by Tom Baugh
Now, even if the departed lived in primitive stone age conditions, the underlying gene pool would still be bubbling just beneath the surface. All of those generations that should have been thinking up stuff might have been too busy digging around for food. But eventually, some spark, such as newcomers showing up with some fancy stuff, might get everything rolling around in people's heads again. Suddenly, this culture would become imitative, and then innovative.
Unless they became distracted by some nonsense such as taking time out to try to erase their generations-old tormenters from the face of the earth. Don't forget, the same gene patterns which caused them to run in the first place would have also led them to see their old kinfolks as an implicit threat, and want to remove them as a potential threat ever again. Should this ever happen, about the only thing that would be able to stop them, machine guns trumping sticks, would be if some collective somewhere thought it would be keen to just let these little conflicts bubble around for a while (more about this later). Punitive war aside, this experimental culture would probably be able to generate a pretty high quality of life for themselves, and for a lot of other people, too.
So the advent of idea workers, and a culture's response to them, plays a large role in how a culture evolves and advances over time. The most important fundamental idea which enables all the rest of them is free trade. Thank you, Og and Pok. Og wanted to do a great job gathering wood so that he could demand the largest number of squirrels for his wood. Conversely, Pok wanted to catch the best squirrels in the best condition so that he could trade them for the largest amount of wood. Scrimping by either man would have simply scrimped themselves.
Now, earlier I said that just because someone uses an idea it doesn't make them an idea worker. On the other hand, just because someone runs a meat tractor all day it doesn't mean that they aren't, either. The distinction is slight, but important, and it makes the difference between whether, under free trade, someone has chosen to be a man, or chosen to be a monkey. Without free trade, monkey is, eventually, the only choice available, unless you take the advice later in this book. Og and Pok, the freest of traders in history, performed at peak performance because it benefitted them the most to do so. The hapless Cog brothers, once they had been absorbed by Brokerog's manipulation of regulations, had little incentive to excel beyond simply escaping being fired.
If free trade is possible, then each man gets to decide, each day, or each hour, or each moment, whether they are just stumbling along behind the plow, or instead, doing important work which eventually will be traded to someone else for something good. If the work matters enough for him to do well, then, poof, he just became an idea worker. The essential ingredient which even makes this thought possible is whether he will benefit from the better work. Under the lash, no man performs at his best, at least for very long, because there is no motivation to do so once the work has been done well enough to escape it. In our modern world, there are many kinds of lashes, it is just that we've gotten good at hiding them. And have been taught to be very bad at noticing them.
The more idea workers in a culture, the higher the quality of life will be. As we saw in an earlier chapter, ideas empower the transformation of resources in ways which can best satisfy our desires for high quality of life. And with free trade, those resources get best allocated to those who can best employ them. Og is the best at collecting wood, so free trade allows him to do that work to most efficiently collect it. Pok is the best at collecting squirrels, and so free trade assigns that task to him, since he is able to best extract value for himself from this task.
Free trade is an essential precondition for a large number of idea workers. As the lack of free trade restricts the benefit derived from ideas, then ideas will become more scarce. Even this fleeing of ideas from restricted trade is itself a triumph of the free trade in ideas and personal motivation in the face of oppression. And so, over time, as free trade flourished for a shining moment in our history, idea workers also flourished, as did the quality of life for much of humanity.
Just as night follows day, however, a third major class of workers follows the advent of idea workers. This third class is known as regulatory compliance workers. These workers, both inside and outside the government, exist solely to cause, or mitigate, the negative quality of life which results from thwarting or obeying, respectively, various government regulations.
In all fairness, regulatory compliance workers have been around for a long time. From the time that the first barbarian king sought to punish threats to his reign, or even simple disobedience, this class of workers existed. From the time that shamans sought to stone those who threatened to expose their con game, this class of workers existed.
As I use the term here, though, I intend that this class refers to those compliance workers who are employed specifically because the regulatory environment expanded to consume the available excess resources. When the tribe changed taxation from a flat per-citizen model to an inventory-based model, regulatory compliance workers, in the form of assessors and accountants, on both sides of the gavel, arose.
This class of workers, unlike the overseer or the snitch or the shaman's stonesmen, spring into being, generally some time after the implementation of a new idea, because of three key reasons. First, the idea worker, like that unknown hero who thought of plow animals, creates such revolutionary beneficial changes in the economic landscape that it takes some time for this idea to completely saturate the culture. So, the regulatory reaction to this idea may take a while to reach a critical mass to be enacted.
Second, the new idea, once it gains momentum, creates an excess of resources which causes unexpected growth in other sectors of the economy. For example, as the use of plow animals began to produce excess food, for a time food suddenly seems easy to obtain. For many generations afterward significant portions of a population became displaced from growing or herding, thinking all the while that the bounty will never come to an end. Until the day arrives that the excess has finally been absorbed, the population continues to grow until famine or other privation once again rears its head. This process takes a while, however, which contributes to the lagging effect between idea worker and regulatory compliance worker.
Third, the lag between the introduction of the idea and the eventual consumption of its bounty leads to an entire wedge of economic activity which may or may not reflect good sense. During this period, the excess resources can tempt the populace to demand restrictions on previously great ideas, restrictions which would seem suicidal in the face of privation. For example, when wood was plentiful the tribe had the luxury of thinking of silly restrictions on the collection and sale of wood. Similarly, while energy is cheap we have the luxury of thinking of ways to legislate limitations on energy.
Times are good in the heyday of a previous new idea worker's grand thought, or in the middle of an overlapping series of great ideas, which is more often the case. During these good times a collective thinks of ways to use that largess to implement some sort of social justice or other nonsense. Why? Because they can afford to. Or at least think they can afford it.
And when the day arrives that they realize that they can't afford some arbitrary restriction? Well, the collective being what it is, they never think of undoing some previous regulation, but instead imagine that new ones will do the trick. Usually, these new regulations just create more problems. Problems such as limiting idea workers.
Brokerog could never have amassed such disproportionate power without regulations which protected him from competition. As the regulations prevented free trade by barring entry to smaller outfits, or by forcing such heavy compliance costs that such operations could never reach a critical mass, Brokerog was unassailable. No amount of great ideas about better ways of collecting or distributing wood, or of better wood grades or blends, would have made any difference in his power. He would not waste resources on implementing these ideas, as his power was assured without them. Yet others couldn't get a toe hold to implem
ent them and compete him out of business.
Over time, as regulations grow, which they always do until a culture collapses, the proportion of idea workers begin to shrink, while regulatory workers grow, seemingly almost without bound. As shown in the chart, we are now at a time when regulatory compliance workers vastly outnumber the number of idea workers or classical labor, combined.
Don't believe me? Look around at your own organization. Count how many people are involved in creating the original value for your organization, and then count how many people exist to fill some regulatory compliance position. If you work in a government institution, then no one there creates original value, as we shall see in a moment. If you work for an attorney or an accountant or a human resources services firm or department, no one around you creates original value.
Many jobs seem like they create original value, but in fact they merely cleverly conceal a regulatory compliance role. Consider a purchasing agent for a company. Someone has to buy stuff, right? But, in our modern world, stuff has to be bought in exactly the right way or someone gets in trouble, usually with the tax law or safety regulations. Or soon with environmental regulations. Purchase this thing or that incorrectly as a capital item or as inventory or as materials or as supplies and the tax man will get you. Buy the wrong thing, or assemble it incorrectly and it is the lawsuit you will fear from the customer more than the lack of quality. Even your manager, who probably spends a lot of time attending and implementing training about sensitivity and other nonsense is spending more time on that kind of stuff and less on actually inspiring you to greatness.
Turning a screw? Great! But how much of how you turn that screw is determined by regulations or contractual obligations which are in turn determined by a regulation somewhere?
Entrepreneur? I don't have to tell you how much of your day is consumed with regulatory compliance, either explicitly or implicitly. If you start analyzing the details of even your own organization you will find a shocking amount of the total amount of manpower is devoted to regulatory compliance which produces not a single positive step forward. And all your compliance efforts can ever do is to prevent backward steps of varying magnitude.
In the lexicon of the chapter regarding quality of life, the original value workers, ideas or labor, create positive delta Q. On the other hand, all that regulatory compliance workers can do is remove artificial sources of negative delta Q. Things are so out of whack today because we are still coasting on the great ideas of past generations. Even our great ideas of today can trace their roots back to ideas more than a hundred years old which are still splashing around and have not yet saturated our world.
Any Internet-based thingy you can think of is still just Alexander's bell ringing or Morse coding. Only the scale of the communication has changed.
Computers? A long time ago someone had to plot a whole bunch of artillery curves, and someone else had figure out what happens to plutonium when you squeeze it into a really hot liquid because it is hard to poke around in the real thing. Yet a lot of what we use computers for is idle entertainment which also doesn't produce anything other than fun. And that's OK, because fun is a lot of fun. But most of the rest of what we use these computers for today is almost completely consumed with complying with and enforcing regulations. Regulations which sprang into being because complying with them was impossible before the advent of the computer. In that case the regulations were only a step or two behind the idea.
Oil-based economy? Poking a pipe in the ground produced resources which were so cheap, and remain so to this day, compared to most of the other options. So cheap that we imagine we have the luxury of denying ourselves some of the best benefits of it. And in so doing create regulations which shield the existing players from competition from you and me.
Nuclear power? This great idea has been stunted through misinformation and the attention-deficit disorder drug which is government monopoly. So stunted that there may not be enough time for it to realize its full potential before its support structure collapses. Now, I think my biggest fear would be that companies of today, staffed as they are by regulation and collective niceness rather than by merit, would try to build a new plant.
Before you think I'm anti-nuke, consider the following thought experiment. The next time you see "Made in China" on some shoddy piece of worn-out crap, or try to navigate through some website or call center or virus-riddled operating system or customer support experience which might as well say "Made in India", pause for a moment. Then, imagine instead that the hardware and software and operating procedures in your next-door plutonium breeder reactor came from those places, too, and you will see what I mean.
In comparison with this mental image, Three Mile Island will appear to be the marvel of engineering safety which it really is. All done by a bunch of guys with slide rules and trucks of concrete and welders and three-ring binders, back when such things mattered.
At some point, though, the cost of compliance becomes too high, and idea workers too dis-incentivized, and classical labor too displaced. At that point, all of those occupations must collapse under the weight of too few people doing anything of useful value. This situation is shown on the right side of the chart. After this collapse is subsistence once again.
Now, to someone looking from the inside out, all of this regulatory compliance will seem to be a good thing. Jobs are created that way, right? Sure, but these are the wrong jobs. Recall that the basis of all economic goodness derives from improving the quality of life of others. We do this through the medium of supplying them with the stuff, push and time which they need to then satisfy their quality of life factors. You can't just push quality of life onto someone else, they first have to value the stuff or push or time which leads to it.
Now, it is true that you have improved the quality of life for someone when you stop beating them with a brick. But, you haven't moved them forward in a real sense, primarily because they would be farther ahead all by themselves if you hadn't beat on them in the first place. The lack of injuries which would have been incurred during the pre-mitigation interval is proof of that.
Similarly, jobs which mitigate the effects of regulation don't provide value to individuals beyond the abeyance of bricking. And, since the regulatory compliance consumes resources which would otherwise go somewhere to provide real improvement for someone else, the overall quality of life in society must suffer. For each regulatory compliance a few individuals benefit, at the expense of resources which would have otherwise trickled to those who could have used them most efficiently.
Thought of this way, regulatory compliance is just a more diffuse version of the mob boss demanding protection money. The guy you give the protection money to could very well be the enforcer if you don't, or at least knows the enforcer. Most of our modern society exists to decouple the brick beater from the enforcer by such a wide gap that you can't perceive them as being at all connected to each other. The collective has so finely tuned their interactions to trap you in this web that it makes you almost feel foolish to even think in these terms.
The complexity and the insanity of regulatory compliance benefits the collective. This benefit accrues especially to the electorate who demands the regulations in the first place. The truth of this can be revealed by reverting back to the simple tribal model and considering what happens when animal power gets applied to food production. We can then compare that primitive example to a more modern example and see how regulations become more palatable.
Before animal power, food was tough to get by hand, and so the population is limited by the available scarcity. Under these circumstances, any idiot who wanted to proscribe what tools one might use to get the job done, perhaps by regulating the kind of wood used in your plow stick, would probably become fertilizer themselves.
As soon as the idea worker produces the innovation of plow animals, and this innovation begins to be adopted, food becomes more plentiful, and so is removed, for a time, as a source of stress. The population
naturally increases, but this increase is so gradual that it takes a while for equilibrium to be established at that higher level. With the stress removed, some become relieved from the tedium of agriculture, which is a nice way of saying their jobs just went poof. All of these excess people milling around, including the additional ones coming on line each year as the babies start popping, need something to do. They either turn to abject poverty as a way out, or start making plows and harnesses, or turn to mischief.
As the population increases, the food consumption goes up, and so some can go back into the business of agriculture, there now being additional market for their services. But unfortunately some of the ones who turned to mischief managed to successfully grind an axe against their former competition. These get the government to pass regulations about things like how grain is to be stored or what the working hours might be, or how wide the harness straps have to be. Then, the mischievous go to work enforcing those regulations.
Note that those regulations were only possible during the period between the adoption of the innovation and the new higher equilibrium level of the population. Had those regulations been introduced at the higher equilibrium, they would have been passed off as absurd, or even dangerous, and poof, more fertilizer. But, because they were enacted during the period of plenty, they seem reasonable even when people start starving again at that higher level.
By passing regulations in the period of plenty, the collective benefits in several ways. First, some of the displaced now have something to do with their time by gaining employ as regulatory compliance workers. This group includes those who have to be involved with manufacturing the new wider harnesses or green plows, as well as the king's men who root around for violations. And the solicitors who plead the case. And the jailer.
Next, as there is no stress for that resource at the time the regulations were enacted, fewer prospective regulatory compliance workers wind up as fertilizer.