Fascinating comment and thoughtful responses. A pleasure to read and follow.

Jared: I know the classic definition of productivity turns on output based on hours (we've discussed this at TPMCafe before), but as any freelance hunter/gatherer will tell you, the job takes however long the job takes. I charge for a day even if the task takes me a day and a half to complete.

Likewise, I'm sure there's no record of how many hours those Chinese workers spent putting that lead paint on the toys that our children will put in their mouths because of the really bright and beautiful colors. But the company hired by Mattel that farmed out the work to some place near the Mongolian border -- my guess is that they paid a lump sum. 5 million Batmans in glorious lead-ridden paint for $X.

Previously, I argued that increases in productivity represented a means of devaluing labor. I suggest that a subtext in Mattel-style globalization involves a complete disconnect between productivity and the valuation of labor. In this scheme, labor has so little value, employers are willing to poison their workers just to deliver on the order.

In sum, this Mattel scheme indicates labor is valued less than materials.

How do we even begin to rectify this problem?

jnbraider

Posted at August 15, 2007 7:25 PM in response to Toy Story, Global Version

JPF311:

re: Languages: The Boston Public Library caters to over 140 different languages in their collection, because -- or so the chief librarian told me -- they have to.

As for "formerly Scandinavian territories", read Quad Cities, portions of Minnesota, and beyond. Now the regions included immigres from Laos and Cambodia as well as Sen. Paul Coleman.

Had I referred to Bohemian outposts, I would, of course, have been talking about Iowa and certain corners of Nebraska.

If it's any comfort, English is also one of the predominant languages in India as well.

Posted at May 20, 2007 9:08 PM in response to Hey Buddy, Can You Spare Some Change (Theory)?

As America becomes an increasingly complex organism -- 300 million people speaking hundreds of different languages, still hording at the coasts but beginning to spread into formerly Scandinavian territories; a formerly manufacturing- and agribusiness-based economy where health care now accounts for almost 1/5 of all economic activity -- I think SamThornton above is kind of right, but not completely. It's not a matter of collective inertia; it's that the synapses haven't yet fully made all their connections with all the various acupuncture points of the American body politic. We're more like the toddler these days who's just gone boom to the floor. The howl of pain only comes eventually and only when we feel and realize we've been hurt.

The good thing, to extend the biological metaphors a tad more, is that unlike the proverbial frogs in the pot of water set on the kitchen stove to boil, we've started shouting before it's gone too late.

A testimony to the stealth of the Reepubs is that it took us five years to feel the change in temperature and a sixth to start hopping.

For policy starters, I'd like to see the ultimate anti-surge in Iraq and then assemble a constitutional convention-scale gathering to address and resolve health care with single-payer as the goal.

Posted at May 20, 2007 12:53 PM in response to Hey Buddy, Can You Spare Some Change (Theory)?

I laud JB for sending the policy wonk cat among the pigeons -- provocative, imaginative, ingenious. But as I read through the comments -- leftists vs. rightists; Dems vs. Repubs; extremists vs. centrists -- I was struck by the caricatures each side of the semantic differential uses to portray the other. On the other hand, I was also struck by the efforts in this discussion to establish the communitarian approach to issues.

My first thought is that the labels we use -- to describe ourselves, to describe our proverbial others -- are woefully inadequate. I suspect part of the problem is the emoticon approach to language. When time is short, and your boss is expecting you to accomplish 72 different tasks in a brief working day, we are all forced to use short-hand.

But who's defining the short-hand terms? That depends. And once terminology falls prey to circumstance-dependency, terms no longer provide the common linguistic ground that allows people on either side of a debate to understand what the opponent is saying. So, instead of exchanging ideas, we transact with each other through the use of the verbal equivalent of non-directional random bass sonorities that could come from anywhere.

As a progressive -- I would describe my "progressive position" as one which enables the most people to experience a gratifying quality of life -- I like to think that such gratification doesn't have to depend on the suffering of others. To put it another way, my gain doesn't necessarily have to equal someone's loss.

Posted at May 18, 2007 10:47 PM in response to Hey Buddy, Can You Spare Some Change (Theory)?

Let me recast a bit what I was trying to say last night: An increasingly tormented work environment was one of the products of the failed Democratic health care initiative in '93-94, because while health care costs remained stable through the Clinton years, the cost of health care for workers even with company plans has gone bang zoom!

Now, health care is said to be one of the costs crippling the Big Three, but it doesn't matter what business you're in. I used to be in pubcasting where my health insurance was covered thanks to the union. Now everyone there is paying upwards of $80 a paycheck for something that used to be free.

What I'm seeing not only in the Cerebus deal, but in all the hot biz deals going down now, is that, thanks to the crippling costs of health care, those who have profited most from the Repub. tax cuts, are now profiting from the weakened job market (don't let that 4.5% job rate fool you) because health care has devalued the value of the workers' stakeholding in their jobs.

Having followed this whole DoJ Banana Republic USA firings gig, I confess that I wonder if there was some kind of conspiracy, you know what I mean? A pharma rep telling a nurse -- all it needs to start is just a single conversation, you know...

Posted at May 16, 2007 4:00 PM in response to Follow-up from Last Week and A Few Related Tidbits

A dazzling discussion, as always. JB, you clearly cater to a better class of commentators...

I noted a daring use of E=mc2 from a possible economist here. A semi-sane physicist will tell you that issues involving mass almost always zero out, except in the rare case of nuclear explosions in which a teeeny bit of mass is actually lost. Otherwise, we're faced with the finiteness of substance. There is, for example, only so much Earth here -- H/T to those following the dynamiting of WV mountaintops.

Economics, or so it seems to me, is unencumbered by the laws of physics. If money is short, our governments can always print more money. Heartfelt photos of Weimark citizens lugging wheelbarrows of cash to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread stick in my mental craw.

Then again, the value of a body of products can only emerge, or so we're told, once the unseen hand of the forces of MARKETS slips into the room.

Which leads me to two observations: We don't know what is the value of value. Daimler spent $36B to acquire Chrysler nine years ago; a private investor group led by former Treasury Secretary John Snow now offers up $7.4B for 80% of said entity (quick math, anyone? My calculator says they're offering a quarter for every original 1998 dollar), while getting some $650M from the soon-to-be-former Daimler/Chrysler to lift the American albatross from their necks.

Cerberus (the dog from Hell) represents that itsy-bitsy cadre of people who profited from the Bush tax cuts. Those people who have so much cash on their hands they aren't even thinking. They don't even care what ends their money pursues. But for a lucky few, the betrayed hope of millions of investors can be transformed into a happy investment.

Posted at May 15, 2007 8:25 PM in response to Follow-up from Last Week and A Few Related Tidbits

What an intriguing collection of commentary and thoughts -- JB, you attract a brain-powered crowd!

A couple of passing clouds crossed my addled brain as I read through:

Productivity these days is not really a measure of output per unit of time; it's output per unit of money. Forget the addage "time is money" -- "money is money." I get $300 for 300 words, whether I write them in an hour or in a day. I would suggest that by breaking the unions over the past 20+ years, we have lost the capacity to value our time. I confess that more than once, I have been willing "to do whatever it takes" to get something done.

When we're spending upwards of three hours per day commuting to a job where spending eight hours is scarcely cutting the mustard, what does that say about how we value our time? Nominally, pay is based on eight hours a day, with time off for lunch. Any show of hands of how often that occurs amongst Sgr. Bernstein's readership?

I will note that in my last office gig -- a quasi-leftist touchy-feely psych show -- we were expected to spend nine hours per day at the office (except when they wanted 12), one of which we weren't paid for because that was our lunch "hour." Spend 45 hours to get paid for 40 -- a win/win!

Which leads me to Jared's opening reminder that the French translate their productivity into vacation time: Of course their civilization is centuries older than ours -- after all, you don't discover the escargots overnight! -- but it's a powerful reminder than Ben Franklin didn't always have it right: Time is time. We need a workaround for that whole "time is money" thing.

Posted at May 2, 2007 7:40 PM in response to Productivity--the good, the bad, and the mantra.

There are numerous threads I'd like to hitch my wagon to, but dang it -- I don't know how.

First and foremost: The quality of audio question. Everybody knows sound is a physical thing -- it's something you feel almost as much as you hear. One of the failings of in-ear hearing thingees is that they have no body/nerve complementary responses to save you from wrecking your hearing with an MP3 player. "If I can feel the sound on my arm, it's probably too loud for my ears." Don't try this at home -- your neighbors will hate you.

More to the general points of this overall discussion, I was involved in recording an interview for the BBC this morning about superconductive wire. For those who don't know this, our electric grid and systems essentially bleed 7% of all the power we generate even before we put on the toaster or boil an egg.

Our century-old network of copper wiring isn't very efficient, it seems.

A concept which turns, curiously enough, on such thoughts as "labor-saving" and "productivity" and God knows what else. Terms linked into that discussion will often include "volume discount" and "cheaper by the dozen."

Jared, you can ennumerate how we define "efficiency" in the workplace and how, by discounting the cost (and, therefore, the value -- for example, by increasingly shifting health care costs to the worker) of labor, we find new and extraordinary ways of increasing productivity in the American economy.

But is this really "productivity"? One comment above noted how inexpensive food is in America. No, only the upfront costs of the American diet are relatively low-cost. Families depending on two or more incomes to keep apace devote almost 50% of their mealtimes to dining out, scoring food from sources that derive much of their nutritional whammy from such high-volume, low-yield stuffs as corn, and featur sodium as their primary flavor enhancement.

But of course, with workers paying a growing share of health care, every family needs at least two incomes to cover the mounting health care costs fueled by a high-fat, low-content diet.

That doesn't sound like an efficient use of our working dollar.

Still, superconductivity in our wiring will, by itself, save us 7% on electrical output. That strikes me as a perfectly reasonable way of increasing both efficiency and productivity. But the getting-blood-from-a-stone model of squeezing more from the workforce -- anyone care to explain how this makes us more productive in the global sense?

And since this all is tied in with the faux nature of "core inflation" -- it reads like, if we don't pay workers more, our goods will remain cheap; but it's really if we just ignore how much they really spend, then to hell with the COLAs!

Apologies for rambling. The doctors haven't adjusted my meds today...

Posted at May 1, 2007 7:50 PM in response to Inflation Frustration: It’s More Than the Core

Jared! You make people think and speak! An awesome gift. I know you will use it wisely.

A couple of thoughts and experiences. As a one-time resident of NYC, I quickly learned that non-essential goods had a magical way of becoming cheap. A Ralph Loren polo knock-off on Houston Street was always five bucks, no problem. An early 8080 make-shift PC with two 5.25 inch double density floppy drives? A good $700...

I think what you're describing here is the sleight-of-hand of the new capitalism: Look at how cheap those things that used to cost much, those things we used to value as luxuries -- heavens to Betsy, to quote a former DefSec, they're practically giving them away and don't we all feel a little bit, well, richer for the knowledge?

But when you mention gasoline and food and shelter in your original post -- it's like we're getting blindsided in a hall of mirrors. We used to define status by goods -- our possessions. Let me throw two new status markers into the mix: Slow food and biodiesel.

I used to buy orange juice in the form of frozen concentrate. It came in a cardboard tube. It made a half-gallon of dilute and it tasted sweet. It cost maybe $1.75. Suddenly, you experience a fresh avacado, a pear that was ripened on the tree, a fish that was ripped from the paws of a bear in Alaska, and the sweet of the tubed concentrate isn't quite right anymore. Now it's squeezed, maybe not even pasteurized. And I'm paying almost 400% more. So I don't drink as much OJ as I used to ...

I haven't made the biodiesel leap, but worry about the carbon footprint is beginning to follow me down the pathways of life.

And all of these thoughts, inspired as they were by your initial post, lead me to wonder if we know what we value any more? Luxuries have become a dime a dozen and yet we still hold them to be luxurious, somehow; meanwhile, the cost of necessities presses us against the proverbial wall, the edge of the envelope, the limits of our endurance.

Bread and circuses, it used to be the recipe for peace in ancient Rome. Now it's beginning to look like the powers-that-be (and you can call them what you will) are forgetting about the bread part of the deal. Then again, if you're ADD and hooked on computer games, who knows how many meals you don't even know you've missed?

Posted at April 30, 2007 8:30 PM in response to Inflation Frustration: It’s More Than the Core