Hacker News Reader

Comment by chairmanwow | Hacker News Reader

“Western problem” yikes.

To write off the economic successes of the west under the guise of “problem” with western culture is deeply problematic. If you were to use this tableau to jump into an argument against societies that are captilistic and encourage the chasing of material wealth over the informal, beautiful moments that make humanity interesting you would have a much stronger case. I think we would all benefit if you were to sharpen your position, as there is something deeply intriguing about your point.

With that said, I also find issue with content of your argument. Economic success requires efficiency in all aspects of a business. A lack of punctuality that permeates a society to the point that it effects business strategy is problematic.

View on HN

>To write off the economic successes of the west under the guise of “problem” with western culture is deeply problematic.

Well, there is a problem with western culture in this area -- it can never be content, and its eating away the planet. It's own visionaries and thought leaders imagined a society of leisure and 3 hour workdays and such, but we have many times the efficiency per hour of previous ages, and people are overworked more than ever (not to mention increasingly in debt as well).

>Economic success requires efficiency in all aspects of a business.

Well, I'm against "economic success" beyond a certain point, and especially when it comes to the detriment of the society, and the environment. I'm for economic sustainability, and with utilizing the vast technological resources to improve life (as opposed to induce consumption).

If you put the price on the free time (as e.g. opportunity cost, or cost of saving resources), you can see leisure as a form of consumption.

The problem of many Western societies is that the cost of leisure is too damn high for many.

This is partly because the efficiency of work (its value for advancing a business project) is non-linear with time spent. Someone spending 100 hours a week maybe pretty inefficient due to overwork and thus lower (even negative) quality of things done. Someone spending 10 hours a week could be also inefficient because the project moves faster (when everyone else around works 40 hours), or the competition moves faster. So there is a range of maximum efficiency, which is hopefully far from 100 h/week, but also likely far from 10 h/week.

"Gig economy" can help: you work hard 2-4 months for a high rate, then coast 4-6 months at a nice place with low cost of living. The problem, of course, is that you must have saved a pretty thick cushion of assets for the case when a new gig is not coming when you planned.

>This is partly because the efficiency of work (its value for advancing a business project) is non-linear with time spent. Someone spending 100 hours a week maybe pretty inefficient due to overwork and thus lower (even negative) quality of things done. Someone spending 10 hours a week could be also inefficient because the project moves faster (when everyone else around works 40 hours), or the competition moves faster.

I'd go further. Most products and projects are BS busywork, if not actively harmful and they shouldn't be part of the economy in the first place.

We've created a huge society middlemen, procurers, and snake-oil salesmen, and turned increasingly more aspects of life into commercial endeavours, where ever more people are constantly hustling and peddling something (manufactured crap, of which there are untold tons [1], planned obsolesce replacement products, their image, and so on).

[1] https://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/

If a product finds some customers (maybe ultimately unsatisfied, or disappointed, or gaslighted customers), there must be a need that the product is filling. It's only filling it poorly.

Finding such toxic-but-still-used product is a good opportunity to both make a living and improve life in general. I suppose the hardest part is to detect and understand the real need being filled.

Certainly enough, education, and other ways to change culture, is a more profound way to change the way people fill their needs, and especially what they even perceive as needs. E.g. the need to serve a bloody revenge is by now mostly absent from a typical Western society, while the need to one-up a neighbor is still pretty widespread.

>If a product finds some customers (maybe ultimately unsatisfied, or disappointed, or gaslighted customers), there must be a need that the product is filling.

Well, I'm a believer in an objective world in which not all needs are equal.

I can accept that which need is important or not can be difficult to ascertain. But I also hold that in many, if not most, cases, it's very easy.

Despite the cult of the individual and the reverence with which subjective taste is held, I'd go on record to say that some (most) people have buy products that fulfill irrelevant non-needs.

For an easy to agree with (but real) example, heroin addicts ands Milli Vanilli listeners both buy products that "fill a need". The question is more whether they should.

If you think about the list of "irrelevant non-needs" from e.g. 15th-century Europe (your choice of country), or from any sufficiently different contemporary culture (consider China or Saudi Arabia), maybe your idea of "objective" needs will... expand a little bit.

If for some reason you prefer today's Western culture to that of 15th century, be certain that it changed mainly because of some people pursuing their irrelevant non-needs, as seen by then-contemporary "normal people".

I hope we can finally make some new expansion going on with all that productivity.

> Economic success requires efficiency in all aspects of a business.

You hasten to generalizations. It's entirely possible that the economic success of the Western societies had historic roots in the industrial revolution and the mechanization of human life it entailed. But it's very hard to prove the same reasons hold today - it might be the case where the historical effect is confused with the alleged cause.

The strong economic growth of countries like Brazil or South Africa seems to indicate that, at least to a point, economics can blend with a relaxed attitude. Modern technology, offline communications like email, telecommuting and just in time fabrication could well usher in an era of high prosperity and low stress. Maybe these countries are laboratories of the future.

> Economic success requires efficiency in all aspects of a business.

Unfortunately, the people benefitting from the 'economic success' aren't the same people as those who are required to be efficient in everything.

It would be much better to look at quality of life than at profits. The only thing amounts of money have going for it is that you can easily put them in spreadsheets.

>Economic success requires efficiency in all aspects of a business. A lack of punctuality that permeates a society to the point that it effects business strategy is problematic.

punctuality doesn't necessarily means efficiency. Punctuality itself comes at a cost. Somewhat similar to low latency. Your argument reminds about those Scrum proponents who tout that decreasing the latency and increasing synchronicity - what the Scrum is really about - would miraculously lead to throughput increase. Which it never does, and usually it has quite the opposite effect (exactly as expected from the systems theory and experience)

Whilst there may not be a perfect correlation between punctuality and efficiency, I'd suggest that it seems likely punctuality in business is more likely to be efficient than not.

For example if you have 10 people attending a meeting and all must wait till they are present before starting (a very common occurrance) having all 10 people turn up promptly is more efficient than having 1-9 people waiting for the remainder of the attendees to arrive.

It's honestly blowing my mind that this point even needs to be argued. Of course being on time correlates with efficiency.

Have they ever looked up a store's hours before going there? Or gone to see a movie? Or met with someone else to do... anything? Or utilized public transit?

Of course it can be argued that, in a cosmic sense, maybe society is more "efficient" toward people relaxing and enjoying life if that train doesn't leave for another 45 minutes because the conductor felt like sleeping in this morning. But at that point, it's not a meaningful discussion.

Honestly it's difficult to imagine having the opposing view with any experience at all managing anything. Or even considering what it might be like to do so.

Indeed, it is a bit surprising to me that timeliness appears to be a debatable point in business.

Even more efficient is: starting the meeting anyway; publishing minutes so people can choose to attend or not; inviting fewer attendees; not having meetings about things which can be resolved by the teams talking directly to each other in their day-to-day work.

Yeah, it's a mistake to think that a meeting is always the most efficient way of doing things. Every meeting held costs the company thousands of dollars as people are not able to do other things during it, and so many companies just don't even think twice about adding anyone and everyone and don't think of how much it's costing them in productivity lost to other things because they just always assume that meetings are the best way to get things done.

I think it would be better if meetings were seen as the expensive beasts they are and only the bare minimum of people that can attend it, should attend it, and it should be considered (especially with routine meetings) whether or not the meetings even need to be held in the first place.

Oh absolutely, I'm not suggesting that meetings are always well run or indeed necessary, but where they are held, time management is important to get people in and out as fast as possible, which improves efficiency.

>Whilst there may not be a perfect correlation between punctuality and efficiency, I'd suggest that it seems likely punctuality in business is more likely to be efficient than not.

Efficient towards what, and what for? Those are good questions seldom asked.

Efficiency in terms of not wasting people's time. The ability in business for people to complete tasks in-line with when they were expected allows for better scheduling.

I'm not suggesting that everything in business benefits from being regimented but that meeting expectations allows for others to plan their time effectively.

Time where people are waiting for others to do work which should have been completed can often be wasted.

>Efficiency in terms of not wasting people's time.

Then you must first consider the need to have the business or meeting in the first place.

In fact, people's time is only "wasted" because it has been made precious -- i.e. because it was stolen and/or sold. That's way more wasted time (they'll never get again) there, than in "wasting time" by not being punctual.

Societies studied by ethnologists had little care for punctuality. In fact the same was true for rural societies in Europe and the US as well (the US South was considered "lazy" and without a "sense of time" as well), and even urban life before the tyranny of the modern "always on" demands. For the upper classes, being fashionably late was a virtue.

Sure as I mentioned elsewhere I'm not arguing that meetings are an unalloyed good, what I am arguing is that where they are held, it is better that people are punctual, rather that non-punctual, and that there is improved efficiency relatively where participants are punctual.

Punctuality is a foundation of respect for other people's time.

Demand of punctuality is a demand on other people's time.

Punctuality is a virtue of slaves -- to other people and to the clock in general.

I understand your point, but you're wrong. Working with other people towards a common goal does not equal becoming a slave to them. It does mean however, that if you don't respect their time then your actions serve against that goal.

I think we are so deeply ingrained in thinking this way in some societies that we completely miss the forest for the trees. We forget what the overall goal is and instead focus mindlessly on efficiently doing little things that seem in that moment to be the goal at a drag on accomplishing the overall goal. We are not ants, we are thinking creatures who, given time and a relaxed attitude can come up with solutions that easily negate the need for the mindless ant-like efficiency that is more suited to ignorant creatures than thinking ones.

Do people often "work with other people towards a common goal" though, or only give the impression of doing so, by going through the motions, and being trapped into one of the default modes of making a living in modern society?

There is effectively zero cost to punctuality. If you have to spend 60 minutes in a meeting to get through the agenda items regardless of when it starts then there's no benefit to being late. Just show up on time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com