Edward Conard

Top Ten New York Times Bestselling Author

Upside of Inequality Unintended Consequences
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Some Workers Seek Employers Who Will Push Them Harder

The Economist reports on an interesting study about parenting and workforce supervision:

“Textbook economics suggests … that in a competitive labour market any attempt to coerce people into working harder than they want will fail, since workers can simply switch jobs. Studies of factory work paint a more complicated picture, however. People … struggle with self-control and do not work as hard as they wish they would. They consequently choose to work for firms that use disciplinary measures to push them. During industrialisation, workers ‘effectively hired capitalists to make them work harder,’ says Gregory Clark of the University of California, Davis, in a seminal paper on the subject. [A recent study] ran a 13-month experiment using data-entry workers, who were paid according to the amount of work successfully completed. … When workers were offered contracts that penalised them for failing to hit performance targets, those who struggled to stay on-task disproportionately accepted, and achieved big gains in output and pay as a result.”

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