I still have a dozen unread articles from the past few days, but it seemed like I was in procrastination mode and that I had already read enough on the original topic ("having it all").
I might try to contact her but the live chat included this quote:
Anne-Marie Slaughter: Dear Norma,
There are all sorts of things that our government can do - more family leave (maternity, paternity, but also caring for parents, and others), laws preventing discrimination against part-time workers (that's what Britain has and it's made a huge difference), other kinds of policies, but right now given the economic situation and our polarized politics we should focus first on what WE can do -- as individual workers, as managers, as CEOs, as leaders. There's so much change that we can make, and we can start right now.
This seems to exactly follow the idea that the economic problems in the US are due to a 'lack of wealth', which incredibly people still 'believe' in despite the noise OWS has been making about the top 1% and corporate profits.
Everything else in the discussion is consistent with the original assumption regarding the concept on this site: that the tendency for people to work full-time is just due to cultural assumptions, that the only use many people have for more money is to buy 'status', and that by changing cultural assumptions unemployment can be fixed with little or no decrease in material standard of living.
___
The events leading to the discovery of the idea on this site were relatively simple: someone didn't answer an email I sent them. By itself this would not seem a remarkable occurrence, but you could say that the situation was in a state of heightened sensitivity due to previous events which could best be described as entropy leading from inaccurate standards of measurement in society.
As has been said in many of the author Terry Pratchett's books, stories can have many beginnings. One of the questions to be answered was whether inaccurate standards have a harmful effect at the personal level, and not just at the level of society. The basic idea is to construct a model of reality and verify that model by comparing the results obtained by someone else's model in the form of strategies and specific choices. An important implication if models are not found to match is that stupid people are harmful to society even if they have good intentions.
This, by itself, would not be a very useful conclusion but does suggest a hidden undercurrent of support in society for so-called 'social Darwinism', which people might assume is facilitated by unemployment.
Of course, allowing inaccurate standards of achievement to 'squish' stupid people fits reasonably well into the classic definition of "evil" so people are not likely to admit to this, which is why "social Darwinist" is not seen as an acceptable label even when "socialist" is (in some countries).
This means few people are likely to be willing to discuss it, and maybe the only way to confirm there is not a problem is by evolving the situation and comparing models of reality again at a future point in time. In my case, this was not successful.
The result is that I feel I am able to say that a problem exists—that the existence of stupid people does lead to problems at the personal level for even the most intelligent people—but I don't see unemployment as having any useful purpose. This is not only because a low income, or even no income is a way of 'countersignalling' or supporting a different standard of achievement which benefits society in the same way art does, but also because being poor does not really prevent anyone from being happy and it even seems like intelligent people, or educated people with high incomes, are less likely to have children—something which not everyone seems to be aware of.
Now, it is possible that achievement like wealth and education is just a 'trap' for stupid people who think they are more intelligent than they really are, and that allowing these people to spend their lives studying and working will lead to the best future outcomes for society, but this does not appear to be the case either. It would imply that the most intelligent people have decided to allow this deception to continue, when in fact everything points to the real explanation being that everyone is just confused about the reason for problems in the economy, how Wall Street gets its profits, whether people who oppose government spending to create jobs are truly malicious or just stupid, etc.
Similarly, if there was a counter-trap... this is complicated isn't it... where intelligent people thought they could get by without a high income but actually they tend to fail in their goals, then the hypothetical even more intelligent people who allow this situation to continue have not tried to prevent the use of the idea on this site except by ignoring it—which everyone else has also done. As mentioned in notes, 'terrorist'-type events are one argument against this possibility since they are specifically intended to affect people who would not normally be the target of violence due to not being poor. This can be seen as the revenge, or proxy revenge, of the intelligent against the hypothetical more intelligent.
So as is common with these types of situations, the people who are injured often had no ill intent. I just had to include that last paragraph didn't I... the point is that deception is bad! If we are going to have the concept of being 'successful' which is central to US culture, then it should lead to outcomes that people want so that intelligent people do not try to subvert the idea. The discussion on work-life balance is just the latest to show that time does have value and that higher monetary rewards do not make up for a lack of time. This is why the percentage of entry or mid-level male employees who would be willing to advance to a C-level management position such as CEO is twice the percentage of female employees who would be willing to do so. The cultural assumptions leading to this result are precisely what the idea on this site is meant to target by making working less, even at the highest levels of management, a more understandable decision and one which does not harm the organization.
This would have been so much easier if people took blog comments and pastebin seriously. I sometimes wonder if, supposing there are people who actually care about this idea and fixing unemployment, they refrain from saying anything just to see what I will do. Not funny.
No comments:
Post a Comment