OK – I’ll own up to this … we were in Barnes and Noble, and there for $7.98 was a book of self-scoring tests called “What’s Your IQ.” I took all of those tests in school, and got the results at that time only in percentile numbers. I’ve never been told my “IQ.” I’ll leave it to my readers to guess the number – the guesses might be from 56 (Swede) to 73 (Fred), to 211 (me).
I haven’t taken anything more than the social skills tests – basically, it says I have none. I’m “argumentative”, it tells me. I gotta give them that.
Here’s a couple of questions they ask:
You have been working at your company for ten years and have not had a history of leaving work early. You have a doctor’s appointment that requires you to leave work a half-hour earlier than scheduled. Instead of letting your boss know you have to leave early, you decide to leave unnoticed and hope nobody sees you. Your boss finds out that you left early and the next day he comes into your office and asks what happened.
Below are five potential responses to your boss. Rate each one according to how effective you think it would be.
1: I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.
2. Look, I never leave early. Will you stop bothering me.
3. I had an appointment that couldn’t be missed. I’m sorry for not telling you.
4. It couldn’t be helped.
5. I understand you’re upset, but I had a personal issue to attend to.You are taking clients out to a business lunch to discuss a proposal. The clients have a very small budget and you don’t feel that they are worth spending much time on. Your food hasn’t arrived in quite some time and you cannot find your server. A different server walks by your table and you ask them where your food is. The server says “I’m not your server. It’s not my problem.”
You say:
1. I want to talk to your boss right now.
2. I know, but we’re in a hurry. Please find him and send him over.
3. You must be having a rough day today.
4. I know you’re busy too. If you happen to see him, could you ask him to come over?
5. That’s not how you speak to customers.
I don’t know why I don’t do well on these tests, but at least part of it is because they don’t even bother to list the answers I would give. In the first case, I would tell the annoying little creep to go f*** himself. “Jesus Christ! Ten years sucking your d*** and you still think that I have to punch your little ego clock every time I move from point A to point B.”
In the second case, I’d just order a second beer and relax. It’s low pressure, and heck – these might even be nice people to lunch with. We could talk some football or baseball on the company tab. Slow down a little. My experience is that wait staff are generally overworked and underpaid. If they go Galt on us, as with garbage collectors, western civilization collapses.
The correct answers, according to the book are “5” and “5.” I suppose that’s right, but at this point I began to understand that these are tests that are really used in real life, and potential employers use them to judge how submissive people are. As a long-time self-employed person, I recovered my personal dignity and am therefore considered poisoned fruit. I’m unemployable.
Piece of Mindful 
I’m sure if you did my taxes you’d have to say that’s some smart idiot.
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Swede – what it said was that you would guess my IQ to be 56. I said nothing about you. OK?
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Your assumption was wrong, along with my skim reading.
I have no doubt you have a high number.
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) You would be a good employee in an honest company doing honest work.
) Yes I think your IQ is 74, about the same as mine.
) Thanks for buying the book so I don’t have to. That is a poor first example. Ten years of solid employment should give one some tenure and cred beyond getting spanked for half an hour. Better to use, “you are in your first week of work after a 90 day hiring probationary period…” It looks like the point is not to grovel or be too aggressive.
The second example also is lacking: they want to examine how to handle slow service, but the example is needlessly complicated with the cheap client story. I suspect the answer to this one was meant to be “2”. The line here is to empathize but again, don’t grovel or be too aggressive. “4” is along these lines, but is too passive, as is “3”, while “1” and “5” are too aggressive.
Looks like you score well on these tests if you are bold and assertive, but not “eff you” aggressive.
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I deliberately overstated the case. What I see around me are people who are far too afraid of “the boss.” No one should have that much power over someone else. It’s like the military, where commands at the top have to be carried out at the bottom, no matter, no thinking allowed.
It’s not a good way to live. Exxon is not the military. People below ought to be allowed to think for themselves, but we are brought up to think that to be the wrong way to live. “The boss” rules.
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) When taking these “tests”, part of the deal is realizing what they want: getting the joke, so to speak.
On the personality tests, they want you to play it straight as they set up a scenario and get your first reaction. In the first example above, they wanted to gauge your reaction to a superior when you really don’t have anything for which to apologize, but not clearly so. In an ambiguous situation: do you go aggressive, in-your-face; do you go belly up; or do you go reasonable firmness?
) What I see around me are people who are far too afraid of “the boss.”
Something akin to us being afraid of you and your well informed outrage, and believing what you want us to.
I would like to see more independence, more small business, more self-sufficiency, more families creating their own entertainment, making their own clothes, growing their own food, etc. But we are up against the certain kind of efficiencies and delivery of security (personal and material) we get from bigness: everyone flocks to a Wal-Mart or the government for the stuff they want. They’re afraid of the Boss because the Boss is delivering more than they could get otherwise.
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You have got this world so damned backward that it’s frustrating … imagine that companies produce wealth and distribute it to employees. Imagine companies without employees – how do they produce wealth?
When there is structural unemployment, as we plan for in this country, and no unions, workers have to take what is offered. They fear losing their job, and so fear their boss. It’s tyranny, nothing more.
Also, you will find that the US is laden with far more managerial personnel than other countries, save perhaps places like Vietnam or Sri Lanka.
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First we should have a debate about the merits of hierarchical systems. You tend to think everyone is equal, all jobs are equal merit, etc. Some Left groups famously tried to have a completely flat structure, powerwise. I think the evidence amply points to a greater return from hierarchy, arranging division of labor and all that. My point here being workers trade independence for a boss, and that leads to a higher standard of living in the long run.
For that matter you overblow the dislike of bosses. Most bosses have the satisfaction of workers high in priority. Workers realize they’re up against the nature of the work, the customer, and other workers. You imagine everyone has your sensibilities about exploitation, but in the main people have other priorities and don’t sit around fretting about the boss.
I find you to have the arrow of causation turned backward:
imagine that companies produce wealth and distribute it to employees. Imagine companies without employees – how do they produce wealth?
The whole fundamental nature of markets and fungibility has eluded you.
When there is structural unemployment, as we plan for in this country, and no unions, workers have to take what is offered. They fear losing their job, and so fear their boss. It’s tyranny, nothing more.
You act like structural unemployment is something that has been planned and mapped out by people smarter than you. But there is no one smarter than you, so these are people you have made up.
Unions come after wealth is created, not before. Unions increase unemployment.
Workers can take what is offered, or they can create their own job, build their own stuff, trade on their own. I think this is a fundamental difference between us: you think everything is given by a higher power; I think the individual makes his own destiny.
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No time till later today, but you do remind me of the prisoner that sits in a cell with the door open and the jailer asleep, and who stays anyway.
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Already telling that you use a prison analogy, with the implication that your ideology will free us from said prison. Good luck with that.
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You’re confusing Marxism and the Soviet Union with trade unionism, it appears. You’re also wildly overstating my beliefs, building a strawman. I do not believe people to be “equal”, as most are herd-driven and do not think for themselves, do not know what freedom is and do not appreciate it.
Nonetheless, knowing how easy it is for a few to manipulate the many, and in es sense steal their labor, we have learned that the best weapon an ordinary person has is association with other ordinary people. This allows them to keep more of the wealth they produce before it is handed upwards.
Again, strawman. Most people do not appreciate freedom, and elect to be employed by others, the trade-off being loss of freedom in exchange for security. We should honor that trade-off, but due to the decline of unions, individuals have very little power, and so even though having made the trade-off, no longer get security in return.
“Bosses” are people, good and bad. I know no more about the preponderance of their makeup than do you. The larger concept is the idea that each of us should have a “boss” that so heavily influences our daily behavior, has such power over us. You seem to accept that as normal, as do most people. I don’t – I think it is perverted, and probably arose out of the Industrial Revolution. But I don’t know.
Don’t be so sure. The essential fact of life is that wealth is a product of labor and natural resources, and that stored wealth – i.e. – capital, flows from that combination. That is cause/effect. Labor can be fungible, or specialized, and the latter is better unionized than the former, but all deserve a modicum of protection. The “capitalist” is entrusted with the product of our labors, and is expected to reinvest it for all our benefit. That too has been lost in the shuffle, 1980 forward, as the capitalist has become, in your mind and so many others, the source of wealth. I find you have the arrow of causation turned backward.
Ha ha … an embedded joke! Society is big and our minds tend to think in terms of individuals. But the general thrust of the capitalist class is to maintain a certain level of insecurity in the workforce. Greenspan while in charge of the Fed said this in exactly those words.
Again, you have the arrow of causation backwards. On top of that, you have no hard data to support you. It’s an ass pull.
I wish it was that simple.
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we have learned that the best weapon an ordinary person has is association with other ordinary people.
I like your sentiment here. Substitute “ethnic” for “ordinary” and you are on your way to explaining much of the world.
Unions I see as both good and bad, mostly bad. You decry market monopoly, but what is a union but a monopoly on the labor market? Same distortions apply.
I’ve seen industries go both union and non-union. I haven’t seen where unions add much value, and the industry motors along at about the same level union or not. Unions usually mean you get fewer people hired at a higher wage.
Unions played a role in the demise of International Harvester, a loss that reverberates today. The company was clipped off at the nadir of equipment sales while they had game changing products in the pipeline. I like to think with a better labor situation they could have come through, but now the market has been ceded to John Deere. Just speculation, I realize, and much other was in play.
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Interesting take on history! IH took their cue from Reagan post-PATCO that labor laws would not longer be enforced. They used scabs and busted the union. It was very ugly.
Interesting how you know how many employees a company would hire with/without unions. You seem to think that companies are the driver behind jobs, rather than demand for products. Essentially, this is a structural impossibility.
Another ass-pull. It appears to me that your understanding of the world is made up as you go.
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I just come here for the insults.
We must be talking about different strikes.
Interesting how you know how many employees a company would hire with/without unions.
Going by basic economics and my anecdotal experience. Do you think unions mean more people are hired? Do unions decrease labor costs?
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Company X makes widgets. It takes ten hours of labor to make one widget. Company X employs 1000 people in its widget department. Demand for widgets is steady.
Widgets are priced at $400 each, and labor costs at $10 per hour to make one widget is $100, leaving a contribution margin on each sale of $300.
Company X paid all of its administrative help and overhead with the $300 made on each widget, and afterward had a profit of $150 per widget.
Labor went on strike demanding an additional $5 per hour, and Company X yielded to the demand. Because it is in a competitive environment, it could not pass the costs along to consumers, as $400 clears the market, and not more.
Thereafter, the cost to make one widget went from $100 to $150, and all else remained the same. The company’s profit on each widget was $100.
No one got fired, and the union demand did not decrease the number of employees, as the hours needed too make a widget remained constant.
Further, the enterprise made the same profit as before except that the profit was devided up differently – more went to labor, less to management and shareholders.
Assume all the same facts above except that Company X tears down its factory and ships it to China, where labor costs are $.20 per hour instead of $15.00. The managers of the company declare huge profits and pay themselves very large bonuses. The source of those bonuses is called “arbitrage”, or the trading of Chinese labor for American labor.
The United States need only enact laws demanding import tariffs to prevent labor arbitrage. After all, when the plant was moved to China, the only people who profited were a small group of investors and managers. The company served a useful social purpose before arbitrage in providing good-paying jobs for the community. Since it no longer does that, it deserves no special treatment, and should endure high marginal taxes for money pulled out of the business. They could avoid those taxes by leaving the money in the business.
That is, as right wingers like to say, Econ101.
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(Written questions passed up front to Professor Tokarski by an anonymous student who is tired of being mocked openly.)
–Professor, in your example, a union gets involved and everyone loses their job. How again are unions good?
–In your example, our economy gets the same number of widgets at the same price, the Chinese have to come over here with $20/widget to buy something (apparently a T-note), and 1000 Americans now have more leisure time. As long as the released American workers can get another job for more than $.20 an hour, or if they value their leisure time at more than $.20 an hour, we see a net gain to the economy in your example. Am I missing something?
–In your example, you advocate taking $50 of capital accumulation per widget and transferring it into (likely) consumption. I missed your lecture on the advantages of consuming capital, so could you give us a little summary? I suspect it has something to do with your notion that a country can have too much capital, but when I mention this to others, they look at me funny.
–Related to the last question, $150 per widget seems like excess profits, and other agents could easily get into the business and sell the same widgets at a lower price. That they don’t tells me that there are significant barriers to entry. Such barriers are often maintained by the government on behalf of the company. Wouldn’t good public policy entail lowering such barriers to entry?
–You have called for import tariffs, and this implies a country with borders worth defending, but most of your lectures end in spittle flecked screaming diatribes about how America is evil and its citizens need to be replaced as quickly as possible by immigrants who will build ethnic enclaves and expand them through chain migration and high birth rates. How do you explain this contradiction in your positions?
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By the way, my example is an immense oversimplification, which I did simply to offset your notion that having a union costs jobs. Economic activity is far too complex to reduce to such a notion of widgets, which is what economics does.
This creation science called “free market theory” is a reduction of economic activity in a similar manner as my example above. I have no silly notions about the world being as simple as my example. Creationists are different. They really beleive that free market theory works in real life.
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You have simply separated freedom from responsibility. Investors should not be free to do with capital as they please – we can put an end to their antisocial behavior. People matter.
And oh, by the way, unemployment is not called “leisure time”, and we should not have to compete with slaves.
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You have simply separated freedom from responsibility.
I’m glad you are on the side of responsibility. Maybe we can discuss the people with the freedom to ruin their life/health with drugs and go on to live off the general fund, people with the freedom to have kids they can’t support, people with the freedom to immigrate here illegally and become a net economic drain.
But I guess the people funding hedge funds and buying Gulfstream jets are the real enemy.
Investors should not be free to do with capital as they please
I somewhat agree with you here, but I think it is a case where I would tell people what they can’t do, and you want to tell people what they can do.
unemployment is not called “leisure time”
I say the value is not zero.
we should not have to compete with slaves.
Our modern society shows that we can out-compete slaves.
There is a general concern with competition from the low wage masses the planet breeds at a prodigious rate. I’m not sure how you triangulate around this, except with borders and some ethnic sorting, which we have lost the ability to maintain. If our human kin at the lower ability levels insist on a high output breeding strategy, what can we do? We’re economically dead at the lower levels. Blade Runner here we come.
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People who smoke and drink heavily actually cost us less than people how live long healthy lives. They die younger and quicker. Not that it matters – you have chosen to hang your whole privatized medicine is a good thing argument on that peg. Good luck with that.
And again, but again anyway, the people in the Gulfstreams want illegal immigration, as it drives your ages down. I fundamentally disagree with you on the quality of people form different cultures. You value white people with white values, and undervalue others.
My answer to the investor freedom question is simply high marginal tax rates, where they have a choice to either invest in people, plant and equipment, or pay a tax that really smarts. Odd thing – we don’t get more investment with low taxes, but rather with high taxes. That’s why things worked so well until Regan got here.
BTW, check your Scientific American – there are still something like 34 million slaves in eh world, including in this country. And, of course, the only difference between sweatshop labor and slavery is that slave owners felt it in their own best interest to see that entire families were fed.
“human kin of lower ability …” – when are you going to learn that the crotch from which you exited is an accident of birth, and that we are all pretty much the same animal.
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There is a cohort of people out there who cost more than they produce. For example, Wall Street bankers. There is also a lower class that costs more than they produce. often through lifestyle choices, e.g. long term drug use, crime. You were on a jag to couple freedom with responsibility, and I wanted some symmetry.
But the two cases aren’t quite symmetrical. The guy smashing a store window harms us in a more fundamental way versus the guy who overcharges us for the replacement window. In the second case, the economy has the same amount of resources, just mis-allocated.
Yes, I agree that the guy in the Gulfstream wants illegal immigration. I’m working on it. But I don’t see any help coming from you.
…you… is an accident of birth, and that we are all pretty much the same animal.
There is difference between accidental and rare, between random and unknown. Ancestral choice to value intelligence and future time orientation isn’t always a winning strategy, but it resonates today. Maybe those ancestors wanted to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”.
We are very similar animals indeed, but the differences are salient. I notice most people who vote with their feet head for areas of “[W]hite values.”
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to offset your notion that having a union costs jobs.
You gave one specific example. I say a general example would favor the more free trade side.
But there is nothing wrong with being honest here: limiting employment might be a social good, in the presence of limited resources, for example. I would do it in other ways than a union, such as limiting immigration and having public policy that favors family formation by the young of the productive native population.
Japan is a country full of structural unemployment, make work jobs, and abused capital (those poor bankers!), yet it functions pretty well, despite the propaganda from the Wall Street Journal et al. We would do well to maybe heed some of their lessons.
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Jobs are created by demand, and not by investors, who merely allocate capital. Therefore unions cannot possibly cost jobs.
Unions can chase investors to low-wage markets, and to sweatshops. We need laws about that. Getting rid of unions is hardly the answer, unless you’re enamored of WalMart greeting.
And again, I don’t pretend that unions and members are anything close to perfect, that they don’s abuse power just like investors. They just give us balance, like the Soviets and the Pentagon – each threatened the other enough to make them behave. We should never forget the abuse of blacks and other minorities by labor unions.
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Jobs are created by demand, and not by investors, who merely allocate capital. Therefore unions cannot possibly cost jobs.
General rule is a substitution of machinery for labor in the presence of higher labor costs.
Unions can chase investors to low-wage markets, and to sweatshops. We need laws about that.
I’m sympathetic here, but water tends to leak out of such a container. For example, we have laws governing immigration, and enforcement of such would keep wages higher than if we let just anyone come across our border, but etc. etc.
Indelicately, if the uterus’s of the world insist on flooding the labor market with product, the clearing price is going to be pretty low.
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