Source of image: screen capture from YouTube clip referenced below.
What motivates employees? Economists have emphasized pay as the primary incentive, while recognizing that there may be “compensating differentials” for aspects of the work that are pleasant or unpleasant.
In recent years many non-economists, such as Daniel Pink in Drive, have emphasized non-pecuniary incentives.
Joe Paterno entered the debate at age 83, after he became the first major college coach to win 400 games on November 6, 2010.
Right after the victory, he was interviewed on the field by “Heather” of ESPN. Starting at 1:33 seconds into the clip referenced below, here is the key dialogue:
Heather: “Coach Paterno, what has motivated you to get to this point?”
Paterno: “Oh geez, I don’t know—gettin’ paid.”
Source: YouTube clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQzdVeYtm5w
(Note: the clip was posted on 11/6/10 by shellymic and has the title “Joe Pa FIRST to 400 Wins!”)
“The unusual suspects, 1969: top row from left, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam; bottom row from left, Terry Jones, John Cleese and Michael Palin.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.
(p. 24) “A lot of contemporary comedy seems self-conscious,” Mr. Palin said. “It’s almost documentary, like ‘The Office.’ That’s a very funny show, but you’re looking at the human condition under stress. The Pythons made the human condition seem like fun.”
He added: “I’m proud to be a Python. It’s a badge of silliness, which is quite important. I was the gay lumberjack, I was the Spanish Inquisition, I was one-half of the fish-slapping dance. I look at myself and think that may be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”
Mr. Cleese and Mr. Jones, in rare agreement, both suggested that one reason the Pythons have never been successfully imitated is that television executives nowadays would never let anyone get away with putting together a show like theirs. When they began, they didn’t have an idea what the show should be about or even a title for it. The BBC gave them some money, and then, Mr. Cleese joked, the executives hurried off to the bar.
“The great thing was that in the beginning we had such a low profile,” he said. “We went on at different times, and some weeks we didn’t go on at all, because there might be a show-jumping competition. But that was the key to our feeling of freedom. We didn’t know what the viewing figures were, and we didn’t care. What has happened now is the complete reverse. Even the BBC is obsessed with the numbers.”
So obsessed, Bill Jones pointed out, that in the case of “Monty Python: Almost the Truth” some people encouraged the documentarians to see if they couldn’t squeeze the six hours down to one.
“Above from left, Mr. Jones, Mr. Gilliam, Mr. Cleese, Mr. Idle and Mr. Palin at the premiere of “Spamalot.”” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.
The clip is the famous corporate graveyard scene from Ben Wattenberg’s 1977 “In Search of the Real America: A Challenge to the Chorus of Failure and Guilt.” The scene appears in the first of 13 episodes, the episode called “There’s No Business Like Big Business” which received the Tuck Award for the Advancement of Economic Understanding. The episode was produced and written by Austin Hoyt.
The corporate graveyard scene illustrates that under entrepreneurial capitalism, companies prosper that innovate in better serving the consumer.
Wattenberg discussed the “In Search of the Real America” program, and the graveyard scene, in his recent book Fighting Words:
(p. 307) The central point of the program was that if big American corporations didn’t compete effectively, they suffer, and many would go out of business.
The producers had the wonderful idea of a visual of a graveyard on a foggy night, with headstones made from papier-mâché and a smoke machine providing the fog. I walked through the mock cemetery in a raincoat and read off the names of corporate tombstones, which included Central Leather (the seventeenth largest company in 1917), International Mercantile Marine (the eleventh largest in 1917), as well as failures like Baldwin Locomotive Works, American Woolen, Packard Motor Car, International Match, Pierce Petroleum, Curtiss-Wright, United Verde Mining, and Consolidation Coal.2 When we showed the Central Leather tombstone, a sound effect mooed; behind International Mercantile Marine’s, a steamship horn bellowed (I love shtick).
. . .
2 The program was based on an article by James Michaels, editor of Forbes. For many years, people would come up to me in airports, recalling that one scene and complementing me on the program.
Source:
Wattenberg, Ben J. Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: I have corrected a few obvious errors involving the omission and placement of commas in the list of companies in the text of Wattenberg’s Fighting book.)
. . . , Mr. Michaels graduated from Harvard in 1943 with a bachelor’s degree in economics.
“Thomas Lee, one of the men featured in the documentary “A Father’s Promise,” watching a video of himself from 1996.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.
(p. C11) The program, with Al Roker as host, follows up a “Dateline NBC” report from 1996 that recorded several births among black women at a Newark hospital and interviewed the unmarried fathers of the children as they earnestly vowed to be there as their babies grew up. The piece was an attempt to look at the alarming rate of fatherless households among blacks.
It is, of course, a problem that has not gone away since 1996, and Mr. Roker’s program tracks down three of those newborns and the fathers who promised to stand by them. That none did — jail, joblessness, depression and general irresponsibility intervened — somehow isn’t surprising.
. . .
. . . the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers of Azusa Community Church in Boston explains in very personal terms why he discounts the easy economic explanations that so often get the blame for fatherless households.
“I had a child out of wedlock,” he says. “That was a bad decision. I can’t say capitalism did it to me.”
Source of photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.
(p. A1) It didn’t take long after America started tuning in to television that people started to worry about what it was doing to children. “When it offers a daily diet of Western pictures and vaudeville by the hour, television often seems destined to entertain the child into a state of mental paralysis,” wrote The New York Times in 1949.
A generation later, the Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of college-bound teenagers had fallen significantly. A 1977 panel appointed by the College Entrance Examination Board suggested television bore some blame for the drop. Indeed, the decline began in the mid-1960s, just as the first students heavily exposed to TV took their SATs.
But University of Chicago Graduate School of Business economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro aren’t sure that TV has been all that bad for kids. In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics this year, they presented a series of analyses that showed that the advent of television might actually have had a positive effect on children’s cognitive ability.
. . .
(p. A8) The economists . . . looked at results of a survey of 800 U.S. schools that administered tests to 346,662 sixth-grade, ninth-grade and 12th-grade students in 1965. Their finding: Adjusting for differences in household income, parents’ educational background and other factors, children who lived in cities that gave them more exposure to television in early childhood performed better on the tests than those with less exposure.
The economists found that television was especially positive for children in households where English wasn’t the primary language and parents’ education level was lower. “We don’t exactly know why that is, but a plausible interpretation is that the effect of television on cognitive development depends on what other kinds of activity television is substituting for,” says Mr. Shapiro, 28.
“Jonas Salk, right, inoculates his son against polio as his wife, left, looks on.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ quoted and cited below.
(p. W9C) “The Polio Crusade” will stir many memories with its account of successful efforts to eradicate the disease whose fear factor, we’re told, was second only to that of the atom bomb. (Monday 9-10 p.m. ET on PBS’s “American Experience” series, but check local listings.) The documentary also tells less-familiar, and sometimes disturbing, stories about the birth of modern fund-raising techniques, and old testing techniques.
. . .
Since the virus is spread most effectively by mouth, or through contact with byproducts of the intestinal tract, the improved hygiene of the 20th century should have led to a decrease in polio infections. The opposite happened. First in Europe and then in America, a disease which had barely registered on the medical radar began to strike more and more people, culminating in a U.S. record of nearly 58,000 cases in 1952.
The explanation for this seemingly counterintuitive symbiosis between cleanliness and disease is astonishing, yet simple. In a germier age, newborns were likely to be exposed to the polio virus very early in life, when they still had immunity conferred by their mother in the womb. When improved hygiene pushed back the time of exposure to a later age, or even to adulthood, many people were by then defenseless.
At a “Workshop on Creative Ideas to Teach Principles,” organized by Jim Gwartney at the Stavros Center in Tampa, I presented some brief video clips that I use to make various points in my principles classes. The first was Hugh Laurie’s Protest Song.
After playing the song, I tell my students that to make the world better, you need more than a guitar and good intentions—you also need to know something about how the world works (in particular, you need to know some economics).
After my presentation, one of the participants asked if I knew where he could find the lyrics. In response, I found the lyrics posted online, and re-post them here in case they may be of use to other economic educators.
Hugh Laurie’s Saturday Night Live Protest Song
[ open on Hugh Laurie standing at Home Base strumming a guitar ]
Hugh Laurie: This is a protest song. [ blows on a harmonica attached to his neck ]
[ singing ]
“Well, the poor keep getting hungry, and the rich keep getting fat
Politicians change, but they’re never gonna change that.
Girl, we got the answer, it’s so easy you won’t believe
All we gotta do is.. [ mumbles incoherently ]
Well, the winds of war are blowin’, and the tide is comin’ in
Don’t you be hopin’ for the good times, because the good times have already been.
But, girl, we got the answer, it’s so easy you won’t believe
All we gotta do is.. [ mumbles incoherently ]
It’s so easy, to see
If only they’d listen, to you and me.
We got to.. [ mumbles incoherently ] as fast as we can
We got to.. [ mumbles incoherently ] every woman, every man
We got to.. [ mumbles incoherently ] time after time
We got to.. [ mumbles incoherently ] vodka and lime.
Well, the world is gettin’ weary, and it wants to go to bed
Everybody’s dyin’, except the ones who are already dead.
Girl, we got the answer, starin’ us right in the face
All we gotta do is
All we gotta do is
All we gotta do is.”
[ pauses, then blows on the harmonica and finishes ]
[ the audience cheers wildly ]
Hugh Laurie: Thank you.
Source of image: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.
Apparently the WSJ‘s new owner, Rupert Murdoch, has not yet succeeded in killing the wonderful, quirky, inimitable front page, center column, articles that are part of what makes the WSJ great:
(p. A1) CHANDLER, Ariz. — Jerry Knoblach wants to bring wireless service to millions of rural Americans. His plan: Beam it down from balloons hovering at the edge of space.
This isn’t just hot air. His company, Space Data Corp., already launches 10 balloons a day across the Southern U.S., providing specialized telecom services to truckers and oil companies. His balloons soar 20 miles into the stratosphere, each carrying a shoebox-size payload of electronics that acts like a mini cellphone “tower” covering thousands of square miles below.
His idea has caught the eye of Google Inc., according to people familiar with the matter. The Internet giant — which is now pushing into wireless services — has considered contracting with Space Data or even buying the firm, according to one person.
. . .
Maintaining a telecom system based on gas-filled bladders floating in the sky requires some creativity. The inexpensive bal-(p. A9)loons are good for only 24 hours or so before ultimately bursting in the thin air of the upper atmosphere. The electronic gear they carry, encased in a small Styrofoam box, then drifts gently back to earth on tiny parachutes.
This means Space Data must constantly send up new balloons. To do that, it hires mechanics employed at small airports across the South. It also hires farmers — particularly, dairy farmers.
They’re “very reliable people,” says Mr. Knoblach. They have to “milk the cows 24-7, 365 days a year, so they’re great people to use as a launch crew.” Space Data pays them $50 per launch.
Source of image: screen capture from the first link below.
Hugh Laurie hosted Saturday Night Live (SNL) on a show re-broadcast on Sat., Aug. 11, 2007. (I am not sure if the original broadcast was in 2006, or earlier in 2007.)
In one hilarious bit, Laurie announces he is going to sing a "protest song" and proceeds to sing one of those earnest-sounding, pompous, self-righteous save-the-world-with-a-cliché songs that were so common in the late 1960s and the 1970s.
The hilarious bit: whenever Laurie gets to the part of the song where he is going to tell us the "answer"—- he mumbles.
After showing the clip to my principles students, I told them that to fill in the mumbling with something effective, you need to know some economics.
The song was apparently first performed as part of a show called "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" that was broadcast in the early 1990s in Britain. Here is a link to the earlier version of the song:
Mr. Moore was back from Cuba, where he made a documentary on the superiority of Castro’s health-care system. Mr. Thompson suggested Mr. Moore is just another lefty who loves dictators. Mr. Moore challenged Mr. Thompson to a health-care debate and accused him of smoking embargoed cigars. Within hours Mr. Thompson and his supposedly nonexistent staff had produced a spirited video response that flew through YouTube and the conservative blogosphere. Sitting at a desk and puffing on a fat cigar, Mr. Thompson announces to Mr. Moore he can’t fit him into his schedule. Then: "The next time you’re down in Cuba . . . you might ask them about another documentary maker. His name was Nicolás Guillén. He did something Castro didn’t like, and they put him in a mental institution for several years, giving him devastating electroshock treatments. A mental institution, Michael. Might be something you ought to think about."
You couldn’t quite tell if Mr. Thompson was telling Mr. Moore he ought to think more about Cuba, or might himself benefit from psychiatric treatment. It seemed almost . . . deliberately unclear.
Source of image: screen capture from YouTube clip referenced below.
