Those of you who are managers may have
been offended by our last two posts, Stupid
Management Tricks and
Ambition?
Or All In?. If so, we want you to know that we wish you well. We just
think that you wield too much power over your employees.
We know that some of you are wonderful managers who are
beloved by your employees. Hey, can we come work for you? On the
other hand, some of you are not wonderful managers.
If you are familiar with South
Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, you know that it was
set up to deal with the effects of apartheid as part of the end of
apartheid. We think it was a very wise approach because the purpose
was not to identify and punish the guilty, but to bring the truth
into the open. They recognized that trying to punish most everyone in
an entire society guilty of discrimination, human rights violations,
and violence was an impossible task, one in which the truth would get
lost among all the lies. The attempt itself would become an open sore
on the society, leading to many more years of violence, and give rise
to witch hunts.
Instead, the Commission just asked for
the truth. Those who testified could apply for amnesty and receive no
punishment for their actions. Victims were identified and
compensated. This approach rapidly led to peace and to the end of
apartheid. Reconciliation was accomplished very quickly, in our view.
In the same spirit, it is not our
purpose to criminalize managers or rich people. It is our purpose to
get them to see what they do in a new light. Some of the things they
must do, the things they would rather the public not know about, are
no longer necessary.
For example, take the period of the
Great Recession in the US. Some of you were managers in that period.
Some of you knew about coming layoffs and concealed that information
from your employees. In answer to their anxious questions, you
outright lied to them. Perhaps you even painted a rosy picture of the
future for them. After all, morale had to be maintained.
Then you laid off your employees. In
tens, hundreds, even thousands. There you were, knowingly dumping
them into a terrible job market, knowing that many of them would lose
their homes and not be able to support their families. Perhaps their
families would break up. No one we want to know would feel good about
that.
You had to do it because you were
ordered to do it. It was your job and your responsibility. They told
you it had to be done. But if you are a decent human being, you did
not like it and you wish it had not happened.
The trouble is that it was not
necessary. These days most human suffering is caused by humans. For
example, here is what John Maynard Keynes said at the beginning of
the Great Depression:
"This is a nightmare, which will
pass away with the morning. For the resources of nature and men's
devices are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of
our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not
less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a
high standard of life ... and will soon learn to afford a standard
higher still. We were not previously deceived. But to-day we have
involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the
control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not
understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to
waste for a time — perhaps for a long time."
We generally agree with Keynes here,
especially regarding our times and the Great Recession. We are now
many generations off the farm and we are generally much better
educated than people were in 1930. We all know the work that we have
to do to keep everyone fed, clothed, sheltered, and in as good health
as nature allows.
Despite that, we allowed our highest
economic and political leaders to blunder (as Keynes said) in the
control of the delicate machine. The competency and good will of our
leadership was and is in question. How could the Great Recession
happen? If it was not intentional, then why is the system so
delicate? How is it that our highest leaders would allow digits on
their balance sheets to lead to a huge economic mess and increased
human suffering?
The tosoc.org explanation is that the
natural result of capitalism is rich people, but rich people are not
devoted to capitalism. They are devoted to keeping and increasing
their riches. Once the rich become rich enough, Adam Smith's
"invisible hand" suddenly becomes visible, and at that
point, things are wide open. You can then pick your metaphor for how the
rich destroy the system that made them. The heavy finger of the rich
tilts the playing field in their favor—something that can only be
expected. They just take advantage of their advantages, but they have
a lot more advantages than we do. They change the game in their
favor. They distort the markets in their favor. The rich cheat, if
you will, although in general we do not think of it that way. See our
post The
Guilty Innocents.
It seems obvious to us, therefore,
that the way to make the system more robust is to separate the rich
markets from the poor markets. Make the competition balanced in every
market. The rich can only destroy the markets in which they compete.
Naturally, splitting up markets and
currencies is not a capitalist thing to do. It must be done by
governments. Some might not like that, but we ask you. How much less
capitalist would that be compared to what we do today? When
governments borrow trillions (from the rich) to keep the private
banks from collapsing?
Coming back to management and today's
managers, we think it would be a lot less stressful for
well-intentioned managers if laying people off meant just lost
income, not also lost livelihoods, loss of homes, and possibly the
breakup of families. The whole employer-employee relationship would
be less tense than it is today.
Especially during economic downturns, employees would never feel
themselves under the almost life-or-death pressure to keep their
jobs. Employers would not have to deal with those emotions.
For those of you managers who enjoy
having an almost life-or-death whip hand over your employees, we do
not have much use for you. We think you are bad managers. We are not
out to punish you, but we want to take the whip out of your hand.
For those of you managers who are
well-intentioned and sympathetic toward your employees, we want you
to be able to exercise your leadership rather than a whip that you
are uncomfortable using. We think that under our system, the
employees of bad managers will migrate to you and your benign
leadership. Ultimately bad managers will have no more employees and
be driven out of the system, improving life for everyone.
Finally, managers would be able to
both hire and fire faster and easier. We think that under the current
system, the consequences (or costs) of firing someone is too severe
for both the employee and the employer. This feeds back into the
hiring process, where taking someone on must be weighed carefully
against the possibility that you will have to let them go. If workers
could change jobs faster without fear of personal financial
destruction, they would find their best-fit employment more quickly.
There should be major economic advantages to that for our entire
system. Economists these days talk about the problem of "sticky
wages" in economic downturns. Perhaps we have a solution to that
for them here at tosoc.org.
The way capitalism
should be.
Socialism for the
socialists and capitalism for the capitalists.
TheOtherSideOfCapitalism
(admin@tosoc.org)
Copyright
© 2014 TheOtherSideOfCapitalism
