[lbo-talk] People today just don't have the work ethic they used to!

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Tue Jun 10 21:42:04 PDT 2008


Obviously you are right, Robert, that's the reason, somehow; why capitalists struggle to overwork workers is also related to Stephen Marglin's classic essay on What Do Bosses [Managers] Do, itself related to the issue of why capitalists pay for that sort of supervision (though the nose!). Keep pushing in that direction and you start asking uncomfortable questions like, What Do Capitalists Do, and why do we need _them_ to make lots of nice stuff. Wouldn't do to have people thinking that way, not at all, no siree.

But the interesting question is how this is coordinated. You'd think that we'd have an n-person prisoner's dilemma with the pressure to defect being great since the payoff in terms of profits is likely to be high. Likewise capitalists could make money getting rid of a lot of middle management that is supposed to monitor the tired and harassed workers.

The question is, why doesn't this happen? One short answer is that capitalists are not individually "rational" in the narrow sense presupposed by neoclassical theory and rational choice theory that is a premise of the prisoner's dilemma. They have some sort of class conscious solidarity and class rationality that values domination over profits.

Alternatively there is an argument (the details of which I do not know) like John Roemer's neoclassical Marxist "divide and conquer" explanation of racial employment discrimination, something that, as Milton Friedman observed long ago, apparently makes no economic sense from the point of view of pure profit maximization.

Still, one would like to see the details. It's puzzling and I'd like to know more about the mechanism. I guess I am still an analytical Marxist at heart.

--- On Tue, 6/10/08, wrobert at uci.edu <wrobert at uci.edu> wrote:


> From: wrobert at uci.edu <wrobert at uci.edu>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] People today just don't have the work ethic they used to!
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tuesday, June 10, 2008, 11:06 PM
> If you're thinkin' about producing more stuff
> without folks getting
> hurt, I don't think there's really a question.
> When you're thinkin'
> about social domination and nipping certain modes of
> resistance in
> the bud, then there's probably something useful to this
> kind of
> exhaustion. robert wood
>
> > Well, that's great that there's "no,
> zero, zip" work
> > from the sciences disputing that less sleep leads to
> > more productivity.
> >
> > So now that that's scientific consensus according
> to
> > you, the problem -- why I brought this up -- is
> > getting employers to agree with this, or at least act
> > like it matters to them.
> >
> > -B.
> >
> >
> > On Mon, 9 Jun 2008, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > "Actually sleeping less and working longer hours
> does
> > not make you more but less productive. This is a
> > result of industrial psychology that is so robust it
> > could be the foundation of the field. I know of no,
> > zero, zip work even disputing it [...]"
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
> >
>
>
> ___________________________________
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