I see what you mean and that's a good and interesting idea.
However, I think while it would be revealing in some areas, it would mask other problems.
For instance, if you look purely at the FTE, you wouldn't see that George had worked 60 hours. That's a problem. Why did George work 60 hours? Was he really productive for all of that time or is he gaming the overtime system by deliberately doing less work within normal hours so that he has to do overtime to complete his scheduled work.
But we're not talking about treating workers badly by any reasonable definition. These are workers that were paid more than the average Australian worker, they got far more Christmas holiday leave than the Australian worker. They weren't living on the minimum wage.
They weren't forced to take a reduction in Christmas leave. They company asked if they could, considering the local and international conditions in their industry. The workers weren't forced, it was their decision and they said no, presumably knowing that the consequence might be that this may be the straw that shuts the factory down permanently.
If the company had made a draconian decision that cut workers pay unreasonably, regardless of the current economic circumstances and pocketed this money, I'd agree strongly with you. But, this isn't what happened. The workers kept all of their conditions and the factory shut down.
There have to be some circumstances where you would see that it would be reasonable for workers to give up some conditions in the industry they are working in if it is under some economic pressure, either internally or externally? They may only agree to give them up temporarily until conditions improve, or make some other offer to help the company to increase output or reduce costs.
The reality is that Australia is an open, market economy. Its companies have to be competitive with the rest of the world in order for those companies to survive.
You say that companies only have an interest in shortening holiday breaks. But if this is the case, how did the holiday break end up as 21 days in the first place? Companies have to compete for workers too - there must have been a time when it was beneficial to the company to attract and retain workers with a longer Christmas break. You point out that some European countries have more workers rights, but this misses the point that the competitive pressure at the time wasn't for workers - it was on total cost of production.
Nobody wants to degrade good conditions and decent pay for workers. However, for many people that work in small business and haven't had a pay rise in several years can only look on with bemusement when highly unionized industries demand 4% pay rises plus extra Christmas holidays and then demand tax payer money when their industries falls over.
It seems like every time a unionized industry is asked to make a small concession that it's seen as a zero sum game, the thin end of the wedge, a race to the bottom and the apocalypse. It's blown completely out of proportion. Most industries go through ups and downs. The inflexible ones go broke.
I think you've moved the goal posts a long way there.
A living wage as defined by the Harvester judgement, which seems to be what you are referencing, was based on begin paid enough money to be able to afford food, shelter and clothing for a family.
In the case I'm referencing the dispute is over whether the workers should have their standard break for Christmas reduced from 21 days to 10 days. I can't think of any other companies within Australia that offer such a generous Christmas break, but maybe there are some; i think it would be a very small number. What they were being asked to give up seemed very generous and the replacement of 10 days instead doesn't seem onerous - it still seems generous compared to many companies.
You'd have to ask the workers that lost their jobs if they are now better off having lost their jobs rather than stay competitive with other places by bringing their conditions in line with what is typical even within the country they live in.
I'm not advocating what you are suggesting. I agree that workers should be paid extra for working additional hours.
I also agree with you that it's important to get an accurate read on how much an employee earned. My point is that there are some people that have an incentive to obfuscate this amount and that I can only see one unambiguous way to avoid this obfuscation.
I think the starting point in these discussions should be what someone was actually paid, not what they might have been paid. Then if that amount can be justified by unsociable hours, extra hours, or whatever, then that's fine. But if the various hours, loadings or whatever seem unreasonable then that's a different discussion.
I wouldn't even normally be interested in what someone's paid - it's not my business. However, the car manufacturing industry is a different case since there was an expectation that tax payer's money should be used to bail it out. In my opinion, tax payers deserve to know what it is that they are paying for, in detail. Particularly in the car industries case since it seemed like every time that the government tipped in more money that it was closely followed by the workers getting a pay rise.
You are right that per FTE is probably a better measure technically, but this just leaves the unions a loophole: they can just classify workers as something other than FTE. They are very clever at finding these sorts of loopholes and exceptions.
What they can't do though is lie to the tax office. That crosses a threshold from being misleading to being illegal.
There is a big incentive for unions to be misleading about what their members are paid. It's hard to garner a lot of sympathy from the public when the average member of the public is paid a lot less than the average union member. That's not to say that this is always the case - the wages, agreements and marketing to the public by the unions varies significantly between unionised industries.
When annual salaries get reported in this context, you have to watch for the pea and the thimble trick where they take the base hourly rate and multiply that by standard hours to arrive at the annual salary, but nobody actually gets paid this amount.
This is because the base rate leaves out all of the various loadings that are applied under different circumstances. There are so many circumstances for loadings that the base rate becomes meaningless.
Overtime is only one way to get paid more than the base rate. Also, overtime becomes a meaningless word when you can get overtime just for working slightly non-standard hours, as opposed to working extra hours.
The agreements are written in a way that makes it really hard to calculate what a worker is actually likely to get paid annually. The only way to be certain is to look at the worker's group certificate for tax purposes.
So, while what Senator Carr said was probably technically correct, it was also meaningless since I would suggest that no worker was actually paid that amount in a year. It would be more meaningful to ask what the average amount on a worker's group certificate was.
The labour unions were unwilling to compromise to stay competitive with international factories.
I was surprised when it was reported that Toyota wanted to reduce the Christmas shutdown period from 21 days to 10 days in line with other international factories and the union rejected this. This was in the context of other car manufacturers shutting down in Australia at the time and they had to know that this attitude was risking Toyota leaving as well, but they just couldn't accept a reduction in any conditions.
Not for me. I think The Fall of Hyperion is my favourite in the series, although it's hard to split it with Hyperion.
The pacing is very different between each book, almost to the point it can feel like each book has been written by a different author. Don't read each book with the expectation that it is a straight continuation of the last as Simmons experiments with different styles and perspectives in the same universe.
>Money saved is the very definition of economic inactivity
When people save money, do you really think they put it under a mattress? No, they put it in a financial institution like a bank, who can then use it as capital to loan out further funds. By increasing the amount of saving you should naturally reduce interest rates. Saved money doesn't just drop out of the economy.
Even if someone did put money under their mattress, they are risking having inflation eat away as its value. Also, if they never spend their money, all they have done is increase the value of everyone else's money. Prices have to fall to the point that markets will clear.
>Actually, the markets created some of the most disease-ridden, sewage-infested hellholes
The two most polluted places in the world currently exist in China and Russia and stem from when they were run by Communist dictators ships without markets. So, an absence of markets doesn't seem to reduce pollution, it actually seems to increase it.
Market's aren't pefect, far from it, but alternate systems seem to do worse at providing for the things that you specifically care about.
> jobs that exploited child labor
In agrarian societies, children worked in the fields and still do. This has been since near the beginning of human civilization. It's only in advanced, developed countries with mature markets that there are barely any children working.
>threw away the sick and injured
What evidence do you have for this?
>It was people who took up arms, got shot at, but persisted in wrenching some measure of control from the "capitalists" who managed to pass child labor laws, get medical insurance, and 40 hour work weeks.
What are you talking about? Who got shot at in advanced developed economies to ensure these laws were passed? The laws were passed through the acts of various parliaments, not through revolution. These changes were made peacefully with in most cases broad agreement across the community. In countries that have experienced violent revolutions, like China and Russia, there are still many children working today, even though they've passed anti child labour laws.
You don't like the current system, obviously. But any alternate systems that have been tried appear to have done a poorer job on achieving the objectives that you desire. So what alternative do you propose and what evidence do you have that it will do a better job than our current systems?
>Your fairy tale narrative is a pleasant fiction, but we have plenty of examples of unfettered capitalism in history--the vast majority of them were horrible.
It's a shame you don't give any examples. I'm presuming you would be referring to the early industrial revolution. Supposing this is the case, you would be right - at the start of the industrial revolution the working conditions for many people (including children) were poor compared with the standards we enjoy today. Yet, despite this, people still flocked to the cities from the country side to work in factories. Why do you think this is? Do you think that people back then were stupid, or that they hated children? Or do you think they could see for themselves that compared with living on subsistence farms that they were better off? As I said earlier, it is common for children in to work on farms, so they weren't any worse off, and the extra income they provided their families made their whole family better off. It's easy to apply today's morality to people having to deal with conditions hundreds of years ago, it's harder to actually live under those conditions and make the best decisions for one's family.
Also, without going through the early industrial revolution, how do you think we all would have escaped living lives that were poor, nasty, brutish and short?
> Your "solution" is also well on its way to making the earth uninhabitable
It's not just my solution. It's the solution consistently voted for in many countries by the most educated general population in history.
If your point is so strong, why do you need to exaggerate? When will the earth be uninhabitable? Do you know a date?
>Responsible for creating societies that have incredibly poor mental and emotional health
Taking this interesting statement at face value, if you traveled back in time several hundred years and asked someone if they would trade: plentiful food, medicine that can heal infections, nearly eliminating infant mortality, rapid travel to distant destinations, nearly everybody enjoying the luxuries that only the exceptionally wealthy of their own time have access to in exchange for: poor mental and emotional health, what choice do you think they would make?
If we don't take it at face value, how do you even measure poor mental and emotional health? Do people with alternate economic systems have better mental and emotional health? I don't think the millions that died in mass starvation in Mao's China appreciated having superior emotional health.
> Worse, the opportunity costs of future development lost because of short-sighted greed - the poor energy choices, the regular financial meltdowns
What opportunities are we passing up? Our energy choices are largely driven by obtaining energy most efficiently, just like the rest of nature. The energy choice you are probably most critical of, coal, is largely responsible for lifting the worlds poorest people out of poverty. Is not wanting to be impoverished being greedy? Are you using a device that runs on electricty? Does it contain plastic?
As for financial meltdowns, economists have discovered recessions throughout history. They are a normal feature of all economies and they affect non-market driven systems too. I'm not sure how you think you would avoid recessions, but lots of people have tried with little success.
> the fact that so much progress relies on military spending and research
I wouldn't agree that a lot of progress relies on military spending. I think a lot of resources are wasted on military spending. However, there needs to be sufficient spending to deter other parties that might start to think they would be better off taking from others rather than creating for themselves.
> the vast cost of industries like smoking and sugar that are only profitable because they destroy the health of their customers
At the time these industries came into existence, there was no evidence they were harmful. All of the evidence is relatively recent. Are you saying in your alternate system you would have foreseen this and banned them before they were ever produced? Perhaps you are saying that as soon as there was evidence they were harmful you would have banned them. But, when trans fats were invented, health conscious scientists wanted to replace all of our fat intake with trans fats because they thought they were healthier. Would you have enforced this change too? What about when it was found they were mistaken about trans fats? Would you force everyone to change back? Maybe it's better to let people make up their own minds.
>If economics came with built-in accounting for the cost of externalities, predictable human failure modes, network effects, and negative feedback for corporate sociopathy, we'd probably be on our way to the rest of the galaxy.
If what you are saying is true, then surely an alternate economic model, like those attempted in Communist Russia and China would have smashed our poor little capitalist economies. Or some other model would have arisen throughout the ages. Or maybe you are saying our situation is hopeless and there is no economic model, either market driven or other, that can force people to behave the way you want them to? In which case we're all doomed and you don't have much to contribute.
> The Internet electric cars are a nice consolation prize, but they're not any more than that - certainly not when the effects of poverty and caste stratification
It's hard to believe that you can throw away all of the achievements of the industrial age so lightly. If you don't value a significant reduction in poverty, longer life expectancy, increased living standards, reduction in child mortality, vastly improved standards of literacy and education, elimination of many infectious diseases, improved environmental outcomes in developed countries vs developing/ex-communist countries... then what do you value?
I'm not saying we can't improve the systems we have. But I think we can be proud of what we've already achieved and feel confident that we will be able to do even better in the future. There isn't any reason to be defeatist or cynical.
Considering that markets when combined with stable institutions, property rights and the rule of law, have done more to reduce poverty, increase lifespans and health than any else in history, I think the onus of proof is on the other side.
If you consider migration a type of voting mechanism, then countries that feature markets tend to attract more votes.
I'm not sure what it is about the profit motive that makes it better, but empirically it seems to result in more successful outcomes for everyone in the countries where it is available when compared with countries where it isn't available.
If workers can construct a better nuclear power plant without anyone making a profit - they are welcome to try. If they did a good job, I would congratulate them. But when it comes to alternate economic systems, there seems to be a lot of talk and little action on the ground where the work gets done. Talk doesn't feed people or keep the lights on.
I think you are misjudging those people that have made large profits as being purely greedy. From what I've seen, they are driven, hardworking and focused on achieving their vision. For most, profits are just the means to the end they imagine.
Do you really imagine the world would be better off if Elon Musk's profits were confiscated and given to some government bureaucrat? Would a workers collective take a risk on inventing new technologies? History suggests not.
The funny thing is that most of the benefits from the hard work of entrepreneurs flows to everyone else, not the entrepreneurs themselves, through more plentiful food, health and technology.
>Those are two absolutely different things. One stems from production, transportation, and financial improvements across the board, the other comes because fewer people want to buy anything.
That's true, but they are measured the same way: through the nominal value of goods and services. The people that the economists are worried about, consumers, only have the price of goods to guide them, they have no information as to whether the falling price is due to improvements in efficiency or lack of demand.
>It's not so much about consumers delaying spending. It's what happens further up the chain. If the holders of wealth that seed the economy figure out that it's better for them to hold on to their >assets rather than invest them, then people lose jobs. We need them to keep investing their money.
I'm not sure I've read this as being the main driver of the theory previously. To me, it doesn't really make sense since theories concerning deflation don't make any predictions concerning the return on investment. If deflation is uniform, then the return should stay the same since the cost of inputs should fall as well. If deflation isn't uniform, then you'd see changes in the allocation of resources as some industries make large profits due to falling input costs, while other industries might go bust due to their input costs staying the same even while their sell prices fall.
Personally, I think that that productivity growth is far more important than deflation and will compensate for any short term negative effects that deflation might or might not bring.
Everyone is scared of deflation, but is completely comfortable with the rapid drop in the price of electronic goods over the last few decades.
I'm simplifying a bit. The traditional theories that warn against deflation are concerned about consumers delaying spending in the hope of waiting for even cheaper prices. This delay theoretically forces the economy to grind to a halt. I think most people accept now that this is an unlikely outcome.
Now when Central Banks worry about deflation they are concerned that it might trigger a fall in real incomes, while debt remains at the same level, meaning people aren't able to pay back their debts. In our debt addicted economies, this is a real risk.
I find it frustrating that so much journalism these days exaggerates environmental issues, with any factual errors seemingly brushed off as just showing an excess of virtue.
https://imperatorworks.com/
They are very expensive, but I've always wondered if getting one would be worth it.