You make a number of causal claims that seem to be empirically based. It would be nice if your post could expand on some details of how the causal inference was performed. For instance here:
This is not only terrible for the workers but also for the economy, since businesses with engaged workers have 23% higher profit, while employees who are not engaged cost the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity, equal to 11% of global GDP.
What data and model are these estimates of the causal effects of it based on?
Another thing that confuses me is why socialist firms need special support and don’t naturally come to dominate the economy. You seem to attribute this to owners extracting value, but that seems short-sighted; presumably if you have an economy with a mixture of socialist and non-socialist firms, and the socialist firms are much more productive, they would grow quicker and become dominant over time.
What data and model are these estimates of the causal effects of it based on?
You can find my sources in the references section. This was based on a gallup study
Another thing that confuses me is why socialist firms need special support and don’t naturally come to dominate the economy. You seem to attribute this to owners extracting value, but that seems short-sighted; presumably if you have an economy with a mixture of socialist and non-socialist firms, and the socialist firms are much more productive, they would grow quicker and become dominant over time.
I explained this in this section:
One issue that arises with starting a socialist firms is acquiring initial investing.[27] This is probably because co-ops want to maximize income (wages), not profits. They pursue the interests of their members rather than investors and may sometimes opt to increase wages instead of profits. Capitalist firms on the other hand are explicitly investor owned so investor interests will take priority.
A socialist firm can be more productive and not dominate the economy if it’s hard to start a socialist firm.
You can find my sources in the references section. This was based on a gallup study
The issue is basically friction. There were several things that made your links difficult to use:
They were not direct links to the study, but instead i direct links to articles that talk about the study, so I had to dig further manually.
The articles are often big and contain lots of specific things that might not be directly relevant to your point of using it in the post.
Even having opened the study, I’m still left with confusions about the methodology. It looks to me like they basically just correlated employee engagement with productivity. This is valid if employee engagement varies in a way that is uncorrelated with other factors that have a big effect on productivity, but they don’t seem to justify that assumption and it doesn’t seem anecdotally sensible to me. Furthermore they suggest that managers have a huge effect on employee engagement, which seems to point to a potential area where this assumption could fail. I would like to see a factor analysis containing employee engagement and a bunch of other variables before I believe it to be reasonably independent of other factors.
Now, these are questions I could study myself, so why put the burden on you? I’d say friction and scale: If everyone reading your article studies this themselves, then it is a lot of duplicated work. Meanwhile if you did the work, e.g. making sure to link directly instead of indirectly to the studies you’ve read, and making sure to also link to factor analyses demonstrating independence or whatever else is assumed, then the work would be only performed once, and the results of the work would be available to everyone reading the article.
One issue that arises with starting a socialist firms is acquiring initial investing.[27] This is probably because co-ops want to maximize income (wages), not profits. They pursue the interests of their members rather than investors and may sometimes opt to increase wages instead of profits. Capitalist firms on the other hand are explicitly investor owned so investor interests will take priority.
I’m not sure I understand the economics of this. If co-ops have an inherent massive growth advantage, wouldn’t that outweigh the advantage capitalist firms have in giving more dividends to investors? Because while in the short term the capitalist firms would maybe give more to their investors, in the long term the co-ops would grow bigger and therefore have more money to give, even if they allocate a smaller fraction of it?
It may be that this post would have been better if Ben had put a ton of extra effort into replacing links-to-links with links, and explaining everything in more detail. But this has a bit of an “isolated demand for rigor” feel to me. To be clear, I don’t mean that I have compared your response to this post with your response to otherwise-similar posts with a different political slant and found a difference; it is consistent with everything I think I know for you merely to be unusually rigor-demanding across the board. But it does feel to me as if (1) you’re saying that to be good enough Ben’s post should have gone to a lot more effort and (2) broadly similar posts with different political leanings don’t generally attract demands for that level of author-effort.
More fundamentally the reason I call out that specific section is because I strongly doubt that the “businesses with engaged workers have 23% higher profit” sentence is based on statistics that are of any nontrivial evidentiary value for whether better workers lead to more profit, and if this part of the post is totally wrong then that calls into question whether the other statistics cited in the post are similarly totally wrong.
However, in spot-checking whether the statistics were totally wrong, I found myself struggling with wading through signups and links and long mostly irrelevant articles. Of course some nonzero amount of this is likely to happen with spot-checks but it seemed like the layers of links just made it even worse.
I was about to say that maybe I handled it wrong to begin with and should have just pointed out this problem. But looking back at my original comment I think I handled it right, in just asking OP to explain what data/model it was based on; the problem is that then OP responded back with repeating the links instead of explaining what he had read in the links. But I guess my followup response to OP responding back with repeating the links might be a problem.
However, in spot-checking whether the statistics were totally wrong, I found myself struggling with wading through signups and links and long mostly irrelevant articles. Of course some nonzero amount of this is likely to happen with spot-checks but it seemed like the layers of links just made it even worse.
This is dishonest, the vast majority of the sources are primary scientific studies and the few times I do refer to secondary sources it isn’t irrelevant.
You did handle it right, especially your deleted comment.
OP to explain what data/model it was based on; the problem is that then OP responded back with repeating the links instead of explaining what he had read in the links
Yeah, because the primary source is right there?! What value would me explaining in my second language bring to the explanation, when you can click on the link and immediately download the primary source?
This is dishonest, the vast majority of the sources are primary scientific studies and the few times I do refer to secondary sources it isn’t irrelevant.
I wasn’t talking about the vast majority of the sources, I was talking about source 3, which turned into source 2, which turned into some other source that I had to find myself.
You did handle it right, especially your deleted comment.
My deleted comment was nearly identical to one of the non-deleted comments. It’s just that I realized there was a problem with one of my comments after posting it and I needed to take some time to look at it.
Yeah, because the primary source is right there?! What value would me explaining in my second language bring to the explanation, when you can click on the link and immediately download the primary source?
The problem is that the primary source does not seem credible without additional information.
A spot check is supposed to take a number of random sources and check them, not pick the one claim you find most suspicious (that isn’t even about co-ops) and use that to dismiss the entire literature on co-ops.
A spot check is supposed to take a number of random sources and check them, not pick the one claim you find most suspicious (that isn’t even about co-ops)
There seem to be three parts to this objections:
I did not spot-check sufficiently many claims
I filtered the claim to spot-check based on being the most suspicious
I did not filter the claims based on being about co-ops
With regards to point 1, I agree that I cannot know your accuracy very precisely without doing more checks, but the problem is that each check takes time and there are a lot of posts on the internet to read, so I have to limit how much I search.
With regards to point 2, it’s not that I spot-checked the most suspicious one, rather it’s that I spot-checked the first suspicious one. This is still a filter on suspiciousness, but a much weaker one. I think some filter on suspiciousness is appropriate since suspicious claims are also the ones I can learn the most from if they turn out to be true, as claims become suspicious through a combination of being unlikely and having big implications.
With regards to point 3, if you put much more effort into verifying the accuracy of your claims about co-ops than your claims about other stuff, then your accuracy on co-ops might not be that correlated with your accuracy on other stuff, and I ought to do a spot-check specifically on your claims about co-ops. I don’t know if that is true. If it is true, it might also be helpful to mention it as a disclaimer in the post so people know what claims to mostly focus on.
and use that to dismiss the entire literature on co-ops.
So it’s not so much that I’m dismissing the entire literature on co-ops. (Or well, I would generally dismiss any social science that I haven’t done some surface checks of. But that’s different from my comments here.) It’s more that I’m dismissing your literature review of the literature.
The articles are often big and contain lots of specific things that might not be directly relevant to your point of using it in the post.
There was a summary of it on the linked page itself:
Unfortunately, most employees remain disengaged at work. In fact, low engagement alone costs the global economy $7.8 trillion.
Even having opened the study, I’m still left with confusions about the methodology
From the study
Methodology
The primary data in this report come from the Gallup World Poll, through which Gallup has conducted surveys of the world’s adult population, using randomly selected samples, since 2005. The survey is administered annually face to face or by telephone, covering more than 160 countries and areas since its inception. In addition to the World Poll data, Gallup collected extensive random samples of working populations in the United States and Germany; these samples were also added to the dataset.
The target population of the World Poll is the entire civilian, noninstitutionalized, aged-15- and-older population. Gallup’s data in this report reflect the responses of adults, aged-15- and-older, who were employed for any number of hours by an employer.
With some exceptions, all samples are probability-based and nationally representative. Gallup uses data weighting to minimize bias in survey-based estimates; ensure samples are nationally representative for each country; and correct for unequal selection probability, nonresponse and double coverage of landline and mobile phone users when using both mobile phone and landline frames. Gallup also weights its final samples to match the national demographics of each selected country.
Regional findings in this report include data obtained from 2021 to as late as March 2022 (reported as part of 2021 data in this report). To determine percentage point changes for regions, Gallup uses data from 2020 and 2021 from the same countries in each region.
Country-specific findings in “Appendix 1: Country Comparisons” are based on data aggregated from three years of polling (2019, 2020 and 2021 — with several countries’ 2021 data obtained in early 2022). Percentage point changes for countries indicate the differences in percentage points when comparing the average from 2018, 2019 and 2020 with the average from 2019, 2020 and 2021.
Gallup typically surveys 1,000 individuals in each country or area, using a standard set of core questions that has been translated into the major languages of the respective country. In some countries, Gallup collects oversamples in major cities or areas of special interest. Additionally, in some large countries, such as China and Russia, sample sizes include at least 2,000 adults. In a small number of countries, the sample size is less than 1,000. In this report, Gallup does not provide country-level data (aggregate of 2019, 2020 and 2021 data) or country-level percentage point change data (aggregate of 2018, 2019 and 2020 data) for any country that has an aggregate n size of less than 300.
For results based on the total sample of adults globally, the margin of sampling error ranged from ±0.5 percentage points to ±0.7 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. For results based on the total sample of adults in each region, the margin of sampling error ranged from ±0.6 percentage points to ±5.0 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. For results based on the total sample of adults in each country, the margin of sampling error ranged from ±0.5 percentage points to ±8.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.
I’m not sure I understand the economics of this. If co-ops have an inherent massive growth advantage, wouldn’t that outweigh the advantage capitalist firms have in giving more dividends to investors? Because while in the short term the capitalist firms would maybe give more to their investors, in the long term the co-ops would grow bigger and therefore have more money to give, even if they allocate a smaller fraction of it?
I never claimed a massive growth advantage:
There seems to be a small increase in companywide productivity[33]
As I said, the meta-analysis’s only show a small growth advantage. If e.g a socialist firm grows with $1000 and a capitalist firm with $900, but the capitalist firm gives the $900 to the investors and the socialist firm gives $500 to both the investors and the employees, the investors can make more money with capitalist firms.
Oh I think one confusing factor was the footnote placement.
But anyway, no, this link doesn’t link directly to the study either, it links to a report that links to the study. I had to go through additional links to find this document which appears to be the original source with the actual analysis.
From the study
The wall of text doesn’t really answer my questions about the independence of employee engagement.
I never claimed a massive growth advantage:
Ah sorry, that’s my mixup between the effects of employee engagement vs effects of co-opts.
But anyway, no, this link doesn’t link directly to the study either, it links to a report that links to the study
You can immediately see a button that says “download report” when you click on that link. I wouldn’t call that “digging for sources”.
The wall of text doesn’t really answer my questions about the independence of employee engagement.
Furthermore they suggest that managers have a huge effect on employee engagement, which seems to point to a potential area where this assumption could fail.
It’s not independent, co-ops let you vote on managers which allows productivity to increase.
EDIT: I have apologized to (and thanked) tailcalled via messages, and have added the document as the third source. Once again, thanks for the suggestion.
You can immediately see a button that says “download report” when you click on that link. I wouldn’t call that “digging for sources”.
I have downloaded the report. When I searched for keywords from the sentence “This is not only terrible for the workers but also for the economy, since businesses with engaged workers have 23% higher profit, while employees who are not engaged cost the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity, equal to 11% of global GDP.” in the report, the main section that appeared was this:
Clearly, the COVID-19 pandemic era put a halt to a long period of gradual but general improvement among the world’s workers. This matters for global economic dynamism. Gallup estimates that low engagement costs the global economy US$7.8 trillion and accounts for 11% of GDP globally. Gallup’s analysis of 112,312 business units in 96 countries found a strong link between engagement and performance outcomes, such as retention, productivity, safety and profitability
The other potentially relevant section that appeared was this:
Business units with engaged workers have 23% higher profit compared with business units with miserable workers.
Neither of these sections give any idea of how Gallup came to the conclusion, but the link in the first section contains a link to a different document that probably forms the foundation/primary source for their analysis.
It’s not independent
I mean if the independence of employee engagement doesn’t hold, then the causal inference doesn’t go through, and you can’t infer that engagement has this much effect on productivity...
co-ops let you vote on managers which allows productivity to increase.
… however this sounds like a different form of independence than the one I brought up.
You make a number of causal claims that seem to be empirically based. It would be nice if your post could expand on some details of how the causal inference was performed. For instance here:
What data and model are these estimates of the causal effects of it based on?
Another thing that confuses me is why socialist firms need special support and don’t naturally come to dominate the economy. You seem to attribute this to owners extracting value, but that seems short-sighted; presumably if you have an economy with a mixture of socialist and non-socialist firms, and the socialist firms are much more productive, they would grow quicker and become dominant over time.
You can find my sources in the references section. This was based on a gallup study
I explained this in this section:
A socialist firm can be more productive and not dominate the economy if it’s hard to start a socialist firm.
The issue is basically friction. There were several things that made your links difficult to use:
They were not direct links to the study, but instead i direct links to articles that talk about the study, so I had to dig further manually.
The articles are often big and contain lots of specific things that might not be directly relevant to your point of using it in the post.
Even having opened the study, I’m still left with confusions about the methodology. It looks to me like they basically just correlated employee engagement with productivity. This is valid if employee engagement varies in a way that is uncorrelated with other factors that have a big effect on productivity, but they don’t seem to justify that assumption and it doesn’t seem anecdotally sensible to me. Furthermore they suggest that managers have a huge effect on employee engagement, which seems to point to a potential area where this assumption could fail. I would like to see a factor analysis containing employee engagement and a bunch of other variables before I believe it to be reasonably independent of other factors.
Now, these are questions I could study myself, so why put the burden on you? I’d say friction and scale: If everyone reading your article studies this themselves, then it is a lot of duplicated work. Meanwhile if you did the work, e.g. making sure to link directly instead of indirectly to the studies you’ve read, and making sure to also link to factor analyses demonstrating independence or whatever else is assumed, then the work would be only performed once, and the results of the work would be available to everyone reading the article.
I’m not sure I understand the economics of this. If co-ops have an inherent massive growth advantage, wouldn’t that outweigh the advantage capitalist firms have in giving more dividends to investors? Because while in the short term the capitalist firms would maybe give more to their investors, in the long term the co-ops would grow bigger and therefore have more money to give, even if they allocate a smaller fraction of it?
It may be that this post would have been better if Ben had put a ton of extra effort into replacing links-to-links with links, and explaining everything in more detail. But this has a bit of an “isolated demand for rigor” feel to me. To be clear, I don’t mean that I have compared your response to this post with your response to otherwise-similar posts with a different political slant and found a difference; it is consistent with everything I think I know for you merely to be unusually rigor-demanding across the board. But it does feel to me as if (1) you’re saying that to be good enough Ben’s post should have gone to a lot more effort and (2) broadly similar posts with different political leanings don’t generally attract demands for that level of author-effort.
More fundamentally the reason I call out that specific section is because I strongly doubt that the “businesses with engaged workers have 23% higher profit” sentence is based on statistics that are of any nontrivial evidentiary value for whether better workers lead to more profit, and if this part of the post is totally wrong then that calls into question whether the other statistics cited in the post are similarly totally wrong.
However, in spot-checking whether the statistics were totally wrong, I found myself struggling with wading through signups and links and long mostly irrelevant articles. Of course some nonzero amount of this is likely to happen with spot-checks but it seemed like the layers of links just made it even worse.
I was about to say that maybe I handled it wrong to begin with and should have just pointed out this problem. But looking back at my original comment I think I handled it right, in just asking OP to explain what data/model it was based on; the problem is that then OP responded back with repeating the links instead of explaining what he had read in the links. But I guess my followup response to OP responding back with repeating the links might be a problem.
This is dishonest, the vast majority of the sources are primary scientific studies and the few times I do refer to secondary sources it isn’t irrelevant.
You did handle it right, especially your deleted comment.
Yeah, because the primary source is right there?! What value would me explaining in my second language bring to the explanation, when you can click on the link and immediately download the primary source?
I wasn’t talking about the vast majority of the sources, I was talking about source 3, which turned into source 2, which turned into some other source that I had to find myself.
My deleted comment was nearly identical to one of the non-deleted comments. It’s just that I realized there was a problem with one of my comments after posting it and I needed to take some time to look at it.
The problem is that the primary source does not seem credible without additional information.
A spot check is supposed to take a number of random sources and check them, not pick the one claim you find most suspicious (that isn’t even about co-ops) and use that to dismiss the entire literature on co-ops.
There seem to be three parts to this objections:
I did not spot-check sufficiently many claims
I filtered the claim to spot-check based on being the most suspicious
I did not filter the claims based on being about co-ops
With regards to point 1, I agree that I cannot know your accuracy very precisely without doing more checks, but the problem is that each check takes time and there are a lot of posts on the internet to read, so I have to limit how much I search.
With regards to point 2, it’s not that I spot-checked the most suspicious one, rather it’s that I spot-checked the first suspicious one. This is still a filter on suspiciousness, but a much weaker one. I think some filter on suspiciousness is appropriate since suspicious claims are also the ones I can learn the most from if they turn out to be true, as claims become suspicious through a combination of being unlikely and having big implications.
With regards to point 3, if you put much more effort into verifying the accuracy of your claims about co-ops than your claims about other stuff, then your accuracy on co-ops might not be that correlated with your accuracy on other stuff, and I ought to do a spot-check specifically on your claims about co-ops. I don’t know if that is true. If it is true, it might also be helpful to mention it as a disclaimer in the post so people know what claims to mostly focus on.
So it’s not so much that I’m dismissing the entire literature on co-ops. (Or well, I would generally dismiss any social science that I haven’t done some surface checks of. But that’s different from my comments here.) It’s more that I’m dismissing your literature review of the literature.
It was the second source in the post: [2]
There was a summary of it on the linked page itself:
From the study
I never claimed a massive growth advantage:
As I said, the meta-analysis’s only show a small growth advantage. If e.g a socialist firm grows with $1000 and a capitalist firm with $900, but the capitalist firm gives the $900 to the investors and the socialist firm gives $500 to both the investors and the employees, the investors can make more money with capitalist firms.
Oh I think one confusing factor was the footnote placement.
But anyway, no, this link doesn’t link directly to the study either, it links to a report that links to the study. I had to go through additional links to find this document which appears to be the original source with the actual analysis.
The wall of text doesn’t really answer my questions about the independence of employee engagement.
Ah sorry, that’s my mixup between the effects of employee engagement vs effects of co-opts.
You can immediately see a button that says “download report” when you click on that link. I wouldn’t call that “digging for sources”.
It’s not independent, co-ops let you vote on managers which allows productivity to increase.
EDIT: I have apologized to (and thanked) tailcalled via messages, and have added the document as the third source. Once again, thanks for the suggestion.
I have downloaded the report. When I searched for keywords from the sentence “This is not only terrible for the workers but also for the economy, since businesses with engaged workers have 23% higher profit, while employees who are not engaged cost the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity, equal to 11% of global GDP.” in the report, the main section that appeared was this:
The other potentially relevant section that appeared was this:
Neither of these sections give any idea of how Gallup came to the conclusion, but the link in the first section contains a link to a different document that probably forms the foundation/primary source for their analysis.
I mean if the independence of employee engagement doesn’t hold, then the causal inference doesn’t go through, and you can’t infer that engagement has this much effect on productivity...
… however this sounds like a different form of independence than the one I brought up.