office.' In all these cases, technological efficiency has lead to increased net consumption of resources. Particularly under competitive conditions, any efficiency gain -- no matter whether economic, ecological or timewise - invites actors to convert the capital,resources or time saved into an expansion of output. Lower prices invite customers to buy more things, higher recycling rates in materials facilitate more output, and faster transport leads to people travelling longer distances. Paradoxically, it is often precisely the economic gains from improved technical efficiency that increase the rate of resource throughput (Wackernagel and Rees 1997: 19). In fact, for decades, efficiency has been the driving force behind competition and growth -- per unit gains have fuelled new rounds of expansion. Efficiency gains can in principle be converted into more quality or less overall inputs, but under competitive conditions there is always a strong incentive to follow the road of expansion.
Volume effects arise from expanding demand for an eco-efficient product. All rebound effects are volume effects, but not all volume effects derive from rebound effects. Demand may grow independently of higher per unit efficiency, but the consequence is the same as with rebound effects: when more is asked of less, the net saving effect is reduced or completely cancelled out. Cars, as mentioned earlier, are considerably more fuel-efficient today than they were 20 years ago, but the increase in the number of cars, in their size and power, and the number of kilometers driven has long swallowed up that gain. Similar processes are at work in a variety of circumstances. Paper production has become much more water-efficient, but the overall output of paper has grown to an extent that the absolute level of water consumption has not diminished. Personal computers require considerably fewer resources than the old mainframe computers, but his gain has been rendered irrelevant by the fact that the number of computers has grown by a factor of 10,000. Efficiency gains on the micro level are therefore -- over time -- likely to be eaten up by growth in volume on the macro level. While they save time in the face of ecological limits in the short term, they are bound to be insufficient over the long term.
Finally, growth effects arise from the expansive tendencies of the economy as a whole. Independent of per unit efficiency, the dynamics of expansion abroad and intensification at home lead to continuously higher volumes of output. Take as an easy example the spread of small appliances in households. Houses might be better insulated and refrigerators might use less electricity, but energy consumption rises largely because of the 'stand-by' functions of devices such as television sets, video-recorders, cordless telephones and hand-held vacuum cleaners. Large-scale trends like economic globalization exhibit conflicting tendencies of a similar kind. On the one hand, free trade stimulates the diffusion of more efficient technologies such as state-of-the-art power plants or digital equipment into the most distant corners of the world. On the other hand, however, free trade is meant to boost economic growth worldwide, which will make global resource use for all kinds of public and private consumption sky-rocket. In sum, the weight with which an expansive economy presses upon the resources of the earth can be mitigated by higher specific resource efficiencies, but if expansion continues unabated, the overall weight will nevertheless continue to grow.
However, it is overwhelmingly clear that the search for sustainability implies a drastic reduction in absolute levels of resource consumption, be it for fossil fuel, for sweet water or for timber. For this reason, any statement about relative efficiency on the micro level remains of little relevance as long as it is not linked to assumptions about the development of absolute volumes on the macro level. There is no logical connection between statements of relative efficiency and statements of absolute scale, but it is in the end the absolute scale of resource consumption that matters (Daly 1991). From this point of view, for example, 100 efficient Indian Maruti cars are not better than 30 old and wasteful Ambassador cars. Indeed, the paradoxical situation in which resource efficiency rises while the ecological efficiency of the economy as a whole diminishes seems to be a recurrent pattern of development. When relative improvement in resource use goes hand in hand with an absolute rise in resource use, not much is gained in ecological terms.
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It is for this reason that the efficiency perspective, if it is to become meaningful, must be embedded in a broader sufficiency perspective. The question 'how much is enough?' cannot be avoided. The transition towards sustainability can be achieved only through a twin-track strategy: an intelligent reinvention of means as well as a prudent moderation of ends. If this dual approach is not taken, the expansive dynamics, remaining unexamined and eventually unchecked, will undermine all successes achieved from boosting resource efficiency. Moreover, the twin-track approach makes the transition to sustainability easier because the pressure for higher efficiency of means is softened when certain levels of sufficiency in goals are socially accepted.
Such a conclusion is not astonishing if one sees history moving in a co-evolutionary manner (Norgaard 1994). From the co-evolutionary perspective, socio-cultural forms evolve in interaction with technical forms, just as technical forms evolve in interaction with socio-cultural forms. Therefore, as 'Factor 10' envisages a technical infrastructure of the economy that works at a drastically lower scale of physical throughput, the institutional rules and cultural forms that prevail in society will also change accordingly. 'Factor 10' philosophy, like all environmental economics, recognizes that the economic system is subordinate to the natural system; it thereby assumes the existence of a proper physical scale for the economy beyond which the natural system -- and in consequence the economic system that depends on it -- would slide into turbulence. Eventually, however, the social scale of the economy will also have to correspond to the economy's physical scale: The balance to be struck between the economic system and the natural world has to be matched by some balance between the economic system and the social world. Unless social thresholds for the expansion of the economic system are taken into consideration, it is difficult to imagine how the physical thresholds of the economy can be maintained.
As it is not plausible to seek limits to economic expansion only in one dimension -- the physical one -- research on sufficiency must also explore limits in the social and cultural dimensions. Such a focus, however, implies a move from the formal notion to the substantive notion of resource productivity. Since social and cultural limits cannot take hold without being integrated into people's perceptions and desires, and debate on sufficiency is bound to be a debate about the productivity of limits. Can the appreciation of limits lead to a more flourishing society? Can even self-limitation be part and parcel of self-liberation? These are the kind of questions around which the inquiry about sufficiency evolves. In other words, this inquiry aims to explore the ultimate efficiency of the economic system as a whole, its satisfaction efficiency. As this is obviously not an evaluation that can be done in an objectivist manner, its discussion proceeds by looking into the history of needs examining consumption patterns, exposing institutional habits, delineating technological styles, probing world views, and highlighting emerging desires. The challenge of the sufficiency debate is to ontribute to society's reflexion about is own well-being and to determine whether a reduced emphasis on economic expansion can enhance the quality of civilization. The question 'How much is enough?' leads without much detour to the question 'What do we want?' Sustainability in the last instance springs from a fresh inquiry into the meaning of the good life.
Mintzberg, Henry. Mintzberg on Management. Free Press, New York: 1989 ISBN 0029213711
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In practice, efficiency does not mean the greatest benefit for the cost; it means the greatest measurable benefit for the measurable cost. In other words, efficiency means demonstrated efficiency, proven efficiency, above all, calculated efficiency. A management obsessed with efficiency is a management obsessed with measurement. The cult of efficiency is the cult of calculation. And therein lies the problem.
A simple experiment demonstrates the point. I asked fifty-nine MBA students, cold, at the start of a class on another subject, to write down the first thing that came into their heads when I said that a restaurant was efficient. (Readers are invited to stop here and record their own answers.) According to Simon's definition, the answers should have varied widely. According to my contention, however, easily quantified goals should have predominated.
In fact, forty-three of the students names that most operational of goals, speed of service, in one form or another (for instance, "fast service," "no delays"). The quality of the food -- surely at least as important a goal for restaurants, although less easily measured -- did evoke thirteen positive comments (such as "serves good meals," "tasty food"), but also five specifically negative ones (for example, "terrible food," "serves what would be thrown out," "bland, boring, and dehumanizing"; my father, to whom I put the same question, remarked, "I don't see what efficiency has to do with food," but then, on further reflection, added, "If I heard that a restaurant was efficient, I would wonder about the food.")* I polled twenty-two more students a year later, and this time all but two mentioned speed of service (fourteen exclusively).
I also polled both groups of students on the statement that my house was efficient. Forty of the fifty-nine as well as ten of the twenty-two referred to something related to getting around in it or cleaning it up quickly. Seven of the first group and ten of the second commented on its fuel consumption. Issues of comfort, beauty, and warmth (in the psychological sense) were hardly mentioned.
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Thus, in practice, efficiency is associated with criteria that are measurable. An efficient restaurant is one that gets its food on the table in thirteen minutes, independent of, or perhaps in spite of, the quality of that food. An efficient home is one that warms the bodies of its occupants with only 3,000 liters of oil during a frigid Canadian winter, not one that warms their hears with its charm.
This orientation has three major consequences.
1. Because costs are typically more easily measured than benefits, efficiency all too often reduces to economy. Compared with benefits, costs more easily lend themselves to expression in quantitative terms -- in dollars, person-hours, materials, or whatever. For example, university administrators know with some precision how much it costs to train an MBA student. But no one really has a clue how much is learned in such programs, or what effect that learning has on the practice of management.
The all-too-frequent result of an obsession with efficiency, therefore, is the cutting of tangible costs at the expense of intangible benefits. What university administrator cannot cut 10 percent from the cost of training an MBA with no measurable affect on the benefits? Even in a business firm, it is a simple matter for a chief executive to cut certain costs without impacting on benefits – that almighty bottom line -- not in the short run, at least. One simply reduces spending on research or advertising. The effect on profits may not show up for years, long after the executive has left. All too often, therefore, efficiency just means economy, with benefits suffering at the expense of costs, so to speak. And efficiency gets a bad name.
2. Because economic costs can usually be more easily measured than social costs, efficiency often
produces an escalation in social costs, which are treated as "externalities." Business firms in particular like to measure things. Peter Drucker makes this clear: The "task can be identified. It can be defined. Goals can be set. And performance can be measured. And then business can perform." The problem is that some thins are more easily measured than others. The dollars spent, the hours worked, the materials consumed are easily quantified. The air polluted, the minds dulled, the scenery destroyed are costs, too, but they are not so easily measured.
In all kinds of organizations, the economic costs – the tangible resources deployed -- are generally easier to measure than the social costs -- the consequences on people's lives. An emphasis on efficiency thus encourages the attribution of only the tangible costs to the organization; the intangible costs, usually social, get dismissed as "externalities," for which society is considered responsible. The implicit assumption is that if a cost cannot be measured, it has not been incurred. And so it is not the concern of a management responsible for "efficiency." As a result, the economic costs tend to be closely controlled by "efficient" managers, while the social costs escalate. And efficiency gets a bad name.
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3. Because economic benefits are typically more easily measured than social benefits, efficiency often drives the organization toward an economic morality which can amount to a social immorality. Human activities create many benefits, ranging from the tangible to the highly ambiguous. A manager concerned with efficiency naturally favors the former; he or she can measure them and attribute them to his or her efforts. The dean who must base his promotion decisions on "hard facts" will be encouraged to count the publications of professors rather than make subjective assessments of their quality.
An obsession with efficiency therefore means that tangible, demonstrable, measurable benefits (such as speed of service) are allowed to obscure intangible, less easily specified and quantified benefits (such as the quality of food). Indeed, the more serious problem is that the former are often allowed to drive out the latter, even when the latter are generally recognized as more important. If one marches to the tune of efficiency, if one is "measured" on one's performance, than there may be no choice. Again, it is those things economic -- associated with tangible resources -- that best lend themselves to measurement. The social values get left behind.
Pirsig, in his popular book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, helps us to take this point one step further, by suggesting that such social values may be beyond our skills of logic and analysis (and, therefore, measurement): "I think there is such a thing as Quality, but as soon as you try to define it, something goes haywire. You can't do it.
... Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, Quality cannot be defined." And yet, "even though Quality cannot be defined, you know that Quality is. But do the efficiency experts? Or at least, do they allow themselves to "know" that which is beyond the power of their tools?
We're More Productive. Who Gets the Money? New York Times, Op-Ed April 5, 2004
By BOB HERBERT
It's like running on a treadmill that keeps increasing its speed. You have to go faster and faster just to stay in place. Or, as a factory worker said many years ago, "You can work 'til you drop dead, but you won't get ahead." American workers have been remarkably productive in recent years, but they are getting fewer and fewer of the benefits of this increased productivity. While the economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, has been strong for some time now, ordinary workers have gotten little more than the back of the hand from employers who have pocketed an unprecedented share of the cash from this burst of economic growth.
What is happening is nothing short of historic. The American workers' share of the increase in national income since November 2001, the end of the last recession, is the lowest on record. Employers took the money and ran. This is extraordinary, but very few people are talking about it, which tells you something about the hold that corporate interests
have on the national conversation.
The situation is summed up in the long, unwieldy but very revealing title of a new study from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University: "The Unprecedented Rising Tide of Corporate Profits and the Simultaneous Ebbing of Labor Compensation - Gainers and Losers from the National Economic Recovery in 2002 and 2003."
Andrew Sum, the center's director and lead author of the study, said: "This is the first time we've ever had a case where two years into a recovery, corporate profits got a larger share of the growth of national income than labor did. Normally labor gets about 65 percent and corporate profits about 15 to 18 percent. This time profits got 41 percent and labor [meaning all forms of employee compensation, including wages, benefits, salaries and the percentage of payroll taxes paid by employers] got 38 percent."
The study said: "In no other recovery from a post-World War II recession did corporate profits ever account for as much as 20 percent of the growth in national income. And at no time did corporate profits ever increase by a greater amount than labor compensation." In other words, an awful lot of American workers have been had. Fleeced. Taken to the cleaners.
The recent productivity gains have been widely acknowledged. But workers are not being compensated for this. During the past two years, increases in wages and benefits have been very weak, or nonexistent. And despite the growth of jobs in March that had the Bush crowd dancing in the White House halls last Friday, there has been no net increase in formal payroll employment since the end of the recession. We have lost jobs. There are fewer payroll jobs now than there were when the recession ended in November 2001.
So if employers were not hiring workers, and if they were miserly when it came to increases in wages and benefits for existing employees, what happened to all the money from the strong economic growth?
The study is very clear on this point. The bulk of the gains did not go to workers, "but instead were used to boost profits, lower prices, or increase C.E.O. compensation." This is a radical transformation of the way the bounty of this country has been distributed since World War II. Workers are being treated more and more like patrons in a rigged casino. They can't win.
Corporate profits go up. The stock market goes up. Executive compensation skyrockets. But workers, for the most part, remain on the treadmill. When you look at corporate profits versus employee compensation in this recovery, and then compare that, as Mr. Sum and his colleagues did, with the eight previous recoveries since World War II, it's like turning a chart upside down. The study found that the amount of income growth devoured by corporate profits in this recovery is "historically unprecedented," as is the "low share ... accruing to the nation's workers in the form of labor compensation."
I have to laugh when I hear conservatives complaining about class warfare. They know this terrain better than anyone. They launched the war. They're waging it. And they're winning it.
Efficiency, variety key as dirt track changes, By Thomas Pope, Motor sports editor Published on: 2004-04-10. Motor sports editor Thomas Pope can be reached at popet@fayettevillenc.com <mailto:popet@fayettevillenc.com> or 486-3520. The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer (http://www.fayettevillenc.com)
Steve Core is operating under some basic guidelines in his first year as race director at Fayetteville Motor Sports Park’s dirt track:
1. “The word ‘can’t’ isn’t in my vocabulary. The word ‘why?’ is.”
2. If there’s not a problem, there’s no opportunity.
All achievements were once considered impossibilities.
Core
Core, the track’s technical director the past two years, is trying to reverse a legacy of one-groove racing and shows that spill over into Sunday morning. Late-running events and infrequent passing have shrunk the track’s fan base over the years, but Core is hoping to win them back with efficiency and more on-track action.
Last Saturday, a program of racing in five classes was completed by 11 p.m., Core said. He’s hoping to duplicate that tonight, when the track’s main event is a $2,500-to-win, 50-lap Late Model feature. “If we can put on a good show, a good race, and get out at a reasonable time, I think the fans will be there week after week,” said Core, an auto mechanics instructor at Fayetteville Technical Community College. “But if there’s follow-the-leader racing and whoever wins the pole always wins the race, the fans aren’t going to come back. “I think we’re on the right track.”
Core’s plan for better racing starts with track preparation. He said he treats the dirt-and-clay mixture much like a farmer would a crop, using his own secret recipe of enhancements to improve the surface’s ability to retain water and remain smooth, yet sticky. He works on the track every weekday afternoon, then turns it over to Billy McFayden on Saturday for fine-tuning. “You won’t find a better heavy equipment operator than Billy,” Core said.
After the track’s Saturday prep, a final load of water is applied, and the race drivers have to roll it in prior to practice, time trials and heat races. That, Core said, hasn’t gone as smoothly as he would have liked, with much of the resistance coming from the high-dollar Late Model performers.
There’s a reason behind their hesistancy to help roll the track in, according to Jeffrey Tyndall, the Late Model winner three times this season. “Once you get it rolled in decent, the track’s been good,” he said, “but I think it needs packer cars that the track puts out there to get it in shape. The other night, after we rolled the track in, I came back in and my car weighed 600 pounds more than it did when I went out. “I don’t see why we should be out there, running $6 a gallon gas and loading these $40,000 cars up with mud. Then you’ve got to get in the pits and scrape and scrape and scrape to get that mud off.”
Core’s reaction? Everybody - Late Model, Open Wheel, Super Street and Pure Stock - is in the same boat.
“It takes a team effort to get it all done,” he said. “If I do it their way, we’ll have the same thing they’ve had out there for years - a one-groove track.”
Also in place is a reversal of long-standing procedures that send all cars involved in a spin to the rear of the field for a restart, or allow the flagman to have discretion over which cars are allowed to resume their position in the lineup.
Conceivably, a driver could now purposely spin a competitor and get away with it - but probably only in the short term. Core’s willing to let the drivers sort those disputes out among themselves, and if things get out of hand, he’ll resort to fines, suspensions and banishment. “Even if you’re looking dead at a situation between two guys, you cannot tell if it’s intentional or if the guy that was leading brake-checked the guy behind him,” Core said. “Only two people know for a fact what went on and the flagman ain’t one of them. They can handle it until we have to step in and settle it for them.”
That could cause some serious problems, Tyndall said: “Some stuff that happens is just flat accidental.” But he concedes that the prospect of having to sit out one or more races as championship points slip away is a deterrent to retaliation.
Another new rule states that any car causing a caution period will go to the rear of the field, and the caution flag is only being employed for safety reasons. If a car stops on the track in hopes of bringing out the caution flag, the flag now isn’t being thrown until that lap is completed. That driver may get the caution he hoped for, but he will also be a lap down. Cars that spin or stop to avoid an accident keep their spot in the running order prior to the incident, Core said.
Also, as a time-saving measure, if cars aren’t in their proper order within two laps after a caution, the field is stopped on the frontstretch and squared away, rather than continuing to circle the track in a parade and hoping everyone finds their proper position.
“I’m getting a lot of criticism from some people about how we’re changing things,” Core said, “but it comes with the territory.”
NASA Tech Briefs, October 2002. Page 66
To test the skates’ performance on the ice, the new polishing tool was brought to the Pettit National Ice center in Milwaukee, WI, for glide tests in September 2001. The tests showed a nearly 15% improvement in unassisted glide over conventionally sharpened speedskates. Further research continued over the next few months.
“It wasn’t until about three weeks before the Olympics started that we finally hit on the design that worked well and we rushed out to Salt Lake city to work with Finn (Halvorsen) and the skaters,” said Lyons. With the Olympics just a few weeks away, it was time to let the skaters use the polishing tool. Speekskater Chris Witty, who won the only tow speed-skating medals in Nagano, was willing to try the new polishing tool.
“When I tried the polishing tool for the first time, immediately you could tell that it made a difference in your skates,” she said, “I knew I was skating faster, It’s hard to say how much, but mentally, I knew my skates were ready to go.”
On February 17, Chris witty used her newly-polished blades to skate the 1,000-meter race, which she finished in world-record time, winning the gold medal. In subsequent races, American short- and long-track speedskaters who used the new polishing tool also stood on the winner’s podium.
Said witty, “I think we had the intimidation factor going at the Olympics. The other countries were saying, ‘NASA’s helping you? What’s going on?’ It created a little wave in speed-skating that the Americans had something nobody else had.”
Measuring Offensive Efficiency By Kevin Pelton From HOOPSWORLD.com <http://www.hoopsworld.com>
Mar 18, 2004
One of the things people often say about NBA statistical analysts is that we have yet to find the underrated statistic teams can take advantage of, a la on-base percentage in baseball. I would disagree. Getting on-base is fundamental to scoring in baseball, but not nearly so key as making shots is in basketball. And while the role of scoring efficiently has always been recognized, measuring it has been a little more complicated.
In my analysis, I typically include what I call true shooting percentage (TS%) to evaluate scoring efficiency. Whatever name this goes by (shooting efficiency, scoring efficiency, points per shot), the general idea is the same—points scored divided by shooting possessions, field goals attempted plus some multiplier times free throws attempted. In my calculations, I use .44 as the free-throw multiplier while doubling the number of possessions used so the numbers I report relatively follow the same familiar scale as field-goal percentage.
True shooting percentage, however, is not the only measure used to evaluate how efficiently players score. Field-goal percentage, for all its bias towards big men, remains the most common statistic used. For the vast majority of basketball fans and analysts, the story ends here. Some do go further, without going to true shooting percentage.
One popular metric is what I’ll call effective field-goal percentage, since that’s what Roland Beech over at 82games.com <http://www.82games.com> calls it. This takes into account that while players make less three-pointers, they’re worth more points. So effective field goal percentage adds .5 times each three-pointer to the field goal total, and then divides by attempts. I think a lot of people know effective field-goal percentage thanks to Rick Barry’s Pro Basketball Bible, which included it.
Another commonly used statistic is points per shot. I listed this with true shooting percentage because John Hollinger of Pro Basketball Prospectus fame calls what I call true shooting percentage “Points Per Shot Attempted”, but the more common form is to simply take points and divide by shots attempted. ESPN.com uses this fairly regularly, including it on its college player pages.
If you want, you’ll receive an e-mail whenever a new column is up with an introduction to the column and a link. If you’re interested, e-mail me atkpelton@hoopsworld.com <mailto:kpelton@hoopsworld.com> and let me know. I will, of course, make every effort to protect the privacy of your e-mail address.
Fukuyama, Francis. The Great Disruption. New York: 1999. ISBN 068484530X
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People associate the information age with the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, but the shift away from the Industrial era started more than a generation earlier with the deindustrialization of the rust Belt in the United States and comparable moves away from manufacturing in other industrialized countries. This period, from roughly the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, was also marked by seriously deteriorating social conditions in most of the industrialized world. Crime and social disorder began to rise, making inner-city areas of the wealthiest societies on earth almost uninhabitable. The decline of kinship as a social institution, which as been going on for more than two hundred years, accelerated sharply in the last half of the twentieth century. Fertility in most European countries and Japan fell to such low levels that these societies will depopulate themselves in the next century, absent substantial immigration; marriages and births became fewer; divorce soared; and out-of-wedlock childbearing came to affect one out of every three children born in the United States and over half of all children in Scandinavia. Finally, trust and confidence in institutions went into a deep, forty-year decline. A majority of people in the United States and Europe expressed confidence in their governments and fellow citizens during the late 1950s; only a small minority did so by the early 1990s. The nature of people's involvement with one another changed as well. Although there is no evidence that people associated with each other less, their mutual ties tended to be less permanent, less engaged, and with smaller groups of people.
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These changes were dramatic, they occurred over a wide range of similar countries, and they all appeared at roughly the same period in history. As such, they constituted a Great Disruption in the social values that prevailed in the industrial age society of the mid-twentieth century, and are the subject of Part One of this book. It is highly unusual for social indicators to move together so rapidly; even without knowing why they did so, we have reason to suspect that they might be related to one another. Although conservative like William J. Bennett are often attacked for harping on the theme of moral decline, they are essentially correct: the breakdown of social order is not a matter of nostalgia, poor memory, or ignorance about the hypocrisies of earlier ages. The decline is readily measurable in statistics on crime, fatherless children, reduced educational outcomes and opportunities, broken trust, and the like.
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The sociologist Max Weber, observing nineteenth-century industrial society, argued that rational bureaucracy was in fact the very essence of modern life. We know now, however, that in an information society, neither governments nor corporations will rely exclusively on formal, bureaucratic rules to organize the people over whom they have authority. Instead, they will have to decentralize and devolve power, and rely on the people over whom they have nominal authority to be self-organizing. The precondition for such self-organization is internalized rules and norms of behavior, which suggests that the world of the twenty-first century will depend heavily on such informal norms. Thus, while the transition into an information society has disrupted social norms, modern, high-tech society cannot get along without them and will face considerable incentives to produce them.
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It was not an accident that the commercial promulgating the message of "no limits" was produced by a private, high-tech corporation trying to maximize its profits, for modern capitalism thrives on the breaking of rules wherein old social relationships, communities, and technologies are discarded in favor of new and more efficient ones. Both Left and Right denounced excessive individualism on the part of the other. Those who supported reproductive choice tended to oppose choice in buying guns or gas-guzzling cars; those who wanted unconstrained economic competition were appalled when they were mugged by unconstrained criminals on the way to the low-priced Wal-Mart. But neither side was willing to give up its preferred sphere of free choice for the sake of constraining the other.
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The tragedy of the commons is actually nothing other than an enlarged, multiple-player prisoner's dilemma game, where each participant has a choice between contributing to the upkeep of the common resource (cooperating) or free-riding on them (cheating). Unlike a two-sided prisoner's dilemma, the free-rider problem cannot be as readily solved through simple iteration, particularly when the size of the group of cooperating people grows large. In larger groups, free riding becomes much more difficult to detect. The free-rider problem has been the subject of an extraordinary amount of attention by economists and other social scientists over the past generation as a key to solving the broader problem of the origins of human cooperation.
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Hardin argued that the tragedy of the commons led to social disaster as seas were overfished and meadows overgrazed. The problem of sharing common resources could be solved, according to him, only through hierarchical authority, presumably by a coercive state or even a supranational regulatory body. The example he gave as over population, where parents' interest in having children is collectively depleting the planet's resources and needs to be restricted through strong population control measures. The economist Mancur Olson argues in his classic treatment of the subject that the problem of the provision of public goods can be solved either through Hardin's hierarchical methods ( a coercive state that, for example, forces people to pay income taxes) or by a single user of the public good much larger than all the other s who is willing to provide it unilaterally and tolerate free riding because the good is necessary.
In contrast to this hierarchical approach to norm generation, a number of economists suggested more spontaneous approaches. One simple solution is to turn common-pool resources into private property. Economist Howard Demsetz argued that by "internalizing the externalities," that is, by converting public property to private property, individual owners would then have an incentive to protect it. This, he argued, was the actual historical pattern among the Indians of the Labrador peninsula at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Douglass North and Robert Thomas extended this argument to explain the emergence of property rights in Europe over an extended period, from A.D. 1000 to 1800. The problem with this approach is that many common-pool resources, public goods, or externalities, cannot readily be converted into private property, because they move around (like air and fish) or are not readily divisible (like aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons).
The fountainhead of the entire Law and Economics field was University of Chicago economist Ronald Coase's often-cited article, "The Problem of Social Cost," in which he argues that when transaction costs are zero, a change in the formal rules of liability will have no effect on the allocation of resources. Put differently, if negotiations between private parties were costless, it should not be necessary for governments to intervene to regulate polluters or other producers of negative externalities, because the parties negatively affected will have a rational incentive to organize and buy off the miscreant. The example Coase use to illustrate this point was the conflict between ranchers and farmers over range cattle that wandered onto farmer's fields and caused damage. The state could intervene to make the ranchers legally liable for the damage that their cattle cause, but Coase pointed out that the farmers would have an incentive simply to pay off the ranchers to have them prevent their cattle from doing damage. Social regulatory norms, in other words, will arise out of self-interested interactions of individual agents and do not have to be mandated through law or formal institutions.
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The problems afflicting large, hierarchical organizations are not trivial ones, and it is reasonable think that the devolution of power and authority within them will continue. But then a new problem emerges: coordinating the activities of all of the players in a decentralized organization where low-level employees have newly acquired powers. One solution is the market, where decentralized buyers and sellers achieve efficient results without central control. The outsourcing craze in American business during the 1990s is an effort to replace hierarchical control with market relationships. But market exchange generates transaction costs, and in any event firms can't organize their core functions as markets with everyone competing against everyone else.
The classic theory of the firm laid out by Ronald Coase in 1937 argues that hierarchies exist because of transaction costs. A complex activity like building cars could be done, in theory, by small, decentralized firms contracting with one another to produce all of the component parts, with separate companies providing design, systems integration, and marketing. The reason cars are not made this way but by giant, vertically integrated firms is that the costs of all of the negotiating, contracting, and litigating required to outsource everything are much greater than the costs of bringing these activities in-house, where the firm can control the quality of all of the inputs and outputs by managerial fiat.
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The early twentieth-century workplace, exemplified by Henry Ford's huge factories, was a hierarchical organization characterized by a high degree of formality. That is, there was an extensive division of labor mandated and controlled through a centralized, bureaucratic hierarchy, which laid down a large number of formal rules for how individual members of the organization were to behave. The principles of scientific management as elucidated by industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor and implemented by Ford contained an implicit premise that there were economies of scale in managerial intelligence and that an organization could be more efficiently operated if its intelligence were segregated in a white-collar managerial hierarchy rather than being distributed throughout the organization.
In such a system there was no need for trust, social capital, or informal social norms: every worker was told where to stand, how to move his arms and legs, and when to take breaks and generally was not expected to display the slightest degree of creativity or judgment. Workers were motivated by purely individual incentives, whether rewards or punishments, and were readily interchangeable with one another. Reacting to this system through their unions, the blue-collar labor force demanded formal guarantees of their rights and the narrowest possible specification of duties -- hence, the rise of job control unionism and labor contracts that were as thick as telephone books.
Taylorism was an effective means -- perhaps the only means -- of coordinating the activities of a low-skill industrial labor force. In the first two decades of the century, half of Ford's blue-collar workers were first generation immigrants who could not speak English, and as late as the 1950s 80 percent did not have a high school education. But Taylorism ran into all of the problems of large, hierarchical organizations, with slow decision making, inflexible workplace rules, and an inability to adapt to new circumstances.
The move form a hierarchical Taylorite organization to a flat or networked one involves offloading the coordination function from formal bureaucratic rules to informal social norms. Authority does not disappear in a flat or networked organization; rather, its is internalized in a way that permits self-organization and self-management. A lean or just-in-time automobile factory is an example of a flat, post-Fordist organization. In terms of formal authority, many of the functions previously assigned to white-collar middle mangers have now been undertaken by blue-collar assembly line workers who themselves are acting in teams. It is the factory floor workforce itself that manages day-to-day scheduling, machine setup, work discipline, and quality control.
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In the absence of social capital, hierarchical organization makes a great deal of sense, and in fact may be the only way in which a low-trust society can be organized. Classical Taylorism requires no trust whatsoever between workers and managers. It requires only that workers lower down in the hierarchy follow formal rules. Workers are motivated by simple carrots and sticks; Taylor was a big proponent of the piece-rate system for stimulating output. There is no reason that workers have to internalize the organization's goals or regard their bosses as part of an extended family.
At low levels of skill and education, hierarchical centralization ensures that workers do not have to think for themselves. Taylorism was used very effectively by Soviet managers during the USSR's headlong industrialization in the 1930s and 1940s, as peasants were yanked off farms and rushed into giant industrial enterprises. There was at the time no other choice: the experience of Stalinism and the Terror atomized Soviet society, severing horizontal links between people and destroying all vestiges of social trust.
As educational requirements and skill levels rise throughout contemporary economies like that of the United States, the number of sectors demanding Taylorite organization will decrease. Part of the workforce will remain difficult to train, however, and the country's many social, ethnic, class, gender, and racial cleavages will prevent the spread of shared norms that re the basis of social capital among even well-educated workers. This guarantees that hierarchical organization will continue to be an important means of coordination.
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The Pied Piper, leading the children of Hamelin to another land, will probably not witness these children destroying themselves in a in a descent into Lord-of-the-Flies-type violence (unless there is a grave imbalance in the sex ratio, and assuming that the Pied Piper himself has no political ambitions). Rather, those children, remembering little of their parents' cultural traditions, will make up new ones not much different. Their new social world will have a kinship system, private property, a system of exchange of goods, status hierarchies, and numerous other norms constraining the behavior of individuals. Honesty, trustworthiness, the keeping of commitments, and reciprocity in various forms will be practiced by many people much of the time and valued, at least in principle, by nearly everyone. There will also be dishonesty, crime, and other forms of deviance, as well as community mechanisms for controlling deviance. Little children without much coaching will divide up the world between good guys and bad guys. They will have powerful feelings of solidarity with those inside their community, and anything form wariness to outright hostility toward those on the outside. They, their children, and their children's children will gossip endlessly about who is naughty and who is nice, who kept promises and who snitched, who had easy virtue and who lost interest the morning after. All of this gossip will serve to sustain ordinary morality -- the kind that is practiced within families and between friends and neighbors -- and is the source of social capital.
Page 232
The children of Hamelin, to repeat, will spontaneously create all of these rules without the benefit of a prophet who will bring the word of God to them and without the benefit of a lawgiver to establish government. They will do this because they are human beings who are by nature moral animals and have sufficient rationality to create cultural rules that will allow them to live with one another.
If ordinary morality is in some sense natural and the product of spontaneous human interaction, what, then, is missing from this picture? What do the prophet and the lawgiver bring to the table that is missing from what we might call New Hamelin? In what ways does spontaneous order need to be supplemented by these hierarchical forms of authority.
What is missing, in the first instance, is scale. The children of Hamelin and their descendants will live in a little colony of perhaps fifty to one hundred people, not too different in some respects from the chimp colony at Arnhem. Most members will be related to one another at various removes; indeed, it will be rare to encounter a nonrelative unless New Hamelin bumps into another colony. New Hamelin, though organized hierarchically, will be relatively egalitarian, with no large differences between leaders and led. But it will not be capable of building a city or of creating all the things that flow from a life in a city. There will be no division of labor, no impersonal market, no economies of scale, no legal guarantees of property rights and therefore no long-term investment, and almost nothing by way of cultural diversity. There will be no high art -- no Michelangelos or Bachs -- for their output was critically dependent on the large surpluses produced by well-organized agricultural societies. There will be no pyramids, no Parthenon, certainly no Palace of Versailles. Novels, scientific research, libraries, universities, hospitals -- while the children of Hamelin may on some theoretical level be capable of producing these things, they won't because their self-organized, egalitarian tribe will remain petty and too hopelessly mired in poverty to worry about much more than their day-to-day survival.
Page 244
The idea, for example, that entrepreneurship will flourish when regulatory burdens are lifted does not always apply to countries with cultures hostile to innovation or risk taking. In some cases deregulation leads to criminal behavior and anarchy. This does not mean, however, that these laws won't work in developed societies where the theories are generated in the first place.
The American difficulty is of a different sort. Due to technological change and the very scale and diversity of contemporary society, it has lost much of the ordinary morality the children of Hamelin would have enjoyed while still living in the cave. The reconstitution of social order for the United States and other societies in a similar position, then, is not a matter of rebuilding hierarchical authority. It is a matter of reestablishing habits of honesty, reciprocity, and an enlarged radius of trust under changed technological circumstances.
Hence, knowing that there are important natural and spontaneous sources of social order is not a minor insight. It suggests that culture and moral values will continue to evolve in ways that will allow people to adapt to the changing technological economic conditions they face and that his spontaneous evolution will interact with hierarchical authority to produce an "extended order of human cooperation." Neither self-organization nor hierarchy is dispensable as a source of rules. Family life cannot be restored in the United States or any other developed country through government fiat, nor can the state dictate how women are going to balance work with responsibilities to children. Crime control is often the responsibility of neighborhoods, which set standards for public behavior. These cultural rules will have to be worked out by individuals and communities interacting with one another on a daily basis. On the other hand, public policy can shape social choices around the margin in ways that are both helpful and unhelpful, by ensuring public safety, on the one hand, or by creating perverse incentives for single-parent families on the other. Although contemporary societies can no longer depend on the authority of religion as they once could, religion has not disappeared and remains a helpful source of common values.
Page 282
The same innovation that increases productivity or launches a new industry undermines an existing community or makes an entire way of life obsolete. Societies caught on the escalator of technological progress find themselves constantly having to play catch-up as social rules evolve to meet changed economic conditions. Machine production moves people from country to city and separates husbands from families, while information technology moves them back to the country while pushing women in the workforce. Nuclear families disappear with the invention of agriculture, reappear with industrialization, and start breaking down with the transition to the post-industrial era. People can adjust over time to all of these changed conditions, but the rate of technological change can often exceed the rate of social adjustment. When the supply of social capital fails to match the demand, societies must pay a high cost.
There seem to be two processes working in parallel. In the political and economic sphere, history appears to be progressive and directional, and at the end of the twentieth century has culminated in liberal democracy as the only viable alternative for technologically advanced societies. In the social and moral sphere, however, history appears to be cyclical, with social order ebbing and flowing over the space of multiple generations. There is nothing that guarantees that there will be upturns in the cycle. Our only reason for hope is the very powerful innate human capacities for reconstituting social order. On the success of this process of reconstitution depends the upward direction of the arrow of History.
Briskin, Alan, The Stirring Of Soul In The Workplace, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco 1996: ISBN 0787902810, Page 97
The vision implicit in mechanization is control; control the variables of the process and you ensure the desired final product. Efficiency, as a concept, draws its basic meaning from this vision, where both things and human labor are broken down into their pieces. How one stands or stoops or swings one’s arm can be studied, and this information becomes useful for an engineer of human beings. And when you engineer the body’s actions, you cannot help but touch the soul.
Page 140
The soul is relegated to a corner where it cannot seek understanding, where wholeness is out of sight, hidden behind the door of the efficiency engineer, the financial officers, and the management consultants. People do not possess the big picture; it is contained in the efficiencies of bureaucracy and in the automated processes of machinery....
Page 158
The pursuit of increased material prosperity fragmented the way work was performed and how work was shared. Efficiency gave owners dominance over work processes and made workers dependent on management to dictate the terms of their employment. Today, we mourn the loss of individuals’ ability to cultivate their own sense of purpose and direction in work.
Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974. ISBN 0853453403, Page 207
Each advance in productivity shrinks the number of workers who are available to be utilized in the struggles between corporations over the distribution of the surplus, expands the use of labor in wasteful employment or no employment at all, and gives to all society the form of an inverted pyramid resting upon an ever narrower base of useful labor. Yet no matter how rapidly productivity may grow, no matter how miraculous the contributions of science to this development, no satisfactory level can ever be attained.
Margrit Kennedy and Declan Kennedy, Interest, Philadelphia: 1995 ISBN 0865713197, Page 48
Right now, society pays twice if a laborer is replaced by a machine. It loses the income tax—as incomes of machines are not taxed—and subsequently pays unemployment benefits to the laid-off laborer.
Ernest Braun, The Aims Of Progress . London: Earthscan Publications, 1995 ISBN 185383243X, Pages 22-7
The same characteristics of bigger, faster, more efficient, less labour intensive, more automatic, more convenient, closer to ideal performance, apply to all examples of technology that come to mind. Never in the history of technology have humans reverted to the use of an in inferior technology when a superior one had become
available….
One of the many problems of measurement of technological progress is the fact that each product represents a different compromise between available design parameters, and thus different products may be good for a particular purpose and less good for another. The designer can often improve one performance characteristic only at the expense of another. The art of design is the reconciliation of incompatible demands. Success in the marketplace is achieved by those designs which most closely approximate to the compromises the purchases are willing to strike.
Borgmann, Albert, Technology And The Character Of Contemporary Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984 ISBN 0226066282, Page 66
What has happened to the engineer’s order? The engineer reduces a problem to its essential functions and realizes the latter in the most efficient way possible. Such isolating of functions seems to be a purifying, liberating, and rational affair. It eliminates the ballast of tradition, site, commitment, and fixity. But ends cannot be kept firm when means are relativized, nor can problems remain articulate when their context is erased. Ends and problems so treated are attenuated to commodities until they almost disappear and there is nearly nothing.
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Republic of Technology: Reflections on Our Future Society, New York: Harper and Row, 1978
Page 4.
For most of human history, the norm has been continuity. Change was news. Daily lives were governed by tradition. The most valued works were the oldest.... The Republic of Technology is a world of
obsolescence. Our characteristic printed matter is not a deathless literary work but today’s newspaper that makes yesterday’s newspaper worthless. Old object simply become second hand—to be ripe for the next season’s recycling.... Most novel of all is our changed attitude toward change. Now nations seem to be distinguished not by their heritage or Rapidly “developing” nations are those that are most speedily obsolescing their inheritance.
Page 5.
The supreme law of the Republic of Technology is convergence, the tendency for everything to become like everything else. Now the distinction is seldom made between nations that are “civilized” and those that re “uncivilized... .” A person need not be learned, or even literate, to share the fruits of technology. While the enjoyment of printed matter is restricted to those who can read, anybody can get the message from a television screen.
Page 8.
Technology invents needs and exports problems. We will be misled if we think that technology will be directed primarily to satisfying” demands” or “needs” or to solving recognized “problems.” There was no “demand “ for the telephone, the automobile , radio or television. It is no accident that our nation—the most advanced in technology—is also the most advanced in advertising. Technology is a way of multiplying the unnecessary.... Wants will be created not by “human nature” or by century-old yearnings, but by technology itself.
Page 9.
Nothing can be made obsolete, no device can be forgotten, or erased from the arsenal of technology.... We cannot go back and forth between the kerosene lantern and the electric light.... The most we seem able to do is to make futile efforts to appease the automobile—by building paring temples on choice urban real estate and by deferring to the automobile with pedestrian overpasses and tunnels. We drive miles—and when we are at the airport we walk miles—all for the convenience of the airplane.
The One World of Americans in the future will be a world of 250 million private compartments. The progression from the intimately jostling horse-drawn carriage to the railroad car to the encapsulated lone automobile rider and then to the seat-belted airplane passenger who cannot converse with his seatmate because they are both wearing earphones for the recorded music; the progression from the parent reading aloud to the children to the living theater with living audiences to the darkened motions-picture house to the home of these are the natural progressions of technology. Each of us will have his personal machine, adjusted, focused, and pre-selected for his private use.
Page 11
In this Republic of Technology the experience of the present actually uproots us and separates us from our own special time and place. For technology aims to insulate and immunize us against the peculiar chances, perils, and opportunities of our natural climate, our raw landscape.
Ellul, Jacques, The Technological Bluff. Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990, Page 290
Once we buy a thing we have to realize that it is ready to be thrown away. The unconscious process is at root what Iribarne has called the “cycle of the better”: the more expensive it is, the better it is! The more recent it is, the better it is! In food, clothes, clothes, hygiene, or care, the infinite cycle which pushes up normal usage is almost solely responsible for the waste that we see. This cycle is the cycle of the better -- a conviction created by advertising but which once created, like a conditioned reflex, finally functions on its own and without stimulus. The cycle of the better has of itself the power to make waste the first item in our budget. The cycle of the better has of itself the power to make waste the first item in our budget. The only brake on its course is the limit of time and of individual ability. It will advance without end when progress makes us more efficient. To increase efficiency is thus to increase the potential for waste. Our daily experience confirms this, but it confirms even more collective waste.
Tom Bender, The Heart Of Place, Page 104
Conventional economics is more truly finance rather than economics. What it measures is not the actual economic costs, but a measure of them after they have been twisted out of recognition through the financial rules, legislation and taxation promulgated by special interest to escape payment of costs and to divert profit into their pockets. It has been demonstrated again and again that our current economic patterns are far from the most “efficient” in terms of production and distribution. They are efficient only in centralization of profit and power.
Buchanan, Allen E., Economics—Moral And Ethical Aspects Ethics, Efficiency, And The Market, New Jersey, 1985: ISBN 0847673952, Page 6
Page 6
For the same reason that productivity is inadequate for overall efficiency assessments, neither the growth rate, nor the rate of capital accumulation is by itself a satisfactory measure of a system’s efficiency, unless we divorce the concept of efficiency from that of well-being.
Page 19
Buyers and sellers must struggle with various logistical problems, including those involving transportation and communication costs. Strategic behavior (for example, bluffing with lower offers than one is prepared to pay or threatening to withdraw from the bargaining process) are also transaction costs. Further, if the total costs of the legal system as far as it is involved with the drafting, interpretation, and enforcement of contracts is included, transaction costs are enormous. The most that can be said in defense of actual markets here is that competition tends to reduce transaction costs.
Producers must proceed on the basis of often highly speculative predictions of changing consumer preferences, and even experienced firms may overproduce or underproduce. Producers also often lack information about the methods of production employed by rival firms, either because producers with less-costly methods deliberately keep this information secret, or because it is restricted by patents, or because it is too costly to obtain, or because it is simply overlooked.
Page 21
Critics of the market have been quick to point out the pervasiveness and seriousness of neighborhood effects, or externalities, as a key source of the markets failure to achieve efficient outcomes. Perhaps the most commonly cited contemporary example is the external costs that are imposed on people who breathe air polluted by chemical producers.
Page 23
Since the individual’s contribution is a cost to him, he will, of rational, conclude that regardless of whether or not others contribute, he should not contribute. But if all or a sufficient number of individuals reason thusly, the good will not be provided.
Page 25
The inability of the market to eliminate externalities and to provide public goods is a serious and pervasive departure from efficiency. However, if this is to serve as a sufficient reason either for attempting to abandon the market altogether or for restricting its scope by government intervention or by supplementing it with government provision of goods and services, additional premises are needed.
Page 30
For complex, large-scale allocation decisions, information required for a rational decision may not be available or may be available only at great cost, or will often be so complex that it will be very difficult if not impossible for any individual or group of individuals to integrate and apply it. There may also be motivational impediments to the gathering, integration, and application of information. In many cases the individual will reasonably believe that his vote will not be decisive. The individual may then reason that either enough others who share his preferences will vote on a given issue to achieve the outcome he prefers, even if he does not vote: or that not enough others will vote to achieve the outcome he prefers, even if he does vote.
Page 49
Proponents of the social Darwinist argument usually claim that the redistributive arrangements of the welfare state ought to be dismantled, and that the market ought to be allowed to operate freely, because such interventions in the market interfere with the natural struggle for survival and hinder the operation of the law of the survival of the fittest. This position, however, is based on several misconceptions. first of all, the notion of fitness must always be understood as fitness relative to or for a particular environment or range of environments. For example, a person who is deficient in upper body strength may be as fit for clerical work as a weightlifter, and a myopic individual in a society which provides corrective lenses may be fully fit for almost any task.
Page 50
If it is to have any practical force at all, the Social Darwinist argument must show either that (1) the market system best promotes the survival of the species and that this criterion of survival alone is relevant for evaluating social systems, or that (2) the individuals who survive competition in the market possess certain characteristics that are desirable independently of their contribution to survival.
Barbarba Ward, The Rich Nations And The Poor Nations, New York: Norton, 1962: Library of Congress Card Number 6211387, Page 30
… The aftermath of the Wars of Religion was to turn educated opinion to the examination of material things in which, it was hoped, the clash of dogma could be left behind. As a result, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all over Western Europe, especially in Britain, the inventors and experimenters set to work to explore matter and improve technology. They revolutionized the use of iron. They transformed textile machinery. they invented the steam engine. The age of the railways and the factory system opened up ahead.
An emancipated and self-confident merchant class, with a strongly developed credit system, had savings to pour into these new technologies. They were joined by enlightened gentleman farmers and by sturdy self-reliant artisans, all ready to experiment and back the experiments with their own—and other people’s savings. This combination of new technology and expanded saving made possible great increases in productivity. Much more could be produced by each pair of hands in each working hour. This process depended on keeping general consumption low. The mass of workers did not at first profit from the new system. Herded into the towns, ignorant, unorganized, they contributed the massive new saving by working for wages which were much lower than their true productivity. But the savings were made by entrepreneurs who reinvested them to expand the whole scale of the economy.
Jerry Mander, In The Absence of the Sacred 1991 ISBN 0871567393 Page 95
The main point to understand in all this is that efficiency of television in influencing and controlling the populace does not result so much from any premeditated conspiracy by the military or corporations as it does from a de
facto conspiracy of technical factors. As is the case with computers, TV technology is more efficient and more effective as an instrument of centralized control than it is for any other use.
Covey, Stephen R. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989, Page 101
Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
Peter F. Drucker, Making For The Future, 1992: ISBN 0525934146 Page 98
But the first question in increasing productivity in knowledge and service work has to be: What is the task? What do we try to accomplish? Why do it at all? The easiest—but perhaps also the greatest—increases in productivity in such work come from redefining the task, and especially from eliminating what needs not be done.
Harrington Emerson, The Twelve Principles Of Efficiency The Engineering Magazine Co., New York, 1919, Page 149
I have been asked why “co-operation” was not to be considered as one of the twelve basic principles of efficiency. Common ideals striven for by a disciplined organization, supernal common sense which forgets the little for the sake of the larger achievements, necessarily result in co-operation, even as the bees, having accumulated a full store of honey, seem to obey a queen, who “as it happened with many a chief among men, appearing to give orders, is himself obliged to obey commands, far more mysterious than those he issues to his subordinates.” The fundamentals of discipline are in fact better learned from the government of a beehive than from college courses, from armies, or from any industrial organization. No bee appears to obey any other bee, no bee seems consciously to co-operate with any other bee, yet so perfect is the “spirit of the hive” that every bee engrossed in her special task, fatalistically acts on the instinct that all other working bees become consciously indignant and make away with them. Co-operation is a matter of course, not a virtue; its absence is the crime.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited New York: 1958 5812451 Page 23
As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and more expensive—and so less available to the enterpriser of limited means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve.
Fromm, Erich. To Have or to Be. New York: 1976. ISBN 0060113790, Page 148
The aim of the marketing character is complete adaptation, so as to be desirable under all conditions of the personality market. The marketing character personalities do not even have egos (as people in the nineteenth century did) to hold onto, that belong to them, that do not change. For they constantly change their egos, according to the principle: “I am as you desire me.”
Those with the marketing character structure are without goals, except moving, doing things with the greatest efficiency; if asked why they must move so fast, why things have to be done with the greatest efficiency, they have no genuine answer, but offer rationalizations, such as, “in order to create more jobs,” or “in order to keep the company growing.” They have little interest (at least consciously) in philosophical or religious questions, such as why one lives, and why one is going in this direction rather than in another. They have their big, ever-changing egos, but none has a self, a core, a sense of identity. The “identity crisis” of modern society is actually the crisis produced by the fact that its members have become selfless instruments, whose identity rests upon their participation in the corporations (or other giant bureaucracies), as a primitive individual’s identity rested upon membership in the clan.
Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering The Corporation, New York: 1993. ISBN 0887306403, Page 48
Despite the prominent role played by information technology in business reengineering, it should by now be clear that reengineering is not the same as automation. Automation existing processes with information technology is analogous to paving cow paths. Automation simply provides more efficient ways of doing the wrong kinds of things.
Kiron, David., Leiss, William., Lears, Jackson T.J. Consumer behavior: The Consumer Society. Washington: 1997. ISBN 1559634855, Page 23
Early proponents of an expansionist market economy believed that the scarcity of goods results from limited productivity and that problems related to the elimination of scarcity represent the central concerns of economic systems. This notion of scarcity implies a relation between wants and available resources, but fails to recognize that scarcity has an experiential component that cannot be addressed or eliminated by increasing production. “If we view scarcity as the disparity between our wants and our capacities, we can understand the possibility that scarcity might increase simultaneously with rising social wealth and productivity.” For instance, in any society respect from others is not easy to obtain, so it has a scarcity value. When scarce commodities are associated with respectability, the experienced scarcity of respect is compounded. Consequently, it is possible for individuals living in a society of wealth and limitless resources to have intense experiences of scarcity. The threat of scarcity is a socially manufactured, permanently entrenched characteristic of any society that connects the satisfaction of needs to consumption of goods.
General Motors Corporation, 1995 Annual Report, Page 5
We’re also working to spread what we call the “lean” ethic throughout GM, which will enable us to become a low-cost producer. The objectives of this effort are to maximize efficiency and quality and to minimize capital investment, factory operations, labor, material, and time.
Lovins, Amory. “Institutional Inefficiency.” In Context #35, Spring 1993, Page 16
Buildings rarely are built to use energy efficiently, despite the sizeable costs that inefficient designs impose on building owners, occupants, and the utility companies that serve them.
The reasons for this massive market failure lie within the institutional framework that shapes how building are and have been financed, designed, constructed, commissioned, operated, maintained, leased, and occupied. Nearly all of the roughly two dozen actors who play a role in this process have perverse incentives that reward inefficient practice and penalize efficient practice. As a result, our buildings cost more to build and operate, are less comfortable, and use far more energy than they should. In the US alone, and considering only space cooling and air handling, the unnecessary expenditures made over the past several decades on space conditioning equipment and the electricity supply infrastructure to run it total many hundreds of billions of dollars.
Kunstler, James Howard, The Geography Of Nowhere, New York, 1993: ISBN 0671707744, Page 10
Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading—the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk-food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth.”
Codrescu, Andrei. "Viva the Tent." Architecture magazine, December 1998, Page 134
I'm for portable houses and nomadic furniture. Anything you can't fold up take with you is a blight on the environment, and an insult to one's liberty. I believe in the tent, the card table, and the trailer. The past two decades have witnessed a huge increase in nomadism. For every house development that carves up the land, a flock of houses on wheels and pontoons takes off somewhere else. Where is the great literature of the mobile home, the trailer park, the perpetual camper, the floating boat ouse?
Today, the workplace is moving into the home, thanks to decentralizing computer technology. A new definition of the house is in the works. Once an exclusively domestic domain, the house of the future will have to allow for work. There will be no escape in the work-connected house from paging devices, telephones, and surveillance equipment.
The predictions of science-fictioneers will doubtlessly come true: The house will become a work-farm prison with limited opportunities for escape.
Brandon Hendrickson Posted on December 06, 1997 at 15:50:25: Just a Little Story.
I cursed the machine standing in front of me. Beep at me, will it? Stupid flashing lights—stupid machine. I was at the local gas station pumping (what else?) gas. At least I was trying to. What I was actually doing was yelling at the new, computerized pump that was doing its best to not let me use it. So I kicked it in its little computerized stomach.
What happened is thus: Upon getting out of the car to get some gas, I notice that the usual corner stop was equipped with new, computerized, pumps. It’s great how our world is progressing. But there is a problem with this one, namely that when I lift up the handle it starts beeping at me and will not stop. I quickly insert the thin into the gas tank, and press the ‘trigger’.
No go. Normally, of course, this action would result in fuel being inserted into the car, but the machine did not seem to realize that, yes, unlike some people using this sort of machine, I was trying to get gas. Even its beeping was worse than most, in that most beeping is uniform: ‘beep beep beep beep beep’. And not only did it sound /stupid/, it started getting louder, which caused me to curse the machine. May its Visa slot rust! May its microchips burn forever in agony! Eventually, of course, I did get fuel out of the blasted device, but it took awhile, and I was left feeling a deep contempt for anything having to do with modernization.
“Drive for Efficiency” by Jim Jones, West Chester, Philadelphia Inquirer, September 28, 1997, Page E5
Last spring, my spouse, her sister and I talked about what was wrong with our jobs. Since one woman was a low-level manager at a major corporation, another was a unionized state employee and I am a college professor, we had different perspectives. Yet we agreed that none of us was happy, and most of it had to do with the attitude our co-workers and the incompetence of all but a few managers.
We learned at an early age that we were supposed to do the best possible job, with the emphasis on quality, efficiency and cooperation. However, we have all encountered co-workers who took advantage of us by slacking off while we did the lion’s share of the work. We’ve also met managers who instead of forcing people to do their share, allow the good ones to overwork in order get the job done right. The result is a lesson that failure to protect yourself in the work place leads to exploitation, overwork; disillusionment and “burnout.”
There seems to be no relationship between the kind of job we do and the compensation we receive, either as money, free time or improved working conditions. When we work more efficiently, jobs take less time, but, instead of getting more free time, we wind up with more responsibilities delegated by managers who face their own pressure to be efficient. Workers who fail to become more efficient get fired, unless they can find some other way to protect then selves. Unions offer help, as do university tenure systems, but workers with seniority relationships with their bosses, or the ability to escape the view of their managers can all shield themselves from the dictates of management.
Where does the drive for efficiency originate? Management claims it makes us stronger in an increasingly competitive marketplace. From where does the increase the competition come? From top-level management that has to obtain capital from investment markets that respond only to risk and return.
Since those markets handle cash that comes from people like me, I should have no reason to complain. I have to work harder so the company becomes stronger and the economy follows suit and my retirement fund grows.
But this arrangement fails to motivate everyone, and it fails to reward people according to the effort they supply. To paraphrase Marx, our system demands effort from each according to the fear of being laid off and rewards each
according to how much money she or he started out with.
We concluded that the best situation was self-employment. We have farmers in the family who work harder than anyone else I know, risk everything on markets and weather they can’t control, and earn about as much as a police officer in a prosperous town. We go there to help out, so we know there’s no romance in the dung of chickens or the pain of picking vegetables. But there is a direct relationship between how much they work, how much they earn, and how much free time they have. And at the end of the day, their complaints are not about the people at work.
Russell Baker, “Cheevy Pumping Gas” New York Times, OP. ED., May 17, 1997
And we call it the modern age! Hah! And we speak of miracles. Hah! And we think this is progress. Hah! Where’s the progress in pumping your own gas? Where’s the progress in being treated with automated contempt by the Cosmodemonic Telecommunications Octopus?
You can call it progress. What I call it is regress. Somebody will say, “Hey, what-taya? Against progress?” Standing here, pumping this gas, feeling the gasoline fumes sneaking into the threads of my best suit, I say, “This ain’t progress, you sap. This is regress in sheep’s clothing.”
The stench of these fumes clarifies the mind, and it thinks of all the wonderful things lost because somebody said, “You can’t stop progress.” What this somebody meant, of course, was, “You can’t stop regress.” People who say you can’t stop progress have the same chilling effect on the soul as people who say you can’t fight City Hall.
What they’re really saying is, “Pump your gas and shut up, or the Cosmodemonic Telecommunications Octopus will make us all punch another 17 numbers.” And you know why they do it to us? For our convenience. That’s right; for our convenience. They fold the only good restaurant in town and—“for your convenience”—replace it with a drive-through grease pit selling plastic hamburgers.
Air travel! That’s a joke. Travel, indeed! Call it travel when you’re sealed into a metal tube and shot over ocean, continent, capes, poles, archipelagoes and antipodes at 500 miles an hour? I call it transportation. That’s all I call it; transportation. It’s regress pure and simple. That’s what I call it: regress. Transportation is what happens to hogs being shipped to the abattoir. That’s what we’ve been reduced to by modern air travel, so don’t talk progress to me.
Travel is sailing out of New York harbor aboard the Michelangelo for a seven-day trip to Naples, the first leg of a two-year tour to Naples, the first leg of a two-year tour of Italy from Sicily to the Dolomite Alps. On shipboard there will be day after day of fine food, wonderful wine, and maybe a glamorous international jewel thief rifling your cabin while you are dancing with a beautiful contessa.
Regress has killed all that. Now it’s take the sealed tube for a quick weekend at the Rome Econolodge, or stay home. All those great old liners gone, gone, gone. Replaced by tubes. So I have now splashed gasoline on my pants. They’ll reek all day.
Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther, My Life And Work New York, 1973: ISBN 0631170618, Page 86
The cure of poverty is not in personal economy but in better production. The ‘thrift’ and ‘economy’ ideas have been overworked. The word ‘economy’ represents a fear. The great and tragic fact of waste is impressed on a mind by some circumstance, usually of a most materialistic kind. There comes a violent reaction against extravagance—the mind catches hold of the idea of ‘economy’. But it only flies from a greater to a lesser evil; it does not make the full journey from error to truth.
Economy is the rule of half-alive minds. There can no doubt that it is better than waste; neither can there by any doubt that it is not as good as use. People who pride themselves on their economy take it as a virtue. But what is more pitiable than a poor, pinched mind spending the rich days and years clutching a few bits of metal? What can be fine about paring the necessities of life to the very quick? We all know ‘economical people’ who seem to be niggardly even about the amount of air they breathe and the amount of appreciation they will allow themselves to give to anything. They shrivel - body and soul. Economy is waste: it is waste of the juices of life, the sap of living. For there are two kinds of waste—that of the prodigal who throws his substance away in riotous living, and that of the sluggard who allows his substance to rot from non-use. The rigid economizer is in danger of being classed with the sluggard.
Iacocca, Lee in Estes, Ralph W. Estes, Tyranny Of The Bottom Line, California: 1996 ISBN 1881052753, Page 170 Footnote 35 cites source as Dowie, “Two Million Firetraps on Wheels.” 46-55.
“Safety don’t sell.”
Rifkin, Jeremy. Entropy: A New World View New York: Bantam, 1980
Pay scales reflect our attitudes toward work: those who labor with their backs and their hands are almost universally at the bottom of the scale; White collar executives who spend their worktime behind desks are at the top.
Thomas Moore. The Care of the Soul—A guide for cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life New York: Harper Collins, 1992 -- Page 178
I have found in my practice over the years that the conditions of work have at least as much to do with disturbances of soul as marriage and family. Yet is tempting simply to make adjustments in response to problems at work without recognizing the deep issues involved. Certainly we allow the workplace to be dominated by function and efficiency, thereby leaving us open to the complaints of neglected soul. We could benefit psychologically from a heightened consciousness about the poetry of work—its style, tools, timing, and environment.
This concept of efficiency implies that more is better, insofar as the “more” consists of items that people want to buy. In relying on the verdicts of consumers as indication of what they want, I, like other economists, accept people’s choices as reasonably rational expressions of what makes them better off. To be sure, by a different set of criteria, it is appropriate to ask skeptically whether people are made better off (and thus whether society really becomes more efficient) through the production of more whiskey, more cigarettes, and more big cars. That inquiry raises several intriguing further questions. Why do people want the things they buy? How are their choices influenced by education, advertising, and the like? Are there criteria by which welfare can be appraised that are superior to the observation of the choices people make?
Arthur M. Okun, Equality and Equity: The Big Tradeoff Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1975 –
Page 2
This concept of efficiency implies that more is better, insofar as the “more” consists of items that people want to buy. In relying on the verdicts of consumers as indication of what they want, I, like other economists, accept people’s choices as reasonably rational expressions of what makes them better off. To be sure, by a different set of criteria, it is appropriate to ask skeptically whether people are made better off (and thus whether society really becomes more efficient) through the production of more whiskey, more cigarettes, and more big cars. That inquiry raises several intriguing further questions. Why do people want the things they buy? How are their choices influenced by education, advertising, and the like? Are there criteria by which welfare can be appraised that are superior to the observation of the choices people make?
Page 6
Features of Rights
An obvious feature of rights—in sharp contrast with economic assets—is that they are acquired and exercised without any monetary charge. Because citizens do not normally have to pay a price for using their rights, they lack the usual incentive to economize on exercising them....
Second, because rights are universally distributed, they do not invoke the economist’s principle of comparative advantage that tells people to specialize in the things they do particularly well. Everybody can get into the act, including some who are not talented actors....
A third characteristic of rights is that they are not distributed as incentives, or as rewards or penalties. Unlike the dollar prizes of the marketplace or the nonpecuniary honors and awards elsewhere, extra rights and duties are not used to channel behavior into socially constructive pursuits....
Fourth, the distribution of rights stresses equality even at the expense of equity and freedom. When people differ in capabilities, interests and preferences, identical treatment is not equitable treatment, at least by some standards.
That most important principle—that rights cannot be bought or sold—is the final characteristic on my list. The owner may not trade a right away to another individual either for extra helpings of other rights or for money or goods.
Page 10
Why then does society establish these inefficient rights? The justifications for rights take three routes—libertarian, pluralistic, and humanistic.
Liberty
To the advocate of laissez-faire, many rights protect the individual against he encroachment of the state, and thus convey benefits that far outweigh any cost of economic inefficiency....
The traditional rationale for public interference with market exchange and for the public provision of services rests on so-called “externalities,” which involve the interests of third parties. Environmental regulations are necessary because the pollution of the air and the water by one individual harms innocent bystanders.
Pluralism
Rights can then be viewed as a protection against the market domination that would arise if everything could be bought on sold for money. Everyone but an economist knows without asking why money shouldn’t buy some things.... Society refuses to turn itself into a giant vending machine that delivers anything and everything for the proper number of coins.
Humanism
These rights that are obtained without a quid pro quo recognize the worth of every citizen in the society. They go along with membership in the club. They then become the hallmarks of affiliation, a part of human dignity, and take on added significance for that reason. Because they are entitlements and not handouts, people can accept them freely without feeling like freeloaders.
Page 19
Rights set floors under the consumption of the various items identified as essential. They thus preserve some incentives for economizing, and leave considerable scope for the marketplace in determining the production and distribution of food, health care, housing and the like, for the majority of the citizens who wish to, and are able to, spend more than the basic minimum that is guaranteed to all.
Page 61
Any realistic version of American socialism that I can visualize would not encroach dangerously on the rights that are precious to me. But precisely because it would operate within the constraints of preserving these rights, the collectivized systems would, in my judgment, achieve only a small improvement in equality at the expense of a significant worsening of efficiency….As in the case of public power, a limited government role in a predominantly private industry can generate benefits the flow in both directions. The public company is constrained and tested by the record of the private companies, while the private ones are obliged to measure up to the yardstick established by the public activity.
Jorge, Antonia. Competition, Cooperation, Efficiency, and Social Organization. New Jersey: 1978. ISBN 0838620264
Page 14
Economic optimization in the abstract is, to say the least, a not very useful concept. In any case, even to the extent that intertemporal and interspatial comparisons could be established, it can be demonstrated that there is no single institutional, organizational, or motivational path to attain optimization. The essence of productivity and efficiency can be incorporated into differing social arrangements. The essential thing, though, is man’s total development. Economic systems must serve as a tool to that end and should not be viewed as ultimate realities in themselves. Economic efficiency must be blended with other variables necessary to human growth in a composite index whose value we should continually seek to maximize.
Page 25
This holds true, of course, even assuming that the trusts or combines that would result from the agglomeration of firms in each industry would enjoy perfect freedom. Of course, if they are not going to engage in competition for economic resources against one another, or grow lax in the absence of internal prodding for efficiency, or if buyers (consumers and producers) will not try to maximize, there is no sense in which we can speak of a competitive (efficient) price system. On the other hand, dealing with questions of economic efficiency would be much diminished in such a society. Seeking efficiency would tend to take place in a physical-technological sense rather than in what would tend to be the alien context of purely economic considerations. Competition with is necessary to make for economic efficiency and to facilitate growth in resource productivity.
Page 56
When we observe modern technology mixed with a “backward” human factor in an underdeveloped country, we know we must “modernize” the latter if we are to have a higher degree of economic efficiency. Unfortunately, our present knowledge is not sufficient to determine what efficiency values may be attached either to the performance of labor under various organizational alternatives or to the managerial and organizational forms that would result from the presence of different “spirits” in the human beings involved.
Mishan, Ezra J. Technology and Growth. New York: Praeger 1969 or Beekman Pub ISBN: 0846411040
Page xix
For those who, from habit as much as conviction, hanker after these things, who are impatient to hustle us into the future, painful though it may be, are not, on an alternative use of language, facing the twentieth century at all. They are merely trimming their sails to the winds of fashion.
Page 130
Living in a world saturated with advertisements may well make a man cynical enough to resist the most persuasive selling technique. But though he successfully ignores the message of each and every advertisement, their cumulative effect over time in teasing his senses and tapping repeatedly at his greeds, his vanity, his lusts and ambitions, can hardly leave his character unaffected. Again, by drawing his attention daily to the mundane and material, by hinting continually that the big prizes in life are the things that only money can buy, the influences of advertising and popular journalism conspire to leave a man restless and discontented with his lot. These influences,
moreover, are rapidly producing a society in which standards of taste and of decorum are in a continuous state of obsolescence, leaving fashion alone as the arbiter of moral behaviour.
Costanza, Robert, et al. An Introduction to Ecological Economics. Florida: 1997. ISBN 1884015727
Those configurations that maximize power, not efficiency, will be at a selective advantage. Entropy dissipation is required for the survival of living systems and there are limits to the efficiency at which this can go on in dynamic adaptive systems. These efficiency limits are at a much lower levels than those theoretically possible at reversible (i.e., infinitely slow) rates. For example, real power plants operate much closer to the maximum power efficiency than to the maximum possible efficiency.
Lane, Robert E. The Market Experience. Cambridge University Press New York: 1991. ISBN 052140391X
Page 13
Giving managers and owners a stake in reducing costs in order to widen profit margins is a central advantage for market economies. This familiar feature of the market creates an efficiency norm that has other, sometimes less widely appreciated effects (Chapter 16). When the efficiency norm overrides other considerations in a consumer-driven economy, it sacrifices designing work to meet the needs and desires of workers; it lends credibility to government reluctance to redistribute income; it limits the force of ethical considerations; it uproots community life; it undermines ecological reparations. Sometimes called "the profit motive," the efficiency norm is wider and deeper than that suggests; it is a system of value priorities and causal explanations. And it greatly modifies the market experience.
Page 16
Market economies do not require private ownership of the means of production, but they inevitably place consumer welfare over worker welfare, derive their emphasis on efficiency from the interest in profits of managers and owners, emphasize exchange that undermines the value of goods that cannot be exchanged, provide goods only contingent on sacrifice, allocate resources by the same acts that reward the owners of these resources. But the market itself is a collective good governed by the same principles that govern all collective goods.
Page 20
Economic growth is primarily a consequence of the improved quality of human resources and increased knowledge. The idea that the reliance on knowledge and that "knowledge is our most powerful engine of production" promises a continued high value assigned to the human mind.
The consequences are enormous. As we shall see, two major feedback cycles are set in motion: Economic growth is a major source of cognitive development, which in turn, is a source of economic growth (Chapter 7); and economic growth has (contrary to recent argument by Easterlin and others) a major impact on subjective well-being or happiness, which also has effects on various facets of behavior that increases productivity and which, in turn, increases the sense of well-being.
Page 35
We live in social systems where the systemic effects are reflexive. For example, the market's efficiency effects on personality in turn affect the market's efficiency. For this reason those market critics who desire to alter one relationship must think of the second-order effects of that alteration on the relationship criticized and on the values that the criticism is designed to advance. The unintended consequences of any one policy, whether it is the current policy or a proposed reform, are substantial and often self-defeating.
Page 314
Market constraints on behavior are not self-enforcing; they require the kind of cultural support that makes the principles of the market appear both rational and moral. This support, which might once have been served by the Protestant ethic, is now the belief that efficiency, doing more with less effort and fewer resources, is not only a source of greater wealth (for someone) but also a duty or even a moral command for everyone. Because of its effect on economic growth and social wealth, the efficiency norm has long-term benefits for workplace learning; in the short run, it is likely to inhibit provision for this kind of learning.
Page 316
But all behavior maximizes something; for most individuals (but not firms) the single maximand of material gain sacrifices the very thing it is intended to maximize, life satisfaction. In this respect, the assumption of a single maximand gives only the illusion of efficiency in economic life, and not the substance -- unless consumers are thought to be soldiers in the service of the market or priests in a society of consumers. The efficiency norm that takes as its premise the maximization of profit does not serve efficient pursuit of happiness.
If economic efficiency does not necessarily imply engineering efficiency, neither engineering nor economic efficiency necessarily implies social efficiency, that is, the promotion of goals in order of their aggregated preferences. In fact, economic efficiency implies social inefficiency whenever it interferes with optimization of other social goals with higher priority. One example of the way the efficiency norm may inhibit other social goals is the tendency for benign qualities of work to reflect back on work in ways that seem to run counter to the efficiency norm. Kohn and Schooler identified a group whose members use leisure in intellectually demanding ways (reading, active pursuit of an avocation); these authors then searched for indications of the causes and consequences at work of such more challenging uses of leisure. They found a very modest tendency for these more challenging kinds of leisure to be causally related to the increase in substantive complexity of work performed, the chances of becoming an owner, and specially of self-direction at work. But the most significant relation to work of a pattern of more challenging leisure is not causal but consequential: It tends to reduce the hours of work performed. Leisure activities that represent a more worthwhile pattern of living are not only separate from but in opposition to facets of work that are economically and humanly productive.
Page 334
Driven by the profit maximand and reinforced by competition, the firms in a market economy seek to increase their efficiency; they favor the customers who provide them with revenue and disfavor workers whose wages represent costs. Efficiency in other institutions has many sources other than profit maximands and competition, but these are not available in a system with a profit maximand.
Competition as alternatives among firms has positive effect on individuals in the marketplace but is the source of the inability of competing firms to yield economically "inefficient" benefits to their employees. Competitiveness as a trait impedes fruitful learning, but is probably not more encouraged by a market economy than many other modern institutions. This is partly because it is associated more with individual failure than with success, that is, competitiveness (but not assertion and dreams of empire -- Schumpeter) is not rewarded by the market.
The division of labor has two manifestations: (1) As detail work, it impdes learning as well as work enjoyment; it is encouraged by the efficiency norm, but is dependent more on technology than market forces other than the efficiency norm itself. (2) As specialization, the division of labor has almost opposite effects. For a growing number of workers, specialization increases their self-esteem, incentives to learn, and sense of competence and power, but for those without specialities in a world of specialists, it is a human disaster.
Page 476
The claim that the market is a study of "the best ways of satisfying human wants" must meet certain arguments about wanting and criteria for the character of the wants, and must further show that the market is a useful instrument for this purpose. My judgment is that the market is useful in this respect, but that usefulness is much more limited than the claim.
Wanting is not necessarily a pain, hence the relief of wanting is not sufficient for life satisfaction. Reduction of wants satisfies many hedonic purposes but is disallowed by the market culture. The ordering of wants requires attention to costs, but people tend to slight this aspect of ordering. Because appetites are not related to having, but rather to wanting, wealth is no insurance against urgent wants.
Page 501
Although most of the pains of this world are beyond the market's capacity to relieve, the pains incurred by the market, especially insecurity, are integral to market processes and not easily relieved. Market pleasures, on the other hand, are abundant, stemming partly from the market's capacity to enlarge choices; they include a capacity to cater to individualized wants, a matching of personal rhythms, an invitation to active engagement in life. But the main pleasures are not the want satisfactions of the consumer market but the opportunities for the achievement and earning in the labor market.
Page 546
New evidence shows that economic growth does increase a sense of well-being in a national community but being richer than others in any society does not, or at least not nearly as much as the ideology and premises of the market would suggest. Money does not buy happiness for individuals because it does not buy the things that make most people happiest, a happy family life, friends, enjoyment of work, and a sense of accomplishment therein. But also, as we saw in the earlier discussion of the capacity of markets to influence pain and pleasure, people's own constitutional dispositions and their abilities to cope with misfortune alter the effects of money stimuli. As it happens, too, many of the ordinary pleasures of life are cheap; perhaps for this reason security of income is often hedonically more important than amount of income. Even in an amoral market economy, priority of equity values sometimes displaces material values.
Recent changes in income, on the other hand, do greatly affect well-being, partly because adaptation has not yet set in and because recurring recessions are short enough to escape the adaptation process. These recessions, therefore, inflict great pain on many members of a population. A sharp downturn has major hedonic effects, not least because losses are more important than gains, thus making the increased income of the postwar period less hedonically influential. Sharp changes in income incur the trauma associated with major "life events."
Walter E. Williams, THE ARGUMENT FOR FREE MARKETS: MORALITY VS. EFFICIENCY The Cato Journal, Vol. 15 No. 2-3
All too often defenders of free-market capitalism base their defense on the demonstration that capitalism is more efficient in terms of resource allocation and, hence, leads to a larger bundle of goods than socialism and other forms of statism. However, as Milton Friedman frequently points out, economic efficiency and greater wealth should be promoted as simply a side-benefit of free markets. The intellectual defense of free-market capitalism should focus on its moral superiority. In other words, even if free enterprise were not more efficient than other forms of human organization, it is morally superior because it is rooted in voluntary relationships rather than force and coercion, and it respects the sanctity of the individual.
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Trowbridge, William P. “The Economy of Single-Acting Expansion Engines.” Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 3 (1882):254-261. cited in Knoedler, Janet T., “Veblen and technical efficiency.” Journal of Economic Issues, Dec97, Vol. 31 Issue 4, p1012, 16p
There cannot be, from the nature of finance and pure mechanics, any exact mechanical relation between abstract mechanical laws and financial operations. The former are invariable and immutable, the latter dependent upon bargain and sale.
SELF-ANALYSIS
by DAVID IGNATOW
I am not writing because I feel as though
I am standing in my grave, looking out
upon the poetic excitement among the poets,
the businessmen stashing it away,
the lovers exuberant, the executives fierce
in their vision of efficiency. Each
has life by the hair.
Yet each will stand dumb, the poetry of their lives
will have come to a standstill. It will not occur
to them that they have carried the burden
of their charge to its limits, the poem taking over
and writing itself on their faces
as puzzlement and anguish. The poem will have become
the ruler of their lives to shape them
as it seems fit, as objects in the universe
of charged particles. They will end their lives
standing in an open grave and looking about them
at the crowds poetically mad with themselves,
in actions fit to their desires and singing.
We will hear their singing of money, of power,
of love, of success, and we will see it wind down
to their puzzlement and frustration and disbelief,
victims of their dreams.
Corporations Need Treatment Documentary Argues Published on Tuesday, January 20, 2004 by the Inter Press Service <http://www.ips.org>, by Stephen Leahy
TORONTO - Corporations are not only the most powerful institutions in the world, they are also psychopathic, a new Canadian documentary on globalization elegantly argues. While the corporation has the rights and responsibilities of “a legal person”, its owners and shareholders are not liable for its actions. Moreover, the film explains, a corporation’s directors are legally required to do what is best for the company, regardless of the harm created. What kind of person would a corporation be” A clinical psychopath, answers the documentary, which is now playing in four Canadian theatres.
“Everything we do in the world is touched by corporations in some way,” says ‘The Corporation <http://www.thecorporation.tv/>’ writer Joel Bakan. Six years ago he was researching a book on the subject and teamed up with documentary makers Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, and then set out to drum up enough money to make the film and to do more than 40 interviews.
“Corporations are the most dominant institutions on the planet today. We thought it was worth taking a close look at what that means,” Bakan told IPS. In law, today’s corporations are treated like a person: they can buy and sell property, have the right to free expression and most other rights that individuals have. This legal creativity came as a result of U.S. businesses using the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—designed to protect blacks in the U.S. South after the Civil War—to proclaim that corporations should be treated as “persons”.
The filmmakers show four examples of corporations at work—including garment sweatshops in Honduras and Indonesia—to demonstrate that this “legal person” is inherently amoral, callous and deceitful. The corporation, the film points out, ignores any social and legal standards to get its way, and does not suffer from guilt while mimicking the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism.
A person with those character traits would be categorized as a psychopath, based on diagnostic criteria from the World Health Organization (WHO), points out the film. Unlike ‘Bowling for Columbine’—to which it has been compared—‘The Corporation <http://www.thecorporation.tv/>’ does not follow a shambling yet crusading interviewer (Michael Moore) into corporate head offices to ask tough questions.
Instead the filmmakers use simple but beautifully lit head and shoulder shots of its subjects against a black background. The interviewer is never seen or heard; the corporate chiefs, professors and activists speak directly to the viewer. The technique is so compelling that not listening or turning away would seem impolite. The interviews are interspersed with archival footage from many sources, including scenes from sweatshops and news conferences. It also includes some ironic and darkly humorous excerpts from corporate ad campaigns and training films from the 1940s and ‘50s.
But the film is not a rant. It gives ample time to corporate chief executive officers (CEOs) and representatives of right-wing organizations, like Canada’s Fraser Institute. Fraser’s Michael Walker tells viewers that hungry people in the developing world are better off when a sweatshop pays them 10 cents an hour to make brand name goods that sell for hundreds of dollars. And it is just good business sense that a corporation moves to seek out more hungry people when its workers demand higher wages and better working conditions, Walker argues.
Many others are less ruthless. Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, former chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, is honestly concerned about protecting the environment. Under his guidance, Shell adopted many green initiatives and a commitment to developing renewable energy.
At the same time, Ken Saro Wiwa and eight other activists were hung in Nigeria for protesting Shell Oil’s pollution of the Niger Delta. Social critic and linguist Noam Chomsky—the subject of Achbar’s 1992 award-winning ‘Manufacturing Consent’—carefully points out that people who work for corporations, and even those who run them, are often very nice people.
The same could have been said about many slave owners, he observes. The institution—not the people—is the problem, Chomsky argues. Eminent economist Milton Friedman sums up the role of the corporation succinctly: it creates jobs and wealth but is inherently incapable of dealing with the social consequences of its actions.
‘The Corporation’ documents a bewildering array of these consequences— including the deaths of citizens who protest corporate ownership of their water in Cochabamba, Bolivia—that demonstrate the extent and power of today’s corporations.
It looks at the often-cozy relationships between corporations and fascist regimes, such as that of IBM and Nazi leader Adolph Hitler. It demonstrates the power of advertising to create desires for luxury items, as well as how corporations can suppress information. The documentary shows agribusiness corporation Monsanto successfully preventing the news media from airing a story about the potential health hazards of a genetically engineered drug given to many U.S. diary cows.
‘The Corporation’ also tells a number of success stories, including activists’ successful fight to overturn corporate patents on the neem tree and basmati rice. Bolivia’s Oscar Olivera describes how citizens of Cochabamba city re-took control of their water. The lesson, he explains, is the people’s capacity for “reflection, rage and rebellion” as an effective counter to corporate globalization
That is one of the film’s messages, says Bakan. “We want people to understand that they can change things.” “Everyone keeps thanking us for making the film,” says Mark Achbar, from the Sundance festival of independent films in Utah state. “People are fed up with being talked down to and enjoy being intellectually engaged,” he adds, trying to explain the documentary’s popularity and several international festival awards.
Despite its current limited distribution in Canada, ‘The Corporation’ has been sold as a three-part, one-hour TV series to international markets, and Achbar is hoping it will be translated into Spanish. Of course, there will not be a multi-million marketing campaign. The number of people who will see it will depend on those who have, spreading the word. That is just one way to take back the power that corporations have usurped.
Federal Workers Score a Victory - Study Says They Outperform Private Contractors in 89% of Cases by Christopher Lee Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, May 26, 2004; Page A25
Federal civil servants proved they could do their work better and more cheaply than private contractors nearly 90 percent of the time in job competitions last year, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
An OMB report released yesterday found that such competitions, the cornerstone of President Bush’s “competitive sourcing” initiative, cost federal agencies $88 million in fiscal 2003. But they are projected to bring savings of $1.1 billion in reduced personnel costs and overhead during the next five years, the report said.
Clay Johnson III, OMB’s deputy director for management, said the report confirms Bush’s belief that requiring federal employees to compete for their jobs promotes government efficiency, even when the work stays in-house. Congress this year required agencies to report annually on competitive sourcing efforts amid concerns that the initiative was taking money away from programs.
“The real savings comes because of competition, because of the challenge of finding the most effective way of doing it,” Johnson said in an interview. “ . . . You ought to always be looking for the most efficient
and effective way to do something.”
Federal employee union leaders dismissed claims of savings as inaccurate and unrealistic. They renewed their criticism of the Bush initiative as an unproductive effort that wastes resources, scares employees and rewards contractors for supporting the administration. “Anytime there is anything close to a fair competition, we do well,” said John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union. Gage also said there should be an independent review of projected savings.
Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, called such projections “fiction.” That’s because agencies, at the direction of OMB, do not include the costs of diverting workers from their regular duties to work on preparing the in-house bid, she said. Costs incurred before the announcement of a competition, such as assessing workloads and evaluating how offices could be reorganized, also are not counted.
Also, many in-house teams win only by agreeing to trim the workforce, limiting services, Kelley said.
“After a public-private competition for federal work, there often simply aren’t enough agency employees left to provide the service at the level the public wants, needs and expects,” she said in a statement.
Contractor groups also objected to the report, saying the high win rate by federal employees raises concerns that the competitions were not fair. Several earlier government studies found that federal workers typically win public-private competitions about 60 percent of the time. Stan Z. Soloway, president of the Professional Services Council, said savings would be even greater with “real competition.”
“When you have a 90 percent rate for either side, you have a process that’s clearly out of balance,” Soloway said. “In the private sector there is tremendous concern about the credibility of the process and the
program, since very little real competition seems to be taking place.”
Chris Jahn, president of Contract Services Association of America, said, “The deck is being stacked against private companies.” “At some point, if these competitions continue to be drastically one-sided, the private sector will stop playing,” Jahn said in a statement. “The taxpayer will be the loser in the long run.”
Of 17,595 federal jobs studied in competitions last year, 15,660 jobs, or 89 percent, were found to be best-performed by federal civil servants, the OMB report said. Agencies determined that the work done by
1,935 federal employees could be handled more efficiently by private contractors. Moreover, agencies transferred work done by 4,309 more federal employees to the private sector without even conducting competitions. Such “direct conversions” are being discouraged and phased out, Johnson said, and were not included in computing the 89 percent win figure for federal employees.
Johnson noted that employees do not automatically lose their jobs when work is moved to the private sector. Some are reassigned within agencies, while others may be offered jobs with contractors and some may be offered buyouts.
“This is not anti-employee,” Johnson said of the initiative. The experience of agencies varied widely, according to the report. The Defense Department, the government’s largest, completed competitions
involving more than 9,200 positions last year, with 81 percent of the jobs staying in-house. Meanwhile, no competitions were completed at such agencies as the Department of Labor, the Department of Homeland Security, the Smithsonian and OMB.
Several agencies that ran job competitions reported a net loss of money, including the Agriculture Department ($3.6 million), the Social Security Administration ($78,000) and the Environmental Protection Agency ($7,100).
Johnson said such deficits are less likely to happen as agencies gain experience with the process. “We now have a base of information to continue to discuss this with Congress and with the agencies,” he said, “and a base of best practices and worst practices and real solid experience—as opposed to anecdotes to build upon to get even better about it as we go forward. . . .It’s a very positive sign for the taxpayers and it's a very positive sign for what the federal employees are capable of doing.
It Didn’t Succeed, So Iwate Prefecture Decided to Give Up Unprosperous Japanese State, Egged On by Its Governor, Goes Slow and Likes It By SEBASTIAN MOFFETT Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL June 30, 2004; Page A1
MORIOKA, Japan—Nothing was going right for the residents of northern Iwate prefecture. Try as they might, the people of Iwate seemed stuck in a poor backwater, with factories closing, shaky state finances and few prospects. So, three years ago, Gov. Hiroya Masuda sent out a bold new message: Just give up. “We don’t make an effort in Iwate,” Mr. Masuda declared in a nationwide ad campaign that has run annually since 2001. Iwate should build traditional wooden houses rather than modern buildings, he said. Instead of striving like the big cities for economic growth, people should take pride in their forests.
“In Tokyo, people are chased by speed, and life consists of working, eating and sleeping,” says the 52-year-old Mr. Masuda, who has local government employees print the we-don’t make-an-effort slogan on their business cards.“Here, I want people to go home early in the evening, take a walk with their family, and talk to the neighbors.”
The wacky ads have been a hit. They boosted Mr. Masuda’s standing in Iwate, helping him get elected for a third time last year, with 88% of votes cast. They also struck a chord with Japanese nationwide. Opposing effort in Japan is as bizarre as disparaging freedom in America. But since their economy slowed in the 1990s, many Japanese have started to question whether their hard work was really worth it.
In the past, even average Japanese workers who devoted their lives to a corporation could prosper. “If you graduated from college and worked solidly, you would reach an annual salary of ¥10 million,” about $90,000, says economist Takuro Morinaga, author of a shelf of downshifting bestsellers with titles such as “It’s Cool to Be Poor.” But now that not everyone gets rich, “They think, why should they work themselves to death for their company?” he says.
The same logic applies to regional economies. Poorer areas used to believe they could catch up with Tokyo living standards, and the central government helped with generous handouts. But this aid has been slashed, and while the urban economies are taking off again, many provinces remain stalled. Iwate people earn less than 60% of what people in Tokyo do, and the prefecture has debts of about $9,000 per citizen.
Far from being derided, the four annual ad campaigns attracted a total of 23,816 overwhelmingly favorable e-mails—mainly from women tired of trying to cope with the strain of work and family. “Iwate is great for
daring to renounce effort,” wrote one 42-year-old woman. “This really takes a weight off my shoulders.”
Actually, the most enthusiastic anti-effort people are former city-dwellers who have rushed to Iwate to lead the slow life—people like the governor himself who used to work for the national government in Tokyo.
Tetsuya Watanabe, a former publishing company employee, now grows flowers and vegetables on a picturesque 2.5-acre farm surrounded by mountains, woods and rice paddies. Mr. Watanabe, a philosophy graduate, says “no effort” means living a more fulfilling life, closer to nature and away from the economic pressures of the city. “We don’t make an effort in a normal way, but we’re very busy,” says the 41-year-old over a lunch of fish, rice and home-grown vegetables. “It’s just not the kind of busyness where you feel stressed.
Tokyo native Nobuo Yoshinari is spreading the no-effort message to the younger generation. He used to work so hard for an event-promotion company that his wife complained he talked only about business. A few years ago, he quit and moved to Iwate.
Mr. Yoshinari is also building a nature retreat deep in the Iwate mountains. Urban Japanese use high-tech electronic toilets, and throw out perfectly good TV sets. At the “Forest and Wind School,” toilet users
sprinkle wood shavings over waste, which is then applied to the school’s vegetable patch or fermented to produce “biogas,” fuel for the center’s cafe.
Such projects have turned Iwate into a mecca for Japan’s nascent slow-life movement. Small towns are promoting green tourism, where urban visitors come to work on a farm, search the mountains for wild vegetables, and make traditional paper. Iwate’s standout industrial complex? Japan’s biggest wind farm.
Traditionalists think this has all gone too far. Toshio Sasaki, a 73-year-old local assemblyman who used to run a fishing business, says he has been striving to drag local living standards closer to those of Tokyo. Mr. Sasaki says it is crazy to waste nearly $400,000 each year on ads that make the prefecture appear lazy. He says Iwate, with its harsh winters, rugged mountains and struggling fishing villages, was built on effort—and needs plenty more in the future. Protesting the no-effort campaign in November 2002, he told the Iwate Prefecture Assembly: “Our elders were like oxen, who said nothing but made an effort.”
What really bugs him is urbanites who patronize the region as a quaint backwater. “One woman wrote the prefecture to say she was trying hard to raise her children and wanted Iwate’s nature to be preserved so she could eventually come here to relax. I thought, ‘What about us in Iwate? Are we supposed just to remain backward for the sake of these people from Tokyo?’ “
The counterattack widened in June when Iwate management consultant Ken Miya gave a speech at a conference in Morioka, the prefecture capital, titled, “Let’s Make an Effort, Iwate!” His small-business clients would collapse if they didn’t make an effort, he told 100 local officials and businessmen. He wanted Mr. Masuda to make an effort to pay off Iwate’s public debt, which recently triggered a 4% pay cut for public employees. But instead, “the governor is sweating and making an effort to explain the no-effort declaration,” he said. “Hasn’t he got anything better to do?”
But many locals back Mr. Masuda. Hiroko Fujisawa, a 34-year-old baker, says that people were long used to the slow life in Iwate but the governor helped them see this as good. “Masuda gives us hope for the future,” she says.
Mr. Masuda says that instead of just goofing off, the “no effort” is about rethinking values. He thinks the no-effort campaign has given locals confidence in the things they have—pleasant scenery, traditional pottery and natural foods—so they focus less on the things they lack. “There is more pride in the region and its culture and history,” he says. “Young people’s thinking will change, and they will stop yearning for Tokyo.”
As for going slow, Gov. Masuda doesn’t always heed his own advice. He gets up at 6 a.m. and starts work at 7:30. He works in the prefecture office until 6 or 7 in the evening. He also works Saturdays and Sundays, and says: “I don’t have so much free time.” Write to: Sebastian Moffett sebastian.moffett@wsj.com
WHAT AILS US by James Surowiecki on THE FINANCAIL PAGE, The New Yorker, July 7, 2003 -- Page 27
Forgive American consumers if they feel a bit perplexed. Policy makers and pundits have been warning them about the prospect of deflation (a prolonged and widespread decline in prices), but there's no sign of any decline in many of the prices that people pay every day. Car insurance premiums jumped more than nine per cent last year. Health-insurance costs are soaring, to say nothing of the cost of a haircut. Cable-TV prices have risen sixteen per cent since 2000. And then there's college: tuitions at private colleges have jumped 5.6 per cent annually over the past three years, according to the College Board, and public colleges are even worse. In times like these, it's hard to get worked up about deflation. Why the divergence? It may have something to do with Mozart. When Mozart composed his String Quintet in G Minor (K. 516), in 1787, you needed five people to perform it-two violinists, two violists, and a cellist. Today, you still need five people, and, unless they play really fast, they take about as long to perform it as musicians did two centuries ago. So much for progress.
An economist would say that the productivity of classical musicians has not improved over time, and in this regard the musicians aren't alone. In a number of industries, workers produce about as much per hour as they did a decade or two ago. The average college professor can't grade papers or give lectures any faster today than he did in the early nineties. It takes a waiter just as long to serve a meal, and a car-repair guy just as long to fix a radiator hose.
The rest of the American economy functions differently. In most businesses, workers are continually getting more productive and can produce a lot more per hour than they could ten or twenty years ago. In 1979, workers at G.M. needed forty-one hours to assemble a car. Today, they need just twenty-four. In the nineties, according to the consulting firm McKinsey &Company, retailers boosted r sales per hour by sixty per cent, and that was nothing compared with computer makers, whose productivity since 1995 has gone up sixty per cent each year.
Because companies arc producing more for less, they can hold down costs, and when times arc good they can raise wages without hiking prices. So, in the late nineties, as productivity rose, wages did, too, though inflation lay dormant.
Generally, productivity growth is a boon, but it creates problems for nonproductive enterprises like classical music, education, and car repair: to keep luring talent, they have to increase wages, or else people eventually migrate to businesses that pay better. Instead of becoming nurses or mechanics, they become telecom engineers or machinists. That's why teachers are getting paid a lot more than they were twenty years ago. (The average salary for an associate college professor has risen almost seventy per cent since the early eighties, and that's if you adjust for inflation.) To pay those wages, schools and hospitals have to raise prices. The result is that in industries where productivity is flat costs and prices keep going up. Economists call this phenomenon "Baumol's cost disease," after William Baumol, the N.Y.U. economist who first made the diagnosis, using the Mozart analogy, in the sixties. As anyone with kids knows, cost disease is alive and well. A recent study by the economists Jack Triplett and Barry Bosworth demonstrates that among the service businesses that have been least productive in recent years you'll find education, insurance, health care, and entertainment. These arethe ones that have seen steep price hikes.
There are really two American economies: one that's getting more productive and one that's not. In the first-the economy of Dell, Toyota, and Wal-Mart consumers have grown accustomed to paying less for more. In the second-the economy of Harvard, the Yankees, and Bob's Body Shop-they pay more for the same. The first economy has policy nakers worried about deflation. The second has consumers worried about paying their bills.
Cost disease isn't anyone's fault. (That's why it's called a disease.) It's just endemic to businesses that are labor-intensive. Colleges, for example, could do many things more efficiently, but, since their biggest expense is labor, the only way to reduce costs is either to increase the number of students each professor teaches or to outsource the work to poorly paid adjuncts. The same goes for health care: you can control drug costs and limit expensive new procedures, but, when it comes to, say, hospital care and doctor visits, the only way to improve productivity is to shrink the size of the staff and have doctors spend less time with patients (or treat several patients at once). Thus the Hobson's choice: to lower prices you have to lower quality.
Once upon a time, economists worried that cost disease would wreck the economy, as services started to eat up more and more of people's budgets. But the evidence now suggests that it can be contained. As long as the productive industries keep growing quickly enough to offset the sluggards, the economy as a whole can stay in good shape. The most significant consequence of Baumol's cost disease, in fact, may be political, rather than economic. Some of the most important services that the government provides-education, law enforcement, health care-are the hardest to make more productive. To keep providing the same quality of services, then, government has to get more expensive. People pay more in taxes and don't get more in return, which makes it look as though the public sector, at least compared with the private sector, is inept and bloated. But it could be that the government is merely stuck in inherently low-productivity growth businesses. It's not inefficient. It's just got a bad case of Baumol's.
DANIEL GROSS “KEYS TO SUCCESS AUTOMATION AND INCREASED EFFICIENCY ARE THE GOALS OF MOST MANUFACTURERS. FOR A FEW, THE OPPOSITE IS TRUE” in US Airways’ Attache, November, 2003. Pages 13-14.
STEINWAY AND SONS, the venerable piano maker celebrating its one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary this year, still makes expensive instruments the old-fashioned way-literally. Most of the methods and many of the tools used at the factory in a gritty sector of Queens, hard by the East River, date to the late nineteenth century. From the laminated wood rims to the cast-iron frames, many components closely resemble those invented in the 1870s by various members of the Steinway family, which has dominated the high-end-piano trade the way Shaquille O'Neal dominates the paint.
"While Steinway didn't invent the piano, it certainly perfected it to where its name and the word `piano' are almost synonymous," says David Liebeskind, who teaches a course at New York University's Stern School of Business using Steinway as a study.
Steinway is more than a study in survival and devotion to tradition. It also stands as proof that greater automation, standardization, and efficiency-the great desiderata of all manufacturers-isn't always better, or more profitable.
Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, born in Lower Saxony in 1797, was a first-class survivor. Before turning 20, he had toughed out a brutal winter (that took the lives of his mother and several siblings), avoided a vicious lightning strike (that killed his father and three brothers), and kept his head down at the Battle of Waterloo (where he served as a bugler).
Steinweg ultimately settled into a comfortable trade-making organs, and eventually pianos. But famines and the turmoil wrought by the failed revolution of 1848 impelled him to cast his lot elsewhere. In 1850, Steinweg, his wife, three daughters, and five sons moved to New York City. The eldest son, Theodor, remained in Germany. In Manhattan, a center of piano manufacturing, Heinrich Steinweg Americanized his name to Henry E. Steinway, and took a job making piano soundboards for $6 per week.
In 1853, Steinway and his sons formed their own company. The first piano they made (serial number 483) was sold for the princely sum of $500. And in 1854, a Steinway won a prize at the Metropolitan Mechanics Institute Fair in Washington.
Between 1857 and the late 1890s, the Steinways took out 58 patents for innovations in piano design. The result was a bigger, better, and richer sound-ideal for the larger concert halls being built.
His son William, a marketing genius, advertised aggressively. In 1866, he worked to open Steinway Hall on 14th Street in New York. With an auditorium of 2,000 seats, it was the destination of choice until Carnegie Hall opened in 1891. Recognizing the value of prominent product endorsers, William courted royalty of the financial and political kind (Baroness de Rothschild and Queen Victoria) and, most successfully, of the musical kind. In 1871, the Steinway company sponsored a 239day 215-performance U.S. concert tour by virtuoso Anton Rubinstein, and then worked to make Steinways the pianos of choice for composers and performers the world over. The publicity and patronage created a powerful mystique. In 1890, Thomas Edison coveted a Steinway and later used one to make the first successful sound recording.
Outgrowing its quarters in Manhattan, the company bought 400 acres of farmland in Queens in 1870. There it built a lumber mill, a foundry, a factory, and a company town, Steinway Village. The site has remained the center of operations.
Under the leadership of a third generation of Steinways, the company hit its peak in the 1920s, when it produced more than 8,000 pianos annually and built a new showroom near Carnegie Hall. In the past 70 years, however, a host of economic trends (the Depression and World War II) and technological trends (radio, TV, synthesizers, the Internet) conspired against the manufacture and sale of expensive pianos. And yet Steinway has endured.
The company is no longer controlled by the Steinway family-Henry Z. Steinway, the great-grandson of the company founder, retired in the early 1970s and, with no heir apparent, sold the company to CBS in 1972. And there have been several changes of ownership in the past 30 years. In 1995, Steinway was sold to Selmer Industries. The parent company now trades under the stock symbol LVB-Beethoven's initials.
But the new owners have remained faithful to Steinway's traditions. At the factory, in a process the company's manufacturing director calls "antimanufacturing," some 450 workers make about 3,000 pianos a year much the same way they did in the 1850s. To better maintain quality, the company refuses to subcontract major work to outside workers. Most of the 12,000-odd components are lovingly and painstakingly crafted and assembled on site. And the work force-which hails from 25 different countries-learn not from manuals but from those who preceded them.
To a striking degree, in fact, Steinway's value proposition is the same as it was 1 years ago. Steinways aren't cheap - new grands cost up to $90,000. But you don't buy one unless you're as serious about your ivories as Steinway is about making them. Each piano has its own personality. "All Steinways are made the same way by the same people in the same factory, yet each is different," as James Barron put it in a lyrical New York Times series that traced the painstaking nine-month-long transformation of wood and steel into a 9-foot concert grand piano.
Steinway still relies heavily on associating its products with high-profile users. But in an era when companies shell out millions to have institutions and performers endorse products, Steinway manages to get its endorsers to pay top dollar. Under the company's longstanding All Steinway Schools, prestigious music conservatories like Juilliard and the Yale School of Music purchase only Steinways. Some 1,300 artists - from Billy Joel to Van Cliburn - perform almost exclusively on Steinways. To ensure that these musician can have access to Steinways while on the road, the company maintains piano banks in cities throughout the world. (Musicians must own a Steinway to use the service.)
Last June, as Steinway and Sons celebrated its anniversary with a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall, the company held a contest to see who owned the oldest Steinway. (The winner was No. 2162, a grand made in June 1859.) As a manufacturer in New York City, and with its devotion to its own storied history, Steinway may seem an anachronism. But going down Steinway Street isn't just a trip down memory lane. The pianos it makes are immensely profitable products-regardless of the state of the economy. The company enjoys 98 percent of the concert-grand market. And, as company president Bruce Stevens told Fortune: "We have 2 percent of all keyboard unit sales in the U.S. But we have 25 percent of the sales dollars and about 35 percent of the profits." Music to the ears of any manager.
DANIEL GR0SS writes from his home in Westport, Connecticut. For Steinway Sons piano info, company history, and factory tours, go to steinway.com on the Web.
Daniel Mcginn, "No PC Required," Newsweek, April 21, 2003.
Page E-16
But when it's time to prepare his clients' 1040s each spring, Larson turns to a different technology: a Pentel 0.5 Twist-Erase graphite pencil and an old-school Texas Instruments calculator. In the age of TurboTax, he powers through 200 or so tax returns each year by hand. Larson, 59, has looked at tax software, but he's not convinced they'd make him more efficient. By doing returns the old-fashioned way, he believes he's paying closer attention. "I feel I'm giving clients more of their money's worth," Larson says.
48-Hour Internet Outage Plunges Nation Into Productivity The Onion 10/1/2003
BOSTON—An Internet worm that disabled networks across the U.S. Monday and Tuesday temporarily thrust the nation into its most severe maelstrom of productivity since 1992.
"In all my years, I've never seen anything like this," said Price Stern Sloan system administrator Andrew Walton, whose effort to restore web service to his company's network was repeatedly hampered by employees busily working at their computers. "The local-access network is functioning, so people can transfer work projects to one another, but there's no e-mail, no eBay, no flaminglips.com. It's pretty much every office worker's worst nightmare."
According to Samuel Kessler, senior director at Symantec, which makes the popular Norton Antivirus software, the Internet "basically collapsed" Monday at 8:34 a.m. EST.
The Gibe-F worm, an e-mail-transmittable virus, initiated cascading server failures. Within an hour, Internet service to more than 90 percent of the U.S. was disabled, either by the worm or by network firewalls that initiated security protocols.
"Unlike SoBig or Blaster, this worm didn't harm individual computers; it just used them as a gate to attack the Internet at the ISP level," Kessler said. "Computer technicians at most offices couldn't do anything but sit by helplessly as people worked through stacks of filing, wrote business-related letters they'd put off for months, and sold record amounts of goods and services over the phone."
Shortly after office workers found their web, e-mail, and instant-messaging capabilities disabled, reports of torrential productivity began to reach corporate offices nationwide.
"My first thought was 'My God, this has to be some kind of mistake,'" said Prudential Insurance executive vice-president Shane Mullins of San Francisco.
"My e-mail wasn't working. Nerve.com wasn't working. I eventually found out that the company web site wasn't working, either. But by that time, my inbox was filling up like you wouldn't believe."
"My actual physical inbox," Mullins added. "It's this gray plastic thing on my desktop—the top of the desk I sit at."
With workers denied access to ESPN.com, Salon, Fark.com, and Friendster, employers struggled to keep up with the sudden increase in efficiency.
"Our office was working at roughly 95 percent efficiency," said Steven Glover, an advertising executive and creative team leader at Rae Jaynes Houser. "It's problematic to have the rate jump like that—it sets a precedent that will be impossible to maintain once the Internet comes back."
Glover said his department failed to reach 100 percent productivity only because employees stopped work every few minutes throughout the outage to see if Internet service had been restored.
"This is terrible," said Miami resident Ron Lewison, an employee at Gladstone Finance and an Amazon.com Top 500 Reviewer. "For two days, I've been denied access to the vital information I need to go about my workday. In the absence of that information, I've been forced to go about my job."
According to Labor Department statistics, companies affected by the Internet outage generated an estimated $4 to $6 billion in extra revenue.
"Losses to online retail companies will be considerable, " said Jae Miles, senior financial economist at Banc One Capital Markets in Chicago.
"Nevertheless, the outage's overall impact on the national economy will be a positive one. The losses should be easily offset by the gains to companies that depend primarily on people finishing actual work."
As of press time, many administrators had begun to apply a patch that combats the Gibe-F worm.
"Thank God, Earthlink service is back, and with it, online shopping and entertainment news," office worker Emily Jaynes said at 7 p.m. Tuesday. "I'm ready to head home now. I couldn't bear to spend another evening repainting furniture and using my pool."
Financial experts say they hope to have detailed data on the economic impact of the outage within the next 24 hours.
"When American office workers are denied access to vast, complex streams of ever-fluctuating and evolving information, they tend to get a lot done," said Nicole Dansby, a business-information analyst employed by the New York Stock Exchange. "The extended Internet outage may or may not have had something to do with the Dow's 278-point jump Tuesday. I'll have to, you know, check the web for a few hours and get back to you."
Douthwaite, Richard. Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World England: 1996. ISBN 1870098641
Page 34
In current conditions, then, selling things outside our immediate areas to earn the money to buy the goods and services we must have to survive cannot be considered the basis for a sustainable, stable local community. What we must do instead is look at the resources of our areas and see how they can be used to meet our communities' vital needs directly rather than via the conventional, indirect, produce-for-someone-else-and-buy-one's-requirements-in route.
I know we have been taught that this latter indirect route is more efficient because it takes more resources to grow bananas in Ennis, Essex or Essen than in Ecuador. My response to this is threefold. One answer is that the much-touted efficiency of the world trade system is a grotesque myth, as I will demonstrate shortly. For the moment, we only need ask ourselves how a system that condemns so many people to spend their lives in involuntary idleness and uses so many scarce resources to do the simplest things can still be regarded as efficient, particularly as we saw in the previous chapter that as some countries' output increases, their citizens are actually receiving a smaller amount of economic welfare year by year.
Secondly, even if the indirect system was more efficient, we ought to at least discuss how much inefficiency we would tolerate from the direct route in order to reduce the risk of our lives being blighted and our livelihoods disrupted by instabilities in the external world. Most of us pay premiums for house or car insurance every year, accepting the certainty of a small loss in exchange for avoiding the risk of a big one. As communities we should also be prepared to pay for insurance, in this case against economic disruption, particularly as local economies that boast a wide range of activities are not only more stable but provide much more scope for their members to find niches within which they can fulfill themselves.
Page 35
Thirdly, bananas are non-essentials, and if they were imported as a direct exchange for some non-essential we grew, the fact we relied on other people to produce them would not matter: either party to the trade would be able to terminate it whenever they wished without seriously harming the other. Our goal should be to minimize our dependence on external trade, not to phase it out altogether. Trading outside our communities should become something we can engage in if we choose, and then on our own terms, not something that is vital for our survival.
World prices must not determine what we produce. Existing levels of prices or profits cannot be allowed to determine whether or not we should make or grow something in our communities. This is because there is no connection between an item's value to our community and the price our neighbours pay for it in normal times. True, most economists and right-wing politicians believe that market prices should determine what is produced, in what quantity, by what method, and where, because it is 'uneconomic' and 'inefficient' to take other factors into consideration. But this is because they believe that the market price of something is equal to its value and because all their thinking is in terms of the industrial system. Efficiency, however, can only be measured in relation to one's objectives; and if we have objectives that those running the industrial system do not share -- such as satisfying work, stability, sustainability and fairness rather than the maximization of returns to investors' capital -- our success or failure must be measured with respect to our targets and not theirs.
From the point of view of progress towards community goals, local production for local use can be much more efficient than production for outside markets. This is because a community is interested in a much wider range of benefits than merely the profit a business makes. It is, for example, interested in the total income -- the wages, the profits, the payments for local materials -- that the business brings into or keeps in the community's area. Investors, on the other hand, are usually only concerned with the tiny fraction of a business's total income flow that ends up in their hands, an outlook that, from a community's point of view, leads to the tail waging the dog.
Page 36
Moreover, because a community needs its income for long-term tasks, such as raising children, it wants to be sure that the activity will continue for many years. Investors, on the other hand, tend to have very short time horizons and frequently give up valuable future benefits to get more immediate returns. In a 1994 survey by the Confederation of British Industry, two-thirds of the companies that responded required investment projects to pay for themselves in three years or less. What is efficient for our communities is therefore very different from what is efficient for investors in the wider world.
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In a goldmine of a book, The Market Experience, Professor Emeritus Robert Lane of Yale University describes an experiment in which students were paid to do a boring task and got more pleasure from it than a control group that was unpaid. However, when another batch of students was paid to do interesting work, they found it less rewarding than those who had done the same task for nothing. In fact the paid group doing the interesting job got even less enjoyment than those who had been happy to do the boring task unpaid because they thought it was useful. In another test, unpaid volunteers showed more commitment than paid workers; they were more likely to continue with their tasks when their supervisors left the room.
Lane quotes from a study by F. Thomas Juster that shows that, almost regardless of the nature of their work or their social class, people prefer their jobs to most of their leisure activities:
People do not work for 'nothing' but what they do work for is often not just the pay they receive ... They may work because meeting the challenges of work increases their sense of personal control, or out of a sense of duty, or because of a pressing need to achieve some high standard of excellence. [Whatever] their motives may be, people evade the market's focus on exchange, for these motives are satisfied by internal rewards that do not depend upon exchanging money for work.
In my view, the internal rewards Lane mentions are best provided by firms owned and controlled by those working in them, which see their role as serving their communities and regard work not only as a source of income but as one of the main ways people fulfil themselves. I also think that unless we can construct environments that foster such firms, cut-throat international competition will ensure that in a few years' time, highly paid jobs will be available only to a fortunate few, and the choice for many of the rest of us will b e between unemployment and a low-paid job in a large, highly pressured firm scrambling for its place in the world market, a firm to which we can rarely make an individual contribution and matter as people not at all.
Page 338
Competition forces firms to don a commercial straitjacket and to act in a very particular way. It is more effectively totalitarian than ever a Soviet central planner was able to be, which is exactly what its supporters like about it because they believe that only one way of operating a company or an economy is 'efficient'. They are happy to admit that their definition of efficiency is entirely commercial and excludes social objectives because they think that non-commercial objectives should be tackled separately once maximum profits have been made. However, as these profits are likely to be made at the expense of social objectives, the ultra-competitive, maximize-profits-first-and-then-use-some-of-them-for-social- ends-later approach is a highly inefficient way of achieving them. What our communities need is a form of economy that gives the producers within it sufficient protection from outside competition for them to meet social objectives as well as their own.
Twitchell, James B. Lead Us Into Temptation. New York: 1999. ISBN 023111518
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What sets American culture of the late twentieth century apart is not avarice, but a surfeit of machine-made things. What is clear is that most of these things in and of themselves simply do not mean enough. So we have developed very powerful ways to add meaning to goods. This is a chicken-and-egg situation, to be sure. For it is American production and marketing techniques (advertising, packaging, branding, fashion, and the like) and our eagerness to embrace them that have produced surplus. Consumption of things and their meanings is how most Western young people cope in a world that science has pretty much bled of traditional religious meanings.
Page 53
Machines do two things with amazing ease. They produce identical objects and they tend to produce them in mass quantities. As a way to work off those surpluses, as well as differentiating what are essentially interchangeable objects, capitalist had to create a new signifying system or they would glut themselves on their own overproduction. Advertising was that system.
Page 54
This interpretation is true enough. Think only of how consumer debt was merchandised until it became an accepted habit, not an abhorred practice. Think only of how shame was transformed from consuming too much to consuming too little. Think only of how the concept of shine and "new and improved" replaced the previous value of patina and heirloom. Naming something differently was often a prima facie case for renewed consumption. You never questioned whether this merited buying more, just as you supposedly never questioned if Jumbo was larger than Giant, or exactly what Premium or Super meant. Creating a massive consumer class with semantic aphasia was the necessary accomplishment of supply-side capitalism.
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It would be nice to think that greater material comforts will release us from racism, sexism, and ethnocentricism, and that the apocalypse will come as it did at the end of romanticism in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, leaving us "Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed... Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless... Pinnacled dim in the intense inane."
But it is more likely that the globalization of capitalism will result in the banalities of an ever-increasing, worldwide consumerist culture. Recall that Athens ceased to be a world power around 400 B.C., yet for the next three hundred years Greek culture was the culture of the world. The Age of European Exposition ended in the mid-twentieth century; the Age of American Markets -- Yankee imperialism -- is just starting to gather force. The French don't stand a chance. The Middle East is collapsing under the weight of dish antennas and Golden Arches. The untranscendent, repetitive, sensational, democratic, immediate, tribalizing, and unifying force of what Irving Kristol calls the American Imperium need not result in a Bronze Age of culture, however. In fact, who knows what this Pax Americana will result in? But it certainly will not produce what Shelly had in mind.
We have been in the global marketplace a short time, and it is an often scary and melancholy place. A butterfly flapping its wings in China may not cause storm clouds over Miami, but a few lines of computer code written by some kid in Palo Alto may indeed change the lives of all the inhabitants of Shanghai.
We have not been led into this world of material closeness against our better judgment. For many of us, especially when young, consumerism is our better judgment. And this is true regardless of class or culture. We have not just asked to go this way, we have demanded. Now most of the world is lining up, pushing and shoving, eager to elbow into the mall. Woe to the government or religion that say no.
Getting and spending has been the most passionate, and often the most imaginative, endeavor of modern life. We have done more than acknowledge that the good life start with the material life, as the ancients did. We have made stuff the dominant prerequisite of organized society. Things "R" Us. Consumption has become production. While this is dreary and depressing to some, as doubtless it should be, it is liberating and democratic to many more.
Peters, Tom in Anthony Sampson’s Company Man, New York: 1995 ISBN 0812926315 Page 2
Read more novels and fewer business books.
“People Who Need People Are New Hampshire People” Philadelphia Inquirer, Page A3
Score one for humans. New Hampshire officials have replaced toll-taking machines on the state’s most traveled thruway with—now get this—people. For the first time, people are working all 16 booths at the Hampton toll on I-95, the direct route from Boston to New Hampshire. They’re also being phased in at other tolls. With human toll-takers, 600 to 700 drivers an hour breeze through, compared with the machines’ average of 400. Nice to know that we as a people are making a comeback.
Brilliant, Ashleigh, From .sig Quotes November 16, 1997, Page 46
To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target.”
Inoue, Shinichi. Putting Buddhism to Work. New York: 1977. ISBN 4770020240 Pages 20-1
One Zen proverb runs: “The way to Enlightenment is easy—just avoid picking and choosing.” Picking and choosing reveals the human tendency to prefer one thing over another for oneself alone, often at the expense of other people and other living things. This tendency is a manifestation of the ego-mind. In Buddhism, release and freedom from this process is called Enlightenment.
Archetypically, we can trace this development in the human psyche from the Genesis account of Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge. In that act they discovered the distinction between their own bodies (myself) and the bodies of others (things not myself). This awareness of self exerted a great deal of power over humans and was, in a certain sense, useful for making distinctions and decisions. However, this development of the human psyche also brought with it an enormous disadvantage, for it resulted in human beings feeling cut off from the larger web of life.
Denning, Peter J. Beyond Calculation, New York: 1997. ISBN 0387949321 Page 113
The Machine-Centered View
------------------------------------ |
PEOPLE |
MACHINES |
Vauge |
Precise |
Disorganized |
Orderly |
Distractible |
Undistractible |
Emotional |
Unemotional |
Illogical |
Logical |
|
|
The Human Centered View
------------------------------------ |
PEOPLE |
MACHINES |
Creative |
Dumb |
Compliant |
Rigid |
Attentive to change |
Insensitive to change |
Resourceful |
Unimaginative |
Shuman, Michael. Going Local. New York: 1998. ISBN 0684830124, Page 199
A self-reliant community might ultimately strive to trade only with other communities committed to adhering to this global grading system. Global trade would continue, but only among partners committed to a community-centered vision of commerce. One consequence of this strategy could be the emergence of two global blocs of communities, each following different economic paradigms and each doing business with different corporations. The “neoliberal bloc” of communities might benefit from cheaper goods and higher rates of return off their investments, but also would have to endure deteriorating working conditions, environmental collapse, and community instability. The “socially responsible bloc” might wind up paying higher prices, but would enjoy a higher quality of life.
Even though the communities and corporations in the latter bloc would start out in the minority, over time—as more workers in the neoliberal bloc lost jobs and pay; as problems from pollution and unsafe products multiplied; as ecology, labor, and social-change organizations emerged to respond to these problems more and more neoliberal communities and corporations would probably begin to choose a better quality of life over obsolete notions of economic efficiency. The mere existence of an alternative bloc would give politicians and activists committed to a new economics of place a concrete goal for organizing.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society: an Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life. United States: 1990. ISBN 0803990766, Pages 199 through 203
Avoid daily routing as much as possible. Try to do as many things as possible in a different way from one day to the next.
More generally, do as many things as you can for yourself. If you must use services, frequent nonrationalized, nonfranchised establishments. For example, lubricate your own car. If you are willing or unable to do so, have it done at your local, independent gasoline station.
To really shake up the clerk at the department store, use cash rather than your credit card.
Send back to the post office all junk mail, especially that addressed to “occupant” or “resident.”
When dialing a business, always choose the “voice mail” option that permits you to speak to a real person.
Seek out restaurants that use real china and metal utensils; avoid those that use materials such as styrofoam that adversely affect the environment.
Read The New York Times rather than USA TODAY once a week. Similarly, watch PBS news once a week with its three long stories rather than the network news shows with their numerous snippets.
More generally, watch as little television as possible. If you must watch TV, choose PBS. If you must watch one of the networks, turn off the sound and avert your eyes during commercials. After all, most commercials are sponsored by enterprises that tout the virtues of rationalization.
Avoid most finger foods. If you must eat finger foods, make them homemade sandwiches and fresh fruits and vegetables.
On your next vacation, go to only one locale and get to know it and its inhabitants well.
Never enter a domed stadium or one with artificial grass; make periodic pilgrimages to Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago.
Luttwak, Edward N. Consumption, Culture, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Washington, DC: 1999. ISBN 1559635355, Pages 62-3
The great claim that is made for the flexibility of Americans and hence of the U.S. labor market -- that is, the willingness of Americans to move from place to place, to change their trade or even their profession, and to accept lower wages in order to keep working -- is, of course, its economic efficiency. Nobody pretends that the personal and social consequences of so much mobility and adaptability are positively desirable in themselves.
However, when the chain of repercussions is followed step by step, from an economic system that achieves efficiency by imposing constant structural change, to the fragmentation of family life that is thereby caused, to the resulting psychological consequences, to the consumption habits these consequences induce, and then to the effect of those habits on the economic system by way of low savings and baroque consumer preferences, it may be concluded that a more rigid but more stable economy could be even more efficient. Labor costs would be higher, but so would savings rates because less mobile, more secure employees would be more likely to plan ahead and to sustain reassuring family ties, reducing their emotionally motivated consumption expenditures. A higher savings rate would increase the supply of capital, which would in turn increase the productivity of labor, offsetting higher labor costs.
At a time when the dynamic "turbo-capitalism" of today's deregulated, globalized U.S. economy is greatly celebrated, one may recall that until the late 1970s, the U.S. economy was more rigid and much more stable. This was because a great many industries, from airlines to natural gas companies to savings and loan associations, were subject to detailed regulation and thus were stabilized, as were their labor forces. At the time, needless to say, consumption spending of all kinds absorbed a lower proportion of incomes. Thus savings rates were higher --and so was growth, for all the supposed inefficiencies of regulation. There were fewer opportunities for financial acrobats to accumulate enormous wealth (the chief executive officers of regulated airlines earned the miserable pittance of only $1 million per year), and employees at large were economically secure because stable industries meant stable jobs. Judging by the lower voluptuary spending of the period, Americans were also happier.
[Source and Author unknown]
A corporation has no soul, no mortals. It cannot feel love or pain or remorse. You cannot argue with it. A corporation is nothing but a process—an efficient way of generating revenue.
We demonize corporations for their unwavering pursuit of growth, power and wealth. Yet let’s face it: they are simply carrying out genetic orders. This is exactly what corporations were designed—by us—to do. Trying to rehabilitate a corporation, urging it to behave responsibly, is a fool’s game.
The only way to change the behavior of a corporation is to recode it; rewrite its charter; reprogram it.
In 1886, the US Supreme Court brought down a decision that changed the course of American history. In Santa Clara county vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, a dispute over a railbed route, the judge ruled that a private corporation was a “natural person” under the US constitution and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights. The judgment was one of the great legal blunders of the century. Sixty years after it was inked, Supreme court Justice William O. Douglas said of Santa Clara that it “could not be supported by history, logic or reason.” With Santa Clara we granted corporations “personhood” and the same rights and privileges as private citizens. But given their vast financial resources, corporations now had far more rights and powers than any private citizen. In a single legal stroke, the whole intent of the constitution—that all citizens have one vote and exercise an equal voice in public debates—had been undermined. In 1882, we, the people, lost control of our affairs and sowed the seeds of the Corporate State we now live in. There is only one way to regain control. We must challenge the corporate “I” in the courts, and ultimately reverse Santa Clara.
Gates, Jeffrey R. The Ownership Solution. United States of America: 1998. ISBN 0201328089
Page xx
There as a time when economic decisions were informed by conscience and made with sensitivity to the community. That was most obviously the case when village elders held sway or when close-knit communities were the rule rather than the rarity. That richly textured, multilayered, multiple-agenda decision-making has gradually been replaced by a cool financial efficiency engineered with but one goal in mind: money-denominated returns. On that score, global capitalism displays an undeniable genius for detached reckoning in its capacity to ferret out financial returns worldwide. But that process also fosters grotesque inequities and environmental travesties. By my calculation, it is demonstrably unsustainable—socially, politically, fiscally, culturally and environmentally.
Page xx1
The human element that Adam Smith saw at the heart of self design has been allowed to atrophy as return-seeking capital has been granted deference, even dominance. We are all now buffeted by a global economy in which key actors are encouraged, even mandated, to maximize financial returns in a worldwide auction of sorts in which financial values have become a substitute for the values of ethics, religion and community. At any given hour of the day, somewhere a capital market is operating. The securities traded often belong to huge, virtually stateless multinational corporations that, in turn, take their cues from the detached concerns of investment managers intent on reaping short-term financial returns. Money, not man, is fast becoming the measure of the public good. Graffiti spotted on a wall in Warsaw captures this very modern dilemma: “We wanted democracy, but we ended up with the bond market.” As we’ll see, the real enemy here is our own bad habits, epitomized by our now institutionalized indifference to the common good. The new field of struggle will be in the domain of finance because it is there that mankind has lost his place as the measure of things.
Instead, both man and his environment are being made to measure for this impersonal and all-pervasive force of his own creation.
Page 23
Let’s recap three of the four reasons why capital ownership is largely closed to outsiders. First, earnings and profits generated by a company belong to those who presently own the company. Second, assets qualify for depreciation only after those owners put the assets to use, because only then do they become subject to wear, tear and obsolescence. Third, debt is most accessible to those who are already “inside” this closed system, because only they have access to the collateral and the cash flow required to secure and service that debt.
The fourth and final source of funds i s the sale of the newly issued shares. New equity has long been a relatively insignificant source of funds. Not since the turn of the century has the sale of the new equities accounted for more than 3 to 5 percent of overall funds raised in any year. Initial public offerings of shares (IPOs) for 1991 totaled only $46 billion (692 offerings), surpassing the record $34 billion in 1993. Those new equities are purchased largely by the well-to-do or by institutional investors.
Policymakers routinely claim that capitalism is an “open” system because anyone can purchase shares. It’s a free market—anyone (i.e., anyone with money) can buy those new equities.
Expecting a broad base of wage earning to buy their way into significant ownership (i.e., from their already stretched paychecks) is what I call “Marie Antoinette Capitalism”— only instead of urging “Let them eat cake,” the modern refrain is “Let them buy shares.” Today’s closed system of finance has much the same economic effect as the enclosure movement of the eighteenth century—creating pools of people who, deprived of any realistic chance to own, find, themselves competing against each other for an ever dwindling number of well-paid jobs.
Mander, Jerry, and Edward Goldsmith. The Case Against The Global Economy. San Francisco: 1996. ISBN 0871563525, Pages 404-14
“Buy-local” campaigns help local businesses survive even when pitted against heavily subsidized corporate competitors. The campaigns not only help keep money from leaking out of the local economy but also help educate people about the hidden costs to the environment and to the community in purchasing less expensive but distantly produced products.
Another idea is the creation of local “tool lending libraries,” whereby people can share tools on a community level. By reducing the need for everyone to have their own agricultural or forestry equipment, gardening implements, or home repair tools, people can keep money within the local economy while simultaneously fostering the sense of neighborly cooperation that is a central feature of real community.
One of the most exciting grass-roots efforts is the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, in which consumers link up directly with a nearby farmer. significantly, in a country where small farmers linked to the industrial system continue to fail every year at an alarming rate, not a single CSA in the United States has failed for economic reasons. [See chapter by Daniel Imhoff]....
If the members of a local community wanted their community to cohere, to flourish, and to last, these are some of the things they would do:
1. Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?
2. Always include local nature—the land, the water, the air, the native creatures—within the membership of the community.
3. Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbors.
4. Always supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting products first to nearby cities, then to others).
5. Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of “labor saving” if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.
6. Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local products to ensure that the community does not become merely a colony of the national or global economy.
7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm and/or forest economy.
8. Strive to produce as much of the community’s own energy as possible.
9. Strive to increase earning (in whatever form) within the community for as long as possible before they are paid out.
10. Make sure that money paid into the local economy circulates within the community and decrease expenditures outside the community.
11.Make the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its properties, keeping itself clean (without dirtying some other place), caring for its old people, and teaching its children.
12. See that the old and the young take care of one another. The young must learn from the old, not necessarily and not always in school. There must be no institutionalized childcare and no homes for the aged. The community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.
13. Account for costs now conventionally hidden or externalized. Whenever possible, these must be debited against monetary income.
14. Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programs, systems of barter, and the like.
15. Always be aware of the economic value of neighborhood, which leaves people to face their calamities alone.
16. A rural community should always be acquainted and interconnected with community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.
17. A sustainable rural economy will depend on urban consumers loyal to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy that will always be more cooperative than competitive.
Seligman, Martin E. P. Learned Optimism. New York: Knopf, 1990. ISBN 0394579151, Page 289
Put aside 5 percent of the last year’s taxable income to give away, not to charities like United Way, which do the work for you; you must give the money away yourself, personally. Among potential recipients in the charitable field you are interested in, you must advertise that you are giving away $3,000 (or whatever) and for what general purposes. You must interview prospective grantees and decide among requests. You give out the money and follow its use to a successful conclusion.
Give up some activity which you do regularly for your own pleasure—eating out once a week, watching a rented movie on Tuesday night, hunting on fall weekends playing video games when you come home from work, shopping for new shoes. Spend this time (the equivalent of an evening a week) in an activity devoted to the well-being of others or of the community at large: helping in a soup kitchen or a school-board campaign, visiting AIDS patients, cleaning the public park, fund-raising for your alma mater. Use the money you saved by canceling the pleasurable activity to further that cause.
When asked by a homeless person for money, talk to him. Judge as well as you can if he will use the money for nondestructive purposes. If you think he will, give it to him (give no less than five dollars). Frequent areas where you will find beggars, talking to the homeless and giving money to the ones in true need. Spend three hours per week doing this.
When you read of particularly heroic or despicable acts, write letters: fan letters to people who could use your praise and mend-your-ways letters to people and organizations you detest. Follow up with letters to politicians and others who can act directly. Spend three hours per week at this. Do it slowly. Compose the letters every bit as carefully as you would a crucial report for your company.
Teach your children how to give things away. Have them set aside one-fourth of their allowance to give away. They should discover a needy person or project to give this money to, personally.
Sarewitz, Daniel R. Frontiers of Illusion. 1996. ISBN 1566394155, Page 137
If the developing nations were setting research priorities for the world, they might emphasize such problems as: improving the efficiency, productivity, and environmental soundness of subsistence and production farming and low-technology manufacturing; devising energy-efficient “end-use” technologies for basic needs such as cooking, lighting, and transport; creating small-scale, nonpolluting, decentralized energy-supply technologies; preventing tropical diseases, such as malaria and cholera, and developing better diagnostics and treatments for respiratory infections; reducing the consequences of natural disasters such as floods and typhoons; increasing the effectiveness of reforestation. But developing nations, with less than 15 percent of the world’s scientists and engineers and less than 5 percent of the world’s total research and development funding, do not have the resources to maintain major programs in areas such as these, while industrialized nations lack the economic and political motivation to pursue aggressively such research goals.
Kimbrell, Andrew. “Breaking The Job Lock.” Utne Reader January-February 1999. Page 48
Even though we are supposed to be living in the postindustrial era—many of our jobs are now dictated by the demands of computers instead of assembly lines -- our lives at work are really not much different from those of 19th-century factory workers. We are still seen as replaceable spare parts for the great machines of production. From the checkout person at the grocery store to the highly trained engineer, we are all expected to work faster, waste less time, produce more.
We are not machines, of course, and the drive for ever greater efficiency in the competitive global economy is taking its toll. More than 80 percent of Americans say their lives are more stressful now than they were five years ago; pressures at work are cited as the primary reason. More and more of us need to be medicated just to get through the workday. More than 45 million American adults are taking prescription psychotropic medications. The largest increase is not in the use of the much publicized antidepressant Prozac, but rather in a variety of drugs used to treat anxiety and stress disorders.
As a society we continue to honor the virtues of caring and empathy in our personal lives, and these must become the cornerstones of a new kind of work ethic. Empathy for the physical and mental needs of workers must replace efficiency as the paramount value of the workplace. After all, no one in their right mind evaluates the importance of their family, friends, or even pets on a strict efficiency basis.
Thomas Moore. The Care of the Soul—A guide for cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life. New York: Harper Collins, 1992, Page 178
Certainly we allow the workplace to be dominated by function and efficiency, thereby leaving us open to the complaints of neglected soul. We could benefit psychologically from a heightened consciousness about the poetry of work—its style, tools, timing, and environment.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession, that
marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.
When you work you are a flute whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.
Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?...
And all work is empty save when there is love;
And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.
And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear
that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to
eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching....
Work is love made visible.
Andrei Codrescu, Workaholish Zombification, 1994
But one day, someone bought one of his do-nothing ideas, and asked him for another. After a few weeks, he started to do nothing on purpose, that is, he did nothing deliberately in order to get one of his great (and profitable) do-nothing ideas. He now had enough money to stop doing nothing. His walk to the cafe became brisker, less noticing of the verdant brilliance. The coffee was indifferent, and he started actually reading the newspaper he had merely enjoyed for its smell before. Even his friends, instead of conversation companions, became sounding boards. And his dreams got grim and apocalyptic.
At the bar, he got into fights. And that’s the story of how this man became a workaholic. Instead of doing nothing he was always doing something. If you are like this man, my friend, if you like doing nothing, beware of those who’d pay you for it.
Baker, Russ. “Pulp Fiction.” Small Business Computing & Communications April 1998: Pages 82-3
Computers aren’t everything. Even some computer-related tasks lend themselves better to paper. Paper’s better for comprehension. Studies show that people absorb information 25 percent slower when they’re reading it on a computer screen. “The more paperless your business is, the more paranoid you must be about your technology.”
Brower, Grayson Cathy. “Timesaving Tools.” Small Business Computing & Communications May 1998, Page 12
I have a confession to make. I don’t always take the high-tech road. At the office, I’ve got technology coming out of the walls. But in my personal life, I’m still a Luddite. For example, when I jot down notes, it’s usually with an ink pen on any piece of paper I can find. Depending on where I am, that includes napkins, Post-its, used envelopes, and occasionally an actual pad. I keep my schedules, to-do- lists, and contact information in a leather-bound book. Outside the office, I’ve been pretty much in the Dark Ages. I’m basically a creature of habit and I feel quite confident that I’m not the only one out there.
David Wann, Environmental Protection Turtle Island, 1990 ISBN 1555660487
Page 112
The backpacker cleans up as he goes, leaving a campsite in just as good a condition as when he arrived. He or she packs out everything that was packed in, minus the food consumed. If our culture cleansed things up as we progressed, we wouldn’t have to resort to “extra-strength” technologies in our manufacturing processes and Superfund sites.
Page 154
We want our products to evolve so that they have a crafty symbiosis with other natural and human-made designs. Ideally, the “genetic” instructions we put into our products will include self-propagation—just like cow manure in a pasture happens to be in precisely the right place to become cow manure again.
The point is, we need long-distance runners in our designs. to bring those kinds of designs into our world, we’ll have to make some cognitive leaps of faith, just as track athletes did when they broke the four-minute mile.
Page 155
Another strategy we need to keep in mind is the Goldilocks strategy—finding just the right size and just the right fit for each of our creations, or not creating them to begin with.
Page 157
The strategy of compost counsels, “Off-white’s all right,” In the same spirit, it reminds us that it’s okay if the fruit has a slight visual flaw: taste buds and stomaches don’t have eyes anyway. And that dent in your car just gives it character. “Relax,” it tells us, “you belong here.”
Page 165
Can humans understand the product, maintain it, and feel satisfied with it?
Does the product increase rather than limit our choices and options?
Does the product enhance self-reliance and self-worth, as opposed to creating dependency and insecurity?
Does it make maximum use of existing infrastructure and recyclable resources?
Is it safe to make, use, reuse, and recycle, not requiring barriers and gas masks during and after use?
If and when it needs to be discarded, will it fit into natural processes like decomposition and nutrient cycles?
Does it leave room for imagination and creativity? (Can these qualities be a human “output” rather than a pre-molded “input”?)
Jensen, Rolf. "Dream Society." The Futurist October 1999, Page 84
Companies will thrive on the basis of their stories and myths -- on their ability to create products and services that evoke emotion. Consumers will engage in emotional jogging. They'll give their feelings a workout by using products and services that satisfy their desire to feel and display emotion. In Denmark, for example, eggs from free-range chickens have captured more than half the market. That's because the story behind them -- the ethical treatment of animals, rustic romanticism -- is so emotionally resonant. Meanwhile, ideas like quality, efficiency, and reliability will no longer sell products. In the end, I'll buy a phone because of its color, if that's what moves me."
Kelly, Kevin. New Rules For the New Economy. New York: 1998. ISBN 0670881112
Page 113
This is where life lives, between the rigid death of planned order and the degeneration of chaos. Too much change can get out of hand, and too many rules -- even new rules can lead to paralysis. The best systems have this living quality of few rules and near chaos. There is enough binding agreement between member that they don’t fall into anarchy, yet redundancy, waste, incomplete communications, and inefficiency are rife.
Page 110
Skate to the edge of chaos. Pay the price of radical churn: endorse redundancy, inefficiency, and set the neatniks up in arms. If people are not complaining about how chaotic the place is, you’ve got a problem.
Page 147
There is more to be gained by producing more opportunities than by optimizing existing ones. Optimization and efficiency die hard. In the past, better tools made our work more efficient. So economists reasonably expected that the coming information age would be awash in superior productivity. That’s what better tools gave us in the past. But, surprisingly, the technology of computers and networks have not yet led to measurable increases in productivity.
Increasing efficiency brought us our modern economy. By producing more output per labor input, we had more goods at cheaper prices. That raised living standards. The productivity factor is so fundamental to economic growth that it became the central economic measurement tracked and perfected by governments. As economist Paul Krugman once said, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.”
Page 148
The problem with trying to measure productivity is that it measures only how well people can do the wrong jobs. Any jobs that can be measured for productivity probably should be eliminated from the list of jobs that people
do.
The task for each worker in the industrial age was to discover how to do his job better: that’s productivity. Frederick Taylor revolutionized industry by using his scientific method to optimize mechanical work. But in the network economy, where machines do most of the inhumane work of manufacturing, the question for each worker is not “How do I do this job right?” but “What is the right job to do?”
Answering this question is, of course, extremely hard to do. It’s called an executive function. In the past, only the top 10% of the workforce was expected to make such decisions. Now, everyone, not just executives, must decide what is the right next thing to do.
Arthur G. Gish, Beyond The Rat Race, Philadelphia: 1975 0836117247 Page 121
With the coming of modern technology has come the deification of technique. How something is done is more important than what is done or why. We devise ingenious and efficient means to arrive at an insignificant end.
Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America, New York: 1970 71117689 Pages 305
In the Middle Ages, when a very different consciousness prevailed, neither technology nor the market was permitted to dominate other social values, no matter how great the “logic” of technology. The most efficient or economic way of doing something was often ignored for religious or social reasons. Thus, in a longrun sense, technology represents a choice (not an inevitability, as Ellul suggests), and we can make a new choice whenever we are ready to do so. We can end or modify the age of science and we can abandon the Protestant ethic. In this sense, it has been a long, long time since we made any real choices; since the end of the Middle Ages, technology and the market have made our choices for us. Perhaps the culture just now being developed by the new generation—the new emphasis on imagination, the senses, community, and the self—is the first real choice made by any Western people since the end of the Middle Ages.
Crispin Sartwell, The Art Of Living, New York: 1995 ISBN 0791423603 Page 139
I am going to offer a “solution” to the “problem” of technology, a solution which I draw from the ancient texts of Chinese Taoism, and which is in some respects Heideggerian in spirit. The solution is this: there is no solution.
We are not going to transform technology into something we could come to regard as wholesome, and we are not going to transform ourselves away from technological thinking. These things are inescapable. Or perhaps the matter should be put this way: any attempt to escape them only ensnares us in them more thoroughly. So what I am claiming amounts to this: we ought to stop trying to evade or escape technology; we should see if we cannot find acceptance of the fact that technology is what we do and how we think.
If we could stop trying to transform technology, we would have transformed technology once and for all. For example, if we could enjoy technology for its own sake (and we ought to admit that we often do!), then we would have transformed mere instrumentality into an artistic devotion to means. There is only one way to enter into a non-technological relation to technology; simply to abide with satisfaction within technology itself. To do this would be to transform our relationship to ourselves and our world by renouncing transformation.
Fodor, Eben. Better Not Bigger. Canada: 1999. ISBN 0865713863, Page 28
Like the Victorians who spoke of love but not of sex, many planners and policy-makers talk about reducing the impacts of growth, but not about slowing it down. An assumption is being made that we can keep on growing, if we just do it right. But no matter how you dress it up, growth is still growth. Even the best-looking, best-planned growth can still have a predominantly negative impact on a community and long-term ecological consequences. Complete r |
