WebSitesOfNote

Class conflict and the state: "National Statistics has today quantified what we've always suspected - that strikes are far more common in the public sector than in the private.It estimates (pdf) that in the last 10 years, the public sector has accounted for 4.2 million of the 5.8 million working days lost through labour disputes. So, although the state represents only one-fifth of all employment, it accounts for 72.2% of strikes.There's a simple reason for this. The state is a monopoly. Monopolies, unlike competitive enterprises, don't care about annoying their 'customers' - because they've got nowhere to go. So, neither workers nor managers in the state sector have much incentive to avoid strikes. Bosses have less incentive to improve workers' morale, and workers have less incentive to co-operate with management.This just corroborates two of my priors. The state is a dysfunctional organization. And the old left were just stupid to believe state ownership would solve the problem of class conflict."

Shareholders and innovation: "... that shareholders have no function in human capital-intensive firms.

But innovation can't be managed from top-down. It relies upon communication, inspiration and dedication. These spring from a sense of fraternity and vocation, not from hierarchy and class conflict. However, shareholders exacerbate the latter - especially if the flotation gave big windfalls to bosses - without contributing any great function. Innovation-intensive companies, then, shouldn't have external, passive shareholders.
Shareholders seem to share this view. In the last 20 years, human capital-intensive innovative sectors - meeja, electronics and software - have under-performed the All-share. By contrast, the three best-performing sectors have been tobacco, banks and miners - industries with big physical capital requirements but little innovation.And since floating in February, Qinetiq's price has dropped 18%, hugely under-performing the market."

The Not-So-Changing Face of Leisure: "Think people today have it easier than their predecessors of 100 years ago? Not so fast. According to a nifty new study, leisure per capita is about about the same now as it was in 1900. How so? Blame a decline in hours worked that has largely been offset by time spent in school, plus average hours spent in home production is slightly higher than it was in the early part of the 20th Century. "

While Europe Slept: "Bruce Bawer talks about his book: I was also shocked to hear people refer to immigrants’ European-born children as “second-generation immigrants.” And their children were “third-generation immigrants.” This summed up an incredibly dramatic difference in the ways Americans and Europeans thought about immigrants. My father’s parents were Polish, but never in my life had it occurred to me to think of myself as a third-generation immigrant or of my father as a second-generation immigrant. The idea was ludicrous. We were Americans, period.My father's parents were Polish. My father was born in England, but lived most of his life in Australia. I'm Australian, period. Read the whole thing, depressing though it may be. (Via Roger L. Simon)"