Yucky Framing of the Day: When Your Workers Suffer, You Don't Make as Much Money

The Australian publication The Age recently ran an article that says that investing in mental health for staff pays off, not because it means human beings will suffer less, but because you can gain a tidy return on your investment.

Employers urgently need to treat the mental health of their staff as seriously as their physical health and safety, according to Australia's first campaign on mental health in the workplace.

With an estimated one in five Australian workers experiencing mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety, the cost to businesses is at least $10.9 billion a year, says mental health group beyondblue.

But if Australian businesses are willing to invest in effective mental health strategies they stand to gain an average return of $2.30 for every $1 spent, according to a report beyondblue commissioned from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/investing-in-mental-health-pays-off-study-shows-20140519-38k7p.html#ixzz32G7orvBB

Yucky Framing of the Day: Don't Force a Generation of Into Debt or they Won't Buy Stuff From Us

From Truthout today comes another example of  moral arguement reduced to a market place equation.  Why is it a bad idea to saddle the next generation with debt before they even get started in life? Because, if you do that, they can't buy as much stuff and "we," presumably, will not make as much money.

Americans with piles of student loan debt have less money to spend on anything from consumer products to homes.

And as The Washington Post points out, first-time home buyers, usually college graduates, are, or at least used to be, "the bedrock of the housing market."

But, since millions of college graduates are drowning in debt, they can't afford to buy a home, which is killing America's housing recovery.

Meanwhile, according to a report from the One Wisconsin Institute, the devastating effects of student loan debt also translate into more than $6 billion in lost car sales each year.

And, the chief economist for General Motors has even said that student loan debt is one of, if not THE major reason why millennials aren't buying cars.

Yucky Framing of the Day: Healthy Bodies Mean More Efficient Cogs in the Economic Wheel!

From an article in today's Metro Times. According to the Michigan Department of Community Health, the economy does not exist to support human life, human life and health exist to support the economy:

Angela Minicuci, spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Community Health, says the goal of the Healthy Michigan plan is to help people get healthier — and to the point where they can afford to buy their own health insurance.

“Countless studies show that if you have a healthier population, they are better employees and they contribute overall to our economic status,” she says. 

  Yuck!

Yucky Framing of the Day: How to Suck Money Out of Young People

I believe I have made it clear in this blog just how much I hate marketing speak that treats literature as product and author as brand.  (Rather than the more relationship/service oriented way of thinking: building an audience by creating work that has value and meaning to them.)

Clicked on a link for an article on "Reaching Tween Readers" today expecting perhaps some reflection on young people's passions and interests, their unique view of the world.

Instead, this was the first line:

"All of a tween’s money is spent on themselves so there is a big opportunity for publishers to learn how to get it."

Yuck.

Not Making Employees Happy Interferes with Your Ability to Use them As Part of Your Machine

I'm all in favor of creating better workplaces that allow employees to be happier, healthier and more engaged with their work. Yet is the only way to frame this argument a financial one? Worker wellbeing is important because our business will earn more if we can keep them well?

The New York Times today ran yet another story about a social value framed entirely in market terms- how do these pesky humans influence our productivity and bottom line?

Here is the premise of today's article Do Happier People Work Harder?

Employee engagement may seem like a frill in a downturn economy. But it can make a big difference in a company’s survival. In a 2010 study, James K. Harter and colleagues found that lower job satisfaction foreshadowed poorer bottom-line performance. Gallup estimates the cost of America’s disengagement crisis at a staggering $300 billion in lost productivity annually. When people don’t care about their jobs or their employers, they don’t show up consistently, they produce less, or their work quality suffers.

This framing has the interesting effect of advocating on behalf of workers while still treating them as cogs in the wheel of corporate machinery, only valuable to the extent that they are increasing profits for the company.

The article speaks from the perspective of owners and managers and asks us to assume that we, the American people, the readers of this article, are the managers rather than the managed. For this most part this is not true. The vast majority of the American public is made up of those unhappy workers, not the managers.

Can't anyone argue that we should try to improve people's quality of life because then they would have a better quality of life?

On the Value of Education: Another Argument Against the Marketization of Everything

There are certain types of value that money measures quite well and certain values that should be measured in other ways. In our political climate and our culture we have become accustomed to discussing everything in terms of its financial value at the expense of values that are harder to quantify.

If you look through the archives, you will find stories about measuring the success of books with a "best seller list" rather than some list based on quality, arguing for arts in terms of tourism dollars or the creation of non-arts jobs, and for arts education with the tortured logic that music makes you good at math, which has some marketplace value.

Robin Cangie today responds to Peter Thiel's much discussed article on what he calls the higher education bubble. Cangie argues on her blog that we devalue education-- and miss the whole point-- when we treat higher learning as nothing more than an overpriced stepping stone to a higher salary, and entry into the middle class.

The very real problems that Thiel identifies aren’t symptoms of a bubble but of an institutional crisis of education; they only look like a bubble because we’ve learned to treat education as a market-driven commodity rather than a social good.

...Students pay top dollar, not for quality, but for a name brand education. For-profit universities treat students as cash cows, making unrealistic promises and even outright lies to increase enrollment.... Meanwhile, rising tuition and student debt are justified on the increasingly faith-based grounds that it all will pay off in the long run.

By commoditizing higher education, we have not only given it away to the highest bidder, or borrower, as the case may be; we have impoverished the notion of becoming educated itself, at great social and economic harm.

...I’m not disagreeing with the problems in higher education that Thiel has pointed out. But to treat all of this as a bubble, on par with housing or high technology, is to not only misunderstand the problem but also to contribute to an impoverished, commoditized view of education that values a monetary return-on-investment over intellectual cultivation, that treats education as a resource, not unlike wood or oil, to be exploited and profited from, rather than a vital ingredient of a healthy society.

And so we must ask ourselves, what does it mean to be educated? If education means churning out obedient, unthinking, indebted consumers, then we’ve done very well. But if it means anything – anything at all – more than that, we have failed massively.

Read the whole article by following the link above.

Oh Yeah, and People Might Starve Too

Why is it that in our culture the only legitimate argument for anything seems to be its effect on making money?  I have brought this up before when it comes to arts funding.  We always try to argue that we should fund arts because of the economic impact artists have on an area.  We argue for arts education funding with the claim that music makes you good at math with which you can, presumably, make actual money.

Do we not place any value on doing things because they are good for the community and society, because doing them makes our nation a more pleasant place to live, because they are morally right?  It seems that we do not consider such arguments to be serious enough.

Take this example.  In The Shamanic Economist, the author says he is going on a one day, symbolic hunger strike to protest extreme austerity measures.  The arguments against cuts to food programs all come down to our ability to boost productivity and bring in money.

The point I personally hope to make is that it is the height of folly, even in an austerity budget, to axe the very things that are necessary for people to work and live. To a limited extent, the government must support such things as food, housing, safety, and transportation.

Let me start with transportation as an example. Broad cuts in transportation leave significant numbers of people at home, unable to get to work. When people don’t work, they don’t pay taxes. And when people don’t pay taxes, that makes the budget situation worse, not better.

It is the same with food. When people can’t eat, the quality of their work suffers almost immediately. If they are looking for work, the quality of their job search declines in the same way, and the tendency for employers to take them seriously or view them favorably all but vanishes. In the United States today, it is basically impossible for a person who looks like they are suffering from hunger to find a job. But again, as long as they aren’t working, they aren’t paying taxes. Thus, withholding food from people does not improve the budget either.

I am not suggesting that by focusing on the economic impact or making an argument based on taxes and revenue that this is the only thing on the writer's mind.  I don't believe this author is concerned about people going hungry only because it affects the quality of their work.  But it does point to a framework for discussion, in which the only thing were are able to consider-- the only "valid" argument we can make-- is a financial one rooted in the concept of economic prosperity measured in terms of GDP.  Is that truly the only thing worth considering when making policy?

Is the Book Good? How Many Copies Did It Sell?

Interesting observation today in an article in The New Republic which contemplates the "end of book stores" and their role as quality gatekeeper. Writer Nicole Krauss asks:

Why does The New York Times Book Review, one of the last book-review sections of a national newspaper left in this country, dedicate six pages that might otherwise be given over to reflection on books to their commercial ranking instead?

If between the lines of those new best-seller lists is an obituary for bookstores, there is also one for The New York Times Book Review itself: Soon all that might be left of it is a bundle of best-seller lists. It is not the notion of a best-seller list that rankles: Commerce is a part of literary life, and the commercial distinction of a serious book—not everything that sells well is dross—lifts the spirits and the bottom lines of publishers and writers. But six pages of Dow Jones-like charts? Why this obsession with the money side, even while everyone agrees that salability has little relationship to quality? The independent spirit of the bookstore is, at its best, a much-needed bulwark against this obsession.

Yes, the technology is real, and, yes, e-books will exist—but why to the exclusion of books and bookstores? Is convenience really the highest American value?

Oh and by the way, there was an article on Broke is Beautiful and my book signing event at the Baldwin Public Library in the Birmingham Patch today.