My Old Blog

More is better. The post is about this article and I even went through the painful ordeal of reading the lecture.

In his Richard T. Ely lecture to the American Economic Association in 2002, economist Edward Prescott of the University of Minnesota concluded that almost all of the difference in living standards between the U.S. and France is accounted for by the impact of taxes on work. He notes that while the capital/output ratio is about the same in both countries, French workers work 30 percent less, due entirely to the much heavier French tax burden on labor. Prof. Prescott concluded that if France had the U.S. tax system, the French standard of living would immediately rise by 20 percent.

This brillant observation points out that if the French worked 30% more their standard of living would rise to American levels. I hope Mr. Prescott did not receive any special merit for pointing out that the French would make more money if they worked more.

Does anyone see an issue with equating more work and more money with a higher standard of living?

Here is my brillant observation: If the French work 30% more they will have 30% less free time. Is that really an increase in living standards?? I’d be upset if I worked 30% more and only received a 20% increase in “living standards”. Where did the other 10% go?

Mr. Prescott’s research isn’t really about the living standard question. It is about the effect of taxation on one’s willingness to work. He proposes that if you are taxed less, you will work more. In effect you will choose work over leisure time because there is more reward for working.

That sounds right, not that it matters what I think sounds good. I am just always amazed by the assumption that more money equals a better life. In a country where money is plentiful and no one is satisfied with it, it troubles me that the assumption lies unquestioned.

I’ve never been a big fan of “networking”, although I am told it is the greatest thing ever if you want to be successful and get a good job.

Essentially networking is where you meet people under the false pretense of friendship for the sole reason of finding out whether or not they can do anything for you.

In effect, networking has jargonized the process of making friends and reduced it to a utilitarian interaction.

Poopy on that!! What happened to “the art of meeting people simply because they might one day become your friend”?? It surely doesn’t have the same sterile ring to it as “networking” but I think it could be rewarding as well, perhaps more rewarding if one assumes people might actually enjoy the company of others for its own sake??

Anyway, I decided to network when I came to SF. This consists of calling anyone with whom I have even the remotest connection and asking them to catch dinner or have a drink. Then I talk for a few hours with a near stranger.

Guess what?? It is a ton of fun!! I love to go out to eat and I love to drink. And I’ve found that, because of all my hobbies and travels and interests and hang-ups, I always have something to talk about. If its with a girl, it sort of doubles as a date…which isn’t so bad either.

Additionally, I am very good at making strangers feel comfortable. Travelling teaches you that. You have to make new friends out of total strangers in a matter of hours or they’ll be gone to the next country before you’ve made a connection.

And networking has a ring of productivity to it. Hanging out with friends is what slackers do to avoid working. With networks you can “establish contacts”, “build relationships”, provide “customer service”, and engage in many other very official sounding activities.

So basically, I’ve turned getting drunk with new friends into something I can check off a to-do list as productive and time well-spent. Anyone think I’m just rationalizing what I wanted to do in the first place??

“Elliott, what did you do in SF?”

Answer 1: “I got drunk a lot and hung out with all the interesting people I met.”

Answer 2: “I spend most of my time networking, trying to find a job.”

Both answers are true.

I have read zillions of job posts over the past year. Some of them are Ok. Most of them are so puffed up with buzz-words and catch phrases I don’t even understand what they’re saying.

Its like there is some secret inventory of cryptic business jargon that spits out these job descriptions. The HR folks just cut and paste a meaningless garble of bullet point sentence fragments obviously looking for employees that can tell them what they hell they just meant to say.

Here is a nice average example of what employers want:

Who are these fucking people? Because I’ve never met them.

But when I do I am sure they will be “implementing” something and way too busy to talk to me. They will have deep and immodulated voices, maintain an unnatural amount of eye contact and repeat my name several times for no reason in our short “results oriented” conversation.

It would be funny if it weren’t so true…..

Folks,

I am packing up and heading to Black Mountain, NC today. I will continue to post and email but will certainly be more busy as work is pretty much 24/7 at camp….not that the work is bad, just long.

I’ll miss my family and Josh and my dog. Other than that….Greenville can EMA.

On another note:

Anyone reading this page that wishes to help me find a job is welcome to contact me. I would like to eventually work in organizational development. I want to help design work so that people like it better. If done right, people will be happier (score one for us) and more productive (score one for the organization). I am willing to do any work that would help me along that path.

Why would I be good at it when I have no direct professional experience doing it? Three great reasons:

1) I have an obsession with work/life balance. Anyone that has read this website once or talked to me twice knows how I feel about the established career path and the endless hours people while away at work with no real engagement. My unwavering committment to the issue is easily seen by looking at the decisions I’ve made in life. If you employ someone to work on what they are obsessed with anyway, you’re bound to get a high level of committment.

2) I love to excel. I waste endless hours getting better at and learning stuff that is of no real use. I just like to do it. It follows that one of the things I like to see most in other people is improvement. I love to help people get better.

That is one of the main reasons I am going to camp for the summer. I get a chance to help all those little kids get better….at everything. For two weeks at a time I have to follow around a cabin of kids and make sure they don’t kill themselves. But they will also be following me around. Remember when you went to camp and there was that counselor you thought was the coolest person ever? You wanted to be just like them when you grew up. You still remember them. I want to be that guy. Isn’t that what you really want to do with you work anyway? You want to do something that, in whatever small way, affects people’s lives for the better.

3) I have an unnatural preoccupation with process. When I bowl, shoot basketball, or play golf I obsess about mechanics. When I think of the guitar I think of scales. When I think of software I think of the code that makes it go. Strategy fascinates me. Lots of people are good at stuff, but few people know exactly why they are so good at it. I like to break it down into component parts and examine what makes it work or not. This coupled with my drive to help people get better, coupled with my ability to write means I am pretty good at communicating to others what works and why it can be good for them.

These three things will some day allow me to design (talent three) excellent (talent 2) jobs (obsession 1).

For the record, these can also be very annoying talents. People hate arguing with me. I have a tendency to get on people’s nerves when I really compete at something. The inclination to break things down into understandable component parts makes me overanalyze and nitpick. This last one has cause me endless problems over the years.

Oh yeah. There is one other thing I’ll miss from Greenville: Riley. She lives up the street and I’ve become pretty good friends with her family. She can’t pronounce my name yet, but she knows who I am….and she loves my dog.

Anyone ever given any thought to the GDP? It is perhaps the most influencial number in our lives. When GDP is up, we prosper.

GDP was invented during the years of the Great Depression before WWII. The thinking was that if we are going to help the economy we first need to be able to measure it. Before that there was no consistent measure of economic growth. GDP was little help until WWII started and we the increased production as a result of war.

At the same time John Maynard Keynes rose to prominence in Britain as a wartime economic planner. His great idea was that the role of government as a social planner and industry regulator should be diminished. The new role of goverment would be as a gigantic financial carburetor.

To me this seems like a ridiculous idea, but Britain won the war and Keynes got famous. So, Keynsian economics got together with our newly minted measure of economic prosperity, the GDP. And so our government became the priests of the church of economics and dropped most social and regulatory agendas since they add little to GDP.

What is the GDP? Simply put, it is a measure of national consumption. If government’s first priority is economic growth then if follows that my duty as a good American is to consume as much as possible, in that way adding to the GDP and general prosperity. Is that really my primary value as a citizen?

Ok. So GDP is a measure of national consumption and used as a surrogate to national well-being. The reasoning goes that as we get richer, the nation is better off and so are its citizens. No one argues that it is a perfect measure. However, the basic premise behind GDP remains unquestioned: As the nation gets richer, overall we are better off.

I disagree and here is why. GDP measures consumption. Consumption of what? Anything. It simply measures transactions, with no regard to whether they are beneficial or not.

Here are some startling examples of the shortcomings of GDP as a measure of well-being:

Husband loses his job, gets rehired at a lower wage, and wife goes to work to help support the family. The wife quits her volunteer position at local community church as youth coordinator. The children go into daycare because the mother is now at work. The relationship get strained. The parents divorce and the kids enter counseling.

Sad story right? Depends on who you ask. Lets look at it from the perspective of GDP, our surrogate measure of well-being.

-Wife goes to work: GDP goes up. There is more money overall entering the household, thus more money to spend.
-Wife quits volunteer position at church and church is forced to hire someone else for a wage: GDP goes up even though church doesn’t benefit.
-Children go to daycare: GDP goes up. A mother at home taking care of her children adds nothing to GDP. The national economy would sky rocket if all mothers went to work and sent their kids to paid day care.
-Parents get a divorce: GDP goes up. Lawyer fees are outrageous, but they do qualify as consumption.
-Kids go to counseling: GDP goes up. Psychologists don’t counsel for free. Misery costs money. Happiness is cheap.

So that is GDP. In this scenario a family broke down, stress went up, leisure time plummeted, a community suffered and children were permanently harmed, but GDP rose in every circumstance. Welcome to the wonders of modern economic theory and the unbelievable assumption that increased GDP is good for national well being.

Here is another one: Big company makes nuclear wrist bands. They mine ore to get the raw materials to run their reactor. They pollute the nearby river and the land they occupy. The city residents become ill through exposure to the pollution.

-Company sells wrist bands: GDP goes up. No matter that nuclear wrist bands are just consumer junk.
-They mine ore: GDP goes up although there is no corresponding measure to account for depleting natural resources.
-They pollute: GDP goes up. They will eventually have to clean up the pollution and clean up adds to GDP. The Exxon Valdez oil spill was a goldmine for GDP.
-Residents become sick: GDP goes up. Illness is a huge boost for GDP. It costs alot of money to get well. And that doesn’t even start to account for the court fees that will cover the litagation against the company.

One of the huge issues with GDP is that there is no way to subtract from it and it makes no distinction between types of consumption. Everything my imaginary company did was either harmful or useless and yet every action added to GDP.

Let me paint this extremely painful scenario: Use up every natural resource in our country: trees, coal, oil, minerals, gold, everything and turn the USA into a desert wasteland. GDP would shoot through the roof. But we are consuming ourselves and mortgaging the future for an extra Gucci bag today. Want it to go even higher? Achieve complete fluidity in the labor market and watch the complete breakdown of family and community. People and companies move around the country in an endless circle searching for increased market efficiencies. Crime, alienation, stress and divorce rise. Trust, leisure time, and job security decline.

And it isn’t just the USA that does this. The World Bank defines developing countries by GDP. I remember in school when we looked at GDP per person for a country like Cambodia or Senegal. It is like 25 dollars a year per head or some other insanely low figure.

But consider this: The GDP of all American Indian nations combined was zero when we marched across the country and took their land. A zero GDP or 25 bucks per capita income doesn’t mean life is unbearable (although it can in some circumstances), it just means a nation or people isn’t participating in the formal economy. Killing buffalo and trading that for clean water while the women take care of children and the elderly in exchange for security and a home….that all adds up to zero. One can live a sustainable and happy lifestyle without contributing anything to the formal economy as measured by GDP.

By encouraging these nations to “develop” we are destroying their way of life. Additionally, if a multinational establishes itself in a poor country the revenue generated is included in that country’s GDP, even though it is likely that all profits will be repatriated to a western nation. It is true that increased wealth can increase well being, but not at all costs. The GDP fails to take these other factors into account. The Centre for Economic Performance found that happiness increases with income up to $15,000 per year. After that it makes no difference at all.

Economists and politicians have offerred resistance to new measures of well being mainly in philosophical terms. A measure of national progress must be scientific and value-free, they say. Any attempt to assess how the economy actually affects people would involve too many assumptions, too many value judgments regarding what to include. Better to stay on the supposed terra firma of the GDP, which for all its faults has acquired an aura of hardheaded empirical science.

Aura notwithstanding, the current GDP is far from value-free. To leave social and environmental costs out of the economic reckoning does not avoid value judgments. On the contrary, it makes the enormous value judgment that such things as family breakdown and crime, the destruction of farmland and entire species, underemployment and the loss of free time, count for nothing in the economic balance. The fact is, the GDP already does put an arbitrary value on such factors–a big zero.

I could go on forever. Everyone knows I have a near obsession with work life balance, wage slavery, the false grail of consume at all costs and any other number of similar topics. I have spent much of my life dealing with it in one form or another. It isn’t mystic, weakminded rhetoric for those without the backbone to buck up and take it like a man. It is an ongoing practical examination of the age old question: Why are we here?

And finally, the image of the snake eating its own tail is my pictoral representation of the world economy. The fuel that drives the economy is us. We are consuming ourselves and mortgaging our planet in the process. It would take 1.2 Earths to replenish the natural environment at the rate we are using it. It would take 4.5 Earths to raise the standard of living of the entire planet to that of the USA. I realize these figures are only as good as the assumptions that went into calculating them, but it does make one think.

I have gathered an absolutely staggering amount of information on the art of job-hunting. Like many other things in my life, I am a virtual expert….without ever actually having done it or been successful at it.

In fact, I decided I should write an article for the Greenville News Career Builder section entitled “What is you job-hunting IQ?” Here is the article:

What is your job hunting IQ?

Job-hunting 101 is not a class I ever had in school. I’m not even sure it is a class, but it should be. The average person goes job-hunting 8 times during their career. It literally pays to know how to find a job.

It isn’t as intuitive as you might think. The skills needed to be a mechanic do not necessarily serve you in finding a job as a mechanic. The most qualified candidate does not always get hired. The best job hunter does. So what should you know about job-hunting?

Employers want a resume right? Not really. Companies use resumes to screen people out, not screen them in. On average you have to mail out 170 resumes to generate one interview. Often as many as 500 people respond to a classified ad. Because of the volume of resumes employers receive; they may look at each one for only a few seconds. Most of us simply do not have the writing skills to compose a resume that stands out in a crowd of 500.

Is the Internet a good place to find a job? Not really. Less than 10% of on-line job hunters land a job through the Internet. Out of curiosity I registered with every major job board on the Internet (6 months ago). Number of responses to my resume and job applications: 0. On a positive note the Internet is an invaluable research tool for investigating companies, preparing for interviews and finding salary information.

What about headhunters and employment agencies? People do get jobs this way. After all, if headhunters never placed anyone they would go out of business. However, the businesses pay the bills for the employment agency, not you. They have little incentive to place you in a job; they want to fill jobs for businesses.

Knowing all this, does anything work for getting a job? Well, most job search methods have low rates of success, but low does not mean zero. Using 4 methods with a 10% rate of success gets you up to 40%. If you play that game long enough, you eventually win.

Of course, there are techniques to increase your chances. Talk to the person in the organization that has the power to hire you. Impressing anyone else is unlikely to get the results you want. Target small companies. Experts have claimed for years that small organizations create two thirds of all new jobs. Competing against an international pool of applicants for a Fortune 500 job will always be an uphill battle.

Not surprisingly, one of the most successful job-hunting methods is asking friends and family for leads. Tell everyone you know that you’re looking for a job. Keep in mind that only 10% of job openings are advertised to the public. Friends and family can help you compete for that other 90%.

Most job-hunters don’t do much hunting. They apply for anything that seems bearable, let a company pick them, and do most of their research after they are hired, only later finding out they “picked” the wrong job. U.S. Department of Labor statistics indicate that 40% of all new hires leave within the first six months.

The most successful job-hunters and headhunters advise actually hunting for a job. Write down on paper what you are good at and what you would like to do. With that in mind, target 5 to 10 companies you want to work for, regardless of whether or not they have any known vacancies. Oddly enough, this is the most successful strategy for finding a job. Forget what’s available; go after what you want most.

In the end job-hunting is a numbers game. It is estimated you’ll spend one month searching for every 10,000 dollars you want to make. The number one reason people don’t find a job: they quit trying.

So how did my article work out?

It is as yet unpublished, which is to say that I am having the same success with writing that I am with the job hunt:

I am a virtual expert.

I got these stats from timeday.org:

We’re putting in longer hours on the job now than we did in the 1950s, despite promises of a coming age of leisure before the year 2000. In fact, we’re working more than medieval peasants did, and more than the citizens of any other industrial country! Mandatory overtime is at its highest levels ever, in spite of a recession. On average, we work 350 hours — nearly nine full weeks — longer than our peers in Western Europe do. Twenty six percent of us got no vacations at all last year while the Europeans AVERAGED six weeks!

I can’t vouch for the truth of the medieval peasant claim, but I know we don’t work longer than the Japenese or Koreans (perhaps they aren’t considered industrialized?). Mandatory overtime is likely at its highest levels ever, but that trend has held across boom and recession. I believe the Westen Europe thing.

This is from the NY Times:

U.S. Census data show a rising share of income going to the top 20 percent of families, and within that top 20 percent to the top 5 percent, with a declining share going to families in the middle. That is, it’s not simply that the top 20 percent of families have had bigger percentage gains than families near the middle: the top 5 percent have done better than the next 15, the top 1 percent better than the next 4, and so on up to Bill Gates. A Congressional Budget Office study found that between 1979 and 1997, the after-tax incomes of the top 1 percent of families rose 157 percent, compared with only a 10 percent gain for families near the middle of the income distribution.

I don’t think its fair to bash the rich. Would you behave any differently if you were in their shoes? I think there is a moral though: Wealth doesn’t necessarily trickle down. As the rich get richer they just buy more summer homes and bigger yachts. And I fear politicians.

This is what it boils down to:

If you purchase a train ticket, you have two concerns: where the train is going, and how fast the train will take you there. And those concerns are clearly listed in order of importance. The direction of the train matters most; speed is only helpful if the direction is correct. If we are heading in the wrong direction, or worse yet on a runaway train, does it really matter how fast we are going?

I keep reading about economic growth…growth…increase…more. Our economic model for growth is Cancer. Cancer grows and grows and doesn’t know when to stop or what kind of growth to produce. Who cares how fast the train is going if no one is steering?

I realize its hard to decide where to go. But I think crashing the ship on the way to some destination is better than thrashing about without any attempt at a direction at all.

Growth for the sake of growth will eat us all up chasing it. You can’t just run faster and faster and faster….especially when you’re not even trying to get anywhere.