Tag Archives: Work

Why Retire?

By Robin Hanson · February 22, 2012 5:45 pm · Comments (12)

Our lives are a mix of work and play (= “liesure”). We tend to play more in the evenings, on weekends, holidays, and vacations, and at the start and end of our lives. Why this pattern of work vs. play?

We clearly like to put some play time close to work time, to avoid delaying gratification, and to get periodic rests from work. We also like to play at the same time as our friends and family. These factors go a long way toward explaining evenings, weekends, and holidays.

We also get some scale economies from periodic longer playtimes, which helps explain vacations; some sorts of play just don’t fit well in weekends. Humans and other animals were designed to learn important skills during childhood playtime, which helps explain our start of life play. (Most animals only play when young.)

Our habit of deferring so much play into the end of life, however, is a bit more puzzling. Our ancestors didn’t do this – it is a feature of our modern world. While encouraged by laws and regulations, the idea also just seems to appeal to many. But why, for example, doesn’t the idea of spreading a decade of play from age 65-75 across the four decades from age 25 to 65 appeal more? Why not want a week off every month, or two years off out of every eight?

Some say we play more when old because our work productivity declines then. And this makes complete sense in the extreme case when one isn’t able to work at all. But as Nick Rowe points out (HT Eric Crampton), before that extreme our ability to play and work decline together. And since our bodies decline faster than our minds, our capability for physically active play declines even faster than our ability to do mental work.

Asking my colleagues, most endorsed the view that when our abilities decline, work abilities decline faster than play abilities. Yet this view doesn’t fit our short-term choices. When we are modestly under the weather, and can choose either to work with reduced productivity, or to play with reduced fun, most folks choose work over play. (I surveyed a class of 35 students.)

Once as a young man working at Lockheed, I decided to switch from working 40 to 30 hours per week, to spend more time on my independent research. My rate of advancement in the company didn’t just slow by 25%, it stopped completely — I was seen as not serious about my job. This suggests a signaling explanation for retirement: spreading our end of life play across the rest of our life would makes us look less serious and productive as workers.

Murray’s book Coming Apart emphasizes how there are many people with very poor work habits and motivation:

“What about the white guys on the corner.” … “The bums. … Those guys couldn’t work here, they can’t hold a job. …. They’re not motivated to work.” … “They’ll live on welfare or any other income they got coming in. They don’t want to work.” (p.217)

It seems that a willingness to put in lots of hours in midlife signals many other good things about you. So we send such signals, and then switch to play at the end of our lives, when it is too late for the bad signals to hurt us much. If real, this is a pretty big signaling cost we all pay, to seem like serious workers.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , ,

Missing Work Stories

By Robin Hanson · February 7, 2012 10:10 am · Comments (20)

In my culture, most stories are not about work life, and the few stories that are focus on a narrow set of unusual jobs like soldier, detective, politician, artist, doctor, lawyer, or teacher. Why?

One explanation is that work is usually boring. But this seem weak to me. I’m often fascinated to read business-book stories about work teams and firms competing (I’m enjoying The Innovator’s Solution) and Horatio Alger type stories were once more popular in my culture. Furthermore, a recent New Yorker article (quotes below) says similar stories are now very popular in China.

The author of that article seemed displeased by this trend, and what it says about Chinese culture. She talks of “get-rich” “Darwinian” “combat”, “manipulation and deceit”, and a loss of “morals”. And this seems to me a clue about why we don’t tell such stories – they push realism on topics where we’d rather stay idealistic.

Consider that we avoid telling young kids stories about corrupt police and teachers taking advantage of their power, since we are trying to get kids to respect and trust such authorities. Similarly, we avoid telling kids stories about selfishness and betrayal in romantic and sexual relations, as we push idealized accounts of marriage, love, etc. Similarly, we may as adults avoid stories that threaten other ideals.

Stories need conflict. For stories about soldiers, detectives, politicians, artists, doctors, lawyers, and teachers, we know of socially acceptable types of conflict, which do not challenge key ideals. But stories about conflicts in ordinary jobs more easily violate key ideals, and trigger moral outrage.

We don’t mind stories about independent professionals competing to please costumers. But the foragers inside us hates hearing about team members who don’t work entirely for the good of the team, and especially about bosses insisting that things be done their way. Foragers are ok with being “lead” covertly, by someone who has gained their respect and agreement. But taking orders just to get material goods, that seems immoral. The moral priority of war, or of medicine, may make it ok to take orders there. But otherwise, no!

We sometimes have stories about heroic employees resisting an evil boss. But overt moralizing gets boring fast, especially when we realize these employees could just quit their jobs. Worse, we know that most of us don’t resist bosses – we obey them, mainly because we like getting paid. We don’t like admitting that that while we are returning to forager ways in our leisure time, we have become hyper-farmers in our work life. And so in our story worlds, we mostly try to pretend that work doesn’t exist. Props to the Chinese, for facing reality more.

Those promised quotes from that New Yorker article: Continue reading "Missing Work Stories" »

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , , ,

Too Much Consulting?

By Robin Hanson · January 31, 2012 6:30 pm · Comments (73)

Last night I discussed the popularity of law, finance, and management consulting with Tyler and many somewhat-libertarian-leaning others. I was surprised that most were skeptical that firms get their money’s worth from consulting, more skeptical than for law or finance. I was also surprised that most focused on explaining why kids from elite schools work at such firms, rather than on why firms pay so much for this consulting.

To me, it is easy to understand why consulting firms attract so many elite students, given the wages, prestige, and job experience they offer. And it is also easy to see why firms might pay a ton for consulting, relative to law and finance – changing your basic business strategy can conceivably add enormous value, while minor changes to contract details and financing terms have limited value.

The puzzle is why firms pay huge sums to big name consulting firms, when their advice comes from kids fresh out of college, who spend only a few months studying an industry they previous knew nothing about. How could such quick-made advice from ignorant recent grads be worth millions? Why don’t firms just ask their own internal recent college grads?

Some say that consulting firms use their access to collect data on best practices, data that other firms are eager to pay for. But while this probably contributes, I find it hard to see as the main effect.

My guess is that most intellectuals underestimate just how dysfunctional most firms are. Firms often have big obvious misallocations of resources, where lots of folks in the firm know about the problems and workable solutions. The main issue is that many highest status folks in the firm resist such changes, as they correctly see that their status will be lowered if they embrace such solutions.

The CEO often understands what needs to be done, but does not have the resources to fight this blocking coalition. But if a prestigious outside consulting firm weighs in, that can turn the status tide. Coalitions can often successfully block a CEO initiative, and yet not resist the further support of a prestigious outside consultant.

To serve this function, management consulting firms need to have the strongest prestige money can buy. They also need to be able to quickly walk around a firm, hear the different arguments, and judge where the weight of reason lies. And they need to be relatively immune to accusations of bias – that their advice follows from interests, affiliations, or commitments.

All three of these functions seem to be achieved at a low cost by hiring good-looking kids from our most prestigious schools. These are the cheapest folks you can buy with our most prestigious affiliations, they are smart enough to judge where reason lies, and they have few prior affiliations to taint them with bias. They can not only “borrow your watch to tell you the time,” but can also cow you into submission in accepting that time.

Yes the information contained in consulting advice can be obtained elsewhere at a lower cost. Firms could hire most any smart independent folks, or set up a prediction market. But alas those sources don’t have the raw strength of status to cow opponents into submission, opponents who in practice can block changes no matter what a CEO declares.

So mine is a signaling and status story (surprise surprise). The weight of status often decides outcomes, no matter what the CEOs commands, and so CEOs often need to bring out status ringers, to cow opponents into submission.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , , ,

The Future Of Inequality

By Robin Hanson · January 29, 2012 10:35 pm · Comments (11)

A few (3.6) years ago I wrote about the inequality over time induced by the big transitions, such as from primates to foragers to farmers to industry:

Advantages do accrue to early adopters of new growth modes, but these gains seem to have gotten smaller with each new [transition]. … 1. The number of generations per growth doubling time has decreased. … 2. … As we get better at sharing info in other ways, the first insight-holders displace others less. 3. Independent competitors can more easily displace each another than interdependent ones.

Earlier today I wrote about the inequality at each point in time, in the eras between transitions:

The number of species per genera and individuals per families has long declined with size as a tail power of two. After the farming revolution, cities and nations could have correlated internal successes and larger feasible sizes, giving a thicker tail of big items. In the industry era, firms could also get very large. Today, nations, cities, and firms are all distributed with a tail power of one, above threshold scales of (three) million, thousand, and one, thresholds that have been rising with time.

So, the unequal success that comes from some moving sooner in a big transition between growth eras has declined in more recent transitions. Yet the within-era inequality at a moment in time between groups like nations, cities, and firms has increased over time. As larger groups have become feasible, with more internal correlation in their success, the high tails of very large groups has gotten thicker, until they are now Zipf distributed evenly across many size scales. And in such Zipf distributions, typical group size increases with the both minimum efficient scale and total population, both of which have been increasing.

“But that is not all, no that is not all!” (Said the Cat in the Hat.) Continue reading "The Future Of Inequality" »

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , , , ,

Virtual Office Design

By Robin Hanson · January 23, 2012 8:00 pm · Comments (31)

Imagine that you have an office job (as most of you do). Full of meetings, memos, reports, proposals, phone and email ping pong, informal gossip in the hall or over lunch, etc.

Now imagine that you work in a virtual office. That is, while you are actually lying at home in your VR pod (or being an em brain in a data center), you experience yourself as sharing a virtual office complex with your work colleagues. Sitting at your desk working at your computer, talking in a meeting, chatting with a neighbor in his doorway, or perhaps walking the cubicles to feel the buzz.

OK, now ask yourself: how could we design more effective virtual offices, for the purpose of making an efficient workplace not needlessly taxing its workers? For example, what features of office spaces today would we jettison if we could, since they mainly deal with physical constraints that need not apply in virtual reality?

Maybe each person would feel the temperature and humidity they like best. Maybe walls would glow, instead of all light coming from glaring overhead lights. Maybe you’d always feel like you were walking barefoot on soft grass. Maybe all surfaces could be of the most luxurious textures and styles. Your computer “screen” might fill up a wall, or be 3D in a vast warehouse-sized space. But what else?

People might just appear in each other’s offices, instead of having to walk there, but that might feel disruptive. Perhaps hallways could be lots shorter, with each person having a huge personal corner office looking out on a spectacular view. But would it be ok if the shapes and views of offices and halls made no sense relative to each other?

In meetings it might be possible to let each person see and hear others in great clear detail, even adding biometrics on if they felt scared, tired, etc. You might even be able hear their thoughts if you wished. Or at the other extreme, each person might instead be able to project a pleasant attentive appearance no matter how they actually felt. You might even appear to be in several meetings at once. Where along this spectrum would typically make for the most productive meetings?

If each person could make the walls etc. look however they want to, then how will other people know what they are seeing in order to interact smoothly with them? Would you like the ability to look out at any time and see dozens of people as they work, if the cost were that dozens of people could you look at you at any time?

I’ve read a lot about speculation about virtual reality over the years, but I’ve not seen much that took these sort of questions seriously.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , , ,

Why Hate Firms, Love Cities?

By Robin Hanson · January 16, 2012 9:10 pm · Comments (41)

Families, clubs, professions, industries, firms, cities, and states are all important units of economic organization. That is, we coordinate to some extent via all of these units, to achieve mutual ends. But firms and cities make an especially interesting comparison.

First, firms and cities are similar in many ways. They both vary greatly in size, and can be costly for long-time associates to leave. Both tend to be “selfish” in avoiding and excluding those who do not benefit other associates, and thus tend to favor rich folks. People can relate to both kinds of units as investors, suppliers, leaders, and customers.

Second, people tend to like cities more than firms. For example, many movies are love songs to particular cities, yet few movies have cities as villains. Many movies have firms as villains, but few have firms as heroes. Sporting teams tied to cities play in huge stadiums, while teams tied to firms play in local parks.

While people tend to dislike bigger firms more than small ones, cities tend to be bigger than firms, and the biggest cities tend to be the most celebrated. People tend to resent firms more when it is more costly to leave them, yet it tends to be harder to leave cities than firms. So why are cities loved so much more?

One theory is that we related to cities less directly. If a city doesn’t hire you, you can say particular firms wouldn’t hire you. If a city won’t sell you a dress cheap, it is particular firms that wouldn’t sell it. So cities can more easily escape blame. However, a similar argument would suggest that we love shopping malls more than stores, or TV channels more than TV shows. Yet these seem weak effects, if they exist at all.

Another theory is that we often see firms as illicit dominators. We see the employer-employee relation as a dominance-submission relation, because firms give employees orders. Of course customers often give orders to firms, such as to waiters and cab drivers. But perhaps the joy of sometimes dominating does not outweigh the pain of at other times submitting. (And why are landlords seen as dominators, with renters submissives?)

Now cities do often seem to take a dominance relation to their citizens, such as via police, teachers, and rule-bound officials. But people seem to resent this dominance less. Is this because the major is democratically elected? CEOs are also usually elected, its just via one stock one vote, instead of one person one vote. Do people love cities less where local officials aren’t elected? Do people love non-profit firms as much as cities? Color me again confused.

Added 4p: Andrew Gelman says many firms are actually very popular. Alas he doesn’t have comparable data on cities.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , , ,

Eye Candy Shows Slack?

By Robin Hanson · January 10, 2012 6:17 pm · Comments (24)

I had a meeting this morning at a management consulting firm that does a lot of government business. Waiting in the lobby, I noticed that their employees are especially good looking. I remembered also noticing this about a similar firm a few years ago.

This makes sense – if you were a government employee choosing among competing firms, you might well choose on the basis of the best eye candy for your regular meetings, since your other personal stakes in the outcomes are so weak.

This suggests that studying how physical attractiveness varies with industry, occupation, and position could give us a window into agency failures at work. That is, it could show us where some employees are especially free to choose for their personal benefit, rather than for a larger benefit. Even when they leave clear evidence of this self-dealing. Seems like a project for an enterprising data-gathering grad student.

Now it could be that some people just place an especially large value on working with attractive others, or that in simple places having attractive associates is an important signal of status. But honestly, while those might be contributing factors, it is hard to believe those are usually the main effects.

Added 11a: Eric Barker a while back:

[Advertising] firms with better-looking executives have higher revenues and faster growth than do otherwise identical firms whose executives are not so good-looking.

Yup – since it is so hard to tell which ads help, folks who hire ad firms probably have a lot of slack.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , ,

You’d Take The Million

By Robin Hanson · January 9, 2012 11:25 am · Comments (48)

Imagine that a month ago you inherited or won a million dollars. You haven’t spent much, but you did tell people you know and you’ve been thinking about how you will spend it. (Probably including quitting your job.) Today you learn that your favorite pet will die unless you spend a million dollars on medical treatment. Ask yourself: would you spend it? What would most people you know do? In this situation, I’m pretty sure most folks wouldn’t spend a million to save their pet.

Now consider a new Vanity Fair survey:

Questions: Would most people you know kill their favorite pet for $1 million? What about you?
Answers: Most people: Yes (23%) No (72%); Yourself: Yes (11%) No (83%).

Matt Yglesias (Hat tip Sir Charles):

I don’t believe it for a minute. Saying you wouldn’t kill your favorite pet for $1 million is cheap talk. Actually declining an offer of $1 million in exchange for the life of your pet, by contrast, costs $1 million. How many people would really turn that offer down in these cash-strapped times?

Actually, my guess is that if no one you knew had ever taken such an offer, and if you took it you’d be in the news so that most folks you know would hear of it, most of you wouldn’t take the offer. But once a few associates had taken the offer, and such offers weren’t newsworthy anymore, most folks would take such offers.

This just shows how much we hate seeming weird. Accepting a million to kill your pet is weird, but then so is paying a million for your pet’s medical treatment. In each case most will do the non-weird thing.

(I posted in July on how you’d take a million to give up the internet.)

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , ,

Low Status Workers Are NOT More “Exploited”

By Robin Hanson · December 30, 2011 5:10 pm · Comments (74)

Russ Roberts once told me that when he lived in Asia he felt reluctant to hire a maid, even though they were very cheap there, and well worth the price. This makes sense to me — I suspect he felt that people would blame him for the poverty of his maid, even if he paid above market wages. It is sad that such feelings discourage beneficial trades.

I recently noted that we mainly limit work hours for low status workers, leaving doctors, lawyers, managers, financiers, artists, writers, athletes, academics, and software engineers to work crazy hours. Responses reminded me of how eager folks are to blame non-poor associates of the poor. Many said that only low status workers need protecting from employer “exploitation”: Continue reading "Low Status Workers Are NOT More “Exploited”" »

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: ,

Why Work Hour Limits?

By Robin Hanson · December 26, 2011 9:30 am · Comments (85)

Many laws discourage and limit work hours. Laws require holidays and vacations, limit hours per day and week, and require extra payment for work over these limits. And of course income taxes discourage work more generally. The standard economic explanation for these limits is to prevent inefficient signaling. People motivated to gain relative status, to show their extra dedication to success, and to appear more able, work extra hours, for a net social loss. Work hour limits can reduce such losses. (Academic articles here, here, here, here, here.)

This argument makes some sense, but it would make a lot more sense if we set broader and more consistent limits. Yet we don’t at all limit housework, and place few limits on self-employed work. Furthermore, high status occupations are especially exempt. Doctors, lawyers, managers, financiers, artists, writers, athletes, academics, and software engineers often work crazy hours. Yet the signaling argument would seem to apply nearly as well if not better to such high status work. Why are we so selective in our limits?

One explanation is a battle for relative status between professions and activities. Areas where work hours are limited produce less, and so look less impressive. Ambitious folks who want to show their high abilities then choose other areas, leading to an equilibrium were observers reasonably less respect folks who work in limited areas. On this story, work hour limits were set in manufacturing and manual labor in order to reduce the status of such activities.

A second related explanation is that each society is eager to look good to other societies. So each society prefers to encourage, not discourage, activities that are especially visible to outsiders. When outsiders evaluate societies more on the basis of their athletes than their shop technicians, societies naturally subsidize the former relative to the latter.

Another third explanation is that voters support limits on work hours in some jobs mainly as a way to defy and “stick it to” employers, who are seen as evil and in need of taking down. Firms who employ low status workers may themselves seem lower status and “exploitive,” and thus more acceptable targets of ire. Work hour limits serve as a quantity limit which raises wages and thus employer expenses. Any reduction of signaling losses is nice, but mainly a side effect.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , , , , , ,