Harry Pollard: > > So you make the point of the question 'why, in spite of enormous increases > in productivity, is it so hard to make a living?' > > But you don't answer it.
(EW) I believe that I did, though perhaps rhetorically. What I was referring to was the enormous amount of work people do just to be considered productive, as productivity is officially measured. Early in the 20th Century, people didn't have to finish high school or even grade school to get a job. They could work in the mine, on the farm or on the assembly line with less than a grade school education. Now even high school won't really do. At least two to four years of unmeasured and unvalued work have been added to attaining the status of being productive.** Remaining productive often requires extra-curricular upgrading, much like the unpaid and unrewarded upgrading I did at a local university when computers first hit the scene. And since those earlier times, people have become dispersed into suburbs and need to commute to get to work - i.e. they need to perform unmeasured and uncompensated work just to get to work. As well, families in which both parents work, now commonplace, need day care and other arrangements, all of which add to the time required to perform work at the work place. What I'm saying, essentially, is that the increasing complexity of how we work, where we live, and how much income is needed to live at an expected standard, have added a great deal of complexity to the way we live. This has added costs which the individual has to absorb. If all such costs were added into our productivity calculations, our productivity would probably be quite a bit lower than the official figures suggest. (**Which leads to the question of how education should be valued. The simplest proxy is the value of tuition, books, room and board etc., which I don't see as at all appropriate. It isn't reflective of the amount of actual effort that the student puts forward. An 'opportunity cost' measure might be better - i.e. the earnings the student foregoes by attending classes instead of working. A 'life-time earnings' measure might also be considered - i.e. by how much are a person's life-time earnings expected to increase because he or she is taking a particular course. However, I really don't know which method is best, so I won't pursue it further.) > (HP) In my high school courses, we define poverty as: "being unable to take a > month off from work without pay." (EW) I supposed that is one way of looking at it. It would seem to me that this would put a considerable proportion of the population into the poverty category, including wealthy misers who simply couldn't see themselves taking that much time away from making money. I gather that you don't have much use for official poverty measurements, like low income cut-offs. > (HP) The average American manages to scrape 9 days off each year for a vacation. > In France, they are trying to increase the mandatory vacation from five > weeks to six. So, are the French better off than the Americans (and Canadians)? (EW) Hard to say. It would depend, at least in part, on what people value in their lives. Perhaps the French value liesure time and are willing to forego income to attain it. Perhaps Americans value big cars and are willing to work longer to afford them. > (HP) Don't go to statistics to measure productivity. A pair of shoes that once > took a morning's skill to make, is churned out by the thousands a day by > unskilled labor. (EW) Are you suggesting that this couldn't be stated statistically? > (HP) Once practically all of us farmed. Now, perhaps 3% are farming. > > It's pretty obvious that the ability to produce the needs and wants of life > have multiplied exponentially. Yet, there is something wrong. We don't seem > to be getting the advantages of all this increased ability to produce. (EW) I do have to get a little statistical here. In advanced societies, which have benefited from rising productivity, people live longer, are generally healthier and are materially far better off than in countries which remain poor and relatively unproductive. I and my generation are far better off than my grandparents and their generation. Yet my adult kids don't seem to be better off than I am, which suggests that productivity gains, when deflated by the complexity of costs that are now encumbering families in mid-life, may no longer be as high as they were a few decades ago. >(HP) In modern times, the worker seems to have little power to change things for > the better. He is the weakling, demanding (as your attached article > mentioned) "an understanding boss (who) can go a long way in reducing > stress and increasing loyalty and job satisfaction for workers." > > What a terribly patronizing way to look at workers. (EW) It's a fact of life, Harry. The work place is not a very secure place. Bosses are all too often judged by how much work they can squeeze out of people, not by how good they are with them. > (HP) Yet, however stressful jobs may be, is not unemployment even more > stressful. Is that not the fear in the minds of middle-class people who > have many of the good things of life. In fact, dare they face the prospect > of a working wife taking a month off? > > Some of the feminists used to look down on the "just a housewife" woman. I > fear that she is beginning to be viewed with envy by some of these > successful women, enough of whom to become a statistic are essentially > saying "to hell with it" before going home to have babies before it's too late. (EW) The culture has changed dramatically. I suggest that most urban women in middle and upper-middle class Canada prefer work to staying home and raising kids. Educationally and in terms of aspirations, they have jumped through the same hoops as men and want to use their skills. I would also suggest that, for middle and upper-middle income families, the desire among women to work has had more to with the growth of two income families than need. However, I don't have any statistics on this. > (HP) But we agree, but the question remains: 'why, in spite of enormous > increases in productivity, is it so hard to make a living?' Perhaps, > instead of "productivity" we should insert "the power to produce". (EW) Perhaps. Ed Weick
