David McElroy

As Christmas approaches, these guys are having to set aside their search for self-discovery, but this is what they do in the off-season. (Click this one for a bigger size.)

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When I started work as a newspaper reporter many years ago, I had to clock in and out every day if I expected to be paid. Just like many millions of people, I was paid for my time, not my output. I never understood why.

When I was a teen-ager and first started cutting lawns to make money, I quickly discovered that people wanted to pay me an hourly rate. I used to gently push for a different arrangement. I wanted a flat fee for the service, because I felt that the hourly rate punished me for working harder and faster. Sometimes my clients agreed, but many held out for an hourly rate, so I was stuck having to make sure I didn’t work too fast and thus cheat myself. I hated it.

The obsession with paying people for their time is a relic of the industrial age, when human labor was considered just another interchangeable part of an industrial machine. (The idea that any hour of labor should have the same worth as another hour of labor was also an important cornerstone of Karl Marx’s thought.) The idea might have made sense in an age when people were treated like gears in machines. It has no place in a world where brains are more valuable than brawn.

I came across software today that is something like a modern version of the time clock for people who work for companies from home or other locations. The software is called Odesk. It’s installed on your computer and it takes screenshots of whatever you’re doing at six times each hour. It records the movement of your mouse. It can even record keystrokes to figure out what you’re doing. If your six screenshots show work apparently taking place, you get paid. If one of your screenshots shows something other than work, you give up one-sixth of your hour’s pay.

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It’s popular today to complain about our complicated and interconnected world and to yearn for simpler days. I’ve certainly felt that way at times. But I think we sometimes forget that we can’t have the things we want unless the world is complicated and interconnected.

There’s a famous essay published in 1958 by Leonard Read called “I, Pencil,” which explains where a pencil comes from — and how many people are required to produce a simple pencil. I read something today that considers a more modern example. Waldo Jaquith wrote earlier this week about the impracticality of a cheeseburger until modern times.

If you want a cheeseburger today, you can probably go to a dozen places within shouting distance of your home or office and get one pretty cheaply. But if you’d lived before the days of modern transportation and refrigeration and all the other things that make a cheeseburger possible, you wouldn’t have found one. It wasn’t that it technically impossible. It was simply that it was so difficult that it would have required tremendous resources to duplicate what we get cheaply today.

I’m not going to retell what made Jaquith start thinking about it. His piece is short and worth reading. Take a look for yourself. And remember it the next time you start longing for a simper life. You can have a simple world if you want it, but there are going to be a lot of tradeoffs. You might gain some things, but you’d give up even more. It’s worth thinking about what modern technology has brought us.