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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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We all know about those archetypal laws. Parkinson‘s – work expands to fill the time available for its completion. The Peter Principle – people get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. They’re useful laws. They answer basic questions. Like: Why all the crap? Why is everything done so badly?
Well, I think I may have discovered another one of these universal laws, which answers the question: Why are so many people who you would think ought to be happy instead so miserable? I give you: Micklethwait’s Law of Negotiated Misery.
It starts with the observation that more and more people are “self-managed” these days. Even people working inside giant business or governmental bureaucracies are being encouraged to think of themselves as free trading entrepreneurs, providing services in exchange for payment, in cash or in kind. Horizontal networking, self-starter, internal markets, intrapreneuring, etc. etc. blah blah blah.
Okay. You’re a self-manager, and maybe even self-employed.
There are four kinds of work you think about maybe doing.
- There’s work you love and are good at.
- There’s work you hate and are good at.
- There’s work you love and are bad at.
- There’s work you hate and are bad at.
The world pretty soon decides that you must stop doing (3) and (4) and of course, you are delighted to stop doing (4). If you insist on doing (3) you are going to have to do it as a hobby.
Which leaves (1) and (2), the stuff you are good at, and either (1) love or (2) hate.
How much do you get paid to do (1), work you love and are good at? If you are a good negotiator, then plenty, because you are good at it, and demand lots of money.
But what if you are a bad negotiator? You jump at the job and accept bad money.
How much do you get paid to do (2)? Chances are you get paid good money. Why? Because you will only consent to do work you hate if you are paid good money. So, with no great effort, you hold out for good money (even if all you thought you were doing was Just Saying No), and, because you are good at the work, you get paid good money. Eventually, someone makes you an offer you can’t refuse, and you take it.
So, if you are a bad negotiator, unable to repress your natural desire to do what you love and to avoid what you hate, you get paid bad money to do work you love, and good money to do work you hate.
Bad negotiators can have semi-good lives if they can afford to oscillate between work they love and work they hate. For a while, they do that. But, by the end of that period the only way they know to make good money is to do work they hate.
Then factor in the following circumstance. They switch to a life in which they then have to make continuously good money. Wife, kids, mortgage. Maybe an addiction to an expensive type-(3) hobby. Or maybe the life they lead just happens to get much more expensive. Clang. The gates of the prison slam shut. From then on they must do work they hate, continuously.
Result: An inexorable tendency for the “self-managed” classes to negotiate themselves into lives of permanent misery.
Is this a truth about the world? I think it is. Am I the first person to have noticed it? Surely not. Certainly not in so many words. But maybe I am the first person to have nailed this extremely widespread experience down into a simple law with a simple name.
(If so, hurrah! I love it. And how much was I paid? Bugger all.)
Comments and links please.
I came across this little comment on man’s foibles in the middle of the chaos known collectively as “the holidays”. At the time I couldn’t do more than check the validity of the article which, I’m sorry to say, was accurate. While the date would now classify it blogospherically speaking as an archeological anecdote, I felt the issue it addresses is still poignant.
This article appeared in a local US newspaper on Nov. 15, 2002 but it’s importance may well be global.
Absolutely the Least Substantial Reason for a Knife Fight:
Police in Mansfield Township and Hackettstown, N.J., charged Emmanuel Nieves, 23, with aggravated assault on Nov. 13 after he allegedly slashed the face of his friend Erik Saporito, 21, as the two men fought after arguing over which one had more hair on his buttocks. [Express-Times (Easton, Pa.), 11-15-02]
As with any criminal act, there is something we as a society can learn. The lesson here is obvious: the bruised male ego can be a violent thing.
The more tickilish question, and the one we must answer if we are to prevent future attacks of this kind, is what finally triggered the assault? Was it ridicule (ha ha. your butt’s hairer than mi-ine!) or was it envy (my butt’s hairer than yours! nah na nahna na.)?
Its a sensitive issue.
For the last month or more I have been paying occasional visits to Michael Jennings‘s blog. One day a picture of him appeared at the top, making him look alarmingly like the bearded bloke on They Think It’s All Over. And then it was there at the top the next day, and the next, and I jumped to the conclusion that he was on holiday and not blogging, because if he was blogging, the photo would have moved down, and have been replaced by further entries. Or so I deduced. But, I do sometimes get matters intenetted slightly wrong (see the comments). It turns out that under the picture he’d been blogging away like a mad thing.
Yesterday, for example, with an unerring eye for the main story, he focussed in on the alleged doom facing the banana. Apparently, bananas are all clones of each other, which means that they can’t do evolution properly, which means that they are now about to be completely wiped out. This was national news in Britain yesterday, and for all I know, everywhere else that bananas are cared about.
Michael notes the supposedly ferocious consumer resistance in Europe to genetic engineering, but goes on to note that banana-wise Europeans – Germans in particular – may face an agonising choice.
Actually this could be interesting. Imagine the scene in 2012. Normal bananas are extinct. Those of us who have been following the ongoing EU banana war for the last couple of decades know that the Germans have an almost legendary appetite for bananas. It may be that they will be faced with a choice: accept genetically modified bananas, or move to some other fruit. My money is on the genetically modified bananas.
Michael also had a posting at the beginning of the month about cricket. For Zimbabwean mass murder reasons I want the entire blogosphere immediately to become fascinated about this strange game, and it can plug itself into an elaborate discussion via Michael’s posting about which international cricket side was the best ever, who the all time best Australian (and English and West Indian) side(s) would consist of, and so on, also involving Iain Murray. And then when all of blogdom everywhere is lusting to watch the World Cup, others whom we have also been instructing, but this time on the political dimension of this tournament, can dig up all the pitches.
The Royal Society of Chemistry is to honour author and critic of scientists George Orwell with a search for the perfect way to make his favourite drink.
Orwell was an expert not only on the Big Brother but also on tea – another important aspect of the British society. His 1946 essay A Nice Cup of Tea laid down 11 steps to the perfect brew, and was a reaction to a lack of guidance on tea-brewing in cook books: “This is curious not only because tea is one of the mainstays of civilisation in this country.., but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.”
According to Orwell tea should be drunk strong, without sugar and from a cup with a round bottom. It should be poured before adding milk, he insisted, entering a debate that has caused acute controversy within the tea-etiquette world.
When Oxford-based poet and professional bore Tom Paulin advocated the shooting of West Bank Jewish settlers he probably expected nothing more than the appreciative plaudits of his academic colleagues. But I daresay he had not even heard of the blogosphere. If he had, he might have kept his mouth shut. As it is, he was catapulted overnight from obscurity to ‘Global Moron’ status and assigned a transatlantic reputation as a virulent anti-semite. Paulin got a maulin’
Personally, I don’t think Mr.Paulin is an anti-semite. More likely he was caught up in the wave of anti-Israel sentiment that has swept right through the academic and media classes; a sort of fashion-induced rush of blood to the head. However, the details barely seem to matter now because, judging from his response in the Guardian the whole affair has unhinged him:
“The first answer is Beckett’s
in another context – to “Mr Beckett
they say that you are English?”
he answered “au contraire”
– he didn’t say “I am not dot dot”
which plays their game
– in this case the ones who play the a-s card –
of death threats hate mail talking tough
the usual cynical Goebbels stuff
so I say the same
and say that peace it must be talked
re Palestine and re Iraq
– Israel has got the bomb
but that’s not why
no one in their right mind
says Israel should be swept into the sea…”
Hey daddy-o it’s, like, so far-out, man. In fact, it’s so far-out I can’t see it. I can, though, imagine one of the Guardian’s editor’s accompanying him on the bongos while he read it.
I think I shall compose a response in similar poetic vain. Ahem…(clears throat):
“First Michael Moore,
Now Tom Paulin,
One by one,
The idiots are fallin’.
Thank you. Thank you.
I don’t know what to make of this, but it is surely interesting. The story, in case this link to it goes dead for some reason or another, is that some French-based (it would seem) Muslim entrepreneurs have contrived something called “Mecca-Cola”. It presumably tastes pretty much like the usual Clona-Cola stuff, but it has an Islamic spin to its marketing.
I’ve just caught a British Channel 5 TV report about this, and they made it look as if the “average Muslim” is all for it. And the sales pitch C5 were reportng was: buy Mecca-Cola and demonstrate against the USA and its vicious anti-Muslim war, a troubling combination of messages.
I don’t know if this is us infecting them or them infecting us, or what the hell is going on here, beyond the obvious of some people trying to make lots of money. Is Mecca-Cola making its way in the USA? Comments anyone?
I am trying to figure out who ‘Holland & Barrett’ are worried might sue them if they discovered NUTS in their packet of… Whole Cashew Nuts!
I don’t read cyrillic script, but I’m I’m told that this link takes one to a book by Yuri Muchin which is about the “murder” by “the Jews” of Beria and Stalin.
All I can say is, if it is true, where do I send my check to the global Zionist conspiracy. It is hard to think of a greater service to mankind.
Yesterday I found myself reflecting on that monstrous half-truth, consumer sovereignty. It’s a half truth because the places where consumers do their consuming are also sovereign. (I seem to recall the late Murray Rothbard having some good things to say about “The Myth of Consumer Sovereignty” in Chapter 7, I think it is, of Man, Economy and State). Shops can also do things as they wish, and if you don’t like this then ultimately your only course may be to run away. I don’t favour shop sovereignty extending to the point where they can bolt the door while you’re still there and force you to do things their way, take back what you just said, buy things you don’t want, and so forth. But short of that I like the occasional shop where the constomer has to walk on egg shells to avoid a proprietorial tantrum or to avoid knocking huge tottering piles of random items all over the grubby floor.
Sure, there must be proper shops where the customer is always right and which are helpful, clean, efficient, full of good stuff well displayed and reasonably priced, etc. etc. But not all shops should be like this.
There used to be a wonderful place in Dover Street, just off Seven Dials (a bit to the north of Covent Garden tube station), which was crammed to the ceiling with hardware of every kind you could possibly want or imagine, provided it could be found.
I remember three things in particular about this place, aside from the general mess and dirt and confusion and lack of walking space.
First, the front window was literally a rubbish dump. There it was, displaying a kind of archaeological system of sediments from previous eras of the shop’s history. Nails from the late nineteen fifties, drill bit sets from the early sixties, crushed cardboard boxes, rolls of insulating material, bags full of obscure and complicated joinery items, long discontinued workbench kits, and of course inch upon inch of genuine actual rubbish. All this could be clearly enjoyed through the front window of the shop. → Continue reading: Retailer sovereignty
You never know who’s trying to get into your computer:
“The phone rings: tech support: “hello computer tech support ” customer: “hello my computer was making a strange hissing noise last night and this morning when I turned it on there was a crackling noise and some smoke then nothing, if I bring it in can you fix it?”
This time, though, the intruder was caught on camera.
I went over to Michael Jennings‘ blog to read his cricket piece, the first version of which was apparently eaten by Blogger (the blogospherical equivalent of Wordstar), and which I recommend to all Americans enthusiastically. The cricket piece, not Blogger.
I also found a link to this piece of nonsense, which must be what they mean by the bursting of the internet bubble.
Greece has banned the sale of living dead dolls – kids’ toys featuring fiery eyes, scarred faces and bloodied mouths which come in their own little coffins. Oh, and the dolls also have their own death certificates.
 Playful Sybill Sybill is strapped in a strait jacket with a collar and chain while Inferno has auburn hair, fiery eyes and bat-like wings. They should be a hit with children who just love all things gory and gruesome. But no, the Development Ministry said:
“There is no way we will allow these dolls on the market…these toys constitute a serious threat to the smooth formation and development of the child’s personality and mental health.”
Unlike your knee-jerk statist interference., right? 
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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