The image upon learning of the importance people place in standards is that at times, standards must be followed. Once the decision is made to change a standard, it must be struck with sufficient force and at the correct angle to completely destroy it.
In other words, "knowing which patterns to break, and which to adhere to is itself a form of skill that can demonstrate competence".
contents:
- declaring one's shortcomings vs others doing so
- discrimination example
- (notes)
- affirming new standard
born richThe above is a plan for convincing people that rich people should work less. It was not used because I don't really have a way of contacting large numbers of rich people.
consumption
reputation (and human element)
end of problems (having money fixes many problems; lack of political conflict fixes most others)
(all about rich people working less... $300 million compensation instead of $500 million)
status: most people cannot change their own value with no cost, since it would imply that everyone they know is 'good'. therefore following the crowd is seen as more beneficial to the individual, and this is used to define stories as well. 'synchronization'.
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Explanation: skilled people might think that if they work less, this will hinder them due to "exponential" growth in success, similar to how corporations retain profits to be able to expand (even through buying out competitors). This requires examining why anyone would want to earn a lot of money.
For children? The film "Born Rich" by Jamie Johnson shows how not having any validation from work can actually be quite boring or even lead to depression.
For items? Not much more the rich have access to. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204632204577128230588463516.html Someone who has $1b uses Firefox, IE or Chrome just like anyone else.
"End of problems": people might say they want to get rich so they can become a "philanthropist". Anecdotally this is not as effective as people expect. Making decisions on what people need is only somewhat effective, as say immunizations come second to having food. And then there is the saying about giving someone a fish vs teaching them to fish. http://occupywallst.org/forum/if-you-give-me-a-fish-you-have-fed-me-for-a-day/
So working less might require acknowledging that yes, really, people with money from an adequate job don't need outside help. People who want to help others can do so in other ways. This can include spending money (see Ubuntu, which I use... the controlling organization was created by someone with lots of money since fixing bugs and "polishing" can be boring for unpaid people to do) but it is up to the individual to make that choice, and would certainly not be a moral issue if people have other alternatives due to having money; for example, if not for Ubuntu I could have used another Linux OS or even Windows/Mac.
To the extent that people who become CEOs of large companies are judged based on living a "moral" life (see: the Microsoft? person who claimed some credential they didn't actually have), recognizing this basic fact that having money fixes most problems might be something people will need to be reminded of.
"reputation": as I said, media organizations are just not likely to accept a submission on this topic from someone with no credentials. But this is probably partly because people who work for the organization, not just the ones looking at submissions but also those who control the standards or who would be affected by anything that contradicted those standards, are not interested in submissions on important topics from people without credentials because they themselves have those credentials. An organization might benefit from a risky decision to publish, but individuals have no reason to make that decision themselves since they would not be rewarded for it—it isn't their job to "break the rules". (The Wikipedia article on the German army's mission-based command talks about how violating orders was essential to getting the system to work.)
[Personal message omitted]
A CEO of a large company who works less might be making the same number of critical decisions (based on http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Recovering_from_information_overload_2735). But there is no real way to tell if they would have made even better decisions if they work more, and so it should be reasonable for business culture to agree that it should be possible for CEOs to work and earn less. Letting people at lower levels in an organization be paid at a higher rate when working less just lets CEOs use the system system, so someone might work half as many hours and be paid $30m, down from $50m, instead of $25m. They might be still contributing $50m of value to the company but, among other things, a decision to do this would indicate that the CEO thinks the extra $20m is not really important.
Meanwhile, some people directly below in the hierarchy might be paid $2m instead of $1m for doing extra work when the CEO is working less; the company would be saving money but again not really important as just a nominally "fair" distribution based on decisions to work more or less, which of course might mean going from 20 hours/week to 30 instead of from 40 to 50.
The final note, "status", is why the original message in a conversation is important. In the recent work-life balance debate, it was someone with an important job title publishing something in The Atlantic, a well-known site. If she had published it anonymously on a blog it would not have had nearly as much discussion.
From an unpublished post:
People with high incomes are usually more skilled than average, which can help with capturing sales from clients who can afford the highest quality. In this sense, working less can slightly decrease national income. But what that income is spent on is also important. All too often money which enters the country through selling high-quality products or services leaves the country via the same route.
The solution to this problem requires explaining several things.
1) Working less will lead to more people with jobs and also lower inequality.
2) Getting people to work less is as simple as changing the wage system.
3) Doing this will "help the world".
Addressing the last point since it is the most difficult to prove, when a society faces an existential threat it is much easier to agree on goals. The US felt like it had an ideological enemy in the form of the USSR during the Cold War, where there was a risk that a centrally-planned economy that curtailed individual freedoms could be more 'successful' and threaten the validity of US culture, but the main threats now are changes in our environment like global warming and resource depletion.
This means that greater industrial capacity is not a useful group objective and conclusions about changes to society should be based on other factors. Staying on topic, creating jobs by working less would address the accusation that the top 1%, or privileged people in general, are exploiting the rest of society and manipulating the political system in unethical ways.
It wasn't really clear if the audience was the skilled top 20% of income earners or the top 1% who set an example; it was either too long or didn't explain the essential details of motivation.
A lengthy example (400 words) which showed the intermediate stages between working less and hiring an additional employee was not published. I think it is a little interesting the similarity it has to a suggestion about overly "quantized" threat in an MMO... just as things work better when the range of conditions where 'things can happen' in an MMO is larger, the economy works better when a "job" is not thought of as a thing with a domain of responsibilities of immutable size.
A simple example showing why working less is potentially more viable than other ways of creating jobs. The other ways are generally about creating inefficiency, which might have some other small benefit but mostly has the "purpose" of just creating jobs.
Option 1: government spending to create jobs, financed through taxation (since people are opposed to inflation).
Option 2: preferential spending on inefficient local people, who are known to be "nice", instead of buying from corporations which leads to corporate profits.
Option 3: working less.
Government spending would be accomplished through voting. An individual vote may benefit someone very little, but it benefits everyone else the same amount. Social norms are how to influence outcomes with group benefit (though opinions may differ based on honesty).
Cost of taxes: $1 (thousands of other people also pay $1).
Benefit from taxes: ~$1 (thousands of other people also benefit), but some people might see it as $0.50, others as $1.50, and people who don't understand the concept of bargaining power might say that wasteful government spending gives them negative utility by increasing "unfairness" in the world.
Local spending would be buying from someone who takes 30 minutes to handcraft an object instead of from a corporation where someone makes it in 10 minutes. Sometimes people are just not aware that the local product is better or cheaper but this is less common.
Extra cost of local product: $1 (an individual decision at the margin).
Benefit from local product: $0.01 due to more bargaining power from lower unemployment, less crime, etc. (hundreds of other people also benefit). Some people have an additional 'personal knowledge' benefit of $1 or more, while others might feel the opposite.
Then there is working less.
Cost: $1 (lost wages); currently another ~$1 in discrimination costs (lower chance to be promoted, more likely to be selected for downsizing due to perceived lower motivation).
Benefit: ~$1 (value of time); another person at the company gets the ~$1 in greater promotion prospects; $0.01 due to lower unemployment (hundreds of other people also benefit).
As pointed out before the company does not really benefit from a culture where highly competent people who work fewer hours are not eligible for promotion. Someone higher up in management might benefit though, if costs and rewards from working more are not properly allocated. But that would be because managers don't want to openly delegate since it might affect their promotion chances in the current culture.
We can conclude that wealth does not accurately denote ability because people do not trust the intentions of the wealthy. Accordingly, they prefer to remain silent about something which would benefit the wealthy socially because they think the wealthy are selfish. Rich, high-income people could have pointed out that their ability to earn money exceeds their ability to spend it, and that this is a failure of capabilities and not of intentions. But instead they talk about being the "engines of the economy" and imply that income really is an accurate indicator of competence. In normal times this might be excusable, but people are consistently saying that the lack of jobs is the most important issue for the nation and so the inability of the rich to understand the reality of the situation indicates they are not as competent as they say they are—or that the ones who do understand it are staying quiet and do not mind if the situation changes.
Now, if the rich just said "it's too much for us, we can't handle it" they might not know what to expect from people's reactions, especially given the persistent idea that the national debt is an indication of a lack of wealth. Similarly, some rich people might suspect that the situation does have some kind of purpose—such as selection for 'nice' people or something. But it has been proved that the middle class as a group is about as competent as you would expect them to be, and there is no grand conspiracy about this.
Anyway, the conclusion is that we can no longer say that wealthy people are going to save us, since they have been revealed to be flawed as a group. Those who were aware of the coming 'change in metric accuracy' have not been motivated to prevent it. (This is a bit like when the Raid Finder was introduced in WoW and clearing a raid went from something that could take weeks to complete to something you could do while away from your keyboard, and then casuals started collecting items like anyone else.) While there will still be variations in competence in all social groups, we can say that wealth, and even status such as job position, is irrelevant to knowing how to fix problems with the economy and society.
(I may have been assuming this all along, and if attempts were made to contact rich people it was only because I expected people would anticipate conflict from an idea that reduced inequality and having the rich support the idea was the best way to prevent this, but that's the point: 'incidentally' repudiating the idea that income = competence is not enough, and the course of the narrative must change to directly address this assumption. In a way this is a test of the awareness of perceived conflict and the use of "overestimation of the self" as a way to avoid the problem, as mentioned above.)
The new standard of competence is simple: avoid unnecessary work or spending decisions which lead to high corporate profits. This includes indirect effects when buying from a "nice" person who is not aware of or does not use this standard and so uses the money they gain to buy from corporations at high prices. Being self-sufficient is still the goal, as has always been the case in the United States, but if you can afford to you should accomplish your goals while doing as little paid work as possible. If this includes being in control of a large corporation, then it should be done with as much delegation as possible while taking a reduced paycheck and smaller bonuses. If governments come to accept this standard then we could even see a part-time US President who gets paid less than the normal amount for full-time work, while the US Vice President takes on a more substantial role than is typically the case.
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