I was watching a TV documentary on the history of engineering car safety. It talked about the really good inventions like better brakes, steering, suspension, and tires, that help the driver avoid an accident. And things like safety glass, crumple zones, seat belts and air-bags that help you survive an accident you don't avoid. Then right at the end it talked about the ultimate engineering problem: the loose nut behind the steering wheel. It showed cars that could drive themselves, and said all cars would be doing this sometime in the future, so fewer of us would die on the roads.
My reaction was immediate and visceral. "I hope I die before that happens".
I'm probably in a minority, but I'm not alone. I don't want a computer to drive my car for me, even if it could do a better job. I want to drive myself.
Paul Krugman doesn't agree. He prefers taking the train, precisely because it leaves him free to read a book or do other things. "…the thing about cars is that you have to drive them, which kind of limits other stuff." To me, what's so great about cars is precisely that — you have to drive them.
That's OK. Nobody says we all have to enjoy the same things. This is not really an argument with Paul Krugman (though reading his post got me thinking about this). This is not even an argument about cars vs trains and planes. Though that makes a good example.
What I'm worried about is that standard cost-benefit analysis may be leaving something out.
Suppose I were doing a standard cost-benefit analysis of cars vs trains and planes. Or of adding computers to cars that did the driving for you. And I wasn't aware of the fact that some people just liked driving themselves. I would underestimate the benefits of cars vs trains and planes. I would overestimate the benefits of adding computerised chauffeurs to cars.
The mistake is obvious in that example. It would be even more obvious in the example of games like crossword puzzles. "I know, why don't we just print the newspaper with the crossword puzzle solved, so people don't have to waste their time solving it themselves?". But are there examples where it's less obvious that people sometimes just like doing things for themselves? They want to be in control of their own destiny, even if the decisions they make aren't better than a computer or someone else would make for them?
We aren't consequentialists. We don't just care about the results. We care about the process of getting those results. And, in particular, we like to have some sort of control over our lives. Because having control over our own lives is part of what makes our lives worth living.
Ideologically, there's a couple of different ways you could take this argument. Libertarians would approve, of course. But so would advocates of participatory democracy. Central planners would disapprove. So would technocrats.
I insist on driving a car with a manual transmission. I have always argued that it's because manual transmissions are better. The newest automatic transmissions (unlike traditional automatics they are really manual transmissions inside with a little computer working the gears and clutches) have made my argument hollow. The newest automatics are able to do everything better than I can. But I still don't want one, even for free. That's not real driving.
And I don't want a GPS either. I'm not going to ask for directions. I want to get lost by my own efforts. And I want to fix my car myself, or at least try.
Most new cars, despite everything they can do, don't tempt me at all. But there is this one:
Now, put that in a cost-benefit analysis!
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
How about a deal: we’ll let you drive the car, but we’ll add yet another safety feature: a row of sharp knives in the steering wheel pointed at the driver’s seat, as first suggested by economist Armen Alchian.
This should enable you to maintain control of the car, while giving you the proper incentive to drive carefully and avoid accidents.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really advocate such a tasteless solution. But still, how much is the human drivers’ ‘control’ worth in the cost-benefit analysis, compared to the increased risk of accidents and subsequent loss of control for their victims?
“And, in particular, we like to have some sort of control over our lives. Because having control over our own lives is part of what makes our lives worth living.” (N.B. But taking a train of course doesn’t mean you don’t have control over your life – you still choose which train to take.)
Now it is interesting, because your approach to this is rational. But many people prefer being able to drive them for a completely irrational reason – it gives them a (misleading) feeling of being in control – and because they are in control – of being able to avoid danger. Plenty of people feel unreasonable levels of anxiety in taking a train or a plane – because they overestimate their ability to control a car. (I have argued strongly that platooning systems will never happen because of this. Whatever the advantages, people will not give up their autonomy.)
I actually find driving tiring, simply because I have a strong sense of everything that can go wrong, so driving requires from me a high degree of alertness. And I like to be a dreamy sort of person, who lives inside his head and doesn’t worry too much about the world around him (I like running or hiking – and I like rowing – but hate sailing – you need to be too alert in sailing.)
Might one effect of driverless cars be to make more people afraid to drive? IIRC (sorry, too lazy to google it…), psychologists have shown that people tend to overrate risks that are entirely out of their control, such as the risk of an accident in a vehicle you’re not driving. It’s partially for this reason that some automated train systems, like the Docklands Light Railway in London, still have drivers–their presence reassures passengers.
I’m curious as to whether you’re someone who ‘enjoys the process’ in all areas of life, just when it comes to driving, or somewhere in between. I like taking public transport whenever it doesn’t greatly increase the journey time. But I also like to cook, and do so even though I could afford to eat a lot of restaurant meals or takeout that taste better than my cooking.
P.S. In Canada, with bears around, I suppose you need a higher degree of alertness when hiking as well.
” But are there examples where it’s less obvious that people sometimes just like doing things for themselves? They want to be in control of their own destiny, even if the decisions they make aren’t better than a computer or someone else would make for them?”
Democracy!
anon: those external costs are a problem with my argument, at least in the case of cars. I expect the solution would be a Pigou tax, rather than the spike in the steering wheel.
Have you seen this great New Zealand economics blog: http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com/
The spike in the steering wheel is its …. motif (?, what’s the right word?).
I’m going to disagree with you about Armen Alchian. I am sure that T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) suggested this before Alchian. I know I remember reading it in his autobiography or biography, but a Google failed to find it.
reason: “Now it is interesting, because your approach to this is rational.”
Unfortunately, I’m not always as rational as I thought I was. When the new automatic transmissions appeared, I was forced to admit my real reason for wanting a manual (even though manuals are better than old automatics, they are not better than the newest ones). I think we fool ourselves, by thinking up consequentialist reasons for things we want to do anyway.
Jeremy: yes, I remember reading stuff like that. But I think there are two separate things: people overestimate their own skill; people just hate being powerless. Hard to disentangle.
I don’t think I’m different from most people in this. I think we all have bits of our lives that we really want to run ourselves. It’s just different bits. I happily let my daughter decide the layout of furniture in my house. I’m not sure though.
reason: yes, it is an argument for democracy. Especially, I think, for low-level (local) democracy. And for free speech. We want to be able to argue our POV, even if we get outvoted eventually.
Eric Crampton says the spike idea comes from Gordon Tullock:
http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com/2009/04/in-which-masthead-is-explained-and.html
“Masthead” is the word I was looking for.
Wow, an economist is the last person I’d expect to argue in favour of less productivity (you get none out of spending your time driving your car).
Fair enough. The tricky part is demonstrating the net value of joy you get from pointing your gun with one bullet and a million empty chambers at me and pulling the trigger exceeds the net cost of the risk.
One could make a very long list of illegal acts where we omit the perpetrator’s enjoyment from the cost-benefit equation.
“I think there are two separate things: people overestimate their own skill; people just hate being powerless.”
Yes. Which means there are two reasons why some people won’t like driverless cars, rather than just one (passengers don’t think they could drive the train or fly the plane, so don’t overestimate their own still at doing so).
Nick,
Couldn’t there be some process utility included in a cost-benefit analysis, with willingness-to-pay studies and so on? In fact, I would disagree that we’re not consequentialists, it’s just that our preferences differ, and so does our interpretations of what is a mean and what is an end. I also think that it’s a weird philosophical glitch that makes us think that our lives need to be made “worth” living, to be worth living. We can certainly wonder if a cost if “worth” bearing, but what is it in a life that should get it subsumed under the cost side, rather than the benefit side? Is getting born winning a lottery, or is it losing one?
BTW, I think the solution to the public health dilemma here is quite simple, and it’s called taxation. At any rate, with only those who enjoy it actually driving less then perfectly, the probability of accident would still be a lot lower than it is now.
Robert, don’t you know? Productivity is what happens to other people.
Nick, Amartya Sen describes his “capabilities” approach to understanding individual well-being as follows:
The [capabilities approach] sees individual advantage not merely as opulence or utility, but primarily in terms of the lives people manage to live and the freedom they have to choose the kind of life they have reason to value. The basic idea here is to pay attention to the actual “capabilities” that people end up having. The capabilities depend both on our physical and mental characteristics as well as on social opportunities and influences (and can thus serve as the basis not only of assessment of personal advantage but also of efficiency and equity of social policies)…..The idea of capabilities has strong Aristotelian connections…
If I wasn’t feeling strongly anti-Wikipedia at the moment, I’d also suggest you look at this entry on the capability approach.
I find the idea enormously attractive, partly because Sen is so brilliant, but then I don’t know what to do with it. (You have the answer: buy an atlas and an MX-6, and hit the road.)
And I would add that Sen is a strong proponent of widening the consequentialist outlook to make it sensitive to procedures and actions. In other words we should consider all logical consequences of actions, including the actions themselves, within the scope of consequentialist analysis.
Home ownership is another example I could have used. Some people (I think) just want to own their own homes, so they can do what they like with them, even if they don’t actually do anything different or better than a landlord would do. But it’s not as easy to make the case there as with automatic transmissions and traction control, which we know work better. (ABS is weird though, because it works better, but IIRC cars with ABS have more accidents.)
Robert: “Wow, an economist is the last person I’d expect to argue in favour of less productivity (you get none out of spending your time driving your car).”
It doesn’t work like that. (OK, it shouldn’t work like that, but economists often forget). The ultimate end of all economic activity is the enjoyment/utility/satisfaction/whatever-you-call-it we get out of life. That’s the only true ultimate measure of productivity. Jevons said something like that 100 years ago.
Gotta go drive to the University of Ottawa. Will respond to more comments later.
I was hoping that you could explain how the sentiments you expressed here jibe with the recent discussion on whether New Keynesian economists can remain consistent with their models when they support unions.
When reading the union thread it was far from clear what your own position on unions was but it was clear that you believed that the logic of New Keynesian models dictates that unions will decrease efficiency. Because of this, you then argued, New Keynesian are hypocrites for supporting unions, because unions are bad for efficiency. (Apologies if this somehow unfairly characterizes your argument)
However an important aspect of unions that was largely peripheral to that discussion was the fact that in addition to providing a mechanism for bargaining for higher wages and greater job security, unions represent an effective way for workers to regulate their own workload and to gain a modicum of control over their work environments.
You seem to be saying that its hypocritical when someone else advocates a potentially efficiency lowering institution like unions and yet maintaining that you yourself should be allowed to benefit from and perpetuate a transportation system that you acknowledge may be more dangerous or inefficient but which gratifies some nebulous desire you have for freedom and control.
In these circumstances how are we to decide which efficiency lowering institutions are acceptable and which are now? At present you seem to be basing the answer to this question on fairly selfish reasons.
I am not an economist but I enjoy reading this blog, and this post brought to mind two non-economic bits of information:
(1) About coming up with “consequentialist” reasons for what we want to do anyway: there is a great book called “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)” by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson about justification and bias and willfully ignoring evidence that goes against what we’ve already made up our minds to believe. Explains a lot about politics, but doesn’t really make you feel better about humanity.
(2) About accidents and ABS: in a course on radiation protection in which we talked a lot about risk and risk reduction, I recall learning that people drive at roughly the same level of risk as safety features are added to cars. In other words, they drive faster or less carefully because they feel protected by the safety features, and still have the same risk of accident, in spite of the improvements in safety. (Or maybe a greater risk of accident, if what Nick said about ABS is true. Maybe this is because people about my age or older (34) didn’t do driver’s ed with ABS, and don’t really “get” how they are supposed to be used [“stomp and steer”])
Nick H: “I was hoping that you could explain how the sentiments you expressed here jibe with the recent discussion on whether New Keynesian economists can remain consistent with their models when they support unions.”
I was wondering if and when anybody would notice that 😉
“When reading the union thread it was far from clear what your own position on unions was but it was clear that you believed that the logic of New Keynesian models dictates that unions will decrease efficiency. Because of this, you then argued, New Keynesian are hypocrites for supporting unions, because unions are bad for efficiency. (Apologies if this somehow unfairly characterizes your argument)”
That’s a fair characterisation, except “hypocrites” is a little strong. Let’s just say there’s an apparent or potential inconsistency in some New Keynesian’s positions.
And now, as you have noticed, there’s a similar inconsistency in my own position. Only in the opposite direction. How would I resolve it?
Well, I just admit that a lot of things have both costs and benefits. And that may include unions. My previous post points to a cost; and this one points to a potential benefit.
And, your next question would be: why do I think the costs would outweigh the benefits? And I would reply that if those benefits did outweigh the costs, firms would encourage unions, because workers would prefer to work in a unionised firm and this would make it easier and cheaper for a firm to hire good workers, and so increase profits.
And that good managers will consult workers, not just because workers can give them good information, but because people like to be involved. So maybe it can all be done without a union.
And that what a union does is not written in stone, so it may be possible to get those benefits without the costs.
And someone else would argue I’m wrong on this because….And so on.
Almost any real world example has pros and cons.
Robert: another example is just sitting around doing nothing. At the beach, in the backyard, or wherever. That’s a highly productive activity, as long as we enjoy it.
Jeff: “One could make a very long list of illegal acts where we omit the perpetrator’s enjoyment from the cost-benefit equation.”
No we don’t. Almost everything we do creates some cost for others, and we could reduce those costs by doing something different. In formal CBA, we include all benefits and costs, and stop people doing things where the total costs are less than the total benefits. (And yes, this can lead to paradoxes).
And, if we are going to argue cars and pollution, what about planes? IIRC, a jet plane gets only slightly better passenger mpg than a car with one occupant. And, at least my car’s engine is not just torching kerosene at umpteen thousand feet with no catalytic converter!
The first question it raises is…where exactly are we getting these “good managers” from, and why do they not appear in real life?
I don’t think it is possible to get the benefits of unions without the costs, but then I’m (unsurprisingly) not convinced what you consider to be the costs of unions to be actual costs.
Rather than imagine good managers, why not imagine all kinds of other things? Like a good Soviet central planning system?
Frances: Interesting links to Sen. From my reading, what I’m talking about here is related, but perhaps closer to Nussbaum, when she talks about control over one’s environment.
Bean: from my small random readings in accident research, one of the biggest problems is “distracted driver”. Which probably means bored driver who doesn’t want to be driving, so is texting or mentally wandering off in some way. They would be happier as well as safer on a bus. But if we could make driving more challenging, so they didn’t get bored??? Who knows.
“Like a good Soviet central planning system?”
Y’a mean like the Fortune 100? Large firms are THE example of (mostly) functional central planning. Might want to rethink what you’re wishing for.
You’re assuming I’m wishing for Soviet central planning…
My point was that the alleged inefficiencies of unions are part of a social balance that works because they compensate for the very fact that such enlightened, socially-conscious managers are hardly guaranteed across the entire economy, and imagining them is kind of like imagining a can-opener. You don’t have a can opener, just as you don’t have a humane way (as far as we know) to create a world in which we know precisely how many shoes will be required for all children next quarter.
To Nick, the apparent inefficiency of human driving has a benefit—his pleasure. Modulo externalities: fine.
The point is, the apparent inefficiency of unions also has a benefit to a much larger number of people, and if you want to suggest that “good managers” are a substitute for unions, you have to address the likelihood of actually having consistent good management that has the altruism and long-term thinking that would consistently substitute for the Real Existing system of worker rights. To the extent that that has not already been eroded.
Assume a can opener…,
Nick says: “Bean: from my small random readings in accident research, one of the biggest problems is “distracted driver”. Which probably means bored driver who doesn’t want to be driving, so is texting or mentally wandering off in some way. They would be happier as well as safer on a bus. But if we could make driving more challenging, so they didn’t get bored??? Who knows.”
Maybe congestion pricing is a solution? one reason people get bored and start texting or talking on the phone is that they are not getting anywhere fast. Sitting in traffic jams and at red lights is boring and feels like a waste of time. What if we reduced traffic via congestion pricing? then people who like to drive could drive, fast without temptation to distraction; those who’d rather text could take transit or drive at a time when there is less congestion and they won’t get bored and need to text; and we’d all be safer?
Wendy: one of the big benefits of electronic gizmos is that they can make congestion pricing simpler. The hassle of paying seems to me to be the only problem with congestion pricing.
A note on control:
Choosing a reputable airline and letting them the specialised task of flying gives me a perfect sense of control as is choosiing my heart surgeon( maybe I am partial since I did train as a pilot in a previous incarnation…)
I enjoy driving on the road but my time is precious. But what worries me the most is not me: I have been driving on the Quebec North Shore for more than 30 years, 700 km to Québec City or 1000 to Montréal ( weekly some years) I knoe the road , my car is equipped with brand-new high quality stuff ( Gisleved snow tires, PIAA supplementary road lights…). Sometimes I cross guys whose cars are worth less than my snow tires and I remember that the separation between airplanes is 5 miles but between cars only 3 feet…
As for ABS: road fatalities are clearly decreasing, whatever the metric used ( by registered driver or car, distance driven etc). If ABS didn’t decrease fatalities, we would have a rare case of 100% income effect with no substitution…
Jacques: there are so few great ocean roads. Hwy 1 California. Adelaide to Melbourne. Canada is very fortunate to have three. The Quebec North Shore is on my “to-drive” list, along with Cape Breton. I would love to drive the Gaspe again. And I would say that North shore Lake Superior counts as well. My car’s engine raised the white flag when I last did that road.
One thing about driverless cars is the technology isn’t mature and the first models won’t be very good. The technology will be adopted slowly. Companies will take bath for the first couple of years if they go fully driverless. I expect it will continue to happen incrementally. We have ABS and electronic stability control on many cars. Proximity alarms are fairly common. I imagine we’ll have sophisticated feedback from traffic monitoring systems to drivers (via electric road signs and GPS units) telling drivers to slow to 60 km/h because there is a jam starting 2500 meters.
So a successful driverless car will come incrementally. My daughter may never know how fun it is to shift a manual.
@Nick. I drove highway 1 in California from San Francisco to south of Big Sur. Beautiful, but I hate heights. I white-knuckled the steering wheel the whole time. I was glad to get back on the freeway. Yeah, I know, Sad.
Hi, Nick. The limitations of Cost-Benefit Analysis that you identity arise in a very real way in the climate change debate. At the risk of misrepresenting the very complex work of brilliant people, Nordhaus takes a very standard CBA approach and (in my view) underestimates the case for mitigating carbon emissions by ignoring non-market impacts and option values. In Australia, Ross Garnaut takes a much broader perspective in reviewing the case for mitigation by recognising that climate change has non-market impacts. For a short summary of his approach, see Professor Garnaut’s recent lecture to the Australian Academy of Social Sciences at: http://www.garnautreview.org.au/update-2011/events-speeches/ross-garnaut-cunningham-lecture.pdf.
Perhaps echoing your sentiment on the value of doing things the “hands-on way”, Professor Garnaut asks: “How much do Australians value … the continuation of town and rural life in the heartland of old Australia in the Murray Darling Basin?”
BTW, I don’t think you should want to die before all that car technology becomes available. What you really value (I think!) is the option value of being able to drive manually. I assume that those futuristic vehicles would include a button that magically transforms the vehicle into a manual car for you to drive manually if you so wish. Am I right? 🙂
This is why I firmly maintain that Economics is not an objective science, nor a natural one. It is a formal science. It proceeds from formal assumptions which are values-based. In my opinion, everything economic ultimately boils down to values. Robert Skiddelsky makes the case for that in his book on Keynes.
I was being serious when I said that behind every economist there is a dead theologian. (Nods to Keynes for riffing on his quote)
Since I happily admit that values matter in economics, I proudly wear my heart on my sleeve when I think about economics and I don’t think that’s a contradiction.
Ultimately every question in economics boils down to “what do you want??
I happen to have the point of view diametrically opposed to Nick’s. I’m so viscerally uncomfortable with the idea of controlling the potentially deadly power of an automobile that I don’t drive, which isn’t a terribly convenient choice in California. Driving seems to me to require an astoundingly positive judgment about ones mental discipline. It’s not one that I feel justified in making. Maybe I’m paranoid.
“Ultimately every question in economics boils down to “what do you want??”-Determinant
I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration. That question is certainly implicit (or explicit) in any question posed in normative economics, but not every question in positive economics. One could argue that your question isn’t really an economic one and that normative economics is really just (positive) economics plus moral philosophy. I certainly think positive economics is more fundamental than normative economics.
“I drove highway 1 in California from San Francisco to south of Big Sur. Beautiful, but I hate heights. I white-knuckled the steering wheel the whole time. I was glad to get back on the freeway. Yeah, I know, Sad.”-Chris J
What’s sad is for one person to feel a need to conform to another person’s taste. We should enjoy what we enjoy and realize that nothing is inherently beautiful or enjoyable. Those things occur in our minds. No music, art, food, or experience is objectively or universally good.
The nice thing about driverless cars will be the chance to separate driving for pleasure from driving for utility, both physically and philosophically.
The downside for avid drivers is that I expect driverless cars to become mandatory on most roads within a few years of their introduction, simply because I expect the safety and congestion-fighting benefits of driverless cars to be so clear. (You can read this backwards if you want: I don’t expect driverless cars to be allowed, much less widespread on roads, until they are clearly much safer than self-driving).
Has anyone driven up hwy 389 in quebec? Was thinking/dreaming about planning a family bike trip sometime to see lac Manicouagan, just wonder how the road is.
Vancouver / Whistler is nice but I really enjoy the back roads of the interior, especially around kamloops. We have a freaking desert. It’s a place I will be going back.
“if those benefits did outweigh the costs, firms would encourage unions, because workers would prefer to work in a unionised firm and this would make it easier and cheaper for a firm to hire good workers, and so increase profits.”
By that logic, firms would never engage in racial discrimination, or refuse to hire women.
Firms are command and control structures, not maximizing entities. The same people who immediately identify how Soviet command and control structures can be subverted for the benefit of those running them have a mental block in acknowledging the same thing happening to firms.
Why?
I think the reason is that firms deliver earnings to shareholders, and so the shareholders are assumed to engage in discipline and monitoring to ensure that no earnings are left on the table.
But again, discipline and monitoring is not free, and shareholders pay others within the firm to do this. Shareholders do not have sufficient information, or, for that matter, time and skill to discipline and monitor. If they did, then they wouldn’t need to hire management. The only thing shareholders do is count the earnings delivered to them, and compare that amount to the earnings delivered by other firms to their shareholders.
Therefore if a firm is already earning the market return, but could be earning more, then the shareholders wont know. They are getting their return and are happy, even if women are not hired or employees are not treated well. If all firms refuse to hire women, then perhaps the overall market return declines, and still the shareholders wont know.
I think that is why shareholder activism has generally not been the source of positive social change within firms, but union activism or government intervention has. And it seems absurd to argue that shareholder activism can replace union activism or government intervention, which is what the original quote is arguing.
RSJ: if there’s an excess supply of labour, employers have no incentive to do things that workers want. They can get more workers than they need already. (And they can discriminate for any reason at zero cost). So that’s why we need unions. But why is there an excess supply of labour?….. Unions create the conditions that justify their own existence. Each of us needs a union, because everyone else has a union. Hobbesian Prisoners’ dilemma again. It’s depressing arguing about this stuff. I would rather think about driving Quebec 389 (in my UAW built car ;-)).
Kien: “What you really value (I think!) is the option value of being able to drive manually.”
Well, that’s the weird thing. Once you have that option, driving can never be the same. You are not really driving, but playing at driving. It’s the difference between hunting for food and hunting for pleasure. Even if you enjoy hunting for food, and eat what you kill when you hunt for pleasure. It’s just not the same activity. It’s a hobby vs a way of life. Goes back to my old post http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2010/11/instrumentalism.html
Because we choose for there to be and for no other reason.
As Determinant wrote:
Yep. It is not a matter of data. You can demonstrate all kinds of strange hypotheses with data. There’s an underlying issue of whether the conceptual primitives themselves make sense,
“But why is there an excess supply of labour?….. Unions create the conditions that justify their own existence.”
No need to rewrite history here. We had involuntary unemployment long before unions came to be. The unemployment in the beginning of the industrial revolution was enormous, and abuse of workers was common, and from this sprang the union movement, not the other way around.
There is an excess supply of labour because optimization is costly and imperfect, as is discipline and monitoring. Management creates the conditions that justify the existence of unions.
It’s not a coastal highway, but Alberta Highway 93 (the Icefields Parkway) between Jasper and Banff is spectacular. Though for you Easterners it’s obviously quite a trek just to get here.
I’m with RSJ in that the management vs. shareholders looks an awfully lot like management vs. labour. Management is a union/cartel. When public companies are owned by many arms length shareholders management has enormous power and the shareholders have very little practical hope of monitoring or checking managements propensity to act in its own best interest before the best interest of the firm. And I’d say that the experience of the past couple of decades supports the case that this is, in fact, what is happening.
Off the cuff, I’d say management is maximizing their wages and bonuses over short periods of time using strategies ranging from fraudulent accounting, and options scams to simple short-signed practices like firing experienced employees in favour of cheaper, lower quality offshore labour (see under Boeing 787, fiasco). Of course, much of this goes away in owner managed firms. But I don’t think they’re as significant a chunk of the economy or employment compared to public companies.
Quebec 389 is in my bailliwick. It is a vile concoction of former forest trails, former construction sites access roads and other horrorss barely patched together. Part of it was built by miners who had ” borrowed” equipment during a strike. The company let them do it as idleness is mother to all vices… The gunmint reimbursed the company.
The only straight and level part is the urban boulevard where the small city of Gagnon used to stand.To borrow from one of your most famous post “Christ…oh Christ…”
The landscape is awesome beyond belief but you really need a jeep and the intestinal fortitude to meet 18-wheelers on a one-a-half-lane road where the twists mask visibility beyond 50 feet. There is no cell cover, 200 kms between gas outlets ( sometimes they are out of the stuff) . Continuing on the Trans-Labrador would provide souvenirs for a lifetime. But your bike is worse than useless and will get you killed. Don’t ever bring anyone who isn’t a totally healthy fully functionnal adult…
Slightly off-topic and long but the ecn blogging community can’t afford you dying just for that..
That sounds awesome, thanks Jaques.
Am I right that you now take it as a challenge?
I generally wonder why those who think that managers are all short-sightedly ripping off workers, don’t think the same of union organizers. They are just managers of a business, and one that often works hard to make sure they don’t have competition.
As a union organizer myself, I always wondered why my hotels and restaurants during organizing drives were so cheap. I must be a very inefficient parasite…
Yes Jacques. I’m familiar with some of the west’s and ontario’s logging roads, but I would like to do an east coast loop sometime. That road, and a sand dune road north of Fort McKay, have been in my mind for a while. The non-motorbike advice is probably sound.
Jacques: ??
Thanks Jacques. Sounds like my MX6 is not going to be up to 389!
Better than Jake, but still pretty bad. Trop anglos, je suis desolé. Je ne peux pas modifié mes commentaires, peut-etre les editeurs du WCI, les changer ou supprimer. [C’est fait! – SG]