Time Management [Guest post by Paddington]

For decades, much was made of the fact that American workers were the most productive of the Western world. Business articles derided the 35-hour work week of the French and Germans.

However, about 10 years ago, there was a study that showed that the French and German workers were much more productive per hour.

This supports my long-held belief that a typical worker averages 6-7 hours of productive work per day. Give them a short-term project and they will work harder and faster, but be less productive afterwards. Tell them that they are going to work overtime, and they will not work as hard in the regular day. Presented with too much work (for them), many will actually do less.

Realizing this is one of the things that has made my job (university teaching) better. I could do my work in less time, so that I had time for myself and my family, rather than twiddling my thumbs at my desk for 8 hours.

In short, people need time to goof off and socialize, and it makes them work better.

Bide-a-Wii

The West is worrying about indebtedness and global competition, and China is devaluing the renminbi to maintain its trading advantage.

It's time for electronic warfare. Not hacking into the military system - that's so obvious, and it was so uncharacteristically direct of the Chinese to do it. No, I think the counterattack is through computer games.

Fund the provision of PSPs, Xboxes, Wiis and a host of absorbing games (e.g. Morrowind, Gears of War) as pseudo-benevolent gifts to bright young Chinese kids. With any luck, the effect will be the same as here: early, heavy adoption by the ASD/OCD types who might otherwise become the core of the mathematics/engineering/science elite that keep the rest of the population warm, well-fed and protected against disease.

If that doesn't work, only power cuts can save us.

WeaselWordWatch: "Quantitative Easing"

Google references now 177,000 (up from 159,000 yesterday); 1,663 news references in the last 24 hours.

Excuse me while I quantitatively ease a balloon, then stick a pin into it for a non-gradual relaxation.

The MSM take up the punishment theme

Nassim Taleb and Pablo Triana echo my call for condign punishment for the white-collar thieves.

Worrying about the wrong things

We teach regularly in schools about drugs, guns and gangs... actually, the real threats to life - that we can do something about -are much less dramatic:


I packed in smoking over 30 years ago - but this coming year, I'd better do something about the weight.

You know you're in trouble when...

... they give a new name to an old crime, in this case, dubbing inflation "quantitative easing".

This phrase yielded an estimated 159,000 results on Google today; watch for imminent "Google result hyperinflation" with respect to this weaselly term. Sackerson is offering a prize for the first sighting of a cartoon in the MSM featuring it.

P.S. 3,210 Google-found news items have it (all dates); 970 in the past month but 1,619 in the last day (how does that statfreak happen?) The earliest news reference found via Google is July 1, 1995 - relating to China's commercial bank reform. A Communist plot, then!

Death to the paper tigers! We demand only tigers with intrinsic value!

The free market and redistribution of wealth

Jesse argues the free market case: interventions just make things worse; real wages in Western economies must decline; international currencies must float freely.

Okay, if we also have some other system of supporting our workers through the change, instead of import tariffs and other protectionist measures. You can't drop masses of people from a great height and expect society to remain stable.

A lot of our present arrangements - health, education, welfare - seem to me to be a fairly inefficient way of transferring wealth from the upper strata to the lower, less the cost and inconvenience of all the system servicers in between.

Why don't we get honest and open about the need for wealth redistribution, balanced with the need to encourage enterprise? Could we get rid of weaselly taxes and insidious benefit traps? All we need is some way of levelling the playing field between groups of workers in very different parts of the world, in such a way as not to force the game to be abandoned by either side. Can anyone propose a system of financial support - could some form of the Citizens' Basic Income be made to work?