It was the worst of times. It was the best of times. And then there is the everlasting present of Lao Tzu in which: "Those who speak do not know. Those who know do not speak."
It takes a mountain of chutzpah for people to be railing against workers who prefer to "play for nothing than to work for nothing." Sorry, I just mixed my metaphors. The quotation is from Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, who basically acknowledged that workers are "rational" human beings: If you don't pay them adequately, they will not work.
Coronavirus times have changed us. Some of us prefer to get $600 per week and stay home rather than $400 (?) per week and go to work.
It takes a mountain of chutzpah to begrudge $600 a week to a mother or a father who might prefer to stay home with their kids, rather than going to work in a dangerous environment.
It takes a mountain of chutzpah to begrudge $600 a week to a multitude of people while granting millions of dollars to the few who sit on top of the economic ladder.
What are the respective sum totals? In an age in which trillions are bandied around as if they were "real money," what difference does it make?
Perhaps, this is too rational a discourse - already made in many different shades of color by many sources - to impress any one.
What I really want to do is to try to convey the idea that withdrawing such people from the workforce adds to the efficiency of the economic system as a whole.
I wish I had enough money under my command to run an in-depth long longitudinal study to prove my case.
Barring this opportunity, and not having the hard data at my disposal, I will verify Lao Tzu wisdom: I do not know, therefore I speak.
The population according to me is divided into two gross segments: those who love to work, and those who hate to work.
I let the reader imagine the proportions of the two segments. But accurate numbers are, again, not necessary. To prove my case, I will repeat my most favorite joke about economists. Here it is.
At the May Day Parade, squadron after squadrons passed by the stand where Khrushchev was reviewing the state of alertness of his military apparatus. Armored tanks followed armored tanks. Missiles on flat trucks after missiles on flat trucks. You got the vision.
The parade was, unexpectedly, closed by two short men in dark suits.
Mr. Khrushchev turned to his secretary and asked: "Who are those two men?"
Sottovoces, the secretary answered: "Sir, they are economists. You do not know how much damage they can do."
There is much truth to this tale. In a more highfalutin environment, one of our brightest Nobel Laureates in economics, Professor Ester Duflo, at a prestigious TED Talk, assessed the work of economists this way:
"[Without foreign aid, Africa might have turned out better, or worse, or the same.] 'We have no idea. We're not any better than the medieval doctors and their leeches.'"
To really impress you, I should now dredge the actual numbers involved in the foreign aid given to Africa, per year, over the decades of its existence, not only by the United States of America, but also by each and every European country. That is not sufficient yet. I should also add the aid given by Saudi Arabia, by Russia and, lately, by China.
Well my homework assignment for the day is to urge you, dear Reader, to consider how much damage can do the, admittedly, small fraction of workers who go to work and hate their job.
Their influence can start in small doses, when they detain workers at the water cooler who are anxious to go to work.
Their influence is more manifest at conference tables in which they advance preposterous ideas just to rile some of the more faithful workers.
Their influence explodes when they consciously put monkey wrenches in production lines which no longer run smoothly for a time.
Do we not all hear of spectacular recalls and mammoth class action suits? How many of them are due to actions of spite against a spiteful supervisor? Because of lawyerly sworn secrecy agreements, we will never know.
I can put all this in more technical terms: Unless we believe that the accounting of the Stock Market exhausts the economy, Capitalism works for the independence of the few, an independence acquired at great expense for the majority of the people. To achieve a full evaluation of the economic system we ought to measure not only the wealth possessed by the few, but also the deprivation of health, food, and shelter experienced by the many.
As against these two evaluations, there ought to be a third evaluation: the evaluation of the results of interdependence.
Interdependence is the 'normal' state of affairs in the economic system. That is true Capitalism (as opposed to Financialism). As Philip Pilkington has recently pointed out in a slightly different context:
"Whether in a football team or an army unit, every good manager or superior officer knows the importance of having people work in sync. The same is true in a band or any other group formation. If people do not form into a aggregative unit with solid interconnections the group formation will breakdown - the team will lose the match; the army unit will lose the battle; the band will play terrible music."
Do not begrudge the people who want to stay home on $600 per week. To keep them out of the workforce might actually immeasurably add to the efficiency of the system as a whole.
Will coronavirus eventually make room to work only for those who love to work?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carmine Gorga is a former Fulbright scholar and the recipient of a Council of Europe Scholarship for his dissertation on "The Political Thought of Louis D. Brandeis." With a book titled The Economic Process and a series of papers, Dr. Gorga has transformed the linear world of economics into a relational discipline in which everything is related to everything else, This characteristic of Concordian economics has been recognized by JEL in December 2017 (p. 1642). He was assisted for 27 years by Professor Franco Modigliani, a Nobel laureate in economics at MIT. For a full understanding of Concordian economics, Gorga has gradually realized that we need to go beyond Individualism and Collectivism, toward Somism (men and women in the social context)—see www.somistinstitute.org—and then we need to pass from Rationalism to Relationalism: see www.relationalism.org. See also Wikipedia, Gorga Relationalism and Google Scholar.
|
![[groups_small]](groups_small.gif)