Category: Labor Economics

As Chinese Marxists Limit Liberty, the Young Show “Silent Resistance” by “Lying Down”

(p. 4) Five years ago, Luo Huazhong discovered that he enjoyed doing nothing. He quit his job as a factory worker in China, biked 1,300 miles from Sichuan Province to Tibet and decided he could get by on odd jobs and $60 a month from his savings. He called his new lifestyle “lying flat.”

“I have been chilling,” Mr. Luo, 31, wrote in a blog post in April [2021], describing his way of life. “I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong.”

He titled his post “Lying Flat Is Justice,” attaching a photo of himself lying on his bed in a dark room with the curtains drawn. Before long, the post was being celebrated by Chinese millennials as an anti-consumerist manifesto. “Lying flat” went viral and has since become a broader statement about Chinese society.

. . .

Mr. Ding, 22, has been lying flat for almost three months and thinks of the act as “silent resistance.”

. . .

The ruling Communist Party, wary of any form of social instability, has targeted the “lying flat” idea as a threat to stability in China.

. . .

Mr. Luo was born in rural Jiande County, in eastern Zhejiang Province. In 2007, he dropped out of a vocational high school and started working in factories. One job involved working 12-hour shifts at a tire factory. By the end of the day, he had blisters all over his feet, he said.

In 2014, he found a job as a product inspector in a factory but didn’t like it. He quit after two years and took on the occasional acting gig to make ends meet. (In 2018, he played a corpse in a Chinese movie by, of course, lying flat.)

Today, he lives with his family and spends his days reading philosophy and news and working out. He said it was an ideal lifestyle, allowing him to live minimally and “think and express freely.” He encourages his followers, who call him “the Master of Lying Down,” to do the same.

After hearing about Mr. Luo’s tangping post on a Chinese podcast, Zhang Xinmin, 36, was inspired to write a song about it.

. . .

Mr. Zhang uploaded the song to his social media platforms on June 3, and within a day censors had deleted it from three websites. He was furious.

. . .

Lying down is really good
Lying down is wonderful
Lying down is the right thing to do
Lie down so you won’t fall anymore
Lying down means never falling down.

For the full story, see:

Elsie Chen. “For Young People in China, ‘Lying Flat’ Beats Working.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, July 4, 2021): 4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 3, 2021, and has the title “These Chinese Millennials Are ‘Chilling,’ and Beijing Isn’t Happy.”)

Water Cooler Encounters May Help More on Less-Developed Projects than Mature Projects

(p. 1) A key scientific breakthrough that would eventually help protect millions from Covid-19 began with a chance meeting at a photocopier — in 1997, between Professor Katalin Kariko and Dr. Drew Weissman, whose work laid the foundation for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

It’s exactly the type of story that has executives itching to get people back to offices. Chance meetings like this are essential for innovation, the theory goes. “Remote work virtually eliminates spontaneous learning and creativity because you don’t run into people at the coffee machine,” Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, recently told shareholders.

Creativity is hard to quantify. But research, including studies of companies working remotely during the pandemic, supports Mr. Dimon’s argument only up to a point. The data shows that in-office work is helpful at one part of the creative process: forming initial relationships, particularly with people outside your normal sphere.

. . .

(p. 5) A new analysis of announcements by the 50 largest public video game companies, by Ben Waber and Zanele Munyikwa, found that companies that moved to remote work during the pandemic had more delays in new products than before the pandemic, while those that worked in person did not.

The researchers have a hypothesis about why. They also tracked billions of communications — email, chat and calendar data — among information employees at a dozen large global companies over recent years. They found that while working remotely, individual workers were more productive than before, and communicated more with people at different levels of the company and with close colleagues. But they communicated 21 percent less with their weak ties. Perhaps the video game developers lost the benefit of asking a co-worker from a different department to test a prototype, for example, or of running into someone from marketing and brainstorming ideas for selling a new game.

“I do think eventually technology will help here, but the stuff that’s widely available today just doesn’t do it,” said Mr. Waber, co-founder of Humanyze, a workplace analytics company started at M.I.T. Media Lab, where he got a Ph.D. “It probably would be fine if those initial water cooler conversations happened remotely. It’s just less likely they would.”

. . .

Another study, using location tracking technology to follow scientists and engineers at a global manufacturing firm, found that people who often walked by one another in the office, like on their way to the printer or the restroom, were significantly more likely to end up collaborating, especially at the beginning of projects.

“For most collaboration, takeoff is the most challenging bit, and that’s when we find co-location is most helpful,” said Felichism W. Kabo, a research scientist at the University of Michigan and the study’s author. “When people have a prior relationship, it’s much easier to sustain that virtually.”

. . .

For Professor Kariko, there was a long period when it seemed that her research on messenger RNA would never get funding. It was so different from that of her close colleagues, she has said, that it had little support. It took that encounter at the copy machine — meeting Dr. Weissman, who brought a different perspective and a desire to make a vaccine — to change that.

For the full commentary, see:

Claire Cain Miller. “Is the Water Cooler a Font of Inspiration?” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, September 5, 2021): 1 & 5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated Sept. 4, 2021, and has the title “When Chance Encounters at the Water Cooler Are Most Useful.”)

The article by Waber and Munyikwa mentioned above is:

Waber, Ben, and Zanele Munyikwa. “Did Wfh Hurt the Video Game Industry?” Harvard Business Review (2021).

The article by Kabo mentioned above is:

Kabo, Felichism W. “A Model of Potential Encounters in the Workplace: The Relationships of Homophily, Spatial Distance, Organizational Structure, and Perceived Networks.” Environment and Behavior 49, no. 6 (2017): 638–62.

Carolyn Shoemaker Developed Tacit Knowledge of Presence of Comets and Asteroids

(p. B6) Carolyn Shoemaker, who for more than a decade managed a telescopic camera with her husband from a high-altitude observatory in California and became widely regarded, without academic training, as the world’s foremost detector of comets and asteroids, died on Aug. 13 [2021] at a hospital in Flagstaff, Ariz.

. . .

In the afternoons, Dr. Shoemaker would take the film they had used the previous night and develop it in a darkroom, then turn over the negatives to Ms. Shoemaker. Using a stereoscope, she would compare exposures of the same block of sky at different times. If anything moved against the relatively fixed background of stars, it would appear to float in the viewing device’s eyepiece.

Ms. Shoemaker was charged with discerning what was the grain of the film (and perhaps dust on it) and what was an actual image of light emitted by an object hurtling through space. “With time,” she wrote, “I saw fainter and fainter objects.”

It took a few years before she found her first new comet, in 1983. By 1994 she had discovered, in addition to hundreds of asteroids, 32 comets, a number considered by the United States Geological Survey and others to represent the world record at the time.

. . .

One comet, known as Shoemaker-Levy 9 (named in part for their associate David Levy), had stood out from the rest. Rather than making a lonely journey through the cosmic vacuum, Shoemaker-Levy 9 was on a collision course with Jupiter.

. . .

“Carolyn Shoemaker is one of the most revered and respected astronomers in history,” Jennifer Wiseman, a senior scientist overseeing the Hubble Space Telescope, said by phone. “Her discoveries, her tenacious care in how she did her work — those things have created a legacy and a reputation that has inspired people who have come into the field after her.”

. . .

. . . scientists still depend on methods that Ms. Shoemaker perfected.

“She and her colleagues set the stage for how to identify what we would call minor bodies in our solar system, such as comets and asteroids,” Dr. Wiseman said. “We still use the technique of looking for the relatively fast transverse motions of comets and asteroids in our own solar system, as compared to the slower or more fixed position of stars.”

For the full obituary, see:

Alex Traub. “Carolyn Shoemaker, 92, a Stargazer Who Spotted Comets and Asteroids.” The New York Times (Monday, September 6, 2021): B6.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Sept. 4, 2021, and has the title “Carolyn Shoemaker, Hunter of Comets and Asteroids, Dies at 92.”)

Business Formations During Pandemic Are “Off the Charts”

Source: Haltiwanger as reprinted in WSJ article cited below.
Source: Haltiwanger as reprinted in WSJ article cited below.

(p. A4) “Sixty or more years ago, most of us, including me, were altogether too willing to treat the economy as close to fully competitive. I now think that was a mistake,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow said in a recent interview. “The economy has grown less competitive and the elements of monopoly power are probably very important for the distribution of income between work and wealth and ultimately across individuals.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a conservative research group, said he is skeptical of the notion that corporate power has hurt consumers. He and other Republicans say the rise of big companies such as Walmart, Home Depot and Amazon has benefited U.S. consumers by helping to push down prices.

“I take all of this talk with a healthy dose of show me,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin said. While Republicans could likely get behind some of Mr. Biden’s proposals—such as pushing back against firms forcing workers to sign noncompete clauses or states imposing what some workers say are unnecessary licensing requirements on workers—other ideas may go too far.

Some research has found less cause for concern around business consolidation. “There are reasons to be cautious about concluding that market concentration has risen or is a meaningful problem for market competition and consumer welfare,” Nancy Rose, a professor in the economics department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concluded in a 2019 examination of research on the issue, citing measurement challenges among reasons for skepticism.

. . .

With the rise of a few big companies, jobs also have become concentrated there. John Haltiwanger, a University of Maryland professor, finds that the share of U.S. jobs at young, small firms declined to 16% in 2018 from 26% in 1987. During the same period, the share of jobs in older, larger firms rose from 41% to more than half.

Mr. Haltiwanger’s research shows that the U.S. economy became less dynamic during this period, with fewer new jobs created by startup firms, less job-hopping by workers seeking out new opportunities and slower worker productivity growth.

. . .

Mr. Haltiwanger said the competition dynamics might now be changing due to the coronavirus pandemic. Tracking business identification data from the Internal Revenue Service, he spotted a surge in business formations in the second half of 2020, a trend that persisted into 2021.

“It is off the charts,” he said. “I think we discovered during the pandemic that our technological infrastructure is just phenomenal. We can do almost anything we want from anywhere. That leads to lots of market opportunities. I think there is going to be a surge of dynamism. The question is will it be transitory, or true innovation?”

For the full story, see:

Jon Hilsenrath. “Economic Competition Scrutinized.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, July 12, 2021): A4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 11, 2021, and has the title “Biden Stakes Out Position in Debate Over Power of Big Companies.”)

Longshoreman Union Reduces Efficiency of American Ports

(p. A15) Global supply chains are buckling, driving up prices, creating shortages and frustrating consumers.

. . .

One problem is productivity. In Asia, ships are worked 24/7, or 168 hours a week, compared with 16 hours a day, or only 112 hours a week, at Los Angeles-Long Beach. Terminal gates used by truckers to deliver and receive seaborne containers operate only 88 hours a week, vs. 168 in Asia. For larger ships, it takes 24 seconds on average to move a container at the Chinese ports of Shanghai, Qingdao and Yantian, vs. 48 seconds at Los Angeles, according to IHS Markit port-performance data.

. . .

A decades-long history of toxic labor-management relations has led to huge cost increases that discourage operators from expanding work hours, limit their ability to automate terminals, and end in avoidable delays during contract negotiations. Many companies won’t soon forget six months of costly delays at West Coast ports during contract negotiations with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in 2014 and 2015. More than 30 container ships were backed up at anchor off the ports during that episode. Companies will be closely watching the next round of negotiations in 2022.

There is no sign that the labor-management paradigm will change, and a Democratic administration is unlikely to challenge longshoremen’s unions to make compromises.

For the full commentary see:

Peter Tirschwell. “Behind Your Long Wait for Packages.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, June 3, 2021): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 2, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)

Men Are More Likely to Risk Their Lives for Others

(p. A15) “T” does what all superb popular science must do: It entertains as it educates.

. . .

Ultimately, “T” is a vigorous defense of the scientific method itself. Ms. Hooven summarizes: “Multiple independent sources of evidence can combine to strongly support a hypothesis, whether it’s about the cause of a rattle in your car, why your soufflé has collapsed, or why someone blocked you on Twitter. It’s just like that in science.”

. . .

. . . she’s emphatic that high T levels do not lead inexorably to rape and murder; mountains of data disprove this fallacy. She also gives testosterone its due: Men are far more likely “to put their lives on the line for others, and are massively overrepresented in the most dangerous occupations.” She lauds the men who protected her while she conducted fieldwork in the jungles; heroism, for her, thrives at the molecular level.

For the full review, see:

Hamilton Cain. “The Hormone of the Hour.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, July 13, 2021): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 12, 2021, and has the title “‘T’ Review: Hormone of the Hour.”)

The book under review is:

Hooven, Carole. T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2021.

Firms That Discriminate Earn Lower Profits

(p. B1) Economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago this week unveiled a vast discrimination audit of some of the largest U.S. companies. Starting in late 2019, they sent 83,000 fake job applications for entry-level positions at 108 companies — most of them in the top 100 of the Fortune 500 list, and (p. B6) some of their subsidiaries.

. . .

(p. B6) In the study, applicants’ characteristics — like age, sexual orientation, or work and school experience — varied at random. Names, however, were chosen purposefully to ensure applications came in pairs: one with a more distinctive white name — Jake or Molly, say — and the other with a similar background but a more distinctive Black name, like DeShawn or Imani.

. . . : On average, applications from candidates with a “Black name” get fewer callbacks than similar applications bearing a “white name.”

. . .

All told, for every 1,000 applications received, the researchers found, white candidates got about 250 responses, compared with about 230 for Black candidates. But among one-fifth of companies, the average gap grew to 50 callbacks. Even allowing that some patterns of discrimination could be random, rather than the result of racism, they concluded that 23 companies from their selection were “very likely to be engaged in systemic discrimination against Black applicants.”

. . .

“Discriminatory behavior is clustered in particular firms,” the researchers wrote. “The identity of many of these firms can be deduced with high confidence.”

The researchers also identified some overall patterns. For starters, discriminating companies tend to be less profitable, a finding consistent with the proposition by Gary Becker, who first studied discrimination in the workplace in the 1950s, that it is costly for firms to discriminate against productive workers.

For the full story, see:

Eduardo Porter. “Study Shows Which Firms Discriminate.” The New York Times (Friday, July 30, 2021): B1 & B6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 29, 2021, and has the title “Who Discriminates in Hiring? A New Study Can Tell.”)

The economic study summarized in the passages quoted above is:

Kline, Patrick M., Evan K Rose, and Christopher R Walters. “Systemic Discrimination among Large U.S. Employers.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper #29053, Aug. 2021.

“Unemployment Rises Like a Rocket and Falls Like a Feather”

(p. B7) Robert Hall, an economics professor at Stanford University, says the job matching process has progressed in two stages. Last year, millions of people were called back to their jobs from temporary layoffs and the unemployment rate descended quickly from 14.8% to 6.7%. This year, the progress has slowed markedly; the jobless rate fell from 6.3% in January [2021] to 5.9% in June.

Mr. Hall and Marianna Kudlyak at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco studied the past 10 recoveries and concluded that U.S. job recoveries have a common pattern. In normal times, they find, “unemployment rises like a rocket and falls like a feather.”

“The easy stuff has been accomplished,” Mr. Hall said in an interview. The rest of the job recovery, he concluded, is going to take some time.

For the full story, see:

Jon Hilsenrath and Sarah Chaney Cambon. “The Mismatch That Is Hammering Job Prospects.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 10, 2021): B1 & B6-B7.

(Note: bracketed year added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 9, 2021, and has the title “Why Aren’t Millions of Unemployed Americans Finding Jobs?”)

Anderson Led NCR to Disrupt Its Own Cash Register Technology

I believe that Clayton Christensen (with Raynor) in The Innovator’s Solution, used the NCR transition from mechanical cash registers to electronic cash registers as an example of creative destruction that was NOT an example of his disruptive innovation. Alternatively, should this be considered a rare case where a firm succeeds in disrupting itself, especially rare because it was not implemented by the firm founders? (The usual case of rare self-disruption is HP disrupting its laser printer by developing the ink jet printer.)

(p. A9) The same self-belief that kept Mr. Anderson alive as a POW gave him confidence he could save NCR.

“The most important message I try to get across to our managers all over the world is that we are in trouble but we will overcome it,” he told Business Week, which reported that he had the “stance and mien of a middleweight boxer.”

Founded in 1884, NCR was comfortably entrenched as a dominant supplier of mechanical cash registers and machines used in accounting and banking. It underestimated the speed at which microelectronics and computers would wipe out its legacy product line. By the early 1970s, NCR was losing sales to more nimble rivals.

A factory complex covering 55 acres in Dayton made hundreds of exceedingly complicated machines rapidly becoming obsolete. Mr. Anderson found that NCR was using about 130,000 different parts, including more than 9,000 types and sizes of screws. For 1972, his first year as president, NCR took a $70 million charge, largely to write down the value of parts and inventory and replace outdated production equipment.

Mr. Anderson slashed the payroll and invested in new products, including automated teller machines and computers. Profitability recovered, and NCR reported record revenue of $4.07 billion for 1984, the year he retired as chairman.

For the full obituary, see:

James R. Hagerty. “Former POW Revived National Cash Register.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 10, 20211): A9.

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date July 6, 2021, and has the title “Former Prisoner of War Saved NCR From Obsolescence.”)

The Christensen co-authored book mentioned above is:

Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

AI Algorithms Use Massive Data to Do “Narrow Tasks”

(p. B2) A funny thing happens among engineers and researchers who build artificial intelligence once they attain a deep level of expertise in their field. Some of them—especially those who understand what actual, biological intelligences are capable of—conclude that there’s nothing “intelligent” about AI at all.

. . .

. . . the muddle that the term AI creates fuels a tech-industry drive to claim that every system involving the least bit of machine learning qualifies as AI, and is therefore potentially revolutionary. Calling these piles of complicated math with narrow and limited utility “intelligent” also contributes to wild claims that our “AI” will soon reach human-level intelligence. These claims can spur big rounds of investment and mislead the public and policy makers who must decide how to prepare national economies for new innovations.

. . .

The tendency for CEOs and researchers alike to say that their system “understands” a given input—whether it’s gigabytes of text, images or audio—or that it can “think” about those inputs, or that it has any intention at all, are examples of what Drew McDermott, a computer scientist at Yale, once called “wishful mnemonics.” That he coined this phrase in 1976 makes it no less applicable to the present day.

“I think AI is somewhat of a misnomer,” says Daron Acemoglu, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research on AI’s economic impacts requires a precise definition of the term. What we now call AI doesn’t fulfill the early dreams of the field’s founders—either to create a system that can reason as a person does, or to create tools that can augment our abilities. “Instead, it uses massive amounts of data to turn very, very narrow tasks into prediction problems,” he says.

When AI researchers say that their algorithms are good at “narrow” tasks, what they mean is that, with enough data, it’s possible to “train” their algorithms to, say, identify a cat. But unlike a human toddler, these algorithms tend not to be very adaptable. For example, if they haven’t seen cats in unusual circumstances—say, swimming—they might not be able to identify them in that context. And training an algorithm to identify cats generally doesn’t also increase its ability to identify any other kind of animal or object. Identifying dogs means more or less starting from scratch.

For the full commentary, see:

Christopher Mims. “AI’s Big Chill.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 31, 2021): B2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 30, 2021, and has the title “Artificial Intelligence’s Big Chill.” When you click on the title in the search list internal to the WSJ, you get a different title on the page of the article itself: “Why Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Intelligent.”)