Consequences Of The Broken Balance

“Ummm, I’m gonna need you to go ahead come in tomorrow.  So if you could be here around nine that would be great, ummm kay. Ahh, I almost forgot ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too, kay. We ahh lost some people this week and ahh, we sorta need to play catch up.” – Office Space

Would John Henry have upgraded to the iPhone® 12?

There have been some pretty significant trends of dehumanization of the workforce.  It might seem like dehumanization is a story right out of 2021, but this trend isn’t new.  The legend of John Henry, that steel drivin’ man that raced a steam drill shows that the fear of machines replacing people and changing the way they work dates back at least as far as the 1800s.  At least John Henry’s performance review only ended with his heart exploding.

I blame Materialism, but more on that in a bit.

There are more and more jobs where each second of employee performance is analyzed and optimized and timed.  I’ve written (some) about this previously (How To Beat Any Computer At Chess*).

There are more people today working under deep surveillance at work than ever before:

  • Don’t perform as well as the computer metric says you should in customer satisfaction surveys?
  • Bosses that are upset that people get sick on Wednesday and never on Saturday or Sunday? And employees blame their weekend immune system.
  • Don’t move in the optimum path from one place to another to pick an item off of a shelf?
  • Bosses firing people with the worst posture? Well, we all have a hunch who that is.
  • Take too long per item to ring out a customer?
  • Not enough keystrokes per minute on the company computer?

These are jobs that are created that use humans as interchangeable parts – ones that wear out or are defective and that can be replaced.  Of course, jobs like this have existed since, well, jobs existed.  Mining comes to mind.  Building railroads probably wasn’t a ball of fun, either.  But in both of those, at least, the job had room for innovation, thought, and human ability.

These children actually worked in a coal seam.  Child labor laws back then weren’t a miner issue.

I think the biggest problem is that people have forgotten that businesses exist for the benefit of society – society doesn’t exist for the benefit of businesses.  In my younger, more libertarian days, I missed that point.  Even though I love freedom (still!) I was always skeptical of the power of big business.

Also, I was always concerned about businesses that produced nothing.  I didn’t have the framework to explain it then, but I do now.

Businesses exist for three reasons:

To benefit society by creating value.

A business can easily fall short of this if it’s an abusive monopoly or makes its profits based on political pull and persuasion – an example would be solar scams during Obama, and military scams, well, any time.  What’s an invulnerable weapon system?  One that has parts made in every Congressional district.  Even if the military doesn’t want it.

No, creating value isn’t the same thing as government forcing money at a company.  Creating value is a much deeper concept – it’s where someone makes something and society gets better.  It doesn’t even have to be a physical thing, the words written by an author aren’t physical, but they create value when enjoyed by an audience.

Of course, physical items are awesome, too.  PEZ®, anyone?

Z3d looks like “Zed.”  Thank you for attending my Zed Talk.

To benefit employees by providing meaningful, necessary work.

When mass business first started, Henry Ford did an amazing thing:  he doubled the wages he paid his employees.  Why?  First, to get a good, stable workforce.  Second, to increase the productivity of that workforce.  Assembly lines were new, and getting a good workforce was crucial.

The experiment was successful, and helped Ford increase production while lowering overall costs.

Today, when you’ve got a good job, you know it.  You’re working on tough things that are right at the limit of your capability.  You’re engaged.  You’ve got support so you don’t sink.  You know what you’re supposed to be working on.  And you’re part of a team.

That sort of work is fun.

To allocate profits to shareholders and owners.

This is also required.  Winners make profits and get more opportunity to manage bigger businesses.  Losers don’t, and their businesses fold.  In a well-functioning society, those profits accrue to those who are creating value, which in turn allows them to create even more value.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve never gotten a job (in business) from a company that had less money than I did.

The most profitable part of the lemonade stand I had when I was growing up?  Selling the antidote.

These three things are a delicate balance.  Too much emphasis on any one of the three is poison to the system:

  • Collective farms in the Soviet Union attempted to “create value” in society by creating awful jobs for people who had no real incentive to do a good job. Result?  Tens of millions dead, followed (much later) by the collapse of an entire country.  But the Soviets did develop an impressive system to stand in line all day.
  • Government, where often it’s set up for the benefit of the employees. What business would you go to where the customer (you and I) has to park farther away than the employee?  That wouldn’t happen at almost any business looking to make a profit.  But does your local police department save the best spaces for citizens?  Does your local DMV?  If so, you’re not the customer.  They are.
  • Hedge funds, high-frequency traders are an example of a business that does, in many cases, literally nothing to help the economy outside of extracting wealth. That’s it.  It’s a casino view of the world, where vampires that produce no value game the system for profit.

Why don’t hedge fund managers ever have problems with ticks or mosquitos?  Professional courtesy.

Imbalance in any of these features leads us to a dystopia.  Our current dystopia in the United States comes from the employee-centric Federal government.  Call it The Swamp or call it the Deep State, it’s all the same.

Even now, the function of some government agencies is so impaired as to be comical –  we have a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that wants to put Internet traders in jail and a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that sells none of those things.  Also?  It’s nearly impossible to fire a Federal government employee.

Unless they’re on the Right.

Hedge funds and other Wall Street hangers-on don’t care about creating value for society.  They don’t care about employees of the firms they buy and gut.  They just want profits, and want them now, please.  Thankfully the SEC will regulate them.  What?  Oh, sorry, the SEC will protect them.  My bad.

Almost all of the horrors of the world are an imbalance between these forces, and each produces its own, unique dysfunctional society.

My friend told me that Biden was going to build a monument to George Orwell.  “Where??”  “Well, pretty much everywhere.”

The root cause for this imbalance is Materialism, the idea that only physical things matter, and a loss of the idea that there is a higher purpose.  Materialism is the very foundation of both Marxism and Libertarianism, and, when applied strictly, is the separation of morality from culture.

I can even prove that Materialism is in complete control in 2021:  Is there a higher crime in society than standing up against something that is morally wrong?  Well, in a world where the rule is “do as thou wilt” saying something is wrong is the highest crime.

I’d call that Materialist.  In fact, I’d bet $10 on it.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

29 thoughts on “Consequences Of The Broken Balance”

  1. Business today, as you note, are totally unbalanced. They don’t produce value for society; they produce products for consumers. They don’t provide meaningful work for employees; they minimize labor costs by any means available. These first two “imbalances” are actually standard capitalism. Social benefit and individual fulfilment are byproducts of capitalism, not core values. But increasingly, they don’t provide value for shareholders and owners as much as they provide kickbacks for themselves as management via stock buybacks and obscene bonus packages.

    I believe the real issue of balance is with the US government, in its role of ideally acting to balance the needs of individuals and businesses, which has indeed become fascistic in the sense that it is leaning towards supporting the interest of businesses far more than supporting those of individuals. Blame the lobbies, K-street, the military-industrial complex, etc.

    But ultimately, the real imbalance is in our entire 20th century concept of money, which has spun into a dysfunctional overdrive in the 21st century. Under our modern fractional reserve system established in the 1910s and 1920s, money is only created for expanded economic activity through the issuance of new debt. The most recent example is the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2008: When the housing mortgage market collapses, the replacement market for new debt issuance and money expansion is the student loan market, which is why student loan debt has exploded to the current $1.7 trillion. This ever-increasing debt cycle can only be sustained through increasing growth. Look at the demographic and economic trends; neither we as a population nor the economy as a productive entity are growing. So to keep the ball rolling now we just print the money wholesale and helicopter it into businesses and individuals. This ain’t gonna keep working much longer. Sigh.

    I started understanding how all of the moving pieces are connected and balanced against one another when I started reading Zero Hedge daily. If you don’t, you should.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/

    Chaos is incoming….

    1. I think much of the problem comes from having women in the work force. Besides the obvious of driving down wages, women are different from men, as I’m sure some of you have noticed. One of those differences is to be far more patient with unreasoning demands; it is not a coincidence that lower and middle management could be replaced by 6 year olds if only the Rules on TPS reports allowed the use of crayons.

      It is also not a coincidence that upper management often takes the form of a smooth-talking abusive husband; smooth-talk and tell how beautiful everyone is, and how appreciated they are, even as raises go up slower (if at all) than inflation and benefits get slashed. Compare your company emails from upper management to lines from the Bad Guy in a Lifetime “Victim of the Week” movie: “Carol, you know I love and value your input, and your work in the kitchen has been exemplary. Now get back in the kitchen with no raise and cut benefits. Don’t move too fast, or the jingling from the chains around your ankles will interrupt me counting up all my stock option profits.”

      Myself and other men will roll our eyes at the emails, take a cold hard look at figures, realize we are getting screwed, and find a new job. Many of us have found that the best way to get a raise is to switch jobs. I’ve worked in a place where a buddy quit, then 6 months later he was rehired. He was then making more than some people who’d worked there for 10 years… I pointed this out to the women, and they’d just get a confused look on their face, as if expecting something more than kind words for a job well done was foreign to their nature.

      Another thing we males would do is intentionally slack off, for practical reasons as well as to get payback on a company that was making record profits from our work while making excuses about the economy for why we weren’t getting raises. I’d try to talk women into slacking off too, and they didn’t get it. If unreasonable demands are placed upon you, and you meet them, the reward isn’t tangible, it is more unreasonable demands… so what is the point of working hard to meet those demands?

    2. Most businesses aren’t even adding value or producing consumer products, they are just acting as distribution channels for products produced elsewhere.

  2. John – – I went to high school in a building built just after World War Two. We had an auditorium where the students who had Study Hall sat in the audience area facing the stage.

    Above the stage, carved into the wood was the following cut in foot high letters:

    “WORK IS HEAVEN’S BEST GIFT TO MANKIND”

    Propaganda? Certainly; we knew it as such and chaffed at it, especially since we were supposed to sit quietly working on assignments instead if horsing around with our chums or teasing the girls.

    But as the decades passed after matriculating, those words grew on me and the truth embodied was evident. I used to quote it to my children who probably humored their old man just as I thought of the phrase as propaganda when I was their age.

    Timeless truths never wear out.

    1. “The monkey-boys have entered the facility. There is no cause for alarm. Work. Work. Work.”

    2. On the bit of attic wall facing the steps where it’d be the first thing the boys saw as they headed down for breakfast, was a hand-lettered sign.

      WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH
      THE TOUGH GET GOING

      Somehow, some ways, those signs came down.

  4. “My friend told me that Biden was going to build a monument to George Orwell. “Where??” “Well, pretty much everywhere.”

    Mastermind comedy/knowledge right there. Will be laughing all day then crying.

    Thanks for the laugh

  5. IDK why, but WP no longer auto-notifies me if someone replies to a comment I made. And I’m just starting to remember to click the “send e-mail” ticky-box.

    Until/unless I troubleshoot this one a non-reply does not mean that you have Bern added to the (currently) 3 replies I need to write and am procrastinating about 😋

    WPDE

    1. Materialism isn’t just the root of Marxism and Libertarianism, it’s also the root of Capitalism.
      Having material wealth as their central highest good, they all fall short, on their own.

      Absent a higher moral authority than materialism, they are all entirely immoral.
      With a higher moral authority to constrain them, one could probably get any one of them to “work”, to some degree.
      With the dictum that the individual’s rights are higher than those of the collective, Marxism falls by the wayside.
      With the dictum that individual’s rights aren’t always higher than everything else, Libertarianism falls on its face as well.
      The ball then rolls to Capitalism as the last man standing, betwixt the other two, and it only “works” to the degree that it doesn’t stray to either extremist position, and only as long as it includes a higher morality than pure materialism as its controlling influence.
      Without that, it fails as well.

      You can also do the same thing with forms of government, from Anarchy to Dictatorship, and you end up in the same place.
      At the end of the day, the only thing that works best, far better than everything else, is a capitalist democratic republic, guided by a higher morality.

      Hmm. How curious.

      “Our Constitution was designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” – John Adams

  6. No country in history has ever hated freedom as much as the USA does. You know that all hope is lost when you talk to 5 Americans in one day and one says that the Bill of Rights should be repealed, another says blacksmithing should be illegal, one swears wearing fur should be a crime, one says private charities should be outlawed, and another says bump stocks must be banned.

    Disgusting.

  7. Very little of what people do for a living in contemporary times has any meaning or value. Mostly it is paperwork, meeting government requirements or acting as a link in a distribution chain for consumer products made overseas. No wonder people hate their jobs when their jobs are such meaningless crap. My wife can point out places in Toledo that her father as a carpenter helped build, I know lots of people who were helped by my father when he practiced medicine, but all I have to show for decades in financial services are a few cheap awards and some corporate logo swag.

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