Kevin Low

Carrots & Sticks

Carrots and Sticks — Singular Representation...

The Economist recently featured an article on the need to package carrots as sticks to help people be more motivated. It is essentially saying that people responds more strongly to loss than gain but since companies need to make credible threats (a very game theory sort of idea) without being deemed unfair (as they would if they had threatened to dock pay) they will have to make their carrots seem like sticks.

But then, is it always about money? A couple of days back I was walking around the bookstore and I spotted a new book – Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, he talks about the stuff that motivates us. We often thought of them as money but he figures out that it’s about “autonomy, mastery, and purpose”, which makes a lot of intuitive sense. The incentive systems in our world often do not drive ordinary souls to excellence. Perhaps, firms and organization must rethink their way they manage their people and this will revolutionize human resource departments and HR work.

The ideas in the book relates closely to another book I saw. It’s Richard Sennett’s documentation of the philosophy of craftsmanship, The Craftsman (reviews here and here). His definition of craftsmanship, “an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake” sounds like a logical consequence when an individual is well-motivated. Perhaps then, craftsmanship is the spirit to be promoted.

Once again, it’s time to stock up books…

A Quick Thinking Kiwi

A Kiwi working for Tesco London

A man in London walked into the produce section of his local Tesco’s supermarket and asked to buy half a head of lettuce. The boy working in that department told him that they only sold whole heads of lettuce. The man was insistent that the boy ask the manager about the matter.

Walking into the back room, the boy said to the manager, “some old bastard wants to buy a half a head of lettuce.” As he finished his sentence, he turned around to find that the man was standing right behind him, so he quickly added, “and this gentleman kindly offered to buy the other half.”

The manager approved the deal and the man went on his way.

Later, the manager said to the boy,” I was impressed with the way you got yourself out of that situation earlier, we like people who can think on their feet here, where are you from son?”

“New Zealand, sir,” the boy replied.

“Why did you leave New Zealand ?” the manager asked.

The boy said “Sir, there’s nothing but whores and rugby players there.”

“Is that right?” replied the manager, “My wife is from New Zealand!”

“Really?” replied the boy, “Who’d she play for?”

Drill, baby, drill… not!

I subscribe via email to The Daily Green, a website that advocates green consumption as well as champions environmental initiatives by the green movement. I chanced upon this article on high gas prices in Alaska one day in my email. It took me by surprise because one would think that since Alaska produces quite a significant amount of America’s gas (gasoline, referred to as oil or petrol in the Singaporean context), one would be surprised by how expensive petrol can be in Alaska. And what caught me by greater surprise is that this article was written by a green Republican! Jim DiPeso, The Green Conservative of The Daily Green, is policy director of Republicans for Environmental Protection, and if you, like me, used to think that Republicans do not believe in saving the environment, then you thought wrong.

Coming back to this article, in the “Land of Sarah Palin”, to have oil prices higher than the rest of the country and to have stage legislators calling for fuel price regulations would be a surprise given our assumptions that Alaskan oil would fuel the state and that Republicans are against price controls or regulation. The article highlights the components of the cost of petrol, and highlights that essentially all that crude oil pumped out of Alaska goes into the global market, subject to global market pricing, which is subjected to influence by OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) as well as influence by global events that will affect demand and supply of crude oil worldwide.

In addition, Alaska’s petrol market is described as oligopolistic, i.e. players have more pricing power in a relatively-small state with little competition in supply of petrol compared to other states. Given that competition in refining and distribution of petrol is limited in Alaska, the prices would probably already been higher even if Alaskan oil went straight to Alaska. The fact that petrol producers in Alaska even need to import crude oil from other countries will debunk the myths about Alaskan-produced oil.

So essentially, the “drill, baby, drill” lobby who claim that the answer to lower petrol prices would be to open up more oilfields in Alaska are quite mistaken. Looks like The Green Conservative is pitting himself against other Republicans who belong to that lobby. And perhaps the solution might turn out to be more competition instead, which is something the Republicans should focus on instead of drilling their way out of an energy crisis in America (and give the environment a reprieve!)

Aliens & Laws

The Lexington of the latest The Economist made an important point about the indirect impact of terrorism on America. Migration of brains into America has slowed, tourist has become rather fed-up with security checks that comes with a vacation in America and even conferences have moved away from there as a result of the hassle brought about by security restrictions. Perhaps improving the ‘service quality’ of border customs would improve the situation.

The interesting phenomena raised in the article is that giving illegal workers legal status will help reduce their competition with the American workers.

American blue-collar workers fear that Mexican immigrants will undercut their wages. Mr Hinojosa-Ojeda says they won’t if they are legal. The fear of deportation makes illegal workers accept worse conditions, he finds. Once legal, they demand higher wages, and no longer drag down those of the native-born.

The report on the economic benefits of immigration reform is available from Center for American Progress. The idea fits into conventional wisdom about making choices between alternatives. Removing the option of getting deported would naturally help raise the expectations of the foreign workers and make it harder for them to compete with those native-born.

Monikers aka Generalisations

An article in The Economist raised a rather interesting but oft-neglected problem: the proliferation of labels and categories where countries are haphazardly shuffled in, without consideration for historical or geographical accuracy. I first encountered this in JC Geography, when we were taught to evaluate (it’s amazing though that we have to be taught how to evaluate, but this is the A-levels for you) the tendency of geographers to pigeon-hole countries into monikers like the North and the South or Third World, Second World and First World, which can be highly inaccurate and neglects discrepancies or outliers. In the topic of Globalisation, we were taught that to divide the world into a simplistic North-South divide would be to forget about what it really means to be geographically in the Northern hemisphere or Southern hemisphere. Developed countries like Australia and Singapore, for instance, would be technically south of what is in the North in the divide but that does not mean these countries are economically comparable to other countries in the South.

Pardon if what I just described to you sounds confusing, but you will get a better idea if you read The Economist article, which gives many more examples of blatant generalisations in history and geography. Even labels we consider absolutely normal or acceptable might hint of insensitivities. We often refer to South America as Latin America, but this term smacks of colonialism, and the continent while still speaking mainly Spanish and Portugese is certainly wielding its own influence rather than continue to be within the Latin or European sphere of influence.

These labels are certainly convenient, but we should never forget that they must be questioned every now and then to check their relevance. Like, even the oft-used ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries could be questioned in terms of the spheres they cover and how to categorise countries. For instance, would Singapore be a ‘developed’ or ‘developing’ country? And based on what indicators?

Something for the GP (General Paper) and Geography student to think about.

Ruin & Farms

As The Economist reports on the need for a whole scale re-invention of the state of Michigan, an investor in Detroit has come up with an interesting proposal to utilize the unused land in the largest city of Michigan and attempt to restore economic activity in the city that is hollowing out.

There is much potential in building up engineering capabilities of the population of Michigan to kick-start newer, more tech-intensive industries. The small start-ups may be slow to hire and would begin with the best brains, subsequent growth would help raise employment figures. Like what is mentioned in The Economist article, the state has no quick-fix to return to prosperity and will have to toil long and hard to develop newer industries. This could be considered a punishment for having lobbied so hard to maintain the inefficient automobile industry and the refusal of firms in the state to carry out restructuring.

On the other hand, the urban farming idea in Detroit might be a good start given that it might offer the chance to warm up the construction industry. Nevertheless, reviving Detroit would do little to help the state of Michigan if the other towns and cities don’t come up with new ideas on how to rise again. Moral of the story of procrastinating change: Someone will have to pay the bill someday.

Internet & China

With so many people obsessed with the Internet in China and yet even more obsessed with curbing the addiction of them, Google should be making money in China. But apparently it didn’t quite beat Baidu.com that much and thus decided on a ‘New Approach‘.

The Economist discusses the issue at length, citing how Google has come to this after experiencing hackers attacks. They also talked about the similar kind of problem other big sites are facing from China.

Tech Crunch noted that Google’s stance in this case is more about business; perhaps the hacking attacks have been around for a long time and Google has gathered the evidence but lately, they reviewed their business and decided that the cost of maintaining the engineers and censorship is too heavy given the gains they made.

Groupthink

Clive Thompson from Wired wrote a great piece on Groupthink; the main question is whether you can persuade people to like something by convincing them that others also like it?

And the experiments cited in the article gave interesting results that leaves us somehow worrying if our ‘destinies’ are determined by pure luck. It appears that for the very best and very worst, evolutionary forces would more or less elevate or eliminate them in long run but for most of the ones in the middle, their fate could be a matter of chance.

The article seem to imply there’s little way out of the problem of groupthink of such grand scale; it is suggested that the use of social cues for many decision-making is wired into our nature.

New Home

When our Climate Change summit comes up with a result that is claimed to be “Better than Nothing“, and that we have to somewhat console ourselves what an underwhelming Copenhagen accord have been or might be useful, we might actually want to find a new planet. One to live in of course.