“Exploiting” workers

My students are quick to call a job “exploitative,” and I wrote the following to frame my thoughts on those jobs and to push them to be more careful about calling too many jobs exploitative.

Workers are exploited when… 

  • They cannot chose where they work.
  • They are screwed because agreed terms are not delivered (wages, housing, hours, etc.)
  • Their working conditions are worse than agreed.

Workers are NOT exploited when… 

  • They work many hours, with bad conditions, for poor wages.
  • They can quit and go work elsewhere
  • They cannot pay for a decent standard of living.

I make these distinctions because there’s a difference between exploitation and being poor. There are MANY poor people in the world, which is why many of them are “economic refugees” to richer countries. But shit luck (those of us in the “lucky sperm club” were born with the right papers) is not the same as getting exploited.  I’ve traveled in many countries, and I appreciate our common humanity, but I am also aware of the really big differences between rich and poor countries.

That’s why I left the US (as an economic — but also social — migrant) to live in the Netherlands.  

Your thoughts? 

Interesting stuff

  1. Here are five interesting (to me) essays by Paul Graham to read:
    1. Mentoring doesn’t scale… but peer networks do.
    2. The Best Essay… is not the goal — it’s to improve your writing. Also: Writing is thinking.
    3. Experts don’t have crazy ideas — they have insights. Also: Genius comes from undirected obsession. Also: This essay (“Beyond Smart”) really describes me well, not because I am smart, but because I have lots of new ideas — the point of the essay. That difference reconciles, I think, my average intelligence with my above average ability (to me, sorry if this is egotistical) to engage with ideas.
  2. In his second 1967 essay on the “Industrial state” (dominated by large companies), Galbraith claims that large corporations “control demand” to match their production targets, a claim that many anti-capitalists are parrot without reservation. Not that Galbraith had any himself. Indeed, he goes on to say: The planning functions of the state are not ad hoc or separate developments. They are a closely articulated set of functions which supplement and fill the gaps in the planning of the modern large firm — a bold claim that does not deserve defence, especially given the fact that shortages and inflation (i.e., planning failures) were already damaging the US economy (and society). Semi-related: Paul Graham writes on the aberration of the “big company 60s” compared to the long history of start-up culture in the US.
  3. Listen: The True Story of America’s Supremely Messed-Up Immigration System
  4. Read (and make changes): The environment in which kids grow up today [with smart phones and social media] is hostile to human development.
  5. Read: They still make shoes in America.
  6. Listen to this interesting history of the notebook, and thus paper, thinking and creativity.
  7. Read a few of Paul Graham’s thoughts on sort up culture (in his essay on how he went from programming to painting to start ups — and back again):

    I learned some useful things at Interleaf, though they were mostly about what not to do. I learned that it’s better for technology companies to be run by product people than sales people (though sales is a real skill and people who are good at it are really good at it), that it leads to bugs when code is edited by too many people, that cheap office space is no bargain if it’s depressing, that planned meetings are inferior to corridor conversations, that big, bureaucratic customers are a dangerous source of money, and that there’s not much overlap between conventional office hours and the optimal time for hacking, or conventional offices and the optimal place for it.

    But the most important thing I learned, and which I used in both Viaweb and Y Combinator, is that the low end eats the high end: that it’s good to be the “entry level” option, even though that will be less prestigious, because if you’re not, someone else will be, and will squash you against the ceiling. Which in turn means that prestige is a danger sign.

    [snip]

    It’s not that unprestigious types of work are good per se. But when you find yourself drawn to some kind of work despite its current lack of prestige, it’s a sign both that there’s something real to be discovered there, and that you have the right kind of motives. Impure motives are a big danger for the ambitious. If anything is going to lead you astray, it will be the desire to impress people. So while working on things that aren’t prestigious doesn’t guarantee you’re on the right track, it at least guarantees you’re not on the most common type of wrong one.

Some articles on urban planning

As a subscriber to The Atlantic, I can read articles from 1857 to the present. It’s fascinating to read how people understood/discussed topics over these 160+ years.

Here are a few that I found searching for “urban planning” (I used my normal tools to make them accessible to you without hitting their paywall.)

If you have good articles to read, then please leave links in the comments!

Interesting stuff

  1. Read: The oceans are transitioning to become more acidic, hotter and higher  (+15m by 2500, so goodbye Netherlands… and many other cities!)
  2. Listen: Good discussion of how Chinese women are getting richer while women in “cloistered” cultures (think stay at home) are just waiting to be let out.
  3. Read: AIs offer effortless knowledge but they are likely to push us to conform to the beliefs of its algorithmic designers. Related: AIs are contributing to the “enshitification” of the Internet (Have you noticed? I see it in the fall in quality at Amazon shopping and Google search. I’m not on social media, thanks god!)
  4. Read this 1967 essay on the “New Industrial State” by John K. Galbraith. His main idea is that large corporations — as bureaucracies that dominate “market economies” — mean that markets are more planned than free. This theme is part of my recent post on setting prices, but JKG does make the mistake (from what I’ve read) of assuming that large firms can maintain power, despite their planning (failures). I can say this with confidence because none of the largest 10 firms in 1967 are in the top 10 today — and many are gone altogether.
  5. Read Jane Jacobs’s 1984 essay on urban economics and development [pdf]. Insightful!
  6. Read a slightly terrifying description of the personalities of the TechBros who are shaping our lives.
  7. Read: Local governments are bulling the press (which is calling attention to shenanigans) — just another sign of end times for America?
  8. Read: Climate chaos is already disrupting seasonal fruits… and much more to come!
  9. Read: Another step in collapse: Climate chaos is hitting Europe, but nobody is doing “anything” about it (compared to pursuing other goals that make CC worse)
  10. Read: We need more heresy, not less.

Grades and learning

Schools tend to go to one extreme or another when it comes to grades: they are either confidential or posted openly.

The reasons for confidential tend to involve self esteem, privacy, peer pressure and bullying. The idea is that students will be mean to each other if they know the grades of others.

This idea is a bit flawed — students can be mean in many ways, grades are feedback on work rather than evaluations of personal character, etc. — but you can see its parallel in discussions of pay at work.

The alternative of open grades is popular with those who want to show the product of potential, habits and behaviour — and how sometimes inputs do not lead to outputs. Sure, So-and-so (the model student) got an A, but what about S0-and-no (the rebel), who also got an A? Going further, open grades help students calibrate their own performance; they help groups of students compete with each other (I’ve published on this); and they force teachers to give clear objective feedback to students who will compare their work.

Learning is a process, and grades are signals of whether than process is going well. Although I’d prefer to post ALL my grades openly, I actually fall somewhere in between — I give open grades on some assignments (along side openly penalising failures to follow guidelines), but I give confidential grades on others. That’s just how things work out.

But my one-handed conclusion is that individual grades only make sense when you can compare yourself to the group. That’s how you know that your B+ is amazing (top grade on the exam!) or a disaster (everyone else got an A- or above).

We learn by comparison, so don’t ignore its potential.

Interesting stuff

  1. Listen to Freakonomics talk about tracking disease in wastewater
  2. Watch this funny satire on “Airbnb aesthetics”
  3. Out-of-control advertising is “enshitifying” the internet.
  4. Read: Is Amazon using excess profits from commissions paid by sellers to crush competition? Seems right to me.
  5. Listen to a good conversation on correctly using statistics
  6. Listen: California’s omni-present “this building contains chemicals known to cause cancer” signs are actually useful (!)
  7. Read: RIOT (a bitcoin miner) seems to embody a mix of fraud and delusion.
  8. The Dutch government will not make housing more “affordable” by giving money to buyers, since they will just pay more for the limited supply. BUILD MORE SUPPLY!
  9. A few choice excerpts from Right Ho Jeeves (PG Wodehouse, 1934), a novel that skewers the English upper classes, via Bertie’s relation with his butler Jeeves:

    I [Bertie] eyed him narrowly. I didn’t like his looks. Mark you, I don’t say I ever had, much, because Nature, when planning this sterling fellow, shoved in a lot more lower jaw than was absolutely necessary and made the eyes a bit too keen and piercing for one who was neither an Empire builder nor a traffic policeman

    I [Bertie] have no doubt that you could have flung bricks by the hour in England’s most densely populated districts without endangering the safety of a single girl capable of becoming Mrs. Augustus Fink-Nottle without an anaesthetic.

    I was trying to think who you reminded me of. Somebody who went about strewing ruin and desolation and breaking up homes which, until he came along, had been happy and peaceful. Attila is the man. It’s amazing.” she said, drinking me in once more. “To look at you, one would think you were just an ordinary sort of amiable idiot–certifiable, perhaps, but quite harmless. Yet, in reality, you are worse a scourge than the Black Death. I tell you, Bertie, when I contemplate you I seem to come up against all the underlying sorrow and horror of life with such a thud that I feel as if I had walked into a lamp post.”

    The fact that pigs were abroad in the night seemed to bring home to me [Bertie] the perilous nature of my enterprise. It set me thinking of all the other things that could happen to a man out and about on a velocipede without a lamp after lighting-up time. In particular, I recalled the statement of a pal of mine that in certain sections of the rural districts goats were accustomed to stray across the road to the extent of their chains, thereby forming about as sound a booby trap as one could well wish

Interesting stuff

  1. Listen to this fascinating discussion of how Ukraine’s postal service functions amidst war.
  2. Listen to this delightful conversation (Part One is also good) with Chris Anderson (TED) on charity, religion and public life.
  3. Reconsider: I’m not 100% onboard with Peter Thiel’s politics, but I really like his program to pay young people to skip college, which is “more popular than ever”
  4. Wanna be happy? Stop complaining. Read more.
  5. Economists’ perspectives on inequality are disconnected from reality.
  6. Read: Climate chaos is reducing lifespans now, via air pollution.
  7. Scary but not at all surprising: A number of Americans actually DO want chaos.
  8. Read this absolutely fascinating 1943 “Report on the Problem of the Mafia in Sicily” — excellent analysis!
  9. John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1973 insights on “The Economics of the American Housewife” [pdf] starts with “The convenient social virtue ascribes merit to any pattern of behavior, however uncomfortable or un­ natural for the individual involved, that serves the comfort or well-being of the more powerful members of the community…” and gets more interesting from there.
  10. I read Lucky Jim (Amis 1954) and enjoyed the roller-coaster plot of a hapless academic [Jim Dixon]. Here are some fun passages from various parts of the book:

    The title of the article he’d written. It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. “In considering this strangely neglected topic,” it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool.

    DIXON was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

    The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chiang Kaishek, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages. Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as miserable, as cocksure, as bad at art, as dismally ludicrous, or as wrong as they’d been in the Middle Age?

    He remembered some Greek or Latin tag about not even God being able to abolish historical fact, and was glad to think that this must apply equally to the historical fact of his drinking out of Christine’s coffee-cup.

    While he dressed, he thought how nice it was to have nothing he must do. There were compensations for ceasing to be a lecturer, especially that of ceasing to lecture.

    Dixon thought he really would have to run downstairs and knife the drivers of both vehicles; what next? what next? What actually would be next: a masked holdup, a smash, floods, a burst tyre, an electric storm with falling trees and meteorites, a diversion, a low-level attack by Communist aircraft, sheep, the driver stung by a hornet? He’d choose the last of these, if consulted. Hawking its gears, the bus crept on, while every few yards troupes of old men waited to make their quivering way aboard.

How does an entrepreneur set prices?

Traditional (neo-classical) economic theory has robust models of price-setting in two extremes. In a perfect market, identical firms sell identical goods at the same price, each firm covering its marginal costs, but no firm making any profit.

But where do normal firms and entrepreneurs set their prices, based on imperfect information regarding their competition, the potential clients, and the “unique” elements of their goods/services?

Here’s a picture:

My one-handed conclusion is that economists are very sure about a very rare set of market circumstances and very unsure (or they should be!) about 99% of market participants.

Interesting stuff

  1. Read: Guatemala’s citizens score a rare win (in Latin America) for democracy over corruption.
  2. Read: More old friends are caring for each other in the face of shrinking and fragmenting families. Very much related: Social media has turbocharged the “bowling alone” decay of social ties.
  3. Watch: “AI can do your homework… now what?
  4. Plan: Dutch banks are calling for climate risk labels for houses mortgages. Here’s one calculator by postcode [Dutch]

H/T to CD

Alexei Navalny, RIP

A hero under all circumstances.

We do not have many civic heroes these days — the people who fight with words rather than weapons to preserve domestic quality of life.

Three of my heroes, Clair Patterson, Jane Jacobs, and Rachel Carson, were civic heroes — they sacrificed a lot to help us all.

Another was Alexei Navalny, who was willing to die to help his fellow Russians.

Last week, Putin murdered him.

Putin didn’t murder him directly — just as MBS didn’t murder Jamal Khashoggi with his own hands — but Putin was 100 percent responsible.

I don’t think I was ever a fan of Putin, but he’s certainly turned from bad to worse since I began criticising him in 2005, but this 2009 post is better. I am not sure I would have been so brave if I was living in Russia. Navalny was beyond brave — not just criticising Putin to his face over the years, but returning to Russia to do so after Putin’s thugs failed to kill him with poison in 2o21. Navalny said: “I am not afraid of Vladimir the Poisoner of Underpants.”

That’s a hero, hands down.

I recommend these articles (“Why Russia Killed Navalny” and “The reckless heroism of Alexei Navalny“) to learn more about a leader the Russians needed but may not have deserved.

I look forward even more to Putin’s fall from power.