Quantitative analysis gone wild
Notice how everything is always calculated as a “cost” to either government or business? I regularly hear a PSA on KACC regarding allergies and how much money allergies cost the economy. How can allergies be a cost? Thirty five years ago, we didn’t know jack about allergies. Most people just suffered miserably through attacks. Many people died from severe attacks. Thousands of years ago before resistance built up, allergies may have wiped out entire societies. How can something that has always existed all of a sudden be considered a cost?
Well, take a look at how much all the lazy bastards out there are costing us:
BOSTON (Reuters) - U.S. workers say they squander over two hours a day at the workplace, with surfing the Web, socializing with co-workers and simply “spacing out” among the top time-wasting activities, according to a survey released on Monday.
Most U.S. companies assume about an hour of wasted time, but workers admit to actually frittering away more than twice as much time at a cost of $759 billion in annual paid salary that results in no apparent productivity, an online survey conducted by America Online and Salary.com showed.
For most of the jobs I have had over the last thirty years, I considered the entire day spent at the job to be a waste of time. The older I get, the more I realize just what a waste of time those jobs were. If only I didn’t need that damn money I could have spent my day on more productive things. Like daydreaming.
If all of these naturally occuring phenoms like lazziness and allergies can be considered a cost, it would be an opportunity cost. This article could just as easy have been titled “Corporations, unskilled managers fail to reduce cost of laziness”.
Paying for hourly work is stupid for almost every non-labor job desription anyway. It encourages laziness because it puts a fixed value on time. The only way for a worker to maximize income is to stretch the job out.
On the other hand, if a worker is payed according to productivity, maximizing income would be a function of completing as many units of productivity as possible in a given set of time.
Sometimes quantitative analysis doesn’t give you the right answer.