Douglas P. Wilson wrote,
>Most technical people are uncomfortable
>with discussing "soft" issues like the way society works, while most
>people who know something about social problem are uncomfortable with
>the math. C.P.Snow's two cultures.
Don't forget, Doug, that each of us who does understand both the technical
and social matters is a universe unto him/herself.
Surely one element of finding a job one wants is being able to work as much
or as little as one wants. The work hours distribution problem is much, much
simpler than the combinatorial problem of job/person matching you raise. I
developed a nifty spreadsheet that estimates the labour costs for different
combinations of hours of work and numbers of employees. After two years of
peddling my device, I'm no longer surprised that folks in the labour market
industry aren't buying, but what does intrigue me is the occasional
flare-ups of overt hostility and recrimination.
>From an incrementalist perspective, the tolerablization problem has to take
precedence over the optimization problem. Before we can ask the question
about optimal solutions, we have to ask why government policies over the
past 30 years have moved away from non-optimal -- but comparatively
tolerable -- solutions toward more pessimal solutions.
There used to be a somewhat effective non-mathematical tool for improving
the person/job match. It was called quitting. In the immortal words of
Johnny Paycheck: "Take this job and shove it!" Then it entered the small and
shriveled minds of the coupon clippers that workers were asking for too much
and needed to be 'disciplined' with the lash of unemployment. The theory of
the "non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment" (NAIRU) was hoisted up
the flag pole to provide an intellectual fig leaf for high interest rate
policies (mixed metaphor intended). Those policies' manifest purpose was to
put people out of work and elevate the formula for compound interest to a
Law of Nature.
The formula for compound interest is a mathematical formula that expresses
exponential growth at a specified rate. It has nothing to do with the
distribution of human abilities or needs or with the amount of natural
resources available in the world. Compound interest is an intellectual,
ethical and practical non-sequitur.
No combinatorial solution of the job matching problem can meet the a priori
condition that it uphold the regime of compound interest ad infinitum. I'm
not referring to something that it would take a zillion pentiums to
calculate but to a basic axiom of mathematics: division by zero is
meaningless. Wouldn't it be easier to just say, "Take this NAIRU and shove it!"?
Regards,
Tom Walker
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