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0 pointsNasrudith4y ago0 comments

That conclusion would be fallacious, although many on both sides believe it. For one it ignores both growth potential and relative costs. High productivity workers can and do utterly dominate in ways which more than make up for it. And miserable employees are mercurial in quality at best relative to happy and motivated ones.

I recall hearing about one desert conflict "gratuitous" allocation of several times the prior typical water per day resulted in outsized military performance. I think it may have been the Six Day War. But Silicon Valley is basically the exemplar of that business model as they specifically go with a very high COL area in the world's richest country instead of mass outsourcing. Even assuming that the actor is a heartless and selfish bastard what truly matters first is net profit.

It is the same fallacious false economy seen both among slaveowners and the Soviet Union. That the labor is free or already paid for so don't worry about its efficiency.

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scaramanga4y ago

The caring professions are quite a special case. The worse things get, the more carers care.

They are not like computer programmers who can make an industrial process be 10,000x faster. They cannot magically care 10,000x more, no matter how relaxed and comfortable they are.

Furthermore, as they are pushed closer and closer to failure, the collapse in patient care standards does not result in a collapse in profit. People aren't going to not seek medical treatment, it's a basic human need, sometimes a life or death need.

So we're back to the question: does that mean they should be exploited and milked of all their caring, at the same time the standard of care collapses, because the economic incentives reward that?

And that is fundamentally a moral/humanitarian question in which you have to make an adult moral judgement.

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