Category: How to think Page 6 of 22

Regular readers will know I’ve written about the logic of markets and capitalism many times. It’s one of my ongoing interests: How they work, what they do well, and where they fail.

And why.

Yesterday, at the supermarket buying a rainbow trout fillet, a thought popped up about one of the ways in which markets fail, giving people power outside their area of expertise; past where they can do good and turn to evil. It was a simple insight, though at the end of a chain of logic.

I was both very pleased and chagrined, it seemed to me that after spending 30 years on this subject I ought to have had this insight already, but I was happy it had shown up.

And then I thought something else, which was “It’s not my responsibility anyway, I get the insights I get when I get them.”

This is one of the fundamental truths of all non-mechanical creative and intellectual inquiry: You do the work, but you don’t control when you reap the results, or even what they will be.

You do the reading, you practice (I’ve written all those “logic of capitalism articles” in part as practice), you contemplate what you know, running through the links. You ask questions (and even the questions are more given than something you control) and the results are out of your hands beyond that.

You control the preparatory work. Reading, thought, conversation; you don’t control the crop.

This is even more true of creative work: You could study the great masters of painting, learn how to do all the brush strokes, spend endless hours contemplating how light, perspective, and symbolism work, but you can’t guarantee what work will come from it.

This is the great curse of such endeavors: You can put in all the work and not get a great deal as a result. The less mechanical the discipline, the less determined the results are.

But it is also a blessing: Your job is just to show up and do the work. Because you can’t control what happens after that, or what your body, heart, and spirit are doing with the material, there is no point in worrying about it; no point in self-blame. What shows up after you’ve mixed in the materials is not your responsibility.

You can relax and enjoy the process, the pleasure of ideas or aesthetics, the joy of a great idea or inspiration popping up.

Indeed, relaxation is necessary. You select a seed, plant it in the right soil, water it, ensure it gets enough sunshine, and weed it. Then, you leave it alone. The breaks, the times you don’t think about your art or area of inquiry are just as necessary as anything else. (In fact I recommend any creative workers or thinkers also be nappers.)

Generally, the more relaxed you are, the more you trust the process, the better the results.

This doesn’t mean you don’t turn your critical intellect or aesthetic sense on whatever pops into your mind. Not all ideas or inspirations are great or even good. But if you self-flagellate, you make the process slower, the results weaker. Treat every sprouted idea and impulse with joy, and you’ll get more of them, even if not all of them are as pretty or useful as you hoped.

That moment when inspiration strikes, those ah-hah moments, are one of life’s great joys. Treat them as such, nourish them, and understand you have no direct control, and you’ll have more of them.

They come when they come, their frequency and quality is not up to you–but nurturing them, evaluating them, and loving them is. They are all your children, all loved, but not all equal.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Telling an Adventure Story with Your Life

By Ian Welsh

On May 25, 2020

32 Comments

One of the most popular articles on my site is The Philosophy of Collapse and Decline, whhich about how to live in a civilization where you know bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them.

This is a topic I keep thinking about. At one point, I threw myself into the fight to stop evils like climate change, massive increases in inequality, a surveillance society, war, and increasing authoritarianism.

Lost those fights. Pretty much all of them. Not just me, us.

While some things will get better, there’s a lot of bad shit coming down the line. Most of is either unstoppable, or stoppable by having worse things happen. For example, facial recognition may be stopped or very delayed if no Covid-19 vaccine can be created, since people may be wearing masks in public most of the time.

Yeah, didn’t see that coming.

Totalitarian states, likewise, may be stopped by economic collapse caused by bad-case climate change.

Mmmmmm, fun stuff.

I don’t want to tell people not to fight the big fights. The best way to lose big fights is to not fight.

But the fact is, we’ve already lost some of the most important ones, for example, climate change. We ain’t stopping that, it’s happening–anyone who says otherwise is expecting a miracle. Now, I’m willing to give Fate, God, or the Wyrd a chance, but I’m not big on counting on any of them, so yeah, happening.

When people look hard at the crap rolling down civilization’s hill, when they do the work, and have their “Oh SHIT!” moment, they tend to lose said shit. Depression ensues, or all the stages of grief.

Go ahead and do that, because generally you have to go through it.

But what’s at the other end? There’s all of the, “Well, love and sex and cookies still rock,” (Hey, try all three at the same time!), and if that’s your path, go chill in the Philosophy of Collapse and Decline with the Chinese gentlemen (and, today, women) getting drunk on fine wine, composing poems, and admiring beautiful men, women, and mountains (sometimes, yes, all at the same time.)

Another model is the adventure hero(ine) model.

I read a lot of fiction as a kid, heck, I still read a lot of fiction (gestures expansively at the many thousands of books I’ve had to abandon over my life). Now, there are angsty protagonists, having a shit time as they labor through their lives, yes. There are the hopeless schmucks of literary fiction, endlessly examining their navels.

But there are also protags who look at bad shit and think (and feel, more importantly), “This is an interesting challenge! How can I manage this?”

Then they manage it and often have fun doing so.

The world is always going to hell, yup. Just depends where you are, when. Roman empire is collapsing, other places doing great. America is booming in the 50s, Chinese are starving. It’s the 60s, there’s a Rock and Roll invasion, dope, LSD, lots of sex, and, hey, the Vietnam war and lots of Vietnamese dying, some being burned alive.

Someone’s always having a shit life. Someone else is always having a good life.

Now, I’m not suggesting you become an asshole: You don’t have to make someone else’s life miserable for yours to be good. You don’t have become the sort of prick who doesn’t understand that other people are suffering.

But perhaps, just perhaps, because the world is going to hell, it doesn’t mean you have to go to hell. Perhaps you can say, “Well, people lived through World War II and some of them even had a good time, and goddamn, I’m going to be one of those.” Perhaps you can look at the challenges and think, “How do I get around this? Is there a good life for me and mine to be had anyway?”

The first art of winning your fights it to choose your fights, “Jet Li or Woody Allen, hrrrrm?”

You’re one person, there are over seven billion people in the world, and a lot of them are a lot more powerful than you. Events like climate change have momentum that an individual can’t stop (you can still contribute), but there are fights you can win, and there are good lives that will be possible even as the world goes to shit.

This is how adventure heroes act, think, and feel. “Well, that’s terrible, but hey, I have a plan.”

And I’d like to encourage some of you reading this to do that. You can’t save everyone, but you may be able to save yourself and some others, and have fun doing it. Heck, maybe you can even look stylish doing it.

And the mountain, wine, and beautiful men or women will all still exist. (So will the cookies, unless we go full Mad Max, in which case, well, remember, apocalypse in style!)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Groups Only a Fool Trusts

By Ian Welsh

On February 18, 2020

36 Comments

Economists: The vast majority missed the housing bubble.

Intelligence Agencies: Remember Iraq? Part of the job description is lying.

Any Army’s PR: Enough said.

Life Insurance Agents: I worked back office dealing with agents. About ten percent of them were looking after their clients first.

Politicians: Yes, obviously.

Stock Brokers: As the book said, “Where are the client’s yachts?”

Media, in general: Most of them are owned by a few conglomerates. They do what’s in the interests of those big conglomerates or their job leaves. And remember the NYT and Iraq.

Private equity or hedge funders, any senior executive in any large bank: They were all in on the fraud leading up to the financial crisis, and yes, they would do it again.

Any senior executive in any large firm: They didn’t get there by being good people. Good people don’t become Senior VPs.

Central Bankers: They either missed the housing and financial bubble or didn’t care, then they bailed out the rich and fucked over the little people. No one will ever be hired for those jobs who wouldn’t do it again, and again, and again.

Etc.

(This seems like an important piece, so back to the top for those who haven’t read it or have forgotten it. Originally published December 29, 2016.)

My friend Charles Green, who co-wrote the book, The Trusted Adviser, loved to say “I trust my dog with my life, but not my lunch.”

Who you can trust depends on what you are trusting them with, and who you are. Charles can trust his dog with his life; I can’t trust his dog with my life.

Central bankers are the dogs of the rich. The rich can trust bankers to save their lives, no one else can. Perhaps if you were to fall in front of one of them and injure yourself, some of them would call an ambulance for you. You can’t trust them not take away your house, however, or pursue policies that crush your wages and make jobs scarce.

The point here is that just because someone is good in one part of their life, doesn’t mean they’re good in another part of their life. I learned this young: My father was a bastard to his family, but was respected by most of his employees for his loyalty to them.

People are not of a piece, and you need to understand what their jobs are to understand what they can be trusted with.

A politician’s job is to get voters to elect them, then to do things that rich people like, because rich people reward them both before and after they leave office; while in office, rich people take care of politicians’ families, invite them to parties, give them loans, and so on, and after they leave office, rich people reward politicians (and heir families) with lucrative positions in their companies. Rich people pay most of a politician’s salary: They work for them.

This is IMPORTANT. So if you want to know if a politician is one of the rare few you can trust, you need to see that they don’t take the rich’s money, and they don’t vote with the other people who have taken the rich’s money. And you can only really see that once they’ve been in office for awhile.

This is why I trust Corbyn. Because he doesn’t take their money; he barely even accepts money from the government for office expenses AND he has a track record of voting against or for the right things when it was against his personal interest. He has integrity. He is a very rare politician.

When I used to back-office for life insurance agents, I could tell the ones whom I’d recommend because they would sell insurance, often, that earned them less commission, if it was better for their clients. That simple.

For economists, look who they work for and look at their prediction record. Did they come out against the housing bubble early, for example? You can trust Stiglitz because he wrote a book attacking the World Bank that named names and turned other economists against him because he was more concerned about how poor people were being hurt than about what his fellow economists thought. He did something against his own interest. Plus, he’s been right on most issues. Integrity + competence.

If you happen to have a 100 million dollars or so, then you would be justified in saying, “I trust central bankers,” because they are looking out after your interests–though you might wonder if they are competent enough to do so. Still, they’ll do anything for you, they are your dogs: You can trust them. No one else can.

As for the rest: Never trust anyone on commission without doing extensive checks to see if they’re putting their clients’ interests first. If they’ll take a hit in pay to do the right thing, they’re trustowrthy. Remember, most of them work for firms which, whatever their “official policy,” strongly discourage getting lower commissions for any reason.

Intelligence agencies. Well, if you’re stupid enough or naive enough to trust an intelligence agency, I can do nothing for you. Even people who work for intelligence agencies don’t trust intelligence agencies.

With respect to the media, people are extraordinarily stupid. For example, I don’t trust Russia Today (RT) with respect to things that Russia cares about, but they’re very good on things Russia doesn’t care about. What you’re looking for is a media outlet which doesn’t care about the issue in question, which isn’t subject to pressure on that issues, whose owner doesn’t care. The US media is useful in regards to the US, of course, but it is not trustworthy.

Understand?

There are few things which will destroy you faster in life than trusting the wrong person or people, and the metrics you have for trusting individuals in your life don’t work when you try to scale them up to measure organizations, professionals, and so on–people who are not your friends, or in your social circle, or who are not being dealt with as friends and members of your social circle.

The interests of these people do not align with yours, they do not identify with you, and your well-being does not concern them in any meaningful way. Figure out what their interests are, who they identify with, and who they serve, if you want to know what they’ll do and whether you can trust them.

And if you’re looking for the rare politician, broker, or commissioned salesman you can trust, look for the ones willing to go against their own interests–and with a track record of doing so.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Why People Don’t Learn: You Can’t Look It Up and You Can’t Give It Away

By Ian Welsh

On February 11, 2020

15 Comments

I have a friend who is a serious meditator. For many years, when someone asked him to help them become enlightened, he would teach them a simple meditation, then instruct: “Do that for six months, every day, for one hour. Then return.” He called it “the very minimum required.”

Over the years, people have come to me wanting some of what I have, intellectually. Not a lot of people, more than five, less than ten.

In every case, I have given them a list of books to read, and said: “As you read each book, get back to me, and we’ll discuss them.”

Only one person ever did, he is the only person I ever charged money for teaching.

You can’t give the good stuff, the actually valuable stuff, away.

He read five books or so, we talked about them, and I gave him assignments and we discussed the assignments. He then stopped, because he had what he wanted, which was to learn how to learn more effectively, and he had proved this to himself by using the skills he was taught, and I was charging him enough money that it mattered to him (not a lot, but he wasn’t rich).

Back when I did some consulting, in the 2000s, I noticed something similar: When I didn’t charge people enough, or said, “Oh, I’ll help you for free,” they never took my advice. If I made them bleed, they did what I said and benefited.

You can’t give it away. I really wish you could.

Anyway, this is a winding intro to my point, which is that if you want to actually understand certain topics, you have to read. A lot.

Let’s run some numbers. From the time I was eight through to age 12, I read at least two books a day. I know this because I went to the library once a week and took out the limit, and I also checked books out of the school library, and I read my father’s books. Actually, I read more than two books a day. Call it 700 a year, so 3,500 books.

From age thirteen to thirty-five, we’ll count it at a book a day. 7,700 books.

From 35 to the end of 45 (11 years), I read two books a week, because I was blogging and reading online articles (they are not a substitute, online content is mostly trash). So 1,100 books, though the proportion of non-fiction books was higher than before.

And for the last four years, I’ve been back to one or more a day, but we’ll count it as one a day. Add another 1,400.

Total? Thirteen thousand, seven hundred books. Put it at 90 percent fiction, and 10 percent non fiction, so about 1,370 non-fiction books.

This is an understatement, at every point I have gone with the lowest estimate. It is not unusual, even today, for me to read three books in a day. Sometimes I read four. The real number is probably close to twenty thousand.

This is not meant as a brag and should not be taken as such. By most people’s standards, my life is trash and I didn’t read so much because “discipline,” I did it because I like reading books and thinking about ideas. If I enjoyed making money, working out, meditating, and eating healthy as much as I liked books and games, well, I’d have a rather different life.

But I have read a lot of books. I have thought about what I read. I have discussed what I read with other people.

Because I have read those books, I can think using the knowledge they contained. You cannot think with knowledge you do not know, and you cannot even look up most Knowledge, because you have to know what you don’t know. The more you know, the more you know what you don’t know.

If you want to engage in the life of ideas, you have to read. You have to read a lot.

Yes, someone like me can make it easier. I’ve read a lot of not very useful books. I can say: “These are the most useful ones!” But you still have to go read them, think about them, and integrate them into your worldview. You need to be able to restate their arguments, and you need to understand the model they are using, and you need to know the assumptions upon which they are based, and you need to know the problems with all of those things, and why it matters and doesn’t matter.

There are shorter roads, but there are no shortcuts, if you really want to know. You just have to read, and then you have to work with what you read. (If this means math, you’ve got to do the math until it integrates. If it’s about human body movements, you’ve got to do the movements. If it’s about “spirituality” you have to actually meditate enough to get the basic insights.)

Discipline is shit. Discipline is only the main tool at the start. If you don’t start enjoying what you’re doing, why the hell are you doing it? The biggest mistake I made intellectually was spending years trying to figure out how economies work because I thought, “Shit, these people (economists, policy makers) are making things worse. I’d better figure it out!”

I did, but it was a lot less fun than the topics I really cared about. (Though it all came around in the end, because it turned out that the technical details were secondary to things like identity, ideology, organization, and all the stuff I write about in “Construction of Reality.”)

Most people have the curiosity and joy of reading and learning beaten out of them by our school system, which seems designed to be one of the most anti-intellectual, anti-wonder ways of “learning” one can imagine. It makes people into machines; spewing out the answer teach wants, talking only when allowed, sitting, and hating.

I mostly ignored school and would even read books in class when I could. My grades were middling, but I was learning.

You want to learn? Find the wonder in it. Find what’s cool and interesting. Yeah, you’ll have to power through some shit, but it’s worth it if you care.

But don’t think you can skip the actual work. Reading for intellectual work is like drills for athletic work, or whatever.

Just figure out why it’s worth doing.

Again, you can’t think with information you don’t know. You cannot look information up you don’t know you don’t know. Any system for which you do not understand the underlying axioms and assumptions, which you try to use, is actually using you. You are just a machine, doing what the creator(s) wanted.

So read and think.

And find it fun!

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Responsibility in Democracies

By Ian Welsh

On December 17, 2019

36 Comments

The primary responsibility for what government is in charge of a democracy rests with voters.

This is fundamental. Voters have choices, they make choices. One can make the claim that the choices are often all bad (although in systems where anyone can join a party and vote in primaries that is weak), but when it comes to the actual choice on the ballot, voters are in charge.

This is fundamental. This is the basis of democratic legitimacy.

It also has to be understood clearly, because there is an exact relationship between power and responsibility. If you put all, or the majority, of the responsibility onto leaders or elites, you are saying you do not have any power to make change.

In Britain’s election, the British made a choice. The forseeable consequences will be a lot more death and suffering. There was another option. They chose.

Perhaps Corbyn did not run as well as he could have, but people who say it’s primarily his fault don’t actually understand democracies.

This is the same as when Americans chose Reagan, or the British chose Thatcher. There was a clear choice, they made it. Reagan ran a racist campaign, it was known at the time (I remember it), and it was also clearly one based on a project of dismantling the regulatory and welfare state. That was the choice, Americans made it, and Americans are responsible for making it. They then ratified the decision by re-electing Reagan.

The same is true of the Brits and Thatcher, especially when they ratified the choice by re-electing her after seeing her policies. (Thatcher also bribed them by letting them buy council housing below price. In the long run that was a bad bribe to take.)

None of this is to say that leaders don’t have responsibilities, or more power than individuals or even groups. But they do not have more power than the population as a whole, in a democracy.

If they do, then it is no longer a democracy. If that’s the case one wants to make (and I can see making it), then fine. After all, Corbyn was lied about more than 75 percent of the time, for example, by the media.

But if the country is still a democracy, then the ultimate responsibility for the government rests with the people.

To claim anything else is to throw away the power and responsibility the people do have and to retreat into leader worship and powerlessness.

Which, actually, is what we’ve done, over and over again.

It’s either your country, or it isn’t.

Brits are about to get what they voted for. That is as it should be. (The same is true of my own country, where we have made bad electoral choices, over and over again. So be it. We made those choices.)

(Data-based aside: In most of the ridings I saw where Labour lost, the swing was usually the Brexit Party vote. Those people who think that strategy for Labour was as simple as “Go Remain” miss the point: One-third of Labour party voters wanted Brexit. Labour had a genuinely broken coalition because of Brexit and there was no obvious way to fix it.)

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How Smart Stupid People Fuck Up the World

By Ian Welsh

On November 26, 2019

63 Comments

Larry Summers, 2013

One of the most aggravating things in the world, at least to me, are smart stupid people.

Think Larry Summers. IQ around 170, people who know him say he’s brilliant, and he’s been wrong about almost everything that mattered. Among his highlights, perhaps the most important was pushing to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which was perhaps the most important in causing the housing bubble and financial collapse.

If you don’t like IQ (and I understand and don’t want this to become an IQ debate) call it processing power. Some people have more of it, a lot more.

Being really smart, but being a bad thinker, just gets you to the wrong place faster. Worse it makes you more certain you are correct.

Being really smart, as smart people with a bit of insight realize in their teens or twenties at the latest, means never having to say “I was wrong.” You can almost always find a reason, a work-around, to maintain the opinion you wanted.

Oh, sometimes you are wrong about something you can’t quite deny, perhaps you predicted an election incorrectly. But in such cases you can still keep your model by finding something your model didn’t include, and shouldn’t have to. Think the bright lads and lassies behind Clinton’s campaign: “It was the Russians! They cheated! Our campaign should have won!” Never mind that they didn’t send Clinton or significant resources to the most important battleground states, which she lost by very low margins, and which their model considered “easy wins.”

Nope, they weren’t wrong and neither was their model, it was all Russians. (See “Everything Cost Clinton the Election.“)

So: Very smart means you get there faster, wherever there is, and that you almost never have to admit you’re wrong.

Bad, bad combination.

Further, our education system trains smart people to be authority-worshiping idiots. In school, you get the best marks for getting the answer teacher wants in the way teacher wants. You get kudos for being the kid seated at the front who puts up their hand first.

Get the approved answer fastest, in exactly the approved way.

So you learn models, and you execute them as you learn them. If the models are right, great, but the models are never right. (No, sorry, this is true in every social science and in the physical sciences–whenever you’re dealing with anything that doesn’t amount to engineering.)

Our educational system teaches people to be calculators, not thinkers–to run quickly through models and get the expected results from running the models. If the models are wrong, say, for example, people aren’t utility maximizers (if you could even figure out what that is) as opposed to rational decision makers, resources and sinks aren’t substitutable (think carbon sinks/aka. climate change, or soil) then running your models will run you (and society) off a cliff.

To revisit a prior analogy, processing power, or IQ, is the power of a motorcycle’s engine. Actual ability to think well is the skill of the rider. If you’re going down a freeway with no other vehicles, the only thing which matters is the power of the engine.

But if you’re going off-road, through twisty paths, with other vehicles all around, the skill of the rider becomes paramount. Without a skilled driver, all a good engine is going to do is make you crash sooner and worse (possibly taking other people with you.)

People get very confused about this. I have a good, smart friend who praises Dick Cheney for being a smart hard-worker. If even someone like him couldn’t get things to work…But Cheney was a smart person applying a number of world models. His model of how the bureaucracy and the US government worked worked with each other and how to in-fight and how to control a bureaucracy (government, or the contractors surrounding government) was brilliant and correct. His model of how the world outside that government-industrial complex worked was, well, almost completely wrong.

So he pushed to invade Iraq as part of a project to invade and remake the Middle East and it blew up in his face, because how he thought the world worked was wrong outside a narrow, but very important, area. (After all, being correct about how the world’s only superpower’s government and contractors work is powerful.)

How he thought successful societies work and are run, how he modeled what would happen in a power vacuum (when current Iraq elites were removed), and how he imagined what military force could and couldn’t do were all wrong. His larger context economic, political, and military models were all wrong.

This doesn’t mean he wasn’t brilliant. It doesn’t mean he didn’t have a lot of processing power. But in practice, in the world beyond his world, he was an absolute moron and everything he touched (that didn’t involve power in the Government-Industrial complex) blew up.

In the old days we used to call this Doctor Complex. Doctors make life and death decisions. They have a lot of authority (and had a lot more 30 to 60 years ago.) A good doctor in his field was a veritable God (surgeons have the worst cases of this complex). People hop when he or she says frog, and they save lives regularly.

So they tend to think because they are good at this, they are good at everything.

No one is good at thinking about everything. I’m not (I get electoral results wrong often enough I’m a contrary indicator). No one is.

The first part of being a first rate thinker, then, is knowing where you think well and where you don’t. The second part is knowing why. If you don’t know the conditions for your own good thought, then you don’t know when and where your models will fail. You see this all the time with “genius” traders or investors: Their model works in a particular type of market or economy, but when that changes, it doesn’t. They didn’t actually have a complete model, and, in many cases, they just had rules of thumb for which they didn’t understand the reasons.

Machiavelli made this a keystone of his political philosophy: You should change with the times, but most people won’t or can’t. When the conditions of their success go away, so does their success.

Processing power, absent understanding of how to think, including an understanding of the conditions of one’s own models, leads to disaster. You must understand what you were trained to do, as well, or like Summers and so many economists, you will be wrong about almost everything. Models exist to do things, and often what they exist to do is ideological–not to explain something, but to create something or justify something. Confusing those three functions will drive you off a cliff.

So, brains are good. Big bulging brains are wonderful. But like high explosives or big motorcycle engines, used incorrectly all they do is blow up in your face, or cause huge accidents,

Don’t rely too much on processing power. Learn how to think, and above all, learn about what you’re bad at thinking about. (Then, if you care enough, learn why and fix it.)

Money would be rather useful, as I don’t get paid by the piece. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Why Labour Unions Matter(ed)

By Ian Welsh

On September 2, 2019

27 Comments

Since it’s coming up on Labour Day weekend here in Canada, I thought I’d write a basic post on labour unions.

There’s been a vast effort, funded by huge amounts of money, to discredit unions and say they’re bad for workers.

That’s simple nonsense, but as with things like climate change denial, nonsense backed with billions of dollars is effective.

So, let’s run through the simple logic.

When we negotiate to get a job, or for a raise, in almost all cases we are negotiating with a group–the people who control a company, who are more powerful than us. They have more money (d’uh), and we need the job more than they need us. There are exceptions, of course, and it’s a lovely position to be in, but the number of exceptions is minute in a job-based economy like ours.

Corporations hire workers to do something which, combined with the effort of other workers, will make money.

The amount of money they make from a worker is “what the worker produces,” or “what the worker is paid.”

In other words, a corporation wants to make as much money as possible from your work, while paying you as little as possible, because that is their profit: That’s what they make.

You want the opposite.

This is a straight up conflict of interest. There can be a compromise which satisfies both, but really, the group hiring you wants you to make as little as possible so they can make as much as possible.

And they are more powerful than you. Also, you need the job, more than they need you. Without a job, you will be homeless and probably die; without any individual worker, they can usually just hire someone else.

So there is an imbalance of both power and consequences: Your BATNA (Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement) is often shit.

Now, it isn’t always shit. In a really tight economy, which most western countries haven’t had since the early 70s, you can just get another job. There are less workers than jobs. But that hasn’t been the case for a long time–except for brief periods in specific locations or jobs, for decades. Where it is the case, companies work to change that, as fast as possible because they don’t want you to have alternatives.

This stuff is important for people who are not in management (which, in the old days, included bottom-level supervisors.) It is unimportant to senior executives, who are usually the people really running the company, and who are in effect negotiating with themselves for compensation. You’ll notice that they reward themselves well.

So, people who don’t control the company, and who are easily replaceable (again, most of us, despite many people’s over-inflated sense of self-worth), need to group up in order to have power. One person, or a few, are easy to replace.

If every line worker walks off the job and then pickets to prevent any other workers (scabs) coming in, the power equation changes.

Because most of us don’t study history, we have forgotten what unions won. At the start of the industrial revolution, people worked 12 hour days, 6 1/2 days a week. The jobs were dangerous, with maiming common, and badly paid. Peasants resisted being thrown off the land because being a feudal tenant with rights to the commons was vastly better than going to a city and working in a factory job (or even most clerk jobs). You worked less, controlled your own work, were less likely to be maimed and had a ton more days off.

It took over a century to turn jobs into what they are now, with the 40 hour week, a lot less maimings, and so on.

Corporations are groups. When they negotiate against an individual they have an advantage.

Corporations almost always have more resources and power than any individual or small group with whom they are negotiating over a job. If you were richer, or more powerful than them, you probably wouldn’t be going to them for a line job.

So what corporations want is to negotiate as a group, with more money and power, against individuals.

Only a complete bloody moron would find it either smart or fair for workers to acquiesce to this. It is not in their interests. The people who control corporations (not own, control) want to make the most money possible, so do workers.

Corporate officers, notoriously ruthless, understand this. Workers should too.

As for those not in a union, and jealous: Unions raise the wages of workers around them. Plus, get in a union if you can.

Don’t be a bloody sucker. Corporations hate unions because when unions are effective, they make less money and workers make more. That is all.

And if you want to know why workers keep having shittier and shittier lives in the US, well, here’s a lovely chart for you.

Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

Support unions. Unless you’re a greedy, asshole boss, who thinks CEOs should earn 300x more than workers, in which case, rot in Hell.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

I’ve Never Known How to Say This

By Ian Welsh

On August 23, 2019

45 Comments

I’ve been writing online for 17 years or so, if you don’t include forums, in which case it’s 25 or so.

And I’ve never known how to say this.

We’re really fucked up. Really. We’re cruel to each other in ways that just aren’t needed. We have more houses than homeless, enough food to feed the hungry. More than enough.

It’s crazy. Just crazy.

We have enough resources to fix our environmental and climate problems. Building and neighbourhoods can be made into net positives. We can, as humans, make ourselves a positive for life as whole.

We can fix this shit.

There are always going to be problems. There is pain beyond imagining that is possible in human existence (visit a burn clinic if you don’t believe me. Or just believe me, ’cause I’ve fucking been there.)

But basically, we can make this into a near paradise any time we get serious about it, just by adhering to the rule of always creating more good than evil, and not tolerating those who tolerate evil.

There’s plenty of complexity to it, aye. But at its heart, it easy. Don’t let people do evil, do more good than evil.

Some of us are so totally broken we don’t–we can’t–get this, but it’s this simple.

Create more good than evil, and this place, despite being, shall we say, metaphysically shitty (we eat each other, and that’s true even if you’re a vegan), would be heavenly.

I just don’t know how to get this across to people. I just don’t.

Don’t burn down forests. Don’t be cruel. Do good. Don’t do bad. You know what such things are.

You do.

And I, and others, shouldn’t have to be screaming “Don’t do fucking evil!” as the world moves towards apocalypse.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: How to think Page 6 of 22

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I’ve Never Known How to Say This