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Sat, 20 Dec 2003

Workers must demand safety

Don Norman writes about accidents, and lays them at the feet of a profit-driven culture. I take him to task and he replies. Esther Dyson chimed in via private email to suggest that Don was talking about a short-term focus. Note that Don was not talking specifically about workplace accidents, but I am, just to keep focus.

Workplace safety is a more complicated topic than it first seems. Anyone might say "What could be wrong with increasing safety?" An economist would reply that it might be too expensive. I want to address this in three directions. First, that some safety is free, and some is not. Second, that there are four sources of money to pay for safety. And third, that it should be workers who demand safe workplaces, or not.

The cost of safety

Increasing the safety of the workplace might or might not cost money. For example, locking down a circuit breaker when you're working on the circuit it controls costs almost nothing. You had to touch it to turn it off anyway. Putting safety instructions on a device is the cost of a label. Other types of safety are going to be more expensive. For example, turning off a circuit breaker when you're working on a piece of equipment that has its own power switch is going to be more expensive. You'll have to stop what you're doing, go to the circuit breaker, turn it off, and go back. Or insisting that someone not use the top step of a ladder (the not-a-step) means that they need to locate a taller ladder.

Providing extra safety might be a capital cost (e.g. adding a railing), or it might be an operational cost (e.g. going the long way around, avoiding the place where a railing is needed). These costs are accounted for differently. Capital might not be available for increased safety. The cost of production might not bear the lessened productivity.

Just as safety is rarely free, so will accidents rarely be free. There is always a cost involved in accidents. Perhaps a trained worker is lost, or idled. Perhaps equipment is broken. Perhaps equipment is idled while the worker's corpse is removed from the equipment. Nobody worries about the accidents that are more expensive than the safety needed to prevent them. The profit motive will cause employers to eliminate those types of accidents. The kind that gets peoples panties tied in a knot are the ones where safety is more expensive than the accident.

For the remainder of this article, I will only speak of the latter kind. The former is boring.

Paying for safety

In the short run a company can pay for safety by raising prices, reducing entrepreneurial profits, by reducing dividends, or by reducing wages. A product doesn't change just because it's been made more safely. Entrepreneurs may have a personal desire to not hurt their employees, in which case the safety becomes cheaper than the accident. Boring! Same thing for the capitalists. Boring! Same thing for the workers, particularly since it's them who get hurt in the accident. If they're willing to do this, then the problem again becomes boring, because the cost of the accident exceeds the safety.

The problem with any of these four sources of safety funding is that they're limited. Customers will not put up with unlimited increases in price with no improvement in the product. Once a (not otherwise productive) capital expenditure on safety has been made, no further source of capital is available unless capitalists want even more safety. Once a worker's wages have been cut because they're less productive because they're being safe, further gains are impossible without further cuts. No worker is interested in working at a perfectly safe job for no pay.

I must note here that it's possible to force all employers to adopt safety measures, through the coercive power of government. That doesn't create money from nothing. What it does is force all employers to pay for safety using the same mix of the same four funding sources listed above. Competition will select the most efficient mix. I think that workers have deluded themselves into thinking that only entrepreneurial and capitalist profits are reduced. That's possible, but not likely. Entrepreneurial activity will move to a less regulated (e.g. a more intrinsically safe) business. Capitalists will make further investments in less regulated businesses. Workers who prefer safety will not. And customers are just "workers" the day after payday.

Workers must demand safety

Coercing safety measures on employers is probably not the right idea, for several reasons. A worker might prefer wages to safety. A worker has a direct interest in maintaining a safe workplace, whereas the government's interest is indirect. Workers can detect unsafe practices and eliminate them. Other workers in the same workplace who are not at the same risk will subvert the safety measures, because they don't want their wages to go down.

The best protection of workplace safety is a robust economy with low costs and high wages. Ironically, this may mean less safety...or more safety. Workers will be able to avoid unsafe workplaces unless they pay well enough to cover the risks. Workers who prefer money over safety will seek out those jobs, e.g. explosives deliveryman.

posted at: 05:57 | path: /economics | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 07 Dec 2003

Fungible

What is money, anyway? Like fish and water, we deal with money every day, but we have so little understanding of its nature. To understand money, let's start without it. Some people don't like money, because they think it's the root of all evil. (Note: that is NOT a quote from the Bible. It's a MISquote. It's actually "the love of money".) Let's say that they got their way, and money was abolished.

No money, so how do we get the things we need for daily life? Food, clothing, shelter, not to mention water and sanitary facilities. We could all be experts at providing all of them -- jack of all trades, master of none. That is the problem with trying to do everything. You don't have the time to become an expert at any one of them, so everyone ends up having to spend a lot of effort learning to do the things that are needed to keep themselves. A world of Robinson Crusoes. Doesn't sound like fun, but that's why people trade.

In tribes, or bands, people tended not to use money, but instead relied on each other. Call it a primitive communism. From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. It worked, but only because the tribe was small enough for a person's reputation to be known. In essence, everyone kept a balance sheet in their heads for who owed whom what.

As societies grew, and people started to trade between tribes, they would barter. Barter is a perfectly fine way to trade except for one thing: the transaction cost. Barter markets are terribly inefficient, because for everything you want to sell, you have to find someone who has something you want to buy. This is not easy to do, because you have to find the perfect match. In essence, marriage is a barter market -- you have to find someone you love, and they have to love you back. Every lonely person can attest to the difficulty of making a good match.

Money is a human invention to get around the inefficiency of barter markets. Money is any kind of thing that people agree it is. Money is the universal commodity. Money is that thing which anyone wants, because they know they can barter it for anything else. Money is a half barter. Most often people don't want money because of the qualities of the commodity which serves as money (although it will have its own qualities). They want money because they know they can trade it for other things they *really* want.

Even if we were to abolish money, as those non-economists would have us do, we would eventually reinvent money. It might not be dollars, pounds, or lire, but it would have the same characteristics of money: something that nearly everybody will give or accept in trade. In wartime and in prison, it has often been cigarettes. Money is not a particular thing. It is an idea.

The Value of Money

Everybody wants more money, right? WRONG! People always want more wealth, but they don't necessarily always want more money. Imagine, if you would, that you could hold all of your wealth in something that you could easily sell. That is, you could barter it for money. That would mean that you need never hold any money, because you could always have your wealth in the form of money.

People hold money because they value its characteristic as the universal commodity (or because, in the case of numismatists, they value it for its intrinsic characteristics). They hold money because they fear that they won't be able to trade goods or services for money. It follows, then, that people's desire for money will rise and fall as the circumstances of their lives change.

If people want more or less money in their lives, it follows that there will be a demand for money, and a supply of money. Similarly, there will be a price of money. If people want less money, the price of money will fall. If people want more, the price will rise. If there comes to be more money, the price of money will fall. If there comes to be less, the price of money will rise. The term for the former is inflation, and the latter deflation. Yes, I realize that in popular language, inflation means rising prices, but there's a reason why the Economist is Angry. When the people fail to understand that inflation is directly related to the supply of money, those who have the power to create money have the power to steal from the people.

If you have trouble understanding the previous paragraph, imagine that dollars are not money, but are instead simply collectible presidents' portraits. Money is ... instead, eggs. You can see that if there are more chickens laying more eggs, then the supply of eggs increases. Eggs will be less dear. Greater egg availability means you want more eggs to sell your dollars.

Fungible

One of the desirable characteristics of money is that it should be fungible: Anyone holding a pieces of money will trade it for any other equally-valued piece of money. Most money that people handle these days truly is fungible. It didn't used to be the case. Coinage, being made from a precious metal, might be debased. That is, the coins themselves might be modified so as to reduce their value. The classical method of doing this is to shave them so they are slightly smaller in diameter. That's why the US quarter has milled edges -- to make shaving harder. Of course, they're not currently made of a precious metal, but their predecessors were, and they needed milled edges.

What if money is in fact not fungible, and yet is forced to be so by legal tender laws? Now you see the action of Gresham's Law: bad money drives out good. If not all money is of equal value, people prefer to hold onto the money which is worth more, and spend the money which is worth less. Since it still has the function of money, people will do better by spending the money which has the least value. In this manner, good money gets quickly driven out of circulation.

To see an example of this, consider what happens when you have a group of people, all of whom want to do laundry. Suddenly, quarters (to put into the washers and dryers) become more valuable than bills. People will tend to pull quarters out of circulation, preferring instead to pay with bills or dimes.

posted at: 06:02 | path: /economics | permanent link to this entry

Archives

Sometimes somebody else writes about something to which I cannot add a thing. Arnold Kling has done it with his Bleeding Heart Libertarianism proposal.

posted at: 05:54 | path: /economics | permanent link to this entry

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