Showing my work (and more thoughts on work in general)

The MELISANDE excerpt will be behind the paywall as usual, and if you are curious why I even have a paywall, I can give you two reasons:

1. This particular information does not want to be free, at least not yet. It is incomplete and untested; if it is later proved to be successful it will free itself, despite all attempts to put tickets around specific performances (the same way you can sing the hook to "Defying Gravity" even if you've never seen or heard Wicked). This, by the way, is the goal.
2. Although Larry and I have the kind of financial stability that allows us to choose the work we do, we're also thinking ahead towards experiences we'd like to have that might require additional saving-and-planning beyond the cost of living and the assumed needs of the future (is capital the word I'm thinking of, do I have to use that word). With that in mind I've targeted $48K (gross, pretax) as the minimum amount of money I'd like to earn in 2025.

This brings us back around to Herbert Croly, who is credited with founding the progressive movement, and what I can only describe as the naïveté of his plan.

I love the idea of regulating fair trades between employers and employees (and/or between producers and workers [and/or sellers and buyers]). I loathe, for example, the way that algorithmic price discrimination is creeping into more and more sectors of the economy. To quote Cory Doctorow:

Take nurses: increasingly, American hospitals are firing their waged nurses and replacing them with gig nurses who are booked in via an app. There's plenty of ways that these apps abuse nurses, but the most ghastly is in how they price nurses' wages. These apps buy nurses' financial data from data-brokers so they can offer lower wages to nurses with lots of credit card debt, on the grounds that crushing debt makes nurses desperate enough to accept a lower wage.

That said, when you go to Doctorow's source you find the situation might be a bit more complicated. To quote the Roosevelt Project, which is where Doctorow appears to have generated his paragraph:

In the gig nursing world, there is zero transparency about how jobs are algorithmically allocated or automatically scheduled. Different shifts will show up on different workers’ phones—often for different amounts of pay. On the same day, at the same hour, in the same hospital, two different gig nurses can be paid different amounts by the same app.

Okay, that checks out.

Gig nursing apps may determine pay by what the firm knows about how much a nurse was willing to accept for a previous assignment, how often they bid for shifts, or how much credit card or other kinds of debt they might hold.

This implies that we don't actually know whether these apps are using credit card debt to make pricing decisions.

ShiftMed, for instance, gives a reliability score to workers based on how many shifts they complete, how early they cancel shifts, and whether they stay late on a job (which can, oddly, hurt one’s score). Higher reliability scores lead to earlier access to shifts while lower ratings result in temporary or permanent suspensions and, workers suspect, lower pay offerings.

Staying late hurts one's score because it demonstrates either a lack of efficiency or a willingness to take additional hours (and additional pay) from ShiftMed to please a hospital supervisor. ShiftMed is the client here, not the hospital, and ShiftMed prioritizes opportunities towards workers who prioritize its values, etc. etc. etc.

I mean, on balance I still loathe all of this, and the primary reason is that the balance is tilted entirely in favor of the middleman, who can twiddle (another Doctorow word) the system to maximize his own profits. Both nurses and hospitals lose, in this case – and, I'm assuming, so do hospital patients.

So Croly would eliminate and/or regulate this problem, and I would say thumbs up, let's go, and he would give everybody the kind of wage that would eliminate anxiety about money, and I would say thumbs up in principle, but in practice we have to do the math.

I would also say that I am neither the first nor the last person to try to puzzle this through, and you don't really need me to ask questions like:

• what does a living wage entail
• who defines the minimum standard of living
• if minimum standard of living is defined, why not give everyone minimum standard of living instead of money
• if everyone receives minimum standard of living instead of money, or just enough money to earn minimum standard of living, why are you assuming that we'll all work disinterestedly instead of continuing our self-interested aspirational scrabble towards work that pays more money, either to achieve a higher standard of living than our neighbors (if your mind is oriented in that direction) or to fund travel to various theater festivals (if your mind is oriented like mine)

I mean, this is literally the second chapter of Plato's Republic, the Greeks are all "well if we just gave everyone the minimum required to live, food+shelter+education, everyone would be happy," and Socrates says "okay, you're all eating bread and drinking wine, sitting outside of huts, limited to two children who are duly trained in logic and rhetoric and gymnastics and bread+wine+hut production, what do you think about that" and then Glaucon is all "but I'd like a few olives with my meal, couldn't we have olives as well" and Socrates says "if you give a mouse a cookie he will want a glass of milk and then we will be obliged to invent capitalism."

The other interesting thing about The Promise of American Life is that it either presumes that jobs will always be available to anyone who wants them or it presumes that anyone who has a job will have enough extra money to save for a future in which they may not be employed. If the latter, it also presumes that people will in fact do that kind of saving instead of putting their money towards more immediate pleasures and goals – but we know from experience that people do not, and it surprises me that Croly does not anticipate governmental programs like unemployment insurance and Social Security.

Which, on balance, are still net positives. Forced savings plans allow us to put more of our remaining income towards shorter-term goals that could increase our overall prosperity. These plans protect us from not only our own mistakes, but also mistakes made by others. Forced savings allows us to behave suboptimally; it also allows us to make untested choices.

At this point I should go ahead and give you the excerpt from MELISANDE, since the last thing you need me to do is turn NicoleDiekerFinley.com into some kind of amateur economist garbage blog. I will let you know that tomorrow I plan to switch topics entirely and begin writing about how to teach, which is very likely to take up more of my time in the future and has already started to take up more of my thoughts.