but wouldn’t the best and brightest/most conscious workers from the other nations either move there, giving the employer superior human resources, or have a strike at home and enable the same kind of thing for themselves?
The incentives are higher for the best and brightest workers to move to where they are allowed to work more. Remember their opportunity cost for not working is much higher than that of the average or below average worker.
If you are good at what you do and get paid more for it than others, let alone if you are competing for prestige within your field, you have an incentive to move to the more work heavy culture. Perhaps we even see this in the real world with migration of top talent from say Europe to the US.
The typical mind fallacy is an important error to watch out for when considering policy. Many people feel they would prefer to work 30 hours instead of 40 hours or that they wouldn’t respond to certain perverse incentives, so they assume no one else will.
Yeah, you’re partly right. I was kinda mixing up two plausible consequences here—many of the “elite” workers might, in the hypothetical organized-labor-world, actively seek out higher wages even at the cost of leisure or worse conditions, while the “average” or “mediocre” ones in their line of work—or even most, if their line of work hardly allows an “elite” except as a foreman post (which was dangled in front of me after my slightly Kafkaesque stint of stocking shelves at department stores) - would prefer to stay where they are and bargain for a combination of 1)more of effective free time, 2)better conditions and 3)higher pay, instead of allowing themselves to be collectively hypnotized by 3) at the expense of 1) and 2).
Um, in fact, to rely on a cached thought—haven’t Italian workers been known for strong unionization, not-too-high wages by European standards and a rather carefree/relaxed attitude? Fun fact: work-to-rule is called an “Italian strike” in Russian.
The incentives are higher for the best and brightest workers to move to where they are allowed to work more. Remember their opportunity cost for not working is much higher than that of the average or below average worker.
If you are good at what you do and get paid more for it than others, let alone if you are competing for prestige within your field, you have an incentive to move to the more work heavy culture. Perhaps we even see this in the real world with migration of top talent from say Europe to the US.
The typical mind fallacy is an important error to watch out for when considering policy. Many people feel they would prefer to work 30 hours instead of 40 hours or that they wouldn’t respond to certain perverse incentives, so they assume no one else will.
Yeah, you’re partly right.
I was kinda mixing up two plausible consequences here—many of the “elite” workers might, in the hypothetical organized-labor-world, actively seek out higher wages even at the cost of leisure or worse conditions, while the “average” or “mediocre” ones in their line of work—or even most, if their line of work hardly allows an “elite” except as a foreman post (which was dangled in front of me after my slightly Kafkaesque stint of stocking shelves at department stores) - would prefer to stay where they are and bargain for a combination of 1)more of effective free time, 2)better conditions and 3)higher pay, instead of allowing themselves to be collectively hypnotized by 3) at the expense of 1) and 2).
Um, in fact, to rely on a cached thought—haven’t Italian workers been known for strong unionization, not-too-high wages by European standards and a rather carefree/relaxed attitude? Fun fact: work-to-rule is called an “Italian strike” in Russian.