Re: Programmer's unpaid overtime.

From: Edward G. Nilges (spinoza1111_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 11/16/03 

Date: 15 Nov 2003 20:13:11 -0800

gerryq@indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn) wrote in message news:<srltb.600$nm6.1613@news.indigo.ie>...
> In article <f5dda427.0311110852.4b43ece4@posting.google.com>, spinoza1111@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote:
> >gerryq@indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn) wrote in message
> >>
> >> Everyone's got the same choice with money. A dollar is a dollar.
> >
> >This isn't true.
> >
> >Neoclassical economics assumes a freedom, from quantum "friction" such
> >that the typical player is a merchant who, when penniless, can buy and
> >sell in a pre-existing bazaar his way back to solvency. Of course, the
> >reality for most people is that outside the criminal economy they are
> >dependent on large employers.
> >
> >What this means is that a "dollar" means something different to the
> >wealthy man, who lives more in the ideal state of neoclassical
> >economics, infinite in all directions, in which he can take
> >entrepreneural risks, and in which a dollar is a tip.
> >
> >Whereas for a WalMart employee who lives in a motel as described in
> >Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed, a "dollar" is the
> >difference between existence and extinction. She lives in other words
> >in a financial "quantum", non "classical" world, as opposed to the
> >Newtonian world of the middle class.
>
> So a dollar means more to a WalMart employee (or shopper, no doubt).
> Nevertheless, it buys the same amount of goods. [Your analogies
> with quantum mechanics have no meaning that I can discern. Perhaps you
> are thinking of Brownian motion? This is small scale physics, but still
> in the classical regime.]

Economics as ideology substitutes abstractions, such as the "same
amount of goods" for lived reality. The lived reality is that bread to
a starving person means something different qualitatively than a loaf
of bread on the kitchen counter of the wealthy man.

This is not hard to discern. In fact, misunderstanding it means that
you do not know, in fact, how economics works, insofar as it works, as
a science.

As a science of man, economics has to make simplifying assumptions so
that it can predict, based on the simplifying assumptions, of economic
behavior in the large. These predictions allow for individual
variation and indeed for "economic irrationality" including the
willingness of the poor man to pay more (for example, at convenience
stores) than is "rational" for a staple.

In this connection, ghetto areas of major American cities have been
deprived, in recent years, of major grocery stores. They have pulled
out, and they have been replaced by so-called "convenience" stores
which peddle staples for high prices and push tobacco and alcohol to
make a profit.

Economics, in a way that parallels physics, has to disregard phenomena
like this, and assume, for its predictions to come true, that the
suburbanite and the ghetto dweller have statistically the same set of
economic choices. The economist would actually have to tell the ghetto
dweller to drive to the suburbs to make the "rational" choice to shop
at Safeway, and, when the economist is told our boy doesn't have a
car, would then probably say, take the bus (completely disregarding
the question of whether a bus even exists).

The economist has to use "Say's Law" to disregard what I do call
quantum, "nickel and dime" effects when the poor person acts in
seemingly "irrational" ways when he is close to penury. "Say's Law"
claims that for a seller, there is a buyer, at some strike point.
"Say's Law" would call the poor person not rational when she pays
overdue bills using expensive Western Union wire transfers, or takes
kids to the doctor in expensive cabs, for clearly (to the economist)
she hasn't rationally ordered her affairs by properly (and at the
right time) entering the market (the job market, in most cases) and
selling her labor for the optimal strike price.

The analogy with physics, which was lost on you because part of the
ideology is an anti-psychiatry which makes people ashamed of certain
ways of thinking, including analogy, as being primitive, was based on
the way that in the late 19th century, anomalies appeared in Newtonian
physics which were later subsumed under quantum physics, without
refuting Newtonian physics.

I claim instead that the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, Amyarta Sen (a
third world economist who questions the stress on Western economic
rationality because of the ways it has distorted the policies of Third
World countries in favor not of their people but of the developed
world) and others raises anomalies in classical economics, and, my
favorite anomaly happens to be the way in which the poor, both in the
developed and the underdeveloped world, have to be "irrational" in
terms of classical economics to merely survive.

Classical economics imagines that the destitute person without
prospects can borrow capital and, by dint of hard work and sobriety,
buy and sell using Say's law until he or she becomes a rich merchant.
Or, they can get a job.

Like Newtonian physics, it ignores quanta...nickels and dimes, these
particles which when we are well-off accumulate in the sofa, and for
which we hunt when we need exact fare...or are unemployed.

The fact is that all over the world, people do struggle in ways
approved by laissez-faire. Marx was wrong. The secret of great
fortunes is not, in all cases, "primitive accumulation" by force and
fraud (it IS in many cases). But classical economics looks at the
chaotic, if micro-ordered world (like Newton) and confuses it with the
only possible world. The problem is the margins and the outside of
this world which classical economics fails to recognize or explain.

For every person who works her way off a garbage dump in Recife, there
are many others who steal their way and still others who remain on the
dump through no moral failing. Classical economics fails to understand
who winds up the clock mechanism of the market, just as Newtonian
physics failed to account for phenomena at the extremes of time,
space, heat, pressure, etc.

>
> >The fact is most people don't save because they can't save. They have
> >to pay for their needs and the needs of their children as more and
> >more any kind of "free" health and welfare benefits are withdrawn,
> >because of Prop 13 style reluctance, on the part of the wealthy, to
> >pay taxes.
>
> If you were surviving on X/week, and you receive an additional Y/week,
> you *can* save Y. At least according to models of humanity that presume
> individuals have a degree of autonomy and self-control.

Unlike physicists, classical economists have a nasty tendency to drop
into moral lectures on the failings, not only of the poor but also of
graduate students who fail to grok the hegemonic philosophy, as if the
failure to grok were an indication of lack of an "autonomy" and
"self-control".

Honest physicists are in fact delighted to hear about anomalies and do
not lecture graduate students for finding anomalous results, unless,
of course, these physicists have been corrupted by the economics, and
the economic ideology, of Big Science.

The "autonomy" of the successful economic actor is a myth. The
homeless man may indeed have a high degree of autonomy precisely
because he does not want to be beholden to a landlord and a job, and
conversely, the man with a job has to resign autonomy and conform to
the requirements of the job.

As to lectures about self-control, sociologists like Max Weber, unlike
typical economists, know that laissez-faire economies have to generate
new "needs" and LACK of self-control when the person steps into the
role of consumer.

The fact is that even by generally accepted guidelines, working
people, even in the USA, do not "survive" at either the minimum wage
or the poverty line. Instead, they develop stress based diseases which
terminate their "survival" in either the short or long term.

The fact is that in major cities of the US, rental, let alone
purchased, homes are out of reach of people-with-jobs who have to use
a variety of stratagems OUTSIDE "economics" to deal with this
situation. These include, today, living long term and at great expense
(relative to income) in motels, in sharing housing space, and, in many
cases, going without shelter, and showing up for work after sleeping
in the car, or in the park.

Again, and for its stupid goddamn equations, classical economists have
to treat the very word "survival" as binary when in fact there is a
continuum of "survival", from living in the park while working at
McDonald's, to living with an abusive male, to having a decent studio
apartment.

Your claim in fact rests upon an assumption which is inconsistent with
the rest of classical economics. Your claim needs a set-point called
"survival" which assumes merely because a person existed, in some
miserable fashion, before the boss gave him a raise, his income and
expenditures represented a survival wage, and, if he has "autonomy",
and "self-control", he can save the raise.

In fact, it treats existence as a predicate, and a luxury.

But what this means is that there is a distinction between basic needs
and luxuries. The problem is that whenever government steps in to
define and to meet basic needs, neoclassical economists claim that
basic needs cannot be defined. In fact, neoclassical economists
nowhere define "needs" versus mere wants and for its stupid goddamn
equations to work, they have to take any one person's survival as a
logical primitive. Somehow, Homeless Joe survived and made it to work,
and the classical economist shrinks in horror from discovering what
extra-market stratagems Homeless Joe might have used to survive.

>
> >> >The concern in Fiji was that the natives, lacking literacy until
> >> >rather recently, would be at a disadvantage as regards "Europeans" (a
> >> >term that in Fiji means Europeans, Americans, and Australasians) who
> >> >would steal their land, and also as regards Indians who'd been brought
> >> >over in the 19th century to work as farm laborers, but who later
> >> >succeeded in business, because their Hindu and Moslem tradition
> >> >demanded that they educate their children. For this reason the British
> >> >commencing with Sir Arthur Gordon instituted a policy, commencing in
> >> >the 1860s, of land rights in which the natives retained title to 85%
> >> >of Fiji.
> >> >
> >> >This may seem to an American a "liberal, bleeding heart" policy. The
> >> >problem for conservatives was that it worked in the sense that Fiji
> >> >has enjoyed relative social peace (there have been problems but what
> >> >is striking about them is that they have consistently been followed by
> >> >periods of reconciliation, initiated by the warring parties
> >> >themselves). This is because the natives, potentially the least
> >> >well-off, were given a deliberate advantage to their benefit.
> >>
> >> Actually it seems more of a racial discrimination policy.
>
> >By a Rawlsian test, "racial discrimination" necessarily includes
> >injustice to the least-well-off and in fact this is the only
> >meaningful kind of "discrimination"...in view of the fact that under
> >the neocon definition of "racial discrimination", ordinary businesses
> >practice "discrimination" all the time under the generally accepted
> >rule of "bonafide occupational qualification".
>
> So it's not racial discrimination when you discriminate by race? I
> don't know whether Rawls would swallow that interpretation of his views.

John Rawls is passed away and therefore we cannot know if his thought
is as complex as mine. I do know, however, that individuals and
organizations "discriminate" all the time, and having, unlike you,
studied the law, I find that claims of racial and gender
discrimination cannot be easily made when in the latter case of gender
discrimination, a bona-fide occupational qualification exists. I also
know that the University of Michigan's "discrimination" was found not
to be racially discriminatory, and it was found to be so because a
majority did not apply the mindless, oversimplified tests dishonestly
favored by the right.

As far as I know, my linkage of Rawlsian political theory and
discrimination law is my own contribution. Morally speaking, to
discriminate in favor of a class that is, up to the present day and
not just in the past, the least well off or less well off, is a
DIFFERENT act from discriminating in favor of a class that is, up to
the present day and not just in the past, the better off.

In the past and up to today, American white people are better off than
people of color. In fact, many of the racial gains of the 1960s were
lost especially as regards elementary education. Therefore, whatever
the abstract rights and wrongs, discriminating in favor of people of
color in a bona-fide (good faith) attempt to end the historical wrong
is just completely different from apartheid laws which work against
the least well off and in favor of the better off.

Indeed, this is a class of simple truth so ineluctable that to differ
from it creates monsters. The women rejected from the University of
Michigan law school because of quotas had to in fact pose as the least
well off when in fact they were employed and employable in good
jobs...just not as lawyers. When in fact their race and class were a
ticket to the good life. Their interview with the press after the
decision was just ugly for this reason.

They were whiners.

> Still, for all I know, Fiji is an island paradise in which a majority of
> feckless but happy natives are leavened by an Asian merchant class, and
> the whole overseen by a benign European ruling class. Whether it works
> or not, it's no longer a mainstream mode of governance.

Oh? And what kind of argument is this? "We shall admit only mainstream
modes of governance" even when, in 1992, the largest riot in American
history occured as a result of "mainstream modes of governance".

When, to divert attention away from corporate greed, the current
administration had to lie to 70% of the people to get its war which it
is in fact losing?

>
> >I have seen for example, ads that ask for "white" people as
> >photographic models and the placers of these ads are using BFOQ. I
> >think their use is probably unjust but this is because racial
> >discrimination, with a component of unfairness to the least well off,
> >is pervasive in America.
> >
> >However, the sleazeballs who place these ads are able to do so legally
> >under bonafide occupational qualification law.
>
> You're being ridiculous, IMO - these ARE cases of bona-fide
> qualifications, just as it's entirely in order to look for a black man
> to play Othello. (And if their use is "probably unjust", shouldn't the
> placers just be "probable sleazeballs?".)

In fact, there's a move in theater for racial and gender neutral
casting. A woman played Falstaff in a recent production of the two
Henry IV plays of Shakespeare. Linda Hunt played an Asian male in the
Peter Weir film The Year of Living Dangerously.

In film, Ken Branagh cast black men in roles in Hamlet that had
nothing to do with their race. I saw a Shakespeare-in-the-park
production of Richard III in 1990, in which Denzel Washington played a
white king.

Whereas when Abercrombie and Fitch contract-out their advertising
work, there is clearly someone in A & F who is demanding white bodies,
exclusively, and the photographer who placed the "whites-only" ad (in
Santa Monica) was skirting the edge of discrimination. I think he's a
probable sleazeball but I guess this violates an implicit "default"
rule: if an American white man does something, he is innocent until
proven guilty. Nothing wrong with the rule...if it were applied to all
citizens, which it isn't.

>
> >Later on I was OUTRAGED by Lawrence Summers (the President of Harvard)
> >who questioned the content of West's research and teaching in a way
> >Summers WOULD NOT question the content of a white faculty member. West
> >rightfully demanded that IF his philosophical research led him to
> >conclude that in fact there is philosophical and political reflection
> >going on in soul and rap music, he had a right to analyze lyrics and
> >even make his own CD as part of his academic duties.
>
> AFAIK the issue was not West's musical career (nor yet his work as an
> actor in sf movies), but an insufficiency of work of a more conventional
> academic nature. Were Dr. Dre to present an academic thesis on

By the time Summers called Dr. West on the carpet, West had published
several books including a complete history of American philosophy. His
publishing record outpaced that of his competitors in academia.

Summers, to my knowledge, made no mention of a LACK of work and he did
not beat on Dr. West for not meeting his classes (a failing of many
academic superstars, for which they are never brought to account).

Summers instead was unhappy about a creation Dr. West made over and
above his large corpus of traditional work. Had Dr. West been a white
academic, this creation would have been (I am sure) represented as
humanizing the producer, and as showing that he or she retained the
common touch.

NOT ONCE has Noam Chomsky been called to account, for writing about
politics in excess of his work in linguistics. Edward Said was
defended and not attacked by the president of Columbia for throwing a
stone towards an Israeli checkpoint. One can only conclude that
Lawrence Summers had singled out West to "make his bones" with white
academics, by demonstrating that he had the balls to confront de black
man.

In fact, this is reminiscent of Bill Clinton's attack on Sistah
Souljah for dissing white people. During the 1992, Clinton blew, out
of proportion, statements Sistah Souljah made about white people that
were "disrespectful".

Clinton of course forgot that music is not only the taming of negative
emotion but also of its expression, and black people have long used
music to both express and to tame the rage created by the daily grind
of oppression to which they are subjected (this is just the facts,
ma'am: I see every day the treatment black people get).

Summers, who was a member of the Clinton administration, was appointed
to "tame" the university. One way this happens is for male
administrators to act very "macho" in order to dampen down a public
perception (that is used by Clinton's conservative opponents) that
universities are the residence of the "failed" male, who needs tenure
and privilege because he cannot "make it" in the "real" world.

Despite the fact, and in my own experience, that education and
research are terribly difficult jobs, for which there is high demand,
we find a class of college administrator for whom Job One becomes not
fostering education and research but instead public relations stunts.
I conclude that the FAILED attempt to bring Dr. West, a gentleman and
a scholar, to de woodshed was a failed public relations stunt and an
attempt to imitate Clinton's attack on Sistah Souljah.

It had NOTHING to do with the mission of Harvard University. Dr West
was doing first-rate work from which I as a member of the public
learned not only about the history of American philosophy but also how
to be a better teacher at the much humbler DeVry Institute, where I
was able, as a result of reading Dr. West, to "connect" better than
full time faculty with all my students.

> alienation among urban blacks as fulfilment of a recording contract, I
> am sure his record company would be equally unhappy.
>
Sure, if they were paying for songs. But Harvard had retained Dr. West
to pursue his interests where they leaded.

If a mathematician, like John Nash in graduate school, steps outside
his field, as did Nash when he used math to prove a famous result in
economics and the theory of games ("n-player equilibrium") he is
celebrated for accomplishment. Nash, belatedly owing to his illness,
received the Nobel for this work.

Similarly, West, in a unique and brilliant way, has shown how
America's "evasion" of philosophy has damaged race relations.

Pragmatism (the only home-grown American philosophy) refuses "grand
narratives" and asks "what works?" West admired the way in which this
brings workable racial justice and was an economic motor behind the
ending of Jim Crow: having to maintain separate facilities was a
private and a public expense, which failed to work.

However, once Pragmatism had accomplished this goal, the lack of any
narrative, any theory, about what race means outside of pragmatic
goals caused the search for equality to be deprived of any force. To
even use my old-fashioned language AS A WHITE MAN (which I happen to
be) is, in a Pragmatic regime, coded as useless windage...because it
does not, or is not seen to, be "pragmatic" and to accomplish any of
my personal life goals.

West read Kant to see that over and above our personal life goals, to
be fully human is to also ask why there has to be injustice. Kant saw
how this cannot be fully "mapped" to self-seeking and at the end of
Kant's analysis, he realized that part of being human is to be
interested in justice and right for its own sake...for the hell of it.

Continuous to this, West realized that people of color were calling in
music for the enabling of this simple fairness and recognition. In
"What's Going On?", Marvin Gaye is just puzzled by the mere fact of
injustice. His puzzlement is philosophical because to be unjust (at
least in Kant's view) we have to will ourselves to be less than human,
all other things being equal.

While the racial injustice of 1968 when the song was cut created short
term advantages for whites (not as many had to die in Vietnam, for
example), American apartheid then and now did not make economic sense.
Kant's question was why when there is equal cost and equal advantage
for doing good or evil, we would even pause and reflect as to what is
the right thing to do. A machine without consciousness would have to
use an exogenous device such as a random number generator, but instead
most people hem and haw and agonize. Furthermore, many people "give
until it hurts" and do good even to their disadvantage.

The black man in America has long asked "what's going on?": "am I not
a man and a brother?", and there simply is no coherent, philosophical
argument for racial injustice.

This mean that Gaye's PHILOSOPHICAL question, "what's going on" was of
genuine concern to Dr. West.

Gilbert Harman, a philosopher at Princeton, once wrote on one of my
papers, in response to my stating that "philosophy is not interested
in physics", "philosophy is interested in everything!", and it is in a
way that physics is interested in everything: there is no physics of
philosophy but there is a philosophy of physics. Therefore, just as a
philosopher might learn quantum theory, just as John Nash pestered
Einstein and von Neumann with questions, West, in a responsible
fashion, worked with rap musicians because of his ethical concerns
with the preservation of Jim Crow in the USA.

The argument might be made that this would be "anarchy", and would
permit, say, John Nash to design ties like the designs in the first
part of the movie, which Nash sees mathematical patterns. However, if
a mathematical superstar, let us say, were to design a line of ties
with fractal patterns, note that NO WAY would Lawrence Summers condemn
him: instead, he'd be gratified by the publicity.

Furthermore, the argument of the "slippery slope", towards "anarchy",
neglects the fact that just as a coherent narrative, or story, of a
mathematician designing ties can be told, I can related rap music and
Marvin Gaye to Dr. West's academic work.

Mathematicians want to solve the Riemann hypothesis not only because a
solution might be "beautiful" but also because of its potential
physical implications (patterns discerned, in prime number research,
have appeared in physical phenomena). Why are humanists, like Dr.
West, condemned for similar creativity?
 
> >But what the US justice department wants is not a new set of laws, but
> >RELIEF, in the Patriot act, from time-consuming, pre-existing,
> >Constitutional checks on executive power. At Guantanamo, they don't
> >want "show trials". They want NO trials, and this means, for the
> >individual concerned, incarceration without any chance (even a sham
> >chance) at a day in court.
>
> In any other war, those incarcerated there would have been shot out of
> hand.

Gee, do something barbaric: it will brutalize the moral sensibilities
of the people, and they will accept more barbarism.

In Shakespeare's Roman plays, he addresses the economics of crime. To
assassinate Caesar becomes an act which rewrites history, and in which
Caesar can be, retrospectively, presented as a Tarquin, as a tyrant.
The evil of the act, done to Caesar (who may, or may not, have been
planning tyranny, but who, in the Shakespeare play, seems primarily a
prize-giver at games and no more) becomes in the confused and public
mind an evil that Caesar somehow did, or was planning, to do.

Since the administration got away with the Patriot act, and has been
able to set up a concentration camp on Guantanamo, and since we assume
that we are Americans, and for this reason are "nice" people (because
we look so good on Teevee), we conclude that "in any other war, those
incarcerated would have been shot out of hand."

THIS IS ABSURD.

German POWs were sent for a rest cure, during WWII, in Arizona and fed
(unlike homeless men in San Francisco today) three (not two) meals a
day. Many of these men had participated in Einsatzgruppen actions on
the eastern front, which were round-ups of Jews for liquidation.

The Germans who landed in Florida to committ terrorist actions were
given a trial in public.

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg may, or may not, have given the secret of
the bomb to Russia. They were executed, after a trial...not "shot out
of hand".

The administration calculated that since so many Americans are TV
brains, who are convinced by electronic images that Americans are the
nice people, who age so gracefully in ads for Celebrex, it could
indeed destroy Constitutional protections for people suspected of not
being nice, and we would somehow not process this fact. The
administration calculated this correctly, and, it has readied us for
the next round of brutalization, including, perhaps, shooting a few
pour encourager.

Anne Coulter said "invade Iraq, take their oil, and forcibly convert
the Iraqis to Christianity". This barbarism was not relegated to the
talk show loony bin. Instead, the administration has done 1 and 2, and
has made a start on 3.

>
> - Gerry Quinn

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