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How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

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Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#41

Post by esotericn »

mulmen wrote: post #33
esotericn wrote: post #10

This is going to sound egotistical, but it's not intended that way, just the experience of your average prole. The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in. When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely kil…

Thanks for sharing, your experience resembles my own. Can you explain your change of heart? You mention it happened in the last year but I’m not sure why. If anything this last year has motivated me to do even more. And I believe we can and will, but I am in a good place professionally. Are you speaking more personally than professionally? It sounds like maybe you did achieve some of what you set out to do but maybe…

The way that my country has, and is handling the coronavirus pandemic, has meant that their vision of the future of society has diverged from something that I wish to be a part of.

It's not about my accomplishments, but whether I feel like I have a stake in this. I have no stake in it now. They want a future that I don't want.

No social ties, no bonds, no community. No counter-culture. No culture. No high street. No shopkeepers.

Amazon, Deliveroo, Uber, Facebook, Netflix.

Skyrocketing wealth inequality. Printing, printing, printing, QE, home prices ten times the median wage.

An elite, and an underclass.

A society that interacts, in a regulated manner, through a screen. By _force_.

Because it's "safer". De-risked. Comfortable.

And their answer for me? Therapy. Anti-depressants. Coping strategies. Learn to love the screen.

Embrace the new future.

Not me. Your insults, your attempts at control, they bounce off me now. "I'm alright, Jack", as they say.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#42

Post by andrepd »

DC1350 wrote: post #28
andrepd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? That sounds like overreaching conclusions. You might as well say "monarchy is responsible for the scientific and industrial revolutions", or "Christianity has created the Renaissance", just because those pairs of complex changes in society and history happened concurrently in time.

Because nobody with money gave a shit about the global poor until they realized they could be used for cheap labour. The ability to collect the surplus value of their work encouraged investment in poor regions

> Because nobody with money gave a shit about the global poor until they realized they could be used for cheap labour.

They did. It's called slavery. It's only when that finally became mostly unacceptable (remember there are still millions of enslaved persons worldwide), that they had to turn to paying them wages of a dollar a day (slavery with extra steps).

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#43

Post by [deleted] »

DC1350 wrote: post #28
andrepd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? That sounds like overreaching conclusions. You might as well say "monarchy is responsible for the scientific and industrial revolutions", or "Christianity has created the Renaissance", just because those pairs of complex changes in society and history happened concurrently in time.

Because nobody with money gave a shit about the global poor until they realized they could be used for cheap labour. The ability to collect the surplus value of their work encouraged investment in poor regions

[deleted]

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#44

Post by wongarsu »

nextos wrote: post #25
esotericn wrote: post #10

This is going to sound egotistical, but it's not intended that way, just the experience of your average prole. The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in. When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely kil…

> The last year has been a period in which I've gone from wanting to take part in society, work on big problems like climate change, sacrifice for the greater good, donate my time and money [...] This might be the biggest problem human race has to solve. How to encourage and reward good behavior for the greater good. Economists would say it's a problem on how to price in externalities. It doesn't matter. I see it eve…

This is something East-Germans are lamenting about when comparing East-Germany to West-Germany. Of course some of this self-serving behaviour exists everywhere, but as a society or even community you can put a focus on the "we" or on the "me". Our society happens to mostly stress the "me" part, which leads to the outcomes you describe.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#45

Post by upbeat_general »

fatsdomino001 wrote: post #13
ignoranceprior wrote: post #11

how I imagine (straw) hyper-capitalists think: "why is poverty bad? not because we have empathy for poor people, nah, just because poor people are not being optimally productive worker bees"

Keep in mind capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.

I think this is the classic correlation != causation.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#46

Post by ehsankia »

nabla9 wrote: post #26

This is just once piece of growing evidence that poverty damages health, cognition, and productivity. * Being poor reduces raw cognitive capability including memory and decision making. * Being poor increases stress, leads to bad decisions and short term thinking. * Even relative poverty can have this effect. It may be because social status is so important factor in human well-being. It used to be a joke that you can…

So much of conservative policy just seems very shortsighted to me. Cutting the pandemic team, cutting the cybersecurity team; homelessness, prisons and so on costing orders of magnitude more than it would cost to eliminate or reduce them. It's just that people can't stomach less well off people getting a hand, or prisoners being treated nicely. But now we're left with the largest pandemic in a century, one of the largest governmental hack ever and will end up paying trillions to fix it instead of the millions of prevent it.

I read a comment last week about how if fire departments didn't exist already, there is absolutely no chance that they would get introduced in this modern era of politics.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#47

Post by pgsimp »

lostcolony wrote: post #40
pgsimp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably companies that don't pay you well are already struggling, so their problems (that you were put to work on) were also more of a struggle. Of course companies who are doing well can also afford to pay more and give all sorts of perks to their employees. I suspect often that is the actual causation, not vice versa. People like to point at successful companies and say "see, if you would treat your employees li…

Of course not. But you mention causation. You have to treat your employees well if you want to be successful. It is necessary, but not sufficient.

It just seems too simplistic to me. Sometimes there is struggle.

Taking an extreme example, soldiers at war. Are they generally being treated well? I'm not sure they are, and I don't necessarily mean deliberately. I don't think generals want their soldiers to be killed, in general. It just happens that situations arise where there is struggle and soldiers get killed.

I remember complaints about CD Projekt Red (makers of Cyberpunk 2077) who had to ask for death marches despite of initial promises to ever do so. I don't think they liked doing that, but presumably the business situation made it necessary.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#48

Post by Jochim »

esotericn wrote: post #10

This is going to sound egotistical, but it's not intended that way, just the experience of your average prole. The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in. When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely kil…

I think the most important thing for motivation and empathy is a sense of agency over one's own life and actions. When you feel like you have no control over what you do each day or don't have the freedom to make meaningful choices, it's very easy to slip into depression.

I've experienced similar situations professionally. My previous employer was happy to hear and implement ideas from anyone on the team, it lead to a really productive and tight knit group, things got done well and at a good pace. My current one is the opposite. Very prescriptive, ideas coming from the top down. As a result everythimg moves like molasses and it's killed all the motivation I have for the work I do there.

I'd urge you not to give up. I still believe things can change for the better, it feels like we're at a tipping point where society will either improve massively or fall into stagnation. Gen Z gives me hope that the former will win out. They seem much more active and interested in tackling these issues than older generations.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#49

Post by throwanem »

esotericn wrote: post #17
throwanem wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. And what does that have to do with the article under discussion?

The entire article is about people who are treated as human beings being more effective at their jobs. I'm saying that this applies at every level of the scale, in work, love, friendship, society, everything. We are wasting mind-bendingly tremendous amounts of talent in our world simply because of tunnel-vision mindsets. And it saddens me that as hard as I try, I can't change this. I've spent my career trying. The we…

Oh, I see.

The culture in which you and I and many others live is, in the current historical moment, a deeply deranged one - 'deranged' not in the colloquial sense, but as an engineer might use it: we live within a giant machine which for a long time now has been operating dangerously far outside its design parameters, with all the metaphorical noise and smoke and flying bits of molten steel that entails. We're all dodging its shrapnel all the time, to a greater or lesser degree. Or failing to dodge. I forget who said it, but I like the way it's put in this (paraphrased) quote: "Everyone is walking wounded. We have never seen a totally sane human being." - not even in the mirror.

Even in the best of times, such a machine needs a large team chosen from among the best of people to operate it effectively. These are not the best of times, and they are not the best of people. Whether there'll be any fixing it before the bearings seize and the spindles snap, I've no idea. But even if they run it to destruction, that won't be the end of the world, although from here it seems like it would be. And either way - in the meantime, we all still have to get through the day, you know?

It's to your credit that you tried so hard. But there's no shame in losing to something that's this much too big for any of us. Try not to take on too much about it, and spend some time thinking about how it, and you, might be if the machine does stop in your lifetime.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#50

Post by Mountain_Skies »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #20
_qulr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also a surprising number of people in the US believe that poverty is a moral failure of some sort. Yep, there's a marriage in the US between business and religion that seems contradictory until you realize that these people believe the "invisible hand" of the market is God.

> that these people Who? I’ve never met anyone who believes that.

>Poor people vote against their own best interests because they don't see themselves as poor, they see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

You'll see the above quote very frequently in any discussion about class and wealth in the US. It's a glib strawman that makes those writing it feel intellectually superior to and condescending to their targets at the same time. Until those on the various sides of ideological divides actually try to understand each other instead of coming up with smug strawman models that diminish the other side's agency, the conflict will continue. Thing is, there are some who benefit from this endless conflict and it is in their best interest to see it continue. They're usually not the ones posting quotes like above as they sit on the sidelines, only occasionally tossing in an ideological grenade or two should any side start gaining the upper hand.

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