Sep

2

Questioning the Hawthorne Effect: Light Work"

The data from the illumination experiments had never been rigorously analysed and were believed lost. But Steven Levitt and John List, two economists at the University of Chicago, discovered that the data had survived the decades in two archives in Milwaukee and Boston, and decided to subject them to econometric analysis. The Hawthorne experiments had another surprise in store for them. Contrary to the descriptions in the literature, they found no systematic evidence that levels of productivity in the factory rose whenever changes in lighting were implemented.

Stefan Jovanovich writes: 

No one who has ever owned or run a factory (guilty on both counts) believes that you can somehow game productivity. Workers, even if they are also profit participants, will ration their work effort, not out of class envy, bitterness or any of the usual Marxist explanations but simply because they want to have enough energy left at the end of the day to go shopping or play softball with their friends and they know that tomorrow they will have to get up and do it all over again. The people who put in conspicuous extra effort are dangerous: they are brown-nosers who aspire to middle management, and they encourage owners/managers to believe that they need hierarchies of oversight instead of simple, hard rules - don't lie and don't ever ship stuff you wouldn't buy yourself. No labor union can tolerate such a system: it leaves nothing for the shop stewards to pretend to do.

Sep

2

Your body is a planet. So where is the ego?

90% of the cells within us are not ours but microbes. Likely in the Amazon the figure is closer to 99%. The rest of the lives in you are seen with a light microscope: the human skin is not a desert but covered with microbes, many others thrive within our mouth, dental streptococcus, the nose is a rainforest, the intestines an oases, mites nestle in the eyelashes, a few of the fleet host athlete's feet fungus, viruses loiter inside nerves, the lawn you mow on your head is enjoyed by flea or lice, and the strangest are the hoboesque pieces of DNA that infected ancient humans and still make up about 8 percent of our genome.

Even the body cells such as leucocytes, sperm, eggs, heart muscle, autonomic neurons, and photoreceptor cone cells of the eye may be classified as harmonious bugs.

Do microbes have consciousnesses? Certainly, though they are rudimentary, more like what we evolved from before stepping out of the trees onto solid earth.

The human eye without a microscope can only see objects larger than one-tenth of a millimeter long. Given the right conditions, you might be able to see a human egg. Gazing down at those tiny objects, you stand on the edge of a world of creatures invisible to the naked eye. Inside this strange land microbes live their tiny day to day lives – wake up, eat, communicate, move, and respond.

Over the billions of years on this planet these microbes have adapted to fit their environments. They are remarkably diverse organisms living in fresh and salt water, on land, in the air, and on or inside other organisms. As you read the microbes march, there are mutualisms, parasitisms, battle lines are being drawn, and help is on the way from every direction.

No wonder we have collective unconsciousness.

Living with all these microbes in people is easy if you maintain health, a positive attitude, keep busy, strive a little each day, and opt to be kind.

The last census shows about 100 trillion inside you. We are composed of multiple individuals many of whom alertly believe they are selves. This is why I could never understand conceit. It's nice to stick in the pocket the theory that each is an individual, however my definition of self includes the legions I'm made of.
Is so hard to grasp that you are the ringmaster of a circus?

The self is especially as distinct from the world and other selves. It is the conscious that most immediately controls thought and behavior, and is most in touch with external reality. However, I believe myself is composed of micro-selves that must be dealt with by logic, whip, barter and trial-and-error.

This flies in the face of the psychological definition of self, religious and political views, however if you invest in a microscope and look, it must be admitted that…

The next time you pull on your shoes realize you are a walking ecosystem.

Sep

2

How many of the rich were in the lower quintiles like What's App which recently sold for 18 billion to Facebook and the owners were on food stamps the previous year. Is that bad for a society to provide such opportunity and for the mobility between classes to increase or should we be like England where once you're in one class you can never move to another.

Richard Owen writes: 

I am unsure if its really true that class barriers exist to any greater degree in the UK than the USA, other than perhaps in the mind or money of the classes themselves. A bit like Mr. Cosby's riffs to African Americans: don't perceive barriers for yourself. As my friend staying at the Knickerbocker club and being variously harassed for his attire, decorum and guests the other week reported "a certain strain of New Yorker could surely teach the British a thing or two about snobbery." Sure, we have a Conservative government with a disproportionate number of Etonians in it, but when one becomes Prime Minister, one tends to reach for trusted friends and fellow travelers. And being an Etonian is not a vote enhancer. Annunziata Rees-Mogg was asked to reframe herself Nancy Mogg for the purposes of election PR. The USA does not seem short of its own political dynasties and classes.

Ralph Vince writes: 

The chair's example of WhatsApp I believe is the exception more so than the rule.

The churn at the higher stratas sees parties leaving unexpectedly. Those arriving, arrive slowly, believing they will be there forever.

Vast sums of money are lost in a day, a minute or the blink of an eye. You see this principle play out at the baccarat tables and the markets. The new arrivals, the beneficiaries of money-begetting-money for protracted periods, often generations. 

Mr. Isomorphisms writes: 

Regarding the very long timetables, I admired both the diligence/ingenuity of Gregory Clark and The Economist for publishing that the surname "Micklethwait" has enjoyed a run of good luck, when its chief editor is John Micklethwait (graduate of Ampleforth College, and later Oxford). Miles Corak also earns a mention in that Economist piece. A short list of Americans from expensive high schools includes Dan Ellsberg, Charles Coker, Thruston Moore, Glenn Close, Adlai Stevenson, Cosma Shalizi, but not Dan Einhorn. 

Stefan Jovanovich adds: 

If you do any serious searching of genealogical records, you discover 2 things:

1. Longitudinal searches of census data by county locations, including the immediately adjacent ones, show limited "social mobility" because the people who stay where they are born and whose children stay there are largely content with their lots in life. This is one reason America scores better than Britain in the 19th century; the people who stayed in Britain were ok with their lives where as, in America, nearly everyone was moving around, even if many of them eventually came back to "home".

2. The people who leave are the ones who become very rich, by local standards, or flat broke or need to get away from the law. The very rich tend to move to the places where they can be with their financial equals (so the Rockefellers abandon Euclid Avenue Baptist Church and become Episcopalians in New York) and the flat broke know they have better chances getting help from distant relatives than from local ones (a great deal of the Northern migration of freed slaves and, even more so, their children follows that pattern). The need for people to get away from the local sheriff hardly needs explanation.

The Harvard study deliberately ignores #1 and #2. "We assign children to commuting zones based on where they lived at age 16 – i.e., where they grew up – irrespective of whether they left that CZ afterward." The study also makes no adjustments for relative costs of living as a discount factor in gauging incomes. A child who migrated from Charlotte to San Jose gained 50% in gross income during the study period; but he or she gained no wealth with the added income compared to a child of lesser social mobility who stayed back home.

There is one other fact of human nature that you learn from reading the ancestry searches people have done: Everyone with any pretensions finds a way to trace their ancestry back to European royalty, even if the parish records stop 300 years or more before the connection is made.

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