Mon Oct 23 17:08:42 UTC 2017
Time block
| Time (PDT) | Intention | Revision 1 | Revision 2 |
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| 0000 | SLEEP | ||
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| 0600 | SLEEP | ||
| 0630 | SLEEP | ||
| 0700 | SLEEP | ||
| 0730 | Waking up | ||
| 0800 | Getting ready | ||
| 0830 | Walk to work | ||
| 0900 | Wandering about | ||
| 0930 | Aimless meandering | ||
| 1000 | PLANNING | ||
| 1030 | Zendesk Connector | ||
| 1100 | Zendesk Connector | ||
| 1130 | Lunch? | ||
| 1200 | Lunch? | ||
| 1230 | Monthly all-hands | ||
| 1300 | Monthly all-hands | ||
| 1330 | Zendesk Connector | ||
| 1400 | Zendesk Connector | ||
| 1430 | Weekly review | ||
| 1500 | Zendesk Connector | ||
| 1530 | Zendesk Connector | ||
| 1600 | Zendesk Connector | ||
| 1630 | Zendesk Connector | ||
| 1700 | End of day review | ||
| 1730 | Social buffer | ||
| 1800 | Dinner/drinks | ||
| 1830 | Dinner/drinks | ||
| 1900 | Walk to lodging | ||
| 1930 | Panda3d | ||
| 2000 | Panda3d | ||
| 2030 | Panda3d | ||
| 2100 | Panda3d | ||
| 2130 | SLEEP | ||
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Mon Oct 23 18:08:18 UTC 2017
Back to a normal sleep schedule?
Tue Oct 24 07:26:30 UTC 2017
Basic Economics reading.
I have a slowly building bit of one-off notes in my tiny notebook of things to mention in Basic Economics. I didn't mention them while reading before, because I was reading on a plane and found it quite awkward to handle my back pack in any way.
I continued the habit today, and I think instead I should just write when I get the feeling to say something, else what I want to say will be lost in the moment. Or, rather, my motivation to want to say it will be lost in the moment.
In Chapter 10, "Productivity and Pay", there's a section called "Pay Differences" and a subsection called "Income 'Distribution'". In it, the book states that the shifting statistics on income are misleading. The bottom 20% own less of the wealth than the bottom 20% of 40 years ago, yes, and wages are flat (or negative considering inflation) for the same job.
But....
The 20% poorest now are not the same people as the 20% poorest 20 years ago. "Three quarters of those initially in the bottom 20 percent in income were in the top 40 percent atsome point over the next 16 years." Wealth is a non-zero sum game, and the majority of people don't work the same job their whole lives (though, notably, a significant percentage does, as far as I know). Are wages up overall if not measuring "apples-to-apples"? According to the book, the incomes of people followed throughout the decade are up, on average.
"The University of Michigan study found that, among working Americans who were in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1975, approximately 95 percent had risen out of that bracket by 1991--including 29 percent who had reached the top quintile by 1991, compared to only 5 percent who still remained in the bottom quintile in 1975."
I should check its sources.
This is important and valuable information, and I'm glad to have been given it. My understanding before was in fact that the poor get pooer and the rich get richer. I understood that wealth is not zero-sum, but took flat wages as evidence that the rich are literally taking all the gains.
Further, the book makes an important distinction between wealth and income. You aren't wealthy if you spend all your income. This is advice I've already taken to heart, Stephan. Though, this makes me wonder if his same point properly applies to the weatlhy. Something to find sources on.
The book mentions businessmen working many hours more per week as evidence of their working more for their money. This conflicts with my understanding that past a certain point, more work has diminishing returns (and in the long run hurts productivity). Their obession or compulsion may have them work more, but they may in fact be doing far less (and perhaps it's related to how so many businesses fail).
There's a good point in the chapter about how "household income" is a misleading term. A single person living alone has their income counted towards "household income". There are smaller families and a greater percentage of single workers today than in decades past. "Houshold income" now vs decades ago may not be showing flat growth so much as more income per person and less people per household. Another thing to find sources on (this one should be provided by the books sources listed online somewhere).
The book makes mention of female infants in China being murdered because they were net-negative for the most-common work at the time (farmwork). Having studied some Chinese history, and having knowledge of the abilities of women to do menial labor (they do a lot of it in India), this is blatantly false. Female infants were killed in China because families were allowed only one child per law for a while, and because women were less valuable politically and regliously than males. I'll find my sources.
The book then goes on a tangent for how women's pay is not in fact less for equal work. Lots of common (and debunked) refrains follow including but not limited to:
"If for example, women were paid only 75 percent of what men of the same level of experience and performance were paid, then any employer could hire four womeen instead of three men for the same money and gain a decisive advantage in production costs over competing firms."
One, this has happened. It has happened on such scales to permanently reduce the pay in a field even to men in that field. Two, hostile work environments exist. There's a lot of things wrong with this statement, I should refind some of the stuff I read on this and link it if/when I consolidate this into more solid writing.
"It is worth noting agin the distinction made in Chapter 4 between intentional and systemic causation. Even if not a single employer consciously or intentionally thought about the economic implications of discriminating against women, the systemi effects of competition would tend to weed out over time those employers who paid a sex differential not corresponding to a difference in productivity."
I actually agree.
Except "weed out over time" requires some evolving mechanism within the system to gain power. Could it be all the women speaking out in their experience of this lopsided system, and all the work going into correcting it (both politically and throughout the corporate world) may in fact be a visible manifestation of such weeding out? Maybe such weeding out could take decades of incremental, inconsistent progress?
Maybe instead of women getting paid less because they do less they do less because they get paid less? Maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy? Consider this paper on the effect gender stereotypes have on the game of chess. Source found, because I wanted to remember where to look for it before I forgot (namely, I found it in this video wherein an incredibly smart anti-capitalist tears into a sexist youtuber saying women are inferior to men).
In any case, that paper found that when women played men without either players knowing the gender differential, they played relatively evenly. When women were informed they were playing against men, and reminded of the gender stereotype, they played worse. This happened even when their opponent was the same person (the information given to the woman was just different).
So, this is a problem that is not simply solved by hiring more women for any given role (though that's certainly a start). It's a cultural problem that must be overcome on purpose to unlock the full potential of oppressed groups. It's so obviously a problem that corporations like Microsoft and Google are now spending significant money towards fixing this problem without government intervention telling them to do so.
The same problems most-certainly apply to minorities as well, though how to solve that problem may well be different. And the book goes on to say a lot of things about discrimination as well. Some of it which may be true and something to consider. Specifically, "minimum wage hurts miniorities" because "less people are hired", and "when less people are hired, and there are more people to choose from, racism holds stronger sway".
Though, now we're in a new chapter. Chapter 11: "Minimum Wage Laws".
I'm not convinced by this argument, though, as minimum wage vs. jobs is a complicated thing that really isn't so simple as the book pretends it is.... As far as I know. And unfortunately the lenght of my knowledge is one FiveThirtyEight article I read a while back about the subject specifically applied to Washington state. So, I'll need to find my sources.
Further, I feel a false dichotomy is being presented: have a job and gain experience towards higher income later vs have no job and have no means of gaining higher income later. Missing are two other possibilities: have a job with too little pay that has no ladder upward, and have no job but get training or education towards a job with enough income. I've just started my reading on "Investment", which actually talks about education, so I think I'll come back to this. But the latter two are entirely possible, and make the minimum wage argument a lot more complicated, I think.
Which leads me to a chapter I have a lot of problems with. Chapter 12: "Special Problems in Labor Markets". This is the "unions are bad" chapter. It starts with some discussion about unemployment and how unemployment statistics are flawed that I mostly agree with. It also talks a bit about the nuances of worker safety and how first-world demands in greater safety for third-world business practices may force people into even less safe situations. Which, at least, paints the situation as complicated, and solutions as less-than-straightforward but worth strivig for.
But this chapter sort've implies that "collective bargaining" on the whole is bad, and I have to stop and talk about it, because it's just amazing to me. It comes across to me that the author thinks that prices just magically find their correct value, and to the extent that there's a human element to it, that human element is invisible.
What's particularly amazing is that the book has an example of unions having improved the accuracy of the price of their wages, but thinks that the example is anti-union:
"In private industryy, many companies have remained non-union by a policy of paying their workers at least as much as unionized workers received. Such a policy implies that the cost to an employer of having a union exceeds the wages and benefits paid to workers. [...]"
There's even more juicey goodness in the paragraph, but the point is that unions proved their validity and did their job: workers were being paid less than they should've been and the threat of workers organizing forced businesses by-and-large to improve working pay (amongst other things like working conditions).
I think this uncovers a very important point, if some group of people are being oppressed under a system and that system doesn't correct that error quick enough, those people will turn to some other system willing to try to help them. Even if the adopted system is less efficient, and hurts everyone overall over the long run.
Capitalism is not an exception to this point. Unions are the tax being paid for business consistently underpaying their workers. Businesses that exist without them do so by avoiding the circumstances that caused them. Some of their means to avoid unions may prove problematic and cause a similar anti-capitalism solution if the problems go uncorrected.
The chapter also makes implications of teachers being greedy and once again conflates working more hours with doing more work (but this time when comparing countries), but I'm not intersted in diving very deep into either of those things.
I mentioned in an earlier entry that a monopoly presented problems not just for consumers, but for employees. The book explicitly mentions this possibility, but mentions it being possible mostly only for highly specialized labor. I think it applies to menial labor as well, but that's something to find sources for.
The book mentions "the exit of businesses from California", and I'm curious about that. I should look at the books sources or find some of my own.
Tue Oct 24 09:00:18 UTC 2017
Wow. I've written a lot. And still have some notes to make before I continue reading, but it's late, I'm tired, and I have work tomorrow. I'll catch up tomorrow.