Critical Exponent

Wal-Mart gets vilified, so why does Target seem to get away scot-free?

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George Takei, of Star Trek fame, just came out publicly. He’s been living with his partner for 18 years. Poor guy, it’s gotta be particularly hard to be closeted and in a relationship for so long. He must be so relieved!

The New York Times reports on an internal memo leaked by WalMart Watch that explores ways to cut costs by, for example, discouraging unhealthy people from applying for work and reducing 401(k) contributions.

I’m sure this goes on at many, many companies; it just so happens to WalMart is high-profile. But what is it all about? Apparently, lucre. Not content to have $10.5 billion in earnings last year, WalMart seeks to maximize its profit at the expense of workers, if necessary. But if you’re already making a profit, surely it is inhumane to sacrifice workers solely to make that profit (which goes to the big wigs) even bigger.

Think about it this way: classical economics teaches, and most companies follow, the principle of fundamentally maximizing profits. Looked at it this way, employee benefits are simply operating costs that must be paid to comply with laws or to obtain necessary resources (workers). Any way to cut these costs will increase profits, whether it be by loosening labor laws or by a down market that causes competitors to decrease their benefits, thereby allowing one to decrease one’s own costs and still retain access to these human resources.

But why should greed trump all? What is the point of it all? Once, say, the top executives have a basic comfortable lifestyle, any additional profit goes to luxuries that marginally increase their standard of living. The same money could go to the workers, who (certainly as an aggregate) are just as responsible for the success of the company. Since they’re typically much poorer, their marginal utility is greater, so their standard of living would increase much more than the top execs’, even if each individual share of the profits is smaller in absolute dollars. From a metric of collective utility, this would be the more socially beneficial distribution.

Let’s leave economics aside, though, and focus on the ethical questions. You’re a CEO, say, and you make more than enough money to have the basic necessities and comforts of life: food, shelter, health care, education, leisure time, and cultural pursuits. Is it not plain greedy to keep accumulating more when fellow human beings do not have such basics? Are you not simply piling on luxuries in your mansion at the expense of others (who happen to have worked to make your profits possible in the first place)? Whether you’re the owner, president, or founder, how does that entitle you to make so many orders of magnitude more money than the other people who are just as important to the success of your enterprise?

So here’s a radical (but not new, I’m sure) suggestion. Instead of looking at the bottom line as a pure profit-maximization problem, why not look at it as a constrained maximization problem? This approach would seek to make a company as profitable as possible, subject to the constraints that its workers all have a decent minimum standard of living. Sure, the big-wigs may have to do with one fewer private jet, but the workers will have access to health care and vacation time. Let’s take this one step further: one can be revolutionay and consider a company’s performance as an optimization problem where both profits and employees’ standards of living are factors in the objective function to be maximized. Under this scenario, if the company does well, employees are able to achieve an even higher standard of living themselves.

What do you think?

You might have thought that the White House had enough on its plate late last month, what with its search for a new Supreme Court nominee, the continuing war in Iraq and the C.I.A. leak investigation. But it found time to add another item to its agenda - stopping The Onion, the satirical newspaper, from using the presidential seal.

I was working so hard I almost missed hearing about National Take Back your Time Day:

Useful and creative work is essential to happiness. But American life has gotten way out of balance. Producing and consuming more have become the single-minded obsession of the American economy, while other values — strong families and communities, good health and a clean environment, active citizenship and social justice, time for nature and the soul — are increasingly neglected.

The Washinton Post has an editorial on initiatives in California and Ohio that would seek to make re-districting a fairer, more apolitical process.

This might be petty, but, coincidentally or not, it speaks volumes about Bush’s relationship to common Americans:

On Friday, police were alerted just before Bush began his commute. With only a few minutes’ notice from the U.S. Secret Service, LAPD and city Department of Transportation cops shut down Sunset Boulevard west of the San Diego Freeway from 8:15 a.m. to 10 a.m.

One commuter commented, “If he can sneak in and out of Baghdad without anybody knowing it, it seems like he could slip in and out of L.A. without disrupting rush hour - twice.”

The boyfriend and I decided to go for a quick jaunt to Downtown Crossing to do some winter shopping. We were jostling with the Saturday afternoon crowd trying to get out of the rain and into Filene’s Basement, when this short Asian lady shoves a clipboard in front of Knox, and points at it, trying to get us to read it and sign it. On the clipboard is a computer printout, in a large font, urging us to “SIGN PETITION TO DEFEND TRADITIONAL DEFINITION OF MARRIAGE.”

Ooh, that got me angry. I rushed past the lady into the store, throwing her a scathing look and saying as pointedly as I could, “We’re GAY.” Did she understand me? I’m not even sure she spoke English, given how she kept pointing and gesturing. At any rate, my blood was was boiling, and the frenzy of shoppers in the store did nothing to calm my nerves.

Later tonight, we were thinking that maybe I should have told her that “traditional marriage” would have her in the kitchen, pregnant, barefoot, and rightless, or that if she weren’t enjoying the fruits of a liberal society she would be working in the mines or in a sweatshop.

Sigh.

The weather is certainly turning here in New England, and I’m biking much less than I was by the end of the summer. Last week was very rainy, of course, and I don’t enjoy biking in bad weather when I am in a hurry to get to work. This week I had a rain fake-out (it was raining heavily when I was getting ready in the morning, but cleared up soon after) and longish days at work.

By far the most important factor is the diminishing daylight. It is barely light when I leave the house and it is already dark when I get home. I am in the market for a handlebar extender I can use to mount a headlight– and not just any headlight, but a lead-battery powered headlight that will allow me to see and not just be seen.

The dropping temperatures also make biking less enjoyable. This morning I remembered to wear my long-fingered gloves, but my nails were still painfully cold. I didn’t have time to locate my skull liner, and the wind running though my helmet was a little too refreshing.

Still, obsessions die hard. Knox and I plan to take the train North and bike to Amesbury tomorrow for some good ol’ apple picking and donut eatin’.