Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Thanks for spotting this looming cultural shift toward a merit-pay world. Instead of regarding the shocking income-gap as a sign of the mal-functioning of our economy, the merit-pay approach takes it as a nudge toward a more efficient concept of labor. This will either become an important ideological battleground, or it is already a slick detour around what should have been a shock encounter with harsh reality.

sorry
i botched this post badly

my point

the burgeoning income share
of the property owning
pedator class
-- correctly measured --
is the real culprit in our growingincome disparity
not relative demand and supply shifts
among various skill levels and types

not the bottom 80 vs top 20 gap
in rates of income growth
between job holders

but the bottom 95 vs top 5 % gap
in net worth growth rates

among wealth holders its hugely skewed toward the top
and positively
exponential
among the top one percenters
themselves

exhibit a :

"All master Zombie's innovation could do is lower the relative product price commensurate with the total reduced labor costs -- and even that's only if the inventor actually owns the rights to his innovation"

should read

in the long un z's innovation
would lower the relative price blah blah blah....in the short run if he owned
the IP rights to his innovation
he might get a patent and earn a royalty stream
or keep it secret and make super profits
again if he owns it can exclude others from it
and no one else figures it out etc etc

but regardles

ninja's "work product"
is not owned by him
it's owned by his corporate employer
so ....even if
he produced it
the gains go else where
and he's only worth what he'd cost to eplace
and in a global where his sort get produced cheap in south asia...

btw
even if the corporation captures all
the savings as earnings increment
ninja would need to come up with
one of these 18 man year savers
every month
to even bgin to justify his
216 x the pay
of the data imput clerk jobs he torched

then again if he discounted
that same net earnings stream
by the corporations market p/e ratio
he could put in for a one time bonus
equal to some part of the present value ....

ahh hell
come to me ith that
and id have him "replaced" just as soon
as HR had a paper trail to bust him with

One way or or another elites endeavor to plunder the rest of us--economic theory, if anything, mainly serves to provide a rational for this plunder and give what really amounts to theft the appearance of a law of physics. In reality, what change over time are not "society's values" so much as the rationalizing philosophies--the concrete reality of a few stinking rich and a broad suffering has been more or less a constant since the dawn of civilization.

...I spent a month recently building an OCR system,

Most times this would be a codeword for integrating or implementing as opposed to custom build designing (coding from scratch). I find it incredibly hard to believe that a solution was developed and implemented in one month from scratch without the use of pre-existing tools.

In my line of work, I see this attitude all the time, and really prevalent from people only marginally more productive then the data-entry people they're displacing.

People use this attitude as a way of whistling through the dark woods, knowing that but for a change in circumstances, there go they.

Good point, Peter. However, there are objective differences (real world consequences for workers) between the different philosophies/ideologies elites use to justify their privileged position. Noting a shift in ideology (though apparently this wasnt the point of OP's post) can be a clue to noting a change in real world practices toward labor.

Louis Proyect recently reviewed "How the Univeristy Works" by Marc Bousquet, in which he shows how TQM theory has been adopted by American universities as an ideological guise for shifting from tenured to un-tenured faculty, a policy that pretty much consigns all current PhD hopefuls to a hard-scrabble life without benefits, tenure, or dignity.

"One way or or another elites endeavor to plunder the rest of us"

in the case
of a corporation for profit mediated production system
language can be made much plainer
and the object of "the plunder" game
stated more direct-ly precise-ly
and operational-ly

the elite managers of a corporation
who's sole mission is profit
have obviously
only one
sure fire ultimate task

maximize
the exploitation of the corporation's
job force

ie
max the gap between
any one employee's notional "value added"
and her real compensation

any rent seeking success
any "earnings " beyond those extracted
from the "intrnal "
production process itself
are best treated
as ...a one time wind fall

angry one :

i suspect as much

btw theory in keeping with the
next best notion
suggests
society should reward the innovator
by the amount
the time stamp on the innovation
may hve brought forward in time
the moment of effective utilization
of the innovation

looks
not so silly in algebraic form
in keeping with the formalism fetish
of the dismal science

what's that worth ????
gets thorny
if we can't put a value
on the innovation itself
because its not a proces improvement
---like with ginja geek here ---
but instead a whole new end product
with use novelty

here's a good speimen of the state of the science as "verbalized"
by the second giant from gary

cousin it
joe stiglitz

http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/download/papers/2008_Econ_Fdns_IPR.pdf