one hundred and ten per cent
musings on the modern economy
next week is going to be an interesting week - an as yet undisclosed “most ambitious crossover event in history” is coming up…. and the week after that even more so as “The Unaccountability Machine” gets released onto a relatively defenceless North American population. get your pre-orders in now!!!
It’s Friday, and so rather than arguments or analysis, I return to the original mission statement - “Back of Mind”. This ‘stack was meant to be the policy equivalent of ambient music, not making arguments or any of that stuff, but floating little ideas that stuck in my brain and hoping they stuck in someone else’s. Here’s a small crop of such mini-posts, all related to the general theme of “modern labour markets, what are they like?”
Giving 110%. A bee in my bonnet from a while back - people laugh at the kind of manager who demands “110% effort” from their employees, but in fact it’s an entirely coherent concept. You measure the output of a machine, for example, relative to its rated capacity - what it can produce with normal breaks for maintenance, without excessive wear and tear and efficiently in the long term. In an emergency, it’s certainly possible to run many machines at 110% of rated capacity, and I think there are plenty of situations in which analogous demands are made on people. (The statement is most associated in my mind with football managers, but I would genuinely hope that in important games at the end of the season, all the players were indeed giving 110%).
The problem of course is on the face of the analogy; if you run at 110% of rated capacity for long periods of time, let alone as a matter of course, things and people will wear out and break.
It’s a problem if it’s a problem. This was actually a description of alcoholism, I forget the source; the idea being that the criterion for “addiction” isn’t really something you can specify in terms of amount consumed, or habitual behaviour. Rather, it’s a problem if it’s a problem - you start treating something as an addiction if it’s having a deleterious effect on someone’s work or family life.
I don’t know if this is a good or bad way to deal with alcohol or substance addiction, but it does strike me as a better way to think about what we’re told is an epidemic of diagnoses of ADHD and autism spectrum disorders. It’s quite likely that nothing much has changed in the population, there is no issue of overdiagnosis, but the world itself (particularly the economy) has changed in such a way that the underlying conditions are more likely to cause problems in dealing with it.
The sentence that makes me regret having started these paragraphs in bold. Related to the above, I still wonder about the relationship between two phenomena with respect to the US economy. On the one hand, high productivity and long working hours compared to the rest of the world. On the other hand, very high consumption of stimulant drugs. I don’t necessarily want to defend the description “take adderall and cope or take fentanyl and die” as the prevailing US economic model, but that sentence has been stuck in my head for a while now, and so here it is for you.
An economic model so great that everyone hates it. It amazes me that people are still writing about the superiority of the US model, now that it’s become clear that its citizens hate it so much that they will vote for … [gestures expansively at pervasive frighting chaos] rather than the status quo. Maybe the final truth of neoliberalism is that eventually you run out of other people’s sanity.
I'd argue that ADHD diagnosis has in fact increased, for fairly straightforward reasons. Many people, including me, are getting diagnosed after 40, often by recognizing symptoms described on social media. Which sounds like garden-variety hypochondriacs, but the reality I keep hearing again and again (and it was mine) is shock and disbelief. I don't have ADHD, in fact. I have ADD (inattentive type) which is a rarer form of the disorder only recognized in the past decade or so. It's unusual in children, too. But a lot of Xers and even some Boomers are finding that it explains previously baffling things about their lives. And, yes, AD(H)D medicine is indeed like "wearing glasses for your brain."
In terms of stimulant use--a survey (Nature?) a generation ago found that ~70% of surveyed active research scientists admitted to using benzedrine or other controlled stimulants regularly. John Barth, a titan of postmodern American literature, discusses his own use openly in Somebody the Sailor, while holding a tenured academic position and writing steadily. (Those of us who are pomo lit nerds like to snicker that it's the only way any human could have written Giles Goat-Boy.
Jared Diamond's next book describes the economic history of the world since the Renaissance by reference to one big graph for each country showing the per-capita consumption over time of alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, and amphetamines.