“Workers effectively hired capitalists to make them work harder. They lacked the self-control to achieve higher earnings on their own.”
The data entry workers in our study, centuries later, might have agreed with that statement. In fact, 73 percent of them did agree to this statement: “It would be good if there were rules against being absent because it would help me come to work more often.” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/upshot/looking-at-productivity-as-a-state-of-mind.html ------------------------snip Several of us tried to find some answers in a recent study <http://www.supreetkaur.com/files/KaurKremerMullainathan%20SelfControl.pdf?attredirects=0>. Supreet Kaur, an economist at Columbia University; Michael Kremer, an economist at Harvard; and I tracked the productivity of Indian data entry workers for over a year. These workers were well motivated. Their pay depended directly on how much data they entered. To gauge the extent of their self-control problems, we gave them an offer. Usually the workers were paid 2 rupees for every 100 fields of data they entered. (A field of data typically included a single number containing several digits.) For some, we gave the option of working under a different contract, in which they would choose a target, say 5,000 data fields in a single day. If they failed to hit the target their usual rate of earnings would be cut in half. They would earn only 1 rupee for every 100 fields of data. If they did make the target they would earn exactly the same rate as before, and no more: just 2 rupees per 100 fields. At any given level of productivity, this contract paid a rate that was less or the same as the old one, never more. And the workers knew this. Yet they chose it because it helped them work much harder and earn much more. The effect on earnings was as large as the benefit, for data entry workers, of an additional year of education or an increase in their piece rate of 50 percent. In fact, Greg Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, has gone so far <http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2122694?uid=3739832&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104200358931> as to argue that the Industrial Revolution was in part a self-control revolution. Many economists, beginning with Adam Smith, have argued that factories — an important innovation of the Industrial Revolution — blossomed because they allowed workers to specialize and be more productive. Professor Clark argues that work rules truly differentiated the factory. People working at home could start and finish when they wanted, a very appealing sort of flexibility, but it had a major drawback, he said. People ended up doing less work that way. Factories imposed discipline. They enforced strict work hours. There were rules for when you could go home and for when you had to show up at the beginning of your shift. If you arrived late you could be locked out for the day. For workers being paid piece rates, this certainly got them up and at work on time. You can even see something similar with the assembly line. Those operations dictate a certain pace of work. Like a running partner, an assembly line enforces a certain speed. As Professor Clark provocatively puts it: “Workers effectively hired capitalists to make them work harder. They lacked the self-control to achieve higher earnings on their own.” The data entry workers in our study, centuries later, might have agreed with that statement. In fact, 73 percent of them did agree to this statement: “It would be good if there were rules against being absent because it would help me come to work more often.”
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