This is to be expected when the working environment gets as cut-throat as the American workplace has become. Blame it on inequality, blame it on the puritanical drive to overwork, blame it on the zeal to squeeze every last bit of profit. It's just one other symptom of how anyone who is not an oligarch in this society is meant as an expendable resource to be crushed by the ubermensch.
My only hope is that the USA fails to export its brand of moral decrepitude to the rest of the world. Europe should stay civilized, for the sake of its people.
This is nothing unique to the United States (or to the 21st century). Just read a history book about another time and place. The workplace here and now is far kinder and gentler than almost any time or place in history (with the possible exception of contemporary, developed nations).
In the good old days, children worked and in horrible jobs, such as coal mines; workers regularly lost limb and life; 7 day weeks and incredible hours were the norm, and in physically and environmentally horrible jobs.
>The workplace here and now is far kinder and gentler than almost any time or place in history (with the possible exception of contemporary, developed nations).
We had kinder and gentler workplaces 30-40 years ago.
We can thank the business community for destroying our unions for that, and neoliberal economists for providing a plausible sounding rationale for why it was in our best interests.
Also, while we haven't quiet brought back debtors prisons, child labor, back breaking labor and 18 hours days, we are certainly headed squarely in that direction.
It sounds to me like you're conflating the difficulty of the work (coal mining is hard, dangerous work) with the way people treat each other at work (like the shitty bosses in the article).
When I read books about other times and places, my main impression is that the work may have been harder, but that the people were much kinder to one another.
Given that I've worked at some places that were horrible and some that were very kind, I'd say that the dangers of the work are often temporarily necessary for economic reasons [1], but the way we treat each other is something purely chosen. Not always chosen explicitly, but a natural consequence of other choices we make in setting up the systems in which we work.
It used to be fairly common for a boss to physically beat the people that worked for them. If anything a modern 'high stress' jobs are a cakewalk compared to what people used to deal with.
Sure, but most people didn't have jobs until recently. A lot of human history is subsistence agriculture in small villages. And a lot of human prehistory is various sorts of nomadic life. The boss-as-tyrant model is only possible when somebody makes their living by controlling others, which only works in times of substantial free resource scarcity and low opportunity.
A good point in general, though I'd add that, 1) slavery has been around for a long time and in many cultures family members are/were treated as property, especially women and children; and 2) for much of history[1] power, including ownership of land, has been concentrated in few hands, who often were not very kind to their subordinates.
I wonder what the historical distribution of self-employed (including subsistance farming) vs employed by others.
[1] Of course it depends how far back we go in history. Until 10,000 years ago we all were hunter gatherers.
Unfortunately for Europe the actual problem is Asia and globalizaton in general. However much you may dislike it the economy is global. Yes you can sell each other heavily regulated lattes but that does not change the market realities for fungible items.
The United States is the way it is because this is the only way to survive within the framework of competitive capitalism. European attempts at cultural protectionism will fail as market pressures force them to adopt American customs and habits.
This is just basic economics. American companies ruthlessly optimize for profit. Any attempt to optimize for anything else will take away from the potential for profit. In a global economy this means that profitable companies will beat out nice companies, and eventually "nice" company shareholders will force restructuring according to American ideals.
I would also say that based on existing trends the United States is quite rapidly succeeding at bringing its way of life to the rest of the world. There are no more competing ideologies left, and the next few years will lead to more trade agreements that will mop up the remains of protectionism. Soon, English will be mandated as a first language in most of the world, and we'll have a truly globalized culture.
Who says that being nice is a competitive disadvantage? Being mean or stingy to employees makes them less motivated, increases turnover, and ensures you only get the people that nobody else wants to hire.
Costco is an example of a retailer that treats its employees well, and enjoys turnover rates a fraction of the industry norm. That means greater productivity, and lower hiring and training costs.
The problem is not optimizing for profit, but optimizing for quarterly profit. Short-term thinking for short-term profit but long-term costs.
Employee happiness is absolutely relevant to P&L. Happy employees are more productive and have less turnover.
Companies already know this. It becomes a game of "how little must we do" but it's far from the sweatshop imagery I saw while reading your comment.
I grew up middle class in middle America and it's not just the SF tech scene I've made my career in; I grew up in a world of company picnics and "4 10s" work weeks. Also, layoffs and plant closures. I'm not naive to the nature of American business, I just have inclusive opinions about how companies can be run profitably. And doubly so in tech.
Yes, let's look at Walmart. Walmart is increasing wages and staffing across the board because it's getting its clock cleaned by Target, CostCo and other retailers that are willing to pay more and grant better benefits, and therefore get employees who are willing to do more than just the bare minimum.
I understand studies on this have a different take: Making employees more productive makes them happier, but making employees happier doesn't make them more productive.
That is a very simplistic world view. Have you ever been to Europe? Central and northern Europe are very successful economically. I know several people that once worked for an american firm, and won't ever do so again. I have never heard that about swiss, swedish or german firms.
It's very individual, and not unique to the USA at all. I have worked in the USA for over 20 years and am thankful that I have never had what I would consider an uncivil boss or supervisor. Demanding at times, yes, playing politics to advance themselves, yes ... but never just overtly rude or mean.
Europe does not avoid this phenomenon. Human nature is human nature. There are bullies and assholes everywhere.
"Basic economics" as some people call it, is a religion, not a science.
Basic neoliberalism, as taught in econ 101, is just as much a shallow pretext for maintaining existing power structures as Stalinism/Marxism was in the Soviet Union, and its predictive power is close to non-existent.
Guess why, for example, David Koch donated to Florida State University and then demanded the right to determine their economics syllabus? So he gets to dictate what counts as "basic economics".
According to [0], the Koch foundation made funding of Florida State University conditional on keeping Bruce Benson, a self-described "libertarian anarchist" as department chair. But anyone who calls themselves a libertarian anarchist or teaches Austrian economics is on the fringe of academic economics. In fact it is so non-mainstream that there is an article[1] written for potential PhD students to help find PhD programs that do focus on Austrian economics.
I mostly agree however the American ideology and it's hunger for profit and domination is resulting in it cannibalizing itself. The trade agreements are a case in point as they are (from what I have read as I know their contents are still largely secret) by very definition protectionist. That said it is a very different type of protectionism to European protectionism. In Europe the protectionism was for social purposes (protecting local jobs etc) while in the US it is to give US corporations unencumbered access to the global economy (ie protecting the interests of unfettered corporatism). Looking a bit further down the road we can see that Marx was amazingly right, just way too before his time. Capitalism's ruthless march toward ever greater efficiency means it will end up undermining itself. There is no other possible outcome.
The American capitalist system is modeled on the European ideal. Before there were the Koch Bros. there was Krupp, Armstrong, Vickers, and I.G. Farben.
This is a very wrong-headed view. There are a variety of other outcomes. For example, we could develop fusion power and perfect generalized manufacturing (3d printing), and have a massive die-off where only the top 1% of wealth holders survive as they disconnect themselves from labor classes and enjoy a post-scarcity economy where they trade influence by creating and playing ever-more-indirect markets. Or they could just de facto enslave labor classes rather than letting them die off. There are plenty of outcomes other than "capitalism undermines itself."
It's possible to have faith without being religious, and Marx is a great example.
Economic protectionism has been an integral part of U.S. policy since the 1850s or so. Politicians were pretty big on tariffs and land law acts for nearly a century, though they have since declined in favor of gunboat diplomacy.
This this this. Freemarket aficionados often conveniently forget that for e.g. South Korea the basis for it's current economic status was forged by strict government controls and not just by "letting markets do it".
The point is, there is very little value in evaluating economic strategies just through textbook orthodoxy.
It's also how every single one of the Asian tigers built themselves up from 3rd world countries to 1st world countries.
There's a reason why Thailand and South Korea started off in the same place and South Korea developed. That reason will profoundly irritate anybody who pledges allegiance to the holy altar of free markets, though.
You're telling it like it is. But does it have to be this way and does it have to stay this way? Once the competition is eliminated the wheels of capitalism start to lose ground. I'm not really sure if our cargo cult of "work work work" at all costs can be upkept for very long, especially when resources per capita start tightening.
Why do you think there's a purpose? The real world is not a narrative. It doesn't have a beginning, middle, and end; there is no rising or falling action; there are no stunning third act reveals; there are no happily ever afters.
This is just the behavior that emerges (seemingly inevitably) from the ruleset of capitalism. It's like evolution -- the winners keep winning and the losers drop out. Eventually people adopt the winning strategies.
If you're asking on an individual level, the "why" is, from the lowest worker to the CEO, "if I don't do my job well I'll be fired, and my family will starve."
"The real world" is also in large part a set of habits and decisions, just like capitalism is simply decisions people make each day, instead of making different decisions. As would be any other mode of relating to one another.
> the "why" is, from the lowest worker to the CEO, "if I don't do my job well I'll be fired, and my family will starve."
That reminded me of two things: a senior nurse responding to her boss saying "you have to X" with "I have to die some day, that's all I have to do" (she was very good at her job too, she just insisted on that being her choice), but also this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ While it is about machines mostly, this "inevitability" of a supposedly "external" system you seem to be already describing, and I'm not sure I see a meaningful difference between "work/profit for the sake of work/profit" and this:
Everything the human race has worked for – all of our technology, all of our civilization, all the hopes we invested in our future – might be accidentally handed over to some kind of unfathomable blind idiot alien god that discards all of them, and consciousness itself, in order to participate in some weird fundamental-level mass-energy economy that leads to it disassembling Earth and everything on it for its component atoms.
To me capitalism is far from being "last man standing".. just consider all the PR blurb by corporations and politicians. Sure, there's a lot of appeals to egotism or pure numbers as well, but also to all sorts of fuzzy things that apparently do matter enough to enough people that even the most depraved have to pay at least lip service to them.
> It's like evolution -- the winners keep winning and the losers drop out. Eventually people adopt the winning strategies.
I'm thinking it's also a bit like narcissism and other personality disorders; abuse leads to more abuse. And it becomes a cycle: in a constant state of warfare of all against all, becoming more ruthless is indeed "winning" -- but from another perspective, it might be getting stuck in a very low local optimum. My point being that we have a basically infititely big universe around us, that is infinitely hostile to life and also infinitely loaded with resources and adventures -- an infinite enemy to compete with, if you will, instead of severely crippling our ability as a "team" (and I don't just mean humans) to do so by sniping each other.
Imagine a PvE game with friendly fire turned on -- if a bunch of people decided that it's a Free-For-All deathmatch game and start ganging up and spawn killing, then that's what it'll effectively be. Even in an infinite world, they'd never get far from spawn, or discover the more interesting and refined game mechanics. And then the free beta ends, the servers get shut down -- "thanks for playing, I hope you made the best of it" -- the people who had the biggest pile of loot and skulls in this Lord of the Flies scenario would still think they "won". Yeah, they were vastly richer than most others, but compared to what they missed out on, they are infinitely poor.
While I'm rambling, I would say evolution would not stop even in the most utopian of hippie societies, simply because there are infinite of hostile places to "conquer"... and in the long run, there are no "winning" strategies anyway, everything dies. But if there is no joy along the way, what's the point? Just because there is no "ever after" doesn't mean there can be no "happily". It somehow being preferable to die with the most toys, or being the last one to turn out the light, the very idea of winners and loosers is ALSO a made up story, a narrative, IMHO. We are stuck with giving life meaning anyway, might as well give it meaning that fulfills us in the here and now AND allows us to reach higher heights, instead living in an endless, aimless race where nobody ever feels happy, until they inevitably get knocked out of it, by others or by the heat death of the universe.
Evolution lead among other things to our cognition, to empathy, to cooperation, to joy. These are higher-level functions rather than basic ones. I don't mean to say that makes them "better", because evolution doesn't care either way, but I personally like them lots. And while children for example also test their boundaries, they generally don't seem to "intend" to compete with or exploit their parents or others, they want to learn and be happy and make others happy. That's my impression, which might be worthless, but my impression it is. Some get neglected, some get broken, and those inevitably cannot see more than what they can see, they think everybody else is also empty or hurting inside, and just seeking to exploit others to get ahead - but I would claim (or wishfully think? I grant it may be the latter) that this is rather unhealthy narcissism than "perfectly natural", and rather the result of a limitation or trauma, while conversely having empathy and compassion don't preclude having elbows if need be.. it just means having more options than just elbows.
With respect, I think that it's best for people to find these things on their own. The crimethought comes to you naturally at that point, without your being able to distinguish it as crimethink until it's too late.
> Europe should stay civilized, for the sake of its people.
Yeah, what a shame those driven over-working puritans went and exported their Americanism to those civilized Europeans in 1944.
Edit: I'll make the point more explicitly in response to the downvoting. (1) It's easy to decry efficiency and hard work in times of peace. But liberté, égalité, fraternité requires not having your society conquered by Hitler or Stalin. France failed that test and would've been a Nazi puppet state if not liberated by a harder-fighting more determined force than the Germans. (2) Anti-Americanism is really lame; America's achievements in the last 80 years have done so immensely much good, while being probably the most benevolent, cooperative, and pro-social world hegemon of all time -- it's not even particularly close. America has its problems, but is an amazing country and our citizens should be proud of our achievements.
But liberté, égalité, fraternité requires not having your society conquered by Hitler or Stalin.
...
France failed that test and would've been a Nazi puppet state if not liberated by a harder-fighting more determined force than the Germans.
Your comment ironically misses that the bulk of the work to bring down Hitler came from Stalin. There's a lot of American Exceptionalism in your comment, and you're handwaving away a lot of inconvenient points - not the least of which is that the French were surprised by brand new tactics in WWII, just like everyone else. The US had the luxury of years of time to figure out how to respond, plus had an immense industrial base that the enemy could not touch. France was plenty willing to fight hard - witness their WWI experience.
The US is awesome, and has tons of awesome people. But you should be exhorting folks to see the full picture rather than papering over the cracks and providing a doctored view of history.
> ... the least of which is that the French were surprised by brand new tactics in WWII...
You're joking, right? The Nazis followed almost exactly the same attack path as World War I, violating Belgian neutrality... again. Oh, how surprising:
> Your comment ironically misses that the bulk of the work to bring down Hitler came from Stalin.
No, it doesn't. The United States has broadly been a defender of European culture and institutions for the last 80 years, both from Nazism and Sovietism, contributed immense amounts of funds to rebuild Europe after WWII, and has broadly been very respectful of European culture and cooperative with European countries even while having immense amounts of power. So yeah, Anti-Americanism is lame.
> But you should be exhorting folks to see the full picture
The context is someone whinging about American "puritanical drive to overwork" and "moral decrepitude" potentially messing up European culture -- a dumb statement of the kind of fashionable anti-Americanism that's so unfortunately prevalent today.
Again, America isn't perfect -- but Americans should be really proud of our achievements. If you want to call that American exceptionalism, so be it.
You have an extremely shallow understanding of military history. Do you think that Germany's 'superior tactic of going through Belgium' helped them steamroller Poland, perhaps? It wasn't the move through Belgium that was new, it was "Blitzkreig" - mobility on a scale never before seen.
Likewise, it was well-known that the Maginot Line was supposed to extend along the Belgian border as well; it's just that it was extremely expensive, and France was short on money and manpower.
If you want to call that American exceptionalism, so be it.
Being proud of achievements wasn't the bit I was labelling American Exceptionalism. It's the whole "we're so awesome, if it wasn't for us, you'd all be speaking kraut" and "those Frenchies are so dumb and useless at war" crap. It's a plastic, shallow version of history.
has broadly been very respectful of European culture and cooperative with European countries
Yes, post-WW2, the Marshall Plan was very friendly to Europe, but it also wasn't charity - it was part of the Cold War. But in the last 30 years? Nothing 'very respectful' in particular - it's actually been somewhat hostile. US military aid goes to furthering US political interests, not altruism. If it were altruistic, you'd see a lot more engagement in Africa. Instead we have the US going on wars of adventure to shore up domestic support, and when US allies don't blindly charge in with them, the US political environment turns hostile. Fancy a Freedom Fry?
Not to mention that the US tries to strongarm it's economic and terrorism laws on anywhere in reach (economic laws like those around IP, for example), with varying success in Europe. I'm not seeing actions that I would call "very respectful" - I'm curious as to what you're thinking of here?
> You have an extremely shallow understanding of military history.
Actually I'm a pretty serious amateur historian who has given briefings to some pretty important people in the US on historical topics.
> it was "Blitzkreig" - mobility on a scale never before seen.
Nazi Germany didn't really pioneer much at all with blitzkreig. Industrialized fast movement warfare in the German tradition was developed under von Moltke, who had been a close observer of what Napoleon got right and integrated railroads, telegraph, and decentralized command --
Of course, the French were very aware of both of those eras, given that Napoleon was dominant until he eventually couldn't stop expanding, and Moltke and Bismarck overran France and proclaimed the German Unification in Versailles. Meanwhile, the maneuvers into France from Belgium just followed von Schleiffen's plans pretty closely with a lot of commitment. The French should have been better prepared, given that they were the ones to declare war.
There were significant changes in hardware, but blitzkreig's strength was not in the hardware, but in the flexible orders style and deep penetration behind enemy lines... which in itself wasn't new and was modeled on Napoleon and adapted by Moltke to industrialization. Rocketry and airplanes saw huge advances, but most of why the Germans were fast was in logistics, communications, and intangibles around Auftragstaktik type stuff --
> If it were altruistic, you'd see a lot more engagement in Africa.
It's damned if we do, damned if we don't. They tried in Mogadishu, there was no strategic interest there for the US. Serbian campaign was anti-strategic for the US, done for human rights. It's tough. I'm glad I don't have to make foreign policy.
As for counter terrorism and intellectual property, these are again complicated. I don't claim the US is perfect, but I think the US does okay in these areas. I do stand by what I said in that I don't think there's any world hegemon in history as generally benevolent, cooperative, and pro-social as the US has been.
Why, then, do you make such a throwaway, shallow comment like "their tactic was going through Belgium"? This is exactly my point - what you're saying is a plastic version of history, and it's only now that you're pressed on the issue that you start talking about a more complex picture. It benefits nothing but mindless patriotism.
If you really are the serious historian you claim to be, you'll know just how damaging and misleading such comments are.
> I don't think there's any world hegemon in history as generally benevolent, respectful, and pro-social as the US has been.
Rome had some high points. Their thousand years wasn't all conquering and pillaging - there was plenty of spread of learning, industry, trade, finer culture. Yes, they did a fair amount of warfare to become top dog... but so did the US - manifest destiny, conquering large parts of Mexico, taking lands from Spain...
... "but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"... :)
In any case, the "shut up and be thankful" trump card of US involvement in WWII can be countered with the "shut up and be thankful" trump card of French involvement in the US War of Independence. It's a stupid trump card to play anyway.
My only hope is that the USA fails to export its brand of moral decrepitude to the rest of the world. Europe should stay civilized, for the sake of its people.