More Stephen Cheung, from my Manufacturing Discontent
Greg Clark proposed that "factory discipline [was] successful because it coerced more effort from workers than they would freely give .... The empirical evidence shows that discipline succeeded mainly by increasing work effort. Workers effectively hired capitalists to make them work harder" (Clark 1994, p. 128).
Greg Clark was referring to the sort of theory earlier proposed by Clark Nardinelli, who, presumably in all seriousness, declared that children in the factories would voluntarily choose to have their employers beat them. In his words: "Now if a firm in a competitive industry employed corporal punishment the supply price of child labor to that firm would increase. The child would receive compensations for the disamenity of being beaten" (Nardinelli 1982, p. 289). Does any parent seriously believe that children would make such a calculation? Similarly, Steven Cheung maintains that riverboat pullers who towed wooden boats along shore line in Pre-communist China agreed to hire monitors to whip them to restrict shirking (Cheung 1983, p. 5).
Even if these children defied all of our understanding of child psychology and chose to have themselves beaten to earn more money for their parents, would such treatment represent an expression of slavery? For example, some people in impoverished nations, such as China and Japan and Russia, were so destitute that they sold themselves into slavery (see Patterson 1982, p. 130). Voluntary slavery is said to exist today in some of the poorest parts of the world. Would any rational person see slavery as an indicator of freedom or just as an absence of choice?
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 530 898 5321 fax 530 898 5901 http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
