I think I agree with your original argument; more specifically my claim is that these people are a small enough fraction of the population that the harms to the majority in terms of happiness and productivity would be greater on net than any productivity boost the exclusively-social workers would experience.
Responding to your responses:
The crux of my belief here is that the interest of the work and the prospect of helping other people are not separable from the camaraderie element. The majority of the actual power these factors exert comes from the social reinforcement. For example, if the satisfaction of the work were enough, why not just work directly alone? This effect is much stronger in things like startups and/or charities, although entirely separately I can see an argument that most startups and charities collapsing would be much more efficient from an economic perspective.
I suspect this is a key disagreement—backing up a bit, I claim that normal for people is more or less continuous social contact. Social contact at work may not be as satisfying as family or friends, but it is at least something. So under this model, time at work is time away from social contact, which is strictly bad and added to the other costs of working a job. This turns a job into a pretty stark money-for-suffering trade, and I see no reason to expect compensation will increase even though suffering does.
I agree it’s a separate cost to measure, but I assert it shares the same cause. So there can be no scenario where you lose camaraderie but maintain teamwork (or enjoyment of the work, or the satisfaction of helping people) at the same levels.
Some workplaces are also populated by bullies and obnoxious people. So while some people lose friendly contact with a great set of colleagues, others are freed from being forced to be around a bunch of jerks. Hard to say how that washes out in the end.
Where people are continuing to work a job in spite of the presence of a bunch of jerks, that’s at least a small sign that the job has some intrinsic value to them or others. Being freed of being around jerks means that they’re still working a job that we can maybe trust is socially valuable, but now they’re strictly better off. This factor means that time away from social contact is not “strictly bad” as you claim, though certainly it is for some people.
By contrast, people for whom camaraderie was a necessary condition for working their job is, to me, a small sign that their job has a relative lack of intrinsic value. While they’ve lost something that was of personal value to them, which is bad in its own right, there may be this countervailing benefit from the destruction of jobs that only exist because of the fun factor for employees/volunteers.
Some workplaces are also populated by bullies and obnoxious people. So while some people lose friendly contact with a great set of colleagues, others are freed from being forced to be around a bunch of jerks. Hard to say how that washes out in the end.
This is an excellent point. There are whole companies with a pretty terrible reputation for this kind of thing; I wonder if they would go out of business because leadership doesn’t know how else to operate, or be saved by people suddenly sticking around for more than a year and developing real competence.
Further, I wonder how well the bullies are represented among that exclusive-social class, except in this case they work exclusively for the experience of domination rather than camaraderie. While I expect them to be the smallest segment we’ve discussed so far, I also expect their neutralization as being the biggest per-capita difference in terms of other people’s welfare and productivity.
If we model bad social experiences like bullying and jerkassery as akin to loss aversion, we might be able to make an estimate. If we model this “social loss aversion” as a 2:1, where experiencing 2 good social interactions is wiped out by 1 bad social interaction, then it starts to look like if one-third of workplace interactions are bad then losing social contact is a break-even proposition. I can easily imagine that being the case in lots of places, particularly since different people are bound to have different real curves for this “social loss.”
I think I agree with your original argument; more specifically my claim is that these people are a small enough fraction of the population that the harms to the majority in terms of happiness and productivity would be greater on net than any productivity boost the exclusively-social workers would experience.
Responding to your responses:
The crux of my belief here is that the interest of the work and the prospect of helping other people are not separable from the camaraderie element. The majority of the actual power these factors exert comes from the social reinforcement. For example, if the satisfaction of the work were enough, why not just work directly alone? This effect is much stronger in things like startups and/or charities, although entirely separately I can see an argument that most startups and charities collapsing would be much more efficient from an economic perspective.
I suspect this is a key disagreement—backing up a bit, I claim that normal for people is more or less continuous social contact. Social contact at work may not be as satisfying as family or friends, but it is at least something. So under this model, time at work is time away from social contact, which is strictly bad and added to the other costs of working a job. This turns a job into a pretty stark money-for-suffering trade, and I see no reason to expect compensation will increase even though suffering does.
I agree it’s a separate cost to measure, but I assert it shares the same cause. So there can be no scenario where you lose camaraderie but maintain teamwork (or enjoyment of the work, or the satisfaction of helping people) at the same levels.
Some workplaces are also populated by bullies and obnoxious people. So while some people lose friendly contact with a great set of colleagues, others are freed from being forced to be around a bunch of jerks. Hard to say how that washes out in the end.
Where people are continuing to work a job in spite of the presence of a bunch of jerks, that’s at least a small sign that the job has some intrinsic value to them or others. Being freed of being around jerks means that they’re still working a job that we can maybe trust is socially valuable, but now they’re strictly better off. This factor means that time away from social contact is not “strictly bad” as you claim, though certainly it is for some people.
By contrast, people for whom camaraderie was a necessary condition for working their job is, to me, a small sign that their job has a relative lack of intrinsic value. While they’ve lost something that was of personal value to them, which is bad in its own right, there may be this countervailing benefit from the destruction of jobs that only exist because of the fun factor for employees/volunteers.
This is an excellent point. There are whole companies with a pretty terrible reputation for this kind of thing; I wonder if they would go out of business because leadership doesn’t know how else to operate, or be saved by people suddenly sticking around for more than a year and developing real competence.
Further, I wonder how well the bullies are represented among that exclusive-social class, except in this case they work exclusively for the experience of domination rather than camaraderie. While I expect them to be the smallest segment we’ve discussed so far, I also expect their neutralization as being the biggest per-capita difference in terms of other people’s welfare and productivity.
If we model bad social experiences like bullying and jerkassery as akin to loss aversion, we might be able to make an estimate. If we model this “social loss aversion” as a 2:1, where experiencing 2 good social interactions is wiped out by 1 bad social interaction, then it starts to look like if one-third of workplace interactions are bad then losing social contact is a break-even proposition. I can easily imagine that being the case in lots of places, particularly since different people are bound to have different real curves for this “social loss.”