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John_Maynard_Keynes

Slow Progress

“From the earliest times of which we have record — back, say, to two thousand years before Christ [BCE 2000] down to the beginning of the eighteenth century [CE 1700] — there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilised centres of the earth... This slow rate of progress, or lack of progress, was due to two reasons — to the remarkable absence of important technical improvements and to the failure of capital to accumulate.”
  • Source: From the Essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” written by John Maynard Keynes in 1930. Included in the book “Essays in Persuasion” edited by John Maynard Keynes and published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1963.

Technological Unemployment

“In our own lifetimes... we may be able to perform all the operations of agriculture, mining, and manufacture with a quarter of the human effort to which we have been accustomed. For the moment the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and bringing difficult problems to solve... We are being afflicted with... technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour. But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment... In the long run... mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is today.”
  • Source: From the Essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” written by John Maynard Keynes in 1930. Included in the book “Essays in Persuasion” edited by John Maynard Keynes and published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1963.

Robert_M_McClure

Time and Motion Code

“I know of one organisation that attempts to apply time and motion standards to the output of programmers. They judge a programmer by the amount of code he produces. This is guaranteed to produce insipid code”

Baruch_Spinoza

Good and Evil

“Experience day by day protested and showed by infinite examples, that good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of pious and impious alike; still they would not abandon their inveterate prejudice, for it was more easy for them to class such contradictions among other unknown things of whose use they were ignorant, and thus to retain their actual and innate condition of ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning and start afresh. They therefore laid down as an axiom, that God's judgments far transcend human understanding. Such a doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to their final causes.”
  • Source: A book. Entitled Ethics. Also entitled Ethica. Written by Baruch Spinoza. Originally published 1677. Translated from Latin by R. H. M. Elwes. Part I, Appendix.

Shoshana_Zuboff

Share the Fruits

“Taylor believed it was necessary to share the fruits of such productivity increases and saw the differential piece-rate system, a central tenet of scientific management, as a method of uniting workers and managers in a bond of common interest. But incentive wages are devilishly hard to administer, and all too often, managers attracted to differential wage schemes succumbed to shortcuts that promised fast gains. Managers would frequently change piece rates as workers learned to meet the standards. This led to the complaints of overwork with which unions relentlessly dogged proponents of Taylorism. Scientific management frequently meant not only that individual effort was simplified (either because of labor-saving equipment or new organizational methods that fragmented tasks into their simplest components), but also that the pace of effort was intensified, thus raising the level of fatigue and stress.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 45. ISBN:0465032125.

Time Study Expert

“The time-study expert became the new focus of workers' antagonisms. Informal production quotas persisted and, in many cases, took on an overtly anti-management spirit. The union contract became the most important means for institutionalizing workers' instincts for self-preservation, as rationalization routed out the ordinary graces with which the workday had been laced. Concern over wages and hours, work rules, and working conditions began to replace the craftworker's culturally embedded practices of effort regulation. Overall, the purification of effort meant a heightened standard of labor discipline, and as such it widened the gulf between those who gave of their bodies in the service of production and those who did not.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 46. ISBN:0465032125.