USA workaholics [or, the invisible hand of vicarious sloth]

[Tom Walker]

The real news story here is France surpassing the USA in hourly
productivity. The overworked American is yesterday's papers. The NYTimes
buries what should be its lead in paragraph 13. The NAM spokesman spins a
slender good-news story out of a thick dark cloud for the "American Way".

France surpassing the USA in hourly productivity makes sense intuitively if
you think about how the statistical series are composed. Hourly productivity
is output divided by hours worked. The result varies inversely with the size
of the denominator.

The problem with conventional political economy, both mainstream and
heterodox, is the implicit assumption that maximizing aggregate output is,
for all intents and purposes, equivalent to optimizing it. The assumption
simplifies things radically and facilitates all sorts of seemingly profound
econometric analyses. 

Not only are maximizing and optimizing not equivalents, in many
circumstances the maxima are suboptimal in the extreme. Think of obesity or
alcohol consumption, for example. Composition is more important than quantity.

The output per hour figures are consequently more significant than the
output per person figures. Still more significant would be a breakdown of
the output per hour into life enhancing versus destructive and/or
restorative output (the Genuine Progress Indicator angle).

The entire process can be greatly simplified by applying the maxim that
"wealth is disposable time." (see
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/dispose.htm). In that anonymously published
phrase can be found the inspiration for Marx's development of the concept of
labour power, as distinct from labour. I suspect also that the central
argument in the anonymous 1821 pamphlet was also, in turn, influenced by a
book on public happiness by the 18th century French immortal Chastellux. The
happiness in question would be of a type that one might pursue, as in "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

So, maybe if the French are doing it better than the USAnians it's because
it was their idea in the first place. By the way, there is an ironic episode
in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments in which he depicts the pursuit
of leisure as leading to a 'happy' excess of industriousness, suggesting,
perhaps that vicarious sloth is the invisible hand that guides the overachiever.

Tom Walker
Bowen Island, BC
604 947 2213