Category: Economics, Business, & Work

Big Idea 2013: Stop Worrying About Efficiency | Ron Baker | LinkedIn

Attacking efficiency is like attacking motherhood and apple pie, but I am going to do it anyway. The tedious quest for efficiency is a false talisman. What happens when we are efficient at doing the wrong things?

Companies have learned costs are easier to compute than benefits, so they cut the costs in the denominator to improve the efficiency—the equivalent of Walt Disney producing Snow White and the Four Dwarfs. Efficient, yes; effective, hardly.

Source: Big Idea 2013: Stop Worrying About Efficiency | Ron Baker | LinkedIn

Low Pay is a Symptom

RE:

Labor unions are adopting unusual tactics, hoping to raise the floor for wages and working conditions in the ultracompetitive economy of the 21st century.

Source: Unionizing the Bottom of the Pay Scale – The New York Times

The pursuit of shareholder value is attracting criticism—not all of it foolish

Source: Taking the long view | The Economist

The economic crisis has revived the old debate about whether firms should focus most on their shareholders, their customers or their workers

Source: A new idolatry | The Economist

Shareholder capitalism suffers from a vacuum of ownership

Source: Beyond shareholder value | The Economist

 

Low pay is a symptom. When is it caused by inadequate allocation vs. inadequate productivity?

 

From comments:

I wish the cost of things got as much attention as salaries. … Pay is NOT the critical issue, cost of living is.

— anonymous

Hotel Lock Firm’s Security Fix Requires Hardware Changes For Millions Of Keycard Locks – Forbes

Onity, whose keycard locks can be found on at least four million rooms around the world, has a plan to fix a security flaw … the fix requires hardware changes to every affected lock.

Onity wants the hotels who already bought the company’s insecure product to pay for the fix

Source: Hotel Lock Firm’s Security Fix Requires Hardware Changes For Millions Of Keycard Locks – Forbes

 

To what extent are companies obliged to patch the security of their products, and at what point are they morally permitted to charge for further maintenance/modification?

How a Robot Will Steal Your Job

On a visit to Standard Motor Products’ fuel-injector assembly line in South Carolina, Atlantic writer Adam Davidson asked why a worker there, Maddie, was welding caps onto the injectors herself. Why not use a machine? That’s how a lot of the factory’s other tasks were performed. Maddie’s supervisor, Tony, had a bracing, direct answer: “Maddie is cheaper than a machine.”

It was just this week that Foxconn, the Chinese company that manufactures so many of America’s favorite gadgets, initiated a plan to buy 1 million robots to replace human workers. When that day comes, thousands of men and women working at Apple’s Chinese manufacturing plants will be unemployed. You’ll have to wonder—in spite of notorious labor abuses at Foxconn—were those jobs better than none?

Source: How a Robot Will Steal Your Job