Skip to content

The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism

Metadata

Highlights

Smith’s idea of an invisible hand guiding the economy toward a desirable social outcome took hold because it fit the needs of those powerful persons who owned the land, raw materials, and capital upon which everyone else depends. — location: 63 ^ref-46388

Within this narrow market perspective, social relations become invisible. Workers are not just creatures that inhabit the workplace. They live within families, a class, and a society. If these relationships are ignored, the potential for substantial progress in grasping the economy is virtually nil. — location: 71 ^ref-60503

The ideology of economics intersected with the personal needs of the people who run the economy. — location: 79 ^ref-41958

Measures that could make workers more productive might threaten to undermine either the rationale for or the authority of the capitalists. So when they had to choose between justifying their position and improving workers’ productive potential, they opted for the former. — location: 80 ^ref-6178

a rational economy would offer workers a helping hand, not just in terms of providing a higher standard of living, but even more important, making sure that workers have every opportunity to develop their potential. — location: 88 ^ref-32851

These invisible handcuffs will continue to undermine society by stunting workers and thereby stifling the economy. — location: 95 ^ref-55477

When they do address them, they end up going to great lengths to nurture the market rather than people; — location: 100 ^ref-20967

Today, when the world faces such difficult threats, society cannot afford to waste a resource as valuable as human potential. — location: 102 ^ref-44636

the primacy of market transactions at the expense of the process of production. — location: 112 ^ref-434

Everybody irritated by a boss’s foolish command or a corporation’s ridiculous bureaucratic demands has taken a first step toward an awakening. These annoyances are symptomatic of a much larger problem associated with an outdated system of command and control at the workplace. Once that realization kicks in, you can sense your inner Bearded Slave. — location: 129 ^ref-35627

that what covers its inner potential is man-made. It is capitalist control that encrusts society with unsightly layers of waste and inefficiency. — location: 134 ^ref-53916

more often than not the waste and inefficiency serve a purpose—to maintain the existing system of control. — location: 135 ^ref-32139

policymakers pretend that all social objectives—whether higher wages, better working conditions, environmental protections, or even the quality of life—must give way to the promise of job creation. — location: 159 ^ref-57056

the impact of the narrow market perspective on everyday life. It examines the enormous amount of time that jobs consume, as well as the extension of controls on people’s behavior outside the workplace. — location: 166 ^ref-42656

Even after people became corralled into wage labor, Smith realized that controls had to reach deeper into people’s lives, even including state regulation of religion. In short, for all his positive rhetoric about freedom, Smith’s ultimate concern was to control people in order to make them obedient workers. — location: 180 ^ref-38071

“The Destructive Nature of Procrusteanism,” is the capstone of the book, surveying some of the innumerable ways in which capitalist discipline proves to be counterproductive, — location: 193 ^ref-50477

This blind devotion to the market is a kind of religion. — location: 209 ^ref-58724

The stubbornness of market fundamentalism reflects a theological view that markets are an end in themselves rather than merely a means to an end. — location: 217 ^ref-47350

“In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”5 Does this system really serve people’s essential needs? I do not think that it does. — location: 229 ^ref-42504

It forces on the individual, to the extent that he is caught up in the relationships of the “market,” the norms of its economic activity. — location: 245 ^ref-5467

people must learn to adjust to the market rather than make any attempt to have the market adjust to people’s needs. — location: 248 ^ref-49954

Economists in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries clearly understood that people would naturally resist employment as wage laborers if they could maintain themselves outside of the market. They proposed strong measures to deny people alternative means of support, including the confiscation of the land upon which people had traditionally provided for their own needs. — location: 262 ^ref-10332

once wage labor became sufficiently common, people would begin to think of it as normal and take it for granted. — location: 266 ^ref-12252

The brutal measures that were required to transform society to the point that people took wage labor for granted did obvious damage. However, once people accept market life as the norm, the Procrustean bed begins to fall from view. — location: 274 ^ref-60495

so long as the causes of the alienation, insecurity, and powerlessness that go along with capitalism remain invisible, free-floating anger becomes common. — location: 278 ^ref-46690

Procrusteans stand ready to impose their will, unleashing violent repression when necessary. For example, in Uruguay, when such repression was in full force, the journalist Eduardo Galeano observed, “People were in prison so that prices could be free.” — location: 289 ^ref-6749

How can anyone rationalize why hours of work have not radically decreased despite the proliferation of modern, labor-saving technology? — location: 298 ^ref-50684

Are these conditions the natural functioning of the labor market or the intentional manipulation of Procrusteans? — location: 299 ^ref-10545

They might seem impossibly utopian, but only because the gate-keepers of the Procrustean economy stubbornly refuse to accept any dialogue or even the possibility of a dialogue. As Margaret Thatcher adamantly proclaimed, “There is no alternative.” The iron bed must remain in place. Everyone must learn to accept the dictates of the Procrustean economy—to voluntarily don the invisible handcuffs. — location: 301 ^ref-62140

That business is not particularly good at creating jobs—especially good jobs—should come as no surprise. Wall Street rewards corporations for eliminating jobs, not creating them. Profits rather than jobs are the highest priority for business leaders. — location: 319 ^ref-18361

Despite the poor record of large corporations in providing good jobs, business attacks any legislation intended to raise wages or improve working conditions as a “job killer.” — location: 334 ^ref-16880

“fields of work” are giving rise to a society that is increasingly “jobless but not workless.” — location: 350 ^ref-63888

modern technology has not so much been used to relieve people of the burdens of work as to extract more work from people. — location: 363 ^ref-37528

Shouldn’t a successful economy emphasize the development of technology that makes work easier, rather than creating technology intended to make a smaller number of people work more intensively? Why wouldn’t a successful economy apply modern technology to make work less stressful? — location: 369 ^ref-33161

Because most people do not enjoy taking orders and have a natural tendency to assert some independence, workers can become rebellious when workplace authorities do not treat them with respect, especially when they feel confident that comparable jobs are readily available. — location: 380 ^ref-42185

Management responded harshly, forcing workers to halt, claiming that they had violated the legitimate channels of authority, training, and communication. If workers had been given the opportunity to organize their own work, Watson claims that they could have completed the task in one-tenth the scheduled time. Management, however, was determined to stop workers from organizing their own work, even when it would have been finished more quickly and management would have saved money because of the speed-up. — location: 399 ^ref-51423

To admit that workers have something to contribute beyond blindly carrying out the demands of management undermines the ultimate rationale for management’s domination. — location: 405 ^ref-50763

industry had two options available. It could intensify its supervision over workers or it could actively engage its employees by giving them more control over their jobs. — location: 417 ^ref-2630

Once you get beyond the theology of capitalism, the ultimate justification for this mode of production is that the efficiency of markets can offer the best possible life for people. Part of the illusion of efficiency is that capitalism is a meritocracy—that the best people rise to positions of authority. Consequently, maintaining the legitimacy of authority is crucial for capitalism. — location: 425 ^ref-2796

business leaders know that maintaining a substantial level of unemployment gives them a strategic advantage. — location: 437 ^ref-9509

Even during the 1990s, a time when interest rates were low, over one-seventh of wage earners’ salaries went to pay interest on their loans. — location: 460 ^ref-10746

Ideally, the Federal Reserve would like to maintain a Goldilocks economy, in which economic growth is just right—strong enough to increase profits, but slow enough to keep workers in check. — location: 464 ^ref-13046

inflation. According to the council’s chairman, Herbert Stein, “If anyone was being severely hurt, the available statistics were too crude to reveal it.” — location: 488 ^ref-59256

The depreciation of the circulating medium (meaning inflation) has been more injurious to monied men … It may be laid down as a principle of universal application, that every man injured or benefited by the variation of the value of the circulating medium in proportion as his property consists of money. — location: 491 ^ref-9489

the Federal Reserve’s partisan behavior is designed to tilt the economy in the direction of the wealthy by making workers more compliant. — location: 503 ^ref-64242

“a baseless fear of full employment” rather than the prevention of inflation was the guiding principle of the Federal Reserve. — location: 507 ^ref-53331

The periodic slowdowns that the Federal Reserve engineered to undermine wage growth are unlikely to stimulate economic growth. According to a study by the Bank for International Settlements, slowdowns actually seem to diminish rather than promote long-term growth. — location: 514 ^ref-32514

The effort to tame inflation was, in reality, mostly a class war, what might be called “sado-monetarism.” — location: 540 ^ref-65406

Volcker wanted wages to fall, the faster the better. In crude terms, the Fed was determined to break labor. — location: 544 ^ref-40354

The Federal Reserve serves the needs of the powerful. Its role is to protect capital against the interests of labor. In order to maintain labor discipline, the Federal Reserve Board is entrusted with the task of maintaining a level of unemployment high enough to keep workers fearful of losing their jobs. — location: 556 ^ref-26621

94 percent of all contracts for chief executives prevent them from being fired for unsatisfactory work without a big severance package. — location: 561 ^ref-44885

Sado-monetarism is not so much a matter of monetary discipline, as most economists would have it, but of class discipline. — location: 570 ^ref-61209

Being unemployed is more stressful than divorce or marital separation. — location: 583 ^ref-64961

even when you are back at work, you still feel its effects as a psychological scar. — location: 589 ^ref-46614

“the working man demands … the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance.” — location: 602 ^ref-3699

Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity.” — location: 619 ^ref-14881

In stark contrast to the sadistic attitude toward labor, when speculative excesses or some other miscalculation create adverse economic conditions that threaten to harm powerful business interests, especially in finance, the Fed is almost certain to rush in to the rescue, throwing money at business interests while letting labor hang out to dry. — location: 651 ^ref-14096

Prisons also serve to reinforce the discipline of the workplace. — location: 661 ^ref-37931

A study of younger workers who were part of a mass layoff confirmed the lethal effect of job loss. These workers had persistently 15 to 20 percent higher mortality rates than others in their cohorts. — location: 669 ^ref-57874

Sadly, the enormous losses caused by the harsh efforts to discipline workers in a capitalist society go unnoticed. — location: 683 ^ref-52940

Repeat offenders over eighteen were to be executed unless someone would take them into service. Third offenses automatically resulted in execution. — location: 692 ^ref-13506

people were slow to realize that the problem with slavery was not that a few slave owners were cruel and sadistic, but rather that the system as a whole was flawed. The coercive systems of the past ended not because of humanitarian scruples, but because of their inherent inefficiency. — location: 695 ^ref-45386

harsh measures, whether or not they involve physical brutality, are ultimately self-defeating. — location: 700 ^ref-56487

In the future, people may well look back to the present time, wondering why people were so slow to realize the inherent irrationality of the current system of organizing labor. — location: 701 ^ref-7307

occupational diseases cause almost ten times as many deaths as industrial accidents— — location: 747 ^ref-24471

Even though unemployment has deleterious health consequences for individual workers, recessions can actually decrease mortality. — location: 765 ^ref-44677

Being employed might be more stressful than being unemployed! — location: 767 ^ref-42508

political economists were becoming more sensitive about the need to explain away the increasingly sharp divide between employers and their workers. — location: 831 ^ref-4334

before the railroad, shipping wheat more than two hundred miles was uneconomical. — location: 848 ^ref-46169

Radical Republican Senator George from Massachusetts credited a meeting of the International Working Man’s Association led by Karl Marx with keeping England from joining the Confederate cause during the Civil War, thereby significantly contributing to the preservation of the Union: — location: 896 ^ref-585

they produced one kind of economics for political and business leaders and other economists and another for workers, telling them why they should accept the market. — location: 914 ^ref-5711

Economists seldom realize that, like work, leisure can be productive and that fulfilling work might actually create more utility than leisure. — location: 971 ^ref-12649

They also celebrate their success in proving the just nature of the economy—that we all get exactly what we deserve. They claim to have “proved” that the economy will work efficiently because business will offer products that satisfy the individual preferences of consumers. — location: 1084 ^ref-37845

economists define an efficient economy to be one in which nobody can be made better off without harming anybody else. — location: 1091 ^ref-62249

this new kind of economics became a science of justifying inaction in the face of popular demands for a more equitable society. — location: 1102 ^ref-51897

His results suggested that an increase in the minimum wage would be unlikely to increase unemployment, a conclusion that infuriated major defenders of the faith. — location: 1109 ^ref-53847

“One evidence of professional integrity of the economist is the fact that it is not possible to enlist good economists to defend minimum wage laws.” — location: 1121 ^ref-1648

They thought that in publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics as a whole. — location: 1130 ^ref-17488

Most economists either ignored their results or, worse yet, rejected them out of hand because they conflicted with their cherished beliefs. — location: 1138 ^ref-5381

Fueled by an intense desire to make economics appear more scientific, many mainstream economists followed in the footsteps of Macleod, attempting to emulate physics, while showing how economic processes are supposed to maximize efficiency. — location: 1189 ^ref-51739

Ironically, this assumption of rationality does not deter many conservatives from decrying the consumption habits of the poor when defending the existing distribution of income. — location: 1203 ^ref-38272

economics began to elevate the status of investors’ financial claims, insisting that owners of this form of property had rights equal to those of owners of real goods, such as land or factories. — location: 1225 ^ref-38274

economics, which one might expect to be the study of the material well-being of society, turns out to emphasize a subset of psychological processes—consumers’ supposed introspection, with matters such as corporate estimates of goodwill thrown in. — location: 1228 ^ref-52002

Because economics stubbornly treats this psychology as rational, the discipline assumes that the outcome will be efficient, even when facts on the ground indicate otherwise. — location: 1230 ^ref-13366

the ideological underpinnings of economics serve to reinforce the Procrustean structure of the system, carefully ignoring the glaring inefficiencies of Procrusteanism. — location: 1233 ^ref-50217

Workers had learned to understand that they were nothing more than objects in the labor market. — location: 1250 ^ref-18538

during the height of union power, economists still taught that training workers would not necessarily be in management’s best interest, because workers could use their training to bargain for higher wages elsewhere. — location: 1254 ^ref-44973

workers’ productivity would increase if business trained as many workers as possible. Yet under this system, the highest corporate priority is to show continual increases in profit to satisfy the financial interests that hold their stock. — location: 1257 ^ref-46312

business intentionally underinvests in workers’ training, undermining long-term growth, which apologists claim to be the objective of the economy. — location: 1260 ^ref-58686

The story tells nothing about how the market restores this balance, how long it will take, or how people adjust. Could this imbalance be temporary, or will further adjustments be necessary? Will the adjustments affect other parts of the economy? — location: 1265 ^ref-54278

Emphasizing consumption rather than production is useful in this regard. Consumers typically purchase finished goods. Producers, in contrast, may have to sink substantial funds in capital goods that may be unable to contribute to production for a considerable period. In the meantime, market conditions may have changed, making such investments inappropriate. Unless business has perfect foresight, market efficiency will be impossible. — location: 1268 ^ref-14853

Workers’ wages are low only because they fail to upgrade their skills—generally ignoring that workers rarely get the same educational opportunities that more affluent members of society do, especially when business “rationally” withholds training. — location: 1276 ^ref-34219

When the economy fares poorly, workers, along with government regulation, are taken to task. Workers’ unions impede efficiency. Workers’ demands for better wages and working conditions are excessive, and so forth. — location: 1278 ^ref-53451

Labor-saving technology can do away with certain types of work altogether, or it can force workers to work harder or faster. To the extent that business is intent on driving workers harder, their welfare, if not their health and safety, is put at risk, — location: 1290 ^ref-32378

After modern technology required more expensive capital goods, ownership passed into the hands of people whose major qualification was access to finance. At this point, management frequently had little or no technical knowledge. Instead, employers had to rely on the knowledge of their most skilled workers. — location: 1294 ^ref-49624

Although management had no interest in training workers, Taylor used workers to train management. — location: 1315 ^ref-52422

Management, however, has little interest in workers’ physical well-being. The objective of business is to extract as much work out of their employees as possible. — location: 1322 ^ref-57076

Taylor’s role was to aid business in being able to treat workers as interchangeable parts. — location: 1323 ^ref-34862

Taylor never seemed to understand that the labor process is not just a matter of finding a better way of performing a job, that the labor process was part of a larger system of social relationships. — location: 1326 ^ref-54259

Since the late nineteenth century, universities regularly purged economists who were suspected of insufficient sympathy for capitalism. — location: 1333 ^ref-13609

Jevons’s offense was that he opened a window on the imperfection of the emerging economic consensus about economic theory. — location: 1383 ^ref-35963

the neglect of working conditions in economic theory is ironic. As mentioned earlier, economists are generally interested in the kind of person that a particular economy creates. — location: 1386 ^ref-6561

Granting that leisure can be part of output, even if that leisure is only for the employers, goes a long way toward accepting the basic thesis of this book. — location: 1462 ^ref-55551

One of the major strategies of the anti-regulators is to argue that the benefits of regulations are less than their costs. — location: 1519 ^ref-14647

economists avoid looking into questions regarding work, workers, and working conditions, except where they can cherry-pick some useful results. — location: 1532 ^ref-64851

If such work will help the workers’ cause, it will be rejected; however, if it can be wielded to harm labor, economists are likely to embrace it as they did Thaler’s dissertation. — location: 1545 ^ref-7212

the degree of disregard for the welfare of others, especially those who do the work upon which all of us depend, is shocking. Perhaps to do otherwise would create a painful sense of guilt. — location: 1588 ^ref-49553

Those who live off their capital rarely understand that their own prosperity could be enhanced by engaging their workers and nurturing their capacities. To do so raises two risks. Acknowledging workers’ capabilities would threaten management’s claim to elevated status. More dangerously, a different management stance could embolden workers to challenge Procrusteanism. — location: 1645 ^ref-42458

The business vision of better education means little more than an improved ability to follow written directions or to write reports for higher management in a clearer manner. A deeper view of education—in the sense of a better ability to make critical decisions (especially with regard to working conditions)—is the furthest thing from their mind. — location: 1650 ^ref-46512

In order to craft an ideology that justifies the current economic system, economics has gone out of its way to avoid dealing with work, workers, and working conditions. In the process, economists have generated serious misperceptions about the world that help to solidify a harsh Procrustean discipline. — location: 1658 ^ref-55396

The fact that families are devoting more hours to work does not necessarily refute economic theory. Nothing can refute economic theory. — location: 1710 ^ref-10935

Excessive hours of work were also conducive to a psychology of despair, which people often try to control with drink, the very symptom of debauchery that long hours are supposed to hold in check. — location: 1776 ^ref-1650

William Temple, a contemporary of Adam Smith, called for the addition of four-year-old children to the labor force. Anticipating modern Skinnerian psychology, Temple speculated, “For by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them.” — location: 1796 ^ref-1319

Locke called for the commencement of work at the age of three. — location: 1800 ^ref-55906

Beatings and other sadistic punishments, together with the requirement to repetitively perform unnatural movements in an unhealthy and dangerous workplace, badly deformed Blincoe’s body. — location: 1805 ^ref-947

Not only can employers shed the responsibility of providing pensions, but they can also enjoy the downward pressure on wages, further traumatizing workers in the process. Yet one is supposed to accept all of this as a result of transactions among equal parties. — location: 1840 ^ref-1975

Whereas Procrustean logic demanded that no industrialist tamper with the working day, when all faced the same requirement the outcome was benign. — location: 1864 ^ref-40040

Procrusteanism presents itself as the only way to create prosperity, yet Procrusteanism itself cannot flourish amid prosperity. — location: 1867 ^ref-20264

The complacency of U.S. business leaders stands in sharp contrast to its insistence on discipline for workers. — location: 1881 ^ref-19512

In response to such unruly behavior, business unleashed a counterrevolution that moved the country significantly to the right—so much so that the domestic policies of Richard Nixon were to the left of those of Bill Clinton. — location: 1905 ^ref-28526

Although the counterrevolution modestly restored profits, it undermined the long-term prospects of the U.S. economy, already weakened by an extended period of weak investment. — location: 1907 ^ref-46078

The most important force in spurring social reforms is ordinary people’s success in organizing themselves to redress injustices. The external conditions just described may offer openings that permit better organization, but in the end the people themselves are responsible for shaping their own destiny in the face of the powerful forces arrayed against them. — location: 1921 ^ref-60984

They starkly pose two alternatives for humanity: individual liberty or state control. Milton Friedman went so far as to declare, “The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.” — location: 1933 ^ref-21259

Prosperity, presumably the primary objective of a market economy, threatens to undermine working-class discipline, as the experience of the Golden Age suggests. — location: 1937 ^ref-56117

although both discipline and accountability must be stringent for those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, they are unnecessary for those at the top. — location: 1948 ^ref-16342

According to this realism, nonmarket routes to an improved society are unthinkable. People are too self-interested. Only the discipline of the marketplace can function effectively. — location: 1950 ^ref-60562

regard any effort by the state to defend citizens from negative consequences of business activity as a violation of natural liberty. — location: 1952 ^ref-52131

With either direct or covert imperial control, the fiction of natural market forces is hardly credible. — location: 1996 ^ref-56697

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, the choice of competing powers is less available to weak countries. The table is now set for the world of international Procrusteanism. — location: 2007 ^ref-65326

no country has ever successfully developed on the basis of free markets. The developed countries, themselves, have gone to great lengths to control market forces, especially during their early phases of development. — location: 2010 ^ref-8842

from the earliest days of the United States, the government protected emerging industries from foreign competition. The question was the degree to which market forces had full rein. — location: 2013 ^ref-18121

The United States gave huge subsidies to the railroads, which were central to the modernization of the economy. Nor should one forget the enormous contribution that slave labor provided. — location: 2014 ^ref-45510

Besides slavery, imperial ventures in Ireland, India, and elsewhere helped to generate the wealth that financed the Industrial Revolution. In addition, the Empire provided a ready market for cotton products. — location: 2021 ^ref-24340

once capitalism gets rolling in these countries, always with the help of force and violence, as was true in the developed countries, indigenous penny capitalism collides with global capitalism and dollar diplomacy. The outcome is never in doubt, as the harried street vendors know. — location: 2033 ^ref-36697

the Golden Straitjacket does not sweep aside all subsidies, kickbacks, and corruption—only those that impede the control of multinational corporations. — location: 2051 ^ref-46326

The regime they advocate makes progressive political processes impossible. In this new hyperactive market environment, governments are reduced to merely ratifying corporate desires, including corporate bailouts for the likes of Wriston’s bank. — location: 2090 ^ref-20552

common people are incapable of understanding what is in their best interests (in contrast to the rationality ascribed to them in their role as consumers). — location: 2099 ^ref-39993

If people are irrational in the political arena, why are they presumed to be rational in the marketplace? — location: 2116 ^ref-65446

Adam Smith’s objective was to portray the market as a realm of liberty and justice, devoid of conflict. — location: 2131 ^ref-34920

Raw capitalism falsely promises maximum returns to the rich and powerful. In truth, some kind of social democratic regime, which takes the harsh edges off of capitalism, is perhaps more effective for extracting profits. — location: 2623 ^ref-23917

In a rational society, such efforts would be unnecessary. Everybody would have a stake in developing more efficient technology, since all could share in its benefits. — location: 3278 ^ref-36766

Despite the inhospitable climate for communication, poor design, outsized executive salaries, and outrageous fuel consumption, blame for the dire straits of the U.S. automobile corporations fell largely on workers. How dare they demand decent wages, pensions, and medical care! — location: 3328 ^ref-52755

in a moment of Cold War triumphalism, Peter Huber compared the corporate command structure of U.S. megacorporations with the overthrown planning system of the Soviet Union: — location: 3333 ^ref-29397

With the rise of financial control, the stock market has become the crucial arbiter of corporate management. — location: 3348 ^ref-14091

directly, financial organizations take over firms under the pretext that they can “add value” by reorganizing the business. Generally, the objective is to repackage the company in order to sell it to unsuspecting investors, but only after charging large fees and loading the company with so much debt that it is vulnerable to failure. — location: 3352 ^ref-56652

management must focus on the next quarterly earnings target, rather than measures that would make the company more productive in the long run. — location: 3361 ^ref-47190

financial pressure often makes business reluctant to put money into expensive investments in physical capital or training workers, which could increase future productivity. — location: 3362 ^ref-47931

Finance represents another threat to the economy. Just as Procrusteanism makes real handcuffs become invisible, it makes imaginary wealth seem real. — location: 3368 ^ref-13991

corporations eventually resort to a meat ax approach as a quick fix to improving profits. — location: 3383 ^ref-39818

Circuit City dismissed 3,400 people, about 8 percent of its workforce, in April 2007, not because they were doing a bad job and not because the company was eliminating their positions. Instead, executives said the workers (who earned $10 to $20 an hour)were being paid too much and that the company would replace them with new employees who would earn less. It — location: 3384 ^ref-44861

Management by numbers ignores both human costs and the destruction of human potential. — location: 3393 ^ref-19601

they encourage people to develop strategies to maximize their own position rather than contribute to the business. — location: 3394 ^ref-58250

the same corporate executives who devise unwieldy bureaucratic structures rail against government bureaucracy (with the exception of the Federal Reserve), calling on government to behave more like business. — location: 3404 ^ref-61466

Certainly, markets do not offer nearly as much opportunity as Smith would have us believe, especially for workers. Instead, the nature of markets is to demand unquestioning discipline amid the rhetorical celebration of freedom. — location: 3409 ^ref-17137

For his trouble, the sailor was hanged for insubordination. — location: 3417 ^ref-64276

By defining jobs narrowly and making each job relatively easy to learn, American industry pursued flexibility through interchangeability of workers with limited skills and experience rather than the cultivation of multiskilled workers. — location: 3438 ^ref-60078

management more or less distributes workers to their appointed task and within any particular job each worker is identical to the others. These workers are expected to follow orders and do nothing else. — location: 3443 ^ref-3468

The disrespect that management shows workers is replicated within the managerial hierarchy. The many layers of hierarchy further complicate the dissemination of information about potential opportunities. — location: 3446 ^ref-54762

Individual capitalists might profit by making their own hierarchies less rigid, yet management identifies so strongly with Procrusteanism that it becomes unable to recognize its own self-interest. — location: 3447 ^ref-63377

as the Tiger Creek incident suggested, control seems to have more allure than profits. — location: 3476 ^ref-62715

nobody can make another person work effectively, even at the point of a bayonet—especially if that work requires any skill or discretion. — location: 3492 ^ref-54992

forcing the study of human resource management into a Procrustean bed of theoretical rigor drains the subject of any relevance, except as an academic exercise. — location: 3526 ^ref-59937

models used to convey this message do not often include the way that business has to make decisions as events unfold in real time—or, in the rare cases when they do, the models exclude the kinds of uncertainty that business faces. — location: 3532 ^ref-51243

Over time, overwork takes a toll on the system as a whole, damaging the capitalists’ prospects. However, individual employers have no incentive to lighten the load on their own employees, whom they will replace once they are no longer capable of keeping pace. — location: 3538 ^ref-35349

“the principal/agent problem,” exploring ways to structure authority so that underlings feel that their interests coincide with that of their superiors. — location: 3559 ^ref-9023

Procrusteans can construct sophisticated command structures, but without the empathy of the people below, their systems may create enormous waste, even though they may be rational from the perspective of those in control. — location: 3635 ^ref-49313

Why are our schools leaving so many poor children uneducated? Here is a waste of monumental proportions because education is the key to unlocking the potential of the upcoming generation. — location: 3648 ^ref-44065

What about offering the schools better funding? Absolutely not! — location: 3650 ^ref-60632

business employs an increasing portion of the workforce in activities that do little or nothing to promote human welfare but which consume great quantities of working time. — location: 3660 ^ref-57630

Advertising is doubly wasteful from the standpoint of economic theory. The purpose of the market economy, according to its advocates, is to produce utility, but much advertising is designed to destroy utility by making people dissatisfied with their own possessions in order to induce people to buy something new. — location: 3671 ^ref-22942

much of the labor in the economy is dissipated in producing consumer goods that do not add to people’s happiness. — location: 3686 ^ref-62573

Capitalists are only able to earn money to the extent that they can prevent people from using their products without paying. — location: 3691 ^ref-9636

Once modern technology allowed one person to lock and unlock the pumps at a distance, one guard could supervise several pumps. People began to pump the gas on their own, revealing the previous attendants’ chief function as guards. — location: 3718 ^ref-19431

Despite the traditional celebration of the Athenian roots of Western democratic society, the United States is coming to resemble Persia (or Sparta) more than Athens. — location: 3731 ^ref-59009

The share of guard labor appears to be closely related to the extent of inequality. — location: 3743 ^ref-7072

I submit that if no Army existed they would have to create one, simply as a schoolroom for the factory. — location: 3755 ^ref-1954

The reliance on guard labor is counterproductive because it does not just enforce discipline. It also blocks workers’ development. — location: 3764 ^ref-24485

The employers prohibited the girls employed as cigar strippers from conversing with each other under pain of fine or dismissal. — location: 3773 ^ref-51159

As of year-end 2006, more than 2.2 million people in the United States were in federal or state prisons or in local jails, representing a population larger than that of seventeen states. — location: 3779 ^ref-14304

Between 1982 and 2001, the cost of the criminal justice system in the United States soared from $37.8 billion to $167 billion, representing about $600 per American. — location: 3781 ^ref-43248

Prisons now claim a greater share of the state budget than higher education, and the disparity keeps becoming more extreme. Prison guards presently earn more than assistant professors. — location: 3783 ^ref-57876

Perhaps symbolic of the end of the Cold War, the United States has now displaced Russia as the world’s leading incarcerator. — location: 3786 ^ref-3415

criminal justice system threatens members of the working class who might resist the discipline of the market. — location: 3788 ^ref-27688

The intended lesson of the prison-industrial complex is that working-class people are expected to work hard and toe the line. No deviations will be tolerated. Only if they get rich will society permit them to do more or less what they choose. — location: 3793 ^ref-3887

Meetings thus function as a means to impose discipline on white-collar workers, much like the soldiers’ marches. — location: 3805 ^ref-19571

despite the outpouring of economic rhetoric praising the productive merits of markets, in a Procrustean world, authority always trumps efficiency. — location: 3811 ^ref-5309

A more rational system would both nurture and draw upon the expertise of the entire workforce rather than relying on a system of command and control. — location: 3812 ^ref-43175

customers in some fast-food restaurants can receive free meals if the clerk fails to give them a receipt, which serves the same supervisory function as the penny. — location: 3827 ^ref-4377

Neither Friedman’s nor Volker’s nor Greenspan’s policies are capable of creating a stable economy. When coupled with the goal of controlling labor, they are certain to do great damage. — location: 3873 ^ref-48097

In contrast to the harsh medicine used to “cure” increasing wages, the Fed treats financial assets with kid gloves. — location: 3924 ^ref-5821

Direct regulation of dangerous and deceptive financial practices would have been a better tool for managing excessive speculation than manipulation of the money supply. The Fed, however, has another, class-based agenda, and it is unlikely to apply the same kind of treatment to wealthy speculators that they impose on workers. — location: 3933 ^ref-46921

Those who celebrate the wonders of the free market are usually silent about this sort of voluntary transaction between business and political leaders. As the great corporations accumulate increasing power, they enjoy unimaginable freedom. — location: 3950 ^ref-15631

The Procrusteans never tire of describing how the market provides magnificent new technologies that offer splendid opportunities to improve the quality of life. In reality, academia and government-sponsored research are the driving forces for the development of technology—not the business sector. — location: 3979 ^ref-47435

Even if the corporate sector had developed all of modern technology, profit-minded businesses are still not suited to handle urgent and complex challenges. — location: 3981 ^ref-32254

The profit motive becomes abhorrent under emergency conditions. People who profit by charging exorbitant rates for bottled water or electricity generators during emergencies appear to be immoral creatures rather than intelligent entrepreneurs meeting a social need. — location: 3992 ^ref-49392

The problem is that the Procrustean world has created a special language, one that intentionally clouds the harsh reality in which people find themselves, in effect, making the handcuffs invisible and questions of class unthinkable. — location: 4003 ^ref-51577

In such cases, the rhetoric of liberty and democracy quickly gives way to violent repression, typically justified in the name of protecting freedom. If people could break through the veil of indoctrination, they would clearly recognize that the current system is neither efficient nor productive of human welfare. — location: 4018 ^ref-61766

The Procrustean language, however, in painting employers in this charitable light, also betrays the underlying imbalance of power. Employers are said to “give” jobs to workers who are reduced to “taking” jobs. This language suggests that the transaction between employer and employee represents an act of benevolence on the part of the job giver rather than a bargain among equals. — location: 4031 ^ref-54531

This inequality between job givers and job takers presumably explains why society is expected to shower the generous job givers with so many benefits, such as subsidies and tax write offs. In contrast, social programs, directed at the people who actually do the work, seem to be nothing more than impositions by ungrateful wretches, who are trying to extort excessive benefits from the already overburdened taxpayer—a code word for the wealthy, — location: 4035 ^ref-10093

“Our society doesn’t promote self-acceptance and it never will. First of all, self-acceptance doesn’t sell products. Capitalism would fall if we liked ourselves the way we are now.” — location: 4049 ^ref-34637

fear sometimes makes people more likely to crave authority. Whether or not this craving is operational, people come to feel unworthy and doubt their own capacities. — location: 4058 ^ref-34397

the great challenge is to win the support of the majority of the population—those people who would stand to benefit the most from a progressive reorganization of society, but who still unquestioningly submit to Procrusteanism. — location: 4070 ^ref-39538

modern institutions identify merit by looking for characteristics associated with upper-class life. Once people become conditioned to accept this pecking order, the system takes on the appearance of a meritocracy. — location: 4076 ^ref-18468

merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others…. — location: 4081 ^ref-30971

society today has an almost hereditary system in which children of the affluent have easy access to the elite universities, which then presumably certify merit. — location: 4097 ^ref-36620

Bible, the illusory merit of such people becomes self-confirming; at that same time it sends a signal of futility to others. — location: 4105 ^ref-14478

rewards are certainly not commensurate with contributions to society. How could anyone rationally explain why schoolteachers or nurses earn less than advertising executives or stockbrokers? — location: 4115 ^ref-3071

those who stay mired in the lower reaches of society owe their fate to their own personal deficiencies. — location: 4135 ^ref-42305

Given that the majority supposedly lacks the qualities to ascend beyond their proletarian existence, how could such people ever function effectively in an environment that offered them more freedom? — location: 4136 ^ref-48371

The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. — location: 4255 ^ref-20674

“the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues” — location: 4258 ^ref-36723

Unless the people in power are willing to abandon the present system of class and control that hobbles society, ultimately even those whom the present system seems to benefit may well suffer the same fate as the admiral on the ill-fated ship who failed to heed a call from an ordinary member of the crew. — location: 4274 ^ref-42388

This book takes the position that neither markets nor managerial controls are particularly efficient and that cooperation offers a better alternative. — location: 4282 ^ref-1302

Just as centuries ago capitalism set free bourgeois energies that had been repressed under feudalism, a new form could be equally liberating for the masses of people presently trapped in their Procrustean beds. — location: 4365 ^ref-30852

book: how many poor children languishing in slums around the world might be potential symphony conductors, scientists, doctors, or inventors? The Venezuelan experiment suggests that people should begin to consider the answer to that question. — location: 4386 ^ref-435

the key to the Procrustean trap is not the threat of physical force but rather the inability to imagine anything outside of the constrained present circumstances. — location: 4458 ^ref-27380

This approach to measuring human capital also reinforces the practice of ignoring work, workers, and working conditions, since learning on the job never enters into the picture. — location: 4514 ^ref-64541

To do so would mean understanding workers as human beings with hopes and desires who have capacities that go far beyond simply taking orders. That realization would undermine centuries of economic theory, which has studiously avoided looking at work, workers, or the labor process. — location: 4519 ^ref-2067

that human capital accumulation is a social activity, involving groups of people in a way that has no counterpart in the accumulation of physical capital.” — location: 4527 ^ref-3443

Had Lucas realized the importance of what his words might have meant, he would have understood how workplaces, free of Procrusteanism, might be a valuable source of human development, which, among other benefits, would make the economy more productive. — location: 4530 ^ref-8269

Personality and talent become “human capital”; homes, families, and communities become “social capital.” — location: 4540 ^ref-63049

capitalism itself depends upon far more extensive forms of shutdowns. What is the prevention of sharing music but a shutdown? — location: 4553 ^ref-57126

Just as Smith’s market did succeed in rupturing feudal society, the time has come for a new rupture—one that would break down the new restraints on human existence created by the corporate market economy. — location: 4575 ^ref-21570

a more sophisticated society would make work conform more to the needs of the workers rather than the reverse, which is the norm today. — location: 4587 ^ref-65015

Anyone who suffers under the illusion that markets adequately supply the means to improve the quality of life needs only turn on a television set. Here is a technology with the capacity to uplift and enlighten people. Instead, it becomes nothing more than a means to promote consumption, while distracting and misinforming us. — location: 4599 ^ref-6062

In such an economy, new technology would not threaten people with unemployment or reduced wages but instead would offer them an opportunity for more leisure or at least better working conditions. — location: 4601 ^ref-63394

because of the exclusion of the issues of work, workers, and working conditions, both economics and market relations impede the development of the human, as well as the productive, potential of society. — location: 4619 ^ref-49348

markets have something tyrannical embedded into their DNA. The blindness of market society is even more troubling. The modern world faces urgent global challenges, such as global warming. Finding solutions will require a better system of social organization than relying on individualistic, profit-maximizing behavior. — location: 4645 ^ref-17578