The ideals of freedom and independence

What is to be avoided: Girl Escapes Boyfriend’s Abuse, Covered with Infected Cuts – chinaSMACK

How to avoid it: as mentioned in a previous post, pursuit of a goal which is commonly seen as being in the interests of society, or at least a community, until a decisive point is reached of either success or failure. It is difficult to justify failure for more important goals, which means that it must come from an external source. Since this retains ambiguity in whether one is being "good" or "bad" by avoiding any benefit from lying about being good, it is then possible to isolate mistakes as being the result of misjudgements of value, specifically an overestimation of the value of the self.

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An informal poll on the Occupy Wall Street forums found that many people do not believe that working harder helps the unemployed. However, as mentioned before on this site the United States was built on the idea of personal success, even if it means risking one's life or ignoring the majority opinion—only about 40~45% of the white population of the thirteen colonies supported the revolutionary cause during the American rebellion against Great Britain, while the rest were neutral or actively opposed to the revolution.

The implication is that if someone is "successful", then unless laws have been broken that person deserves to enjoy their success due to the fundamental assumptions of the moral system. Similarly, if someone else is not content with their fortune then in most cases it does not matter what the basis of their decisions were to reach that point. The system may change through democratic participation, but until that happens, exploiting the flaws in the system is not only allowed, it is encouraged. One might be lead to assume that the current mapping of income and wealth to individuals is not only fair, but also an accurate measure of ability if everyone desires to have the financial security that a high income provides.

But this is not a reason to keep the current economic system or the assumptions which support it. If, for example, the financial sector becomes much less profitable due to a policy of no inflation, then people who did not spend time and effort learning how to be proficient at financial markets become the winners and people who were proficient become the losers in the sense of opportunity cost of work experience, although they might feel that the investment was worth it. Predicting, or causing, changes to the economic system is also a form of skill. As a previous post mentioned, the rules in life are not fixed.

So who would be the winners and losers if the accelerated work week was used to fix unemployment? This depends on who uses it, and is somewhat hard to predict without knowing the goals that people have. Stereotypes are part of what cause people to act in ways that economists do not expect, and someone might choose to work hard because they believe it reflects on their skin colour, gender, or some other attribute and feel that the economic impact of their actions is less important than the social benefit to these categories of similar people.

But types of work can be identified based on changes to demand for work and compensation rate: unskilled work, 'necessary' skilled work, and 'unnecessary' skilled work. Skilled work is defined by the length of education required to get a job. Unnecessary skilled work is simply that which has a lower value to society and is sometimes seen as unethical, such as the financial sector and the work that results when wealthy corporations file large numbers of lawsuits against competitors.

Unskilled work would be the clear winner vs unnecessary skilled work, which depends on the high profits that come from spending excess income on brands or unwisely investing in financial markets. However, necessary skilled work, such as that done by doctors, is more complicated. Lower inequality would reduce the optimum prices for skilled work, but demand is less elastic than for unnecessary skilled work so if this was all that changed, we would just see a reversion to the income distribution by sector of previous decades, with roughly the same number of doctors but fewer financial sector workers.

But there are two other considerations. By definition, the supply of labour for any particular skilled job is limited and if people choose to work less this will cause prices to rise and reduce use of that service. At the same time, the option of working less may induce people to make an investment for education or training for that job if working less is not realistic with the compensation rates for unskilled work. Many high-paying jobs come with the expectation that someone will work as much or more than someone doing unskilled work, and combined with the opportunity cost of education this may lead to a substantial reduction in the lifetime amount of 'free time' someone has. According to one estimate, a physician will spend nearly twice as much of their life either working or in training as a teacher will. Regardless of pay, talented people might be more willing to pursue these occupations if the demands on time were not so high.

It was also mentioned that some types of skilled work might see oversupply if people become willing to do that work for free in their spare time. This has been seen in the popularity of open-source software like Firefox, with much of the work being done by volunteers.

Any changes to college, such as reversing the historical trend toward grade inflation, are more difficult to predict as are improvements of other standards for deciding employment or promotion within a company. However, the clear winners would be those who are prepared to succeed within the new system and not too invested, emotionally or otherwise, in the old system.

TL;DR: costs of moral integrity or time are too high for some types of skilled work in the current system, reducing supply and causing employment in these jobs to not accurately reflect skill or the allocation of talent with the greatest benefit to society.