Re:Why women lose the dating game
by harryh on Friday October 25, 2013 @04:03PM
(#6614169)
I don't think that's a realistic solution. No matter what terms you write there will always be someone willing to work crazy hard and ignore their life in return for financial reward. That person is always going to get ahead of someone that wants more balance.
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It's not clear to me whether companies that clear the path for "overperformers" like that are going to outperform companies that do their best to shield their team from this stag hunt problem.
Maaaaybe. But this line of thinking sometimes strikes me as have your cake and eat it too thinking. It would be really nice if the world worked that way for sure, but the idea that harder work leads to greater returns seems pretty robust to me.
The premise of your comment is that the productivity-maximizing strategy for managing a company is to allow everyone to work at their maximum personal tolerance.
But that's not necessarily true; it's possible to imagine a scenario where you net out ahead by buying improved median productivity at the expense of reduced maximum individual productivity.
Think of it game-theoretically, assume a coordination problem that penalizes defectors (here, people who don't sacrifice their personal lives for improved productivity), and then bear in mind that some workers might be required to defect no matter what the rules of the game are.
The strategy you want obviously depends on your mix of natural cooperators vs. natural defectors.
It's certainly possible that you are correct. But isn't the over performance of the US economy compared to Western Europe (where they have made the kind of tradeoff you propose) evidence to the contrary?
It's evidence that the dial settings Europe uses aren't productivity-maximizing, but not evidence that "optimize for maximum individual productivity" is the productivity-maximizing strategy.