#359: Maybe
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If there really is something about the American experience that's exceptional, what is it? Well, I think I can put my finger on it. But first, here's what it isn't.
Most native cultures around the world value tradition because "the old ways" have emerged over the centuries as the best way forward.
What makes the West--and especially America--different in the modern era is that the individual is arbiter of the best way forward. And the fact that hundreds of millions of humans can live in relative luxury is mainly due to harnessing individual self-interest.
This 'productivity' is the focus of a recent piece in the New Yorker by Cal Newport that attempts to fight back against the recent vilification of productivity.
But the genius of Western productivity isn't that it allows bosses to force workers to put out more and more for the corporate bottom line. That, of course, is phony productivity, since there's no individual self-interest generated, any more so than in a factory in the old Soviet Union.
When this country was 90% family farms, two centuries or so ago, most work was based on self-interest, and that pattern is what set up what we can now claim as American Genius. When productivity is one's own to maximize, or laugh at, the mind has decades of practice finding the best solution to any given predicament.
How best to rekindle that original genius now that our workforce is at least 90% urban (mainly hourly wage earners), and most work in the remaining 10% is no longer that of self-interested farmers, but of hired hands and such?
Time control, by employees.
1. Determine a job's average productivity.
2. Allow any employee an early exit on days when that employee's productivity exceeds the average.
3. Or, instead, allow that employee to take paid time off at a later date.
4. Management receives a third of any increased productivity. There are also better health outcomes through improved morale, and thus less spending on healthcare.
Determining average productivity is done in a systematic way, commonly referred to as the industrial time study. Though instead of improved workflow, the emphasis is on setting a baseline beyond which productivity is deemed to have increased. It is then up to individual self-interest to increase productivity beyond this determined 'average'. This of course happens due to the payoff of an early exit to the workday or time off at a later date. Work quality can also be measured to avoid slapdash effort, and those pursuing quality work instead of speed retain their baseline paycheck.
Controlling the pace of one's actions is the essence of a self-employed life.
A slightly less powerful answer to our question is the co-op. A business that is owned by its workers will have that same self-interest propelling work ("If I do my best, my paycheck will be bigger"). There are, of course, opportunities for goof-offs to ride other workers' productivity (compared to the above individual worker-based system), which is why co-ops are a second-best option. Though, obviously, a worker-owned business could always implement the above 4-step process.
Ironically, it may be that labor unions would benefit even more than individual workers if our pace-of-work process were implemented. This is because, currently, hourly wages enable less than productive work practices ("My paycheck won't increase if my work is above average, so why try? Instead, I'll just take it easy"). And those who happen to observe union workers will unconsciously notice that work is being done at a suboptimal pace, and over time conclude that unions are inherently a drag on American Genius.
