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October 18 - November 22, 2018
An employee is—by design—more valuable inside a firm than outside of it; that is, more valuable to the employer than the marketplace.
A free market is a place where forces act to determine specialization, and information travels via price point; but within a firm these market forces are lifted because they cost more to run than the benefits they bring. So market forces will cause the firm to aim for the optimal ratio of employees and outside contractors.
Why? Because you can inflict a much higher punishment on a slave than a free person or a freedman—and you do not need to rely on the mechanism of the law for that.
Welcome to the modern world. In a world in which
products are increasingly made by subcontractors with increasing degrees of specialization, employees are even more necessary than before for some specific, delicate tasks.
Slave ownership by companies has traditionally taken very curious forms. The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status.
Why? Because the further from headquarters an employee is located, the more autonomous his unit, the more you want him to be a slave so he does nothing strange on his own.
Ninety-five percent of the employee’s mind will be on company politics…which is exactly what the company wants. The big boss in the board room will have a supporter in the event of some intrigue.
The original Aramaic version had a wild ass, instead of a wolf, showing off his freedom. But the wild ass ends up eaten by the lion. Freedom entails risks—real skin in the game. Freedom is never free.
Whatever you do, just don’t be a dog claiming to be a wolf.
Most people prefer to adopt puppies, not grown-up dogs; in many countries, unwanted dogs are euthanized. A wolf is trained to survive. Employees abandoned by their employers, as we saw in the IBM story, cannot bounce back.
they don’t give a f*** about their reputation, at least not their corporate reputation.
There, I was surrounded by highly employable persons (my most unpleasant experience in life), until I switched to trading (with another firm) and discovered that there were some wolves among the dogs.
Salespeople had tension with the firm as the firm tried to dissociate accounts from them by depersonalizing the relationships with clients, usually unsuccessfully: people like people, and they drop business when they get some generic and polite person on the phone in place of their warm and often exuberant salesperson-friend.
Traders who made money, I realized, could get so disruptive that they needed to be kept away from the rest of the employees. That’s the price you pay for turning individuals into profit centers, meaning no other criterion mattered.
“One part arrogance, one part aesthetics, one part convenience,” was my usual answer. If you were profitable you could give managers all the crap you wanted and they ate it because they needed you and were afraid of losing their own jobs. Risk takers can be socially unpredictable people.
Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it. You take risks, you feel part of history. And risk takers take risks because it is in their nature to be wild animals.
Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free—and, ironically, competent.
Ironically the highest status, that of a free man, is usually indicated by voluntarily adopting the mores of the lowest class.
What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.
Work on something that appreciates value in time
People whose survival depends on qualitative “job assessments” by someone of higher rank in an organization cannot be trusted for critical decisions.
The employee has a very simple objective function: fulfill the tasks that his or her supervisor deems necessary, or satisfy some gameable metric.
While this paralysis can arise because the distribution of responsibilities causes a serious dilution, there is another problem of scale.
*1 The academic tenure system is meant to give people the security to express their opinions freely. However, tenure is given (in the ideological disciplines, such as the “humanities” and social science) to the submissive ones who play the game and have shown proofs of such domestication. It’s not working.
Being ethical comes at a huge cost to others.
It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.
To make ethical choices you cannot have dilemmas between the particular (friends, family) and the general.
Celibacy has been a way to force men to implement such heroism: for instance, the rebellious ancient sect the Essenes were celibate.
While, in Aristotle’s days, a person of independent means was free to follow his conscience, this is no longer as common in modern days.
By the minority rule, all it takes is a very small number of detractors using misplaced buzzwords of the type that makes people cringe (such as “racist”) to scare an entire institution. Institutions are employees—vulnerable, reputation-conscious employees.
In addition, those who engage in smear campaigning as a profession are necessarily incompetent at everything else—hence at that business too—so the industry accumulates rejects who are prone to ethical stretches.
To be free of conflict you need to have no friends.
which stipulates that believing in the creator has a positive payoff in case he truly exists, and no downside in case he doesn’t.
Scars signal skin in the game.
People can detect the difference between front- and back-office operators.
always do more than you talk. And precede talk with action. For it will always remain that action without talk supersedes talk without action.
“The Son of God shares our nature so we can share His; as He has us in Him, so we have Him in us.”—Chrysostom
*2 I note that even the fact that Trump expressed himself in an unconventional manner was a signal that he never had a boss before, no supervisor to convince, impress, or seek approval from: people who have been employed are more careful in their choice of words.
What we saw worldwide from 2014 to 2018, from India to the U.K. to the U.S., was a rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy League, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think, and…5) whom to vote
their main skill is a capacity to pass exams written by people like them, or to write papers read by people like them. Some of us—not Fat Tony—have been blind to their serial incompetence.
people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instincts and to listen to their grandmothers (or to Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge), who have a better track record than these policymaking goons.
They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components—that is, they think that our understanding of single individuals allows us to understand crowds and markets, or that our understanding of ants allows us to understand ant colonies.
In most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of gross domestic product). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and university social science departments—most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI, which explains how they can be so influential in spite of their low numbers.
The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited.
“democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when plebeians dare to vote in a way that contradicts IYI preferences.
They are what Nietzsche called Bildungsphilisters—educated philistines. Beware the slightly erudite who thinks he is an erudite, as well as the barber who decides to perform brain surgery.
The IYI also fails to naturally detect sophistry.
The IYI subscribes to The New Yorker, a journal designed so philistines can learn to fake a conversation about evolution, neurosomething, cognitive biases, and quantum mechanics. He never curses on social media. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality,” but never goes out drinking with a minority cab driver (again, no real skin in the game, as, I will repeat until I am hoarse, the concept is fundamentally foreign to the IYI).
Typically, the IYI get first-order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects, making him totally incompetent in complex domains.
Michèle Lamont, the author of The Dignity of Working Men, cited by Williams, did a systematic interview of blue-collar Americans and found a resentment of high-paid professionals but, unexpectedly, not of the rich.
