Salary Problem Quotes

Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a huge research staff to study the problem.

The rich get the assets, the poor get the debt, and then the poor have to pay their whole salary to the rich every year just to live in a house. The rich use that money to buy the rest of the assets from the middle class and then the problem gets worse every year. The middle class disappears, spending power disappears permanently from the economy, the rich becoming much fucking richer and the poor, well, I guess they just die.

Now shame is the only direct attack on conceit, the defensive image of oneself. Conceit is the common denominator of the Organization man, the hipster, and the juvenile delinquent-this is why I have been lumping them together. The conceited image of the self is usually not quite conscious, but it is instantly woundable; and people protect it with a conformity to their peers (oneself is superior). But the conceited groups differ in their methods of confirming and enhancing conceit: the juvenile delinquent by surly and mischievous destructiveness of the insulting privileged outgroup; the hipster by making fools of them with token performances; the Organization Man by status and salary. To his inner idol, they sacrifice the ingenuous exhibition and self-expression that could make them great, effective, or loved in the world; but that can also be shamed if it is mistaken, out of place, or disproportionate.

Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them. Curricula are designed to give coherence to the educational experience and to challenge students to develop a strong degree of moral awareness. Professors, deeply involved with the enterprise of undergraduate instruction, are committed to their students' intellectual growth and insist on maintaining the highest standards of academic rigor. Career services keep themselves informed about the broad range of postgraduate options and make a point of steering students away from conventional choices. A policy of noncooperation with U.S. News has taken hold, depriving the magazine of the data requisite to calculate its rankings. Rather than squandering money on luxurious amenities and exorbitant administrative salaries, schools have rededicated themselves to their core missions of teaching and the liberal arts. I'm kidding, of course.

I’ll tell everyone about our stellar apartment—though maybe I’ll bump us up to Park Slope—and about my fabulous publishing internship—I think I’ll pretend it’s a salaried job.” Come to think about it, this reunion seemed like a really bad idea. I leaned against the counter in defeat. “Oh, God. I haven’t done anything. I’m going to show up and be a failure.”“‘Oh, woe is me,’” Eva said from back at the mirror.“‘To have seen what I have seen,see what I see!’”That was the problem with living with a former theatre major. Sometimes she rebuked me with Shakespeare.

Twenty years of being in the classroom have taught me that 90% of ‘emotional problems’ in the classroom are manipulation tactics. Why is it that so many students who exhibit emotional problems in other classes are miraculously able to make them disappear in mine? Well, either I have eight advanced psychology degrees I haven’t told you about, or the student knows they have to face a consequence they don’t want. 4. Self-esteem is not built by pow-wows in class about connections and cultural understanding, but by honest, hard work. Education theorists and other ‘professionals’ whose salaries are dependent on a dysfunctional system will tell you a teacher’s job is part psychologist, part parent, blah blah blah. This is opinion, not fact. The truth is, the best teachers spend their time doing their job—teaching. The best thing you can do for your students is to teach them your subject matter—and the best way to do that is with a classroom that is quiet, attentive, focused, and on task. To achieve that you need leverage—consequences that count for those who do not comply with your behavior standards.

Worrying about money is one of the worst worries. It’s like having locked-in syndrome, except you’re still moving around and doing things. Your head burns. If other people are not having money problems, it pisses you off because it reminds you that you’re limited in the ways you can express your agency in the world, and they aren’t. Worrying about money is anger-inducing because it makes you think about time: how many dollars per hour, how much salary per year, how many years until retirement. Worrying about money forces you to do endless math in your head, and most people didn’t like math in high school and they don’t like it now.

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

I do not see, however, why a democratic state, armed with a legislature and the power to draw up a budget, cannot strive for a certain fairness in, for example, pension policies or tax policies, or support to the unemployed, or salaries to public employees, or assistance to the elderly living alone, people who have health problems, or those who, for various reasons, find themselves at the bottom of society. Every civilized state attempts, in different ways and with different degrees of success, to come up with reasonable policies in these areas, and not even the most ardent supporters of the market economy have anything against it in principle. In the end, then, it is a conflict not of beliefs, but rather of terminology.

All A players have six common denominators. They have a scoreboard that tells them if they are winning or losing and what needs to be done to change their performance. They will not play if they can’t see the scoreboard. They have a high internal, emotional need to succeed. They do not need to be externally motivated or begged to do their job. They want to succeed because it is who they are . . . winners. People often ask me how I motivate my employees. My response is, “I hire them.” Motivation is for amateurs. Pros never need motivating. (Inspiration is another story.) Instead of trying to design a pep talk to motivate your people, why not create a challenge for them? A players love being tested and challenged. They love to be measured and held accountable for their results. Like the straight-A classmate in your high school geometry class, an A player can hardly wait for report card day. C players dread report card day because they are reminded of how average or deficient they are. To an A player, a report card with a B or a C is devastating and a call for renewed commitment and remedial actions. They have the technical chops to do the job. This is not their first rodeo. They have been there, done that, and they are technically very good at what they do. They are humble enough to ask for coaching. The three most important questions an employee can ask are: What else can I do? Where can I get better? What do I need to do or learn so that I continue to grow? If you have someone on your team asking all three of these questions, you have an A player in the making. If you agree these three questions would fundamentally change the game for your team, why not enroll them in asking these questions? They see opportunities. C players see only problems. Every situation is asking a very simple question: Do you want me to be a problem or an opportunity? Your choice. You know the job has outgrown the person when all you hear are problems. The cost of a bad employee is never the salary. My rules for hiring and retaining A players are: Interview rigorously. (Who by Geoff Smart is a spectacular resource on this subject.) Compensate generously. Onboard effectively. Measure consistently. Coach continuously.

Do you condemn the kids for not having been blessed with I.Q.s of 120? Can you condemn the kids? Can you condemn anyone? Can you condemn the colleges that give all you need to pass a board of education examination? Do you condemn the board of education for not making the exams stiffer, for not boosting the requirements, for not raising salaries, for not trying to attract better teachers, for not making sure their teachers are better equipped to teach? Or do you condemn the meatheads all over the world who drift into the teaching profession drift into it because it offers a certain amount of paycheck every month security ,vacation-every summer luxury, or a certain amount of power , or a certain easy road when the other more difficult roads are full of ruts? Oh he’d seen the meatheads, all right; he’d seen them in every education class he’d ever attended. The simpering female idiots who smiled and agreed with the instructor, who imparted vast knowledge gleaned from profound observations made while sitting at the back of the classroom in some ideal high school in some ideal neighborhood while an ideal teacher taught ideal students. Or the men who were perhaps the worst, the men who sometimes seemed a little embarrassed, over having chosen the easy road, the road the security, the men who sometimes made a joke about the women not realizing they themselves were poured from the same streaming cauldron of horse manure. Had Rick been one of these men? He did not believe so…. He had wanted to teach, had honestly wanted to teach. He had not considered the security or the two-month vacation, or the short tours. He had simply wanted to teach, and he had considred taeaching a worth-while profession. He had, in fact, considered it the worthiest profession. He had held no illusions about his own capabilities. He could not paint, or write, or compose, or sculpt, or philopshize deeply, or design tall buildings. He could contribute nothing to the world creatively and this had been a disappointment to him until he’d realized he could be a big creator by teaching. For here were minds to be sculptured, here were ideas to be painted, here were lives to shape. To spend his allotted time on earth as a bank teller or an insurance salesman would have seemed an utter waste to Rick. Women, he had reflected had no such problem. Creation had been given to them as a gift and a woman was self-sufficient within her own creative shell. A man needed more which perhaps was one reason why a woman could never understand a man’s concern for the job he had to do.

Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor, suppress miser, put an end to the unjust farming out of the feeble by the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy of the man who is making his way against the man who has reach his goal, adjust, mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor, mingle gratuitous and compulsory education with the growth of childhood, and make of science the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping arms busy, be at one and the same time a powerful people and a family of happy men, render property democratic, not by abolishing it, but by making it universal, so that every citizen, without exception, may be a proprietor, an easier matter than is generally supposed; in two words, learn how to produce wealth and how to distribute it, and you will have at once moral and material greatness.

All the problems that the socialists proposed to themselves, cosmogonic visions, reverie and mysticism being cast aside, can be reduced to two principal problems. First problem: To produce wealth. Second problem: To share it. The first problem contains the question of work. The second contains the question of salary. In the first problem the employment of forces is in question. In the second, the distribution of enjoyment. From the proper employment of forces results public power. From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness. By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution must be understood. From these two things combined, the public power without, individual happiness within, results social prosperity. Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation great. England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth admirably, she divides it badly. This solution which is complete on one side only leads her fatally to two extremes: monstrous opulence, monstrous wretchedness. All enjoyments for some, all privations for the rest, that is to say, for the people; privilege, exception, monopoly, feudalism, born from toil itself. A false and dangerous situation, which sates public power or private misery, which sets the roots of the State in the sufferings of the individual. A badly constituted grandeur in which are combined all the material elements and into which no moral element enters. Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem. They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition made by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is therefore impossible to pause over these pretended solutions. Slaying wealth is not the same thing as dividing it. The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved. The two problems must be combined and made but one.

Avoiding School or Dropping Out Unfortunately, school sometimes becomes so difficult for people with social anxiety that they start avoiding it as much as they can. This has a serious effect on a person’s future. It is difficult to get a good job with a decent salary if you do not have a high school diploma. If you drop out, you are setting yourself up for a difficult time. Cedric has always had a hard time in school because of his extreme social anxiety. He feels uncomfortable with his classmates and avoids speaking with them. During classes, he always sits in the back and never participates. When teachers call on him, he usually mumbles “I don’t know.” As a result of his social anxiety, he has low self-esteem and suffers from depression. One day, he decided that it didn’t matter if he went to school or not. Some mornings, he hides in the yard until his mother leaves for work, and then he stays in his room all day. Other times, he wanders around the woods. Cedric has no idea what he wants to do with his life. He knows it is only a matter of time before his mother finds out he has been missing school. He wishes he could just hide and hibernate. Deep down, he knows he has a problem, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. Secretly, he hopes his mother forces him to see a therapist because he is afraid of what the rest of his life is going to be like.

Life as an Enron employee was good. Prestwood’s annual salary rose steadily to sixty-five thousand dollars, with additional retirement benefits paid in Enron stock. When Houston Natural and Internorth had merged, all of Prestwood’s investments were automatically converted to Enron stock. He continued to set aside money in the company’s retirement fund, buying even more stock. Internally, the company relentlessly promoted employee stock ownership. Newsletters touted Enron’s growth as “simply stunning,” and Lay, at company events, urged employees to buy more stock. To Prestwood, it didn’t seem like a problem that his future was tied directly to Enron’s. Enron had committed to him, and he was showing his gratitude. “To me, this is the American way, loyalty to your employer,” he says. Prestwood was loyal to the bitter end. When he retired in 2000, he had accumulated 13,500 shares of Enron stock, worth $1.3 million at their peak. Then, at age sixty-eight, Prestwood suddenly lost his entire Enron nest egg. He now survives on a previous employer’s pension of $521 a month and a Social Security check of $1,294. “There aint no such thing as a dream anymore,” he says. He lives on a three-acre farm north of Houston willed to him as a baby in 1938 after his mother died. “I hadn’t planned much for the retirement. Wanted to go fishing, hunting. I was gonna travel a little.

Before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the very word conspiracy was seldom used by most Americans. The JFK assassination was the seminal national event in the lives of the Baby Boomer generation. We’ve heard all the clichés about the loss of our innocence, and the beginning of public distrust in our government’s leaders, being born with the events of November 22, 1963, but there’s a good deal of truth in that. President Kennedy tapped into our innate idealism and inspired a great many people, especially the young, like no president ever had before. John F. Kennedy was vastly different from most of our elected presidents. He was the first president to refuse a salary. He never attended a Bilderberg meeting. He was the first Catholic to sit in the Oval Office, and he almost certainly wasn’t related to numerous other presidents and/or the royal family of England, as is often the case. He was a genuine war hero, having tugged an injured man more than three miles using only a life preserver’s strap between his teeth, after the Japanese had destroyed the boat he commanded, PT-109. This selfless act seems even more courageous when one takes into account Kennedy’s recurring health problems and chronic bad back. He was an intellectual and an accomplished author who wrote many of his memorable speeches. He would never have been invited to dance naked with other powerful men and worship a giant owl, as so many of our leaders do every summer at Bohemian Grove in California.

First problem: To produce wealth. Second problem: To share it. The first problem contains the question of labor. The second contains the question of salary. In the first problem the employment of forces is in question. In the second, the distribution of enjoyment. From the proper employment of forces results public power. From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness. By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution must be understood. From these two things combined, the public power without, individual happiness within, results social prosperity. Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation great. England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth admirably, she divides it badly. This solution which is complete on one side only leads her fatally to two extremes: monstrous opulence, monstrous wretchedness. All enjoyments for some, all privations for the rest, that is to say, for the people; privilege, exception, monopoly, feudalism, born from toil itself. A false and dangerous situation, which sates public power or private misery, which sets the roots of the State in the sufferings of the individual. A badly constituted grandeur in which are combined all the material elements and into which no moral element enters. Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem. They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition made by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is therefore impossible to pause over these pretended solutions. Slaying wealth is not the same thing as dividing it. The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved. The two problems must be combined and made but one. …Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor, suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the feeble by the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy of the man who is making his way against the man who has reached the goal, adjust, mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor, mingle gratuitous and compulsory education with the growth of childhood, and make of science the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping arms busy, be at one and the same time a powerful people and a family of happy men, render property democratic, not by abolishing it, but by making it universal, so that every citizen, without exception, may be a proprietor, an easier matter than is generally supposed; in two words, learn how to produce wealth and how to distribute it, and you will have at once moral and material greatness; and you will be worthy to call yourself France.

When a man helps a colleague, the recipient feels indebted to him and is highly likely to return the favor. But when a woman helps out, the feeling of indebtedness is weaker. She’s communal, right? She wants to help others. Professor Flynn calls this the “gender discount” problem, and it means that women are paying a professional penalty for their presumed desire to be communal.10 On the other hand, when a man helps a coworker, it’s considered an imposition and he is compensated with more favorable performance evaluations and rewards like salary increases and bonuses. Even more frustrating, when a woman declines to help a colleague, she often receives less favorable reviews and fewer rewards. But a man who declines to help? He pays no penalty.11 Because

In order for a person to work at a church legally as an independent contractor, we believe it is prudent to consider the following guidelines:   ·       The church cannot substantially direct the person’s duties; the church can only give them overall tasks to complete.   ·       The church cannot control or set their hours that they work.   ·       Since their “company” provides the service, they can send anyone to do the job.   ·       They cannot have an office at the church that is their primary office.   ·       It cannot be their only source of income.   ·       The church needs to have a written contract in place including cost, delivery of Services, duration (i.e. six months, one year, etc.) and a termination clause.   ·       They cannot participate in any employee benefits plans (insurance, retirement plans, etc).   ·       The contractor must provide annual proof of worker’s comp and liability insurance naming the church as additionally insured or the church could be held liable in the event of a claim.   ·       The church must issue a 1099 at the end of the year for all contract wages paid if the total amount for the year exceeds $600.00 to one contractor. We strongly recommend that no payments are made until an accurate and fully completed W-9 is completed by the contractor and on file at the church.        Given these requirements, many workers such as those in the nursery, kitchens, and other service areas are not 1099 contractors, but employees.     Regarding interim pastors, there is disagreement over whether they should receive a W-2 or 1099. Factors such as length of service, who supervises them, and whether they are a contractor, come into play in the decision on how to report their salary. For the best practice we recommend always using the W-2 to report salaries, but seeking tax and legal counsel would be wise to avoid any future IRS issues.      While there are advantages to the church to pay independent contractors who regularly work for the church such as avoiding the need to pay the employer's part of the FICA tax and the ease of terminating their services, we would recommend against their regular use.      We recommend against the use of independent contractors (that regularly work at the church) because we believe it can create the following problems for the church:   ·       Less control over the position   ·       Leaves the church open to an IRS challenge, which the church only has a 50/50 chance of defending, not to mention the cost and hassle of litigation   ·       In the event of insurance claims, the church may encounter issues with worker’s compensation coverage or liability insurance coverage such as sexual misconduct, etc.   ·       The church is open to contract disputes with the independent contractor   ·       Based on how the individual/company is filing their taxes, it could bring an unwanted tax audit to the church        Our conclusion is that we do not see enough cost-saving advantages for the church to move in this direction. It also creates unnecessary red flags for the IRS. The other looming question is, why is this such an important issue for such a small incremental (if any) tax break for the individual? Because the independent contractor will have to pay employer FICA, we don’t see any large tax advantage for this shift. They can claim mileage and some home office expense (maybe), but it just does not amount to enough to place the church at risk.      Here are some detailed guidelines

Moreover, these changes occurred when most American households actually found their real incomes stagnant or declining. Median household income for the last four decades is shown in the chart above. But this graph, disturbing as it is, conceals a far worse reality. The top 10 percent did much better than everyone else; if you remove them, the numbers change dramatically. Economic analysis has found that “only the top 10 percent of the income distribution had real compensation growth equal to or above . . . productivity growth.”14 In fact, most gains went to the top 1 percent, while people in the bottom 90 percent either had declining household incomes or were able to increase their family incomes only by working longer hours. The productivity of workers continued to grow, particularly with the Internet revolution that began in the mid-1990s. But the benefits of productivity growth went almost entirely into the incomes of the top 1 percent and into corporate profits, both of which have grown to record highs as a fraction of GNP. In 2010 and 2011 corporate profits accounted for over 14 percent of total GNP, a historical record. In contrast, the share of US GNP paid as wages and salaries is at a historical low and has not kept pace with inflation since 2006.15 As I was working on this manuscript in late 2011, the US Census Bureau published the income statistics for 2010, when the US recovery officially began. The national poverty rate rose to 15.1 percent, its highest level in nearly twenty years; median household income declined by 2.3 percent. This decline, however, was very unequally distributed. The top tenth experienced a 1 percent decline; the bottom tenth, already desperately poor, saw its income decline 12 percent. America’s median household income peaked in 1999; by 2010 it had declined 7 percent. Average hourly income, which corrects for the number of hours worked, has barely changed in the last thirty years. Ranked by income equality, the US is now ninety-fifth in the world, just behind Nigeria, Iran, Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast. The UK has mimicked the US; even countries with low levels of inequality—including Denmark and Sweden—have seen an increasing gap since the crisis. This is not a distinguished record. And it’s not a statistical fluke. There is now a true, increasingly permanent underclass living in near-subsistence conditions in many wealthy states. There are now tens of millions of people in the US alone whose condition is little better than many people in much poorer nations. If you add up lifetime urban ghetto residents, illegal immigrants, migrant farm-workers, those whose criminal convictions sharply limit their ability to find work, those actually in prison, those with chronic drug-abuse problems, crippled veterans of America’s recently botched wars, children in foster care, the homeless, the long-term unemployed, and other severely disadvantaged groups, you get to tens of millions of people trapped in very harsh, very unfair conditions, in what is supposedly the wealthiest, fairest society on earth. At any given time, there are over two million people in US prisons; over ten million Americans have felony records and have served prison time for non-traffic offences. Many millions more now must work very long hours, and very hard, at minimum-wage jobs in agriculture, retailing, cleaning, and other low-wage service industries. Several million have been unemployed for years, exhausting their savings and morale. Twenty or thirty years ago, many of these people would have had—and some did have—high-wage jobs in manufacturing or construction. No more. But in addition to growing inequalities in income and wealth, America exhibits

The MTA had limited flexibility to cut its expenses. The subways had very high fixed costs and the Transit Authority needed to provide enough services for the four-hour peak commuting period. While a private business would have tried to replace full-time workers with part-time workers or scaled back salaries and benefits, those were not feasible options for a state-run enterprise whose workers were politically influential. Instead, a new union contract in 1968 allowed transit workers to retire with half pay after twenty years of work, exacerbating the MTA’s financial problems and affecting service quality after most of the car maintenance workers and 40 percent of the electrical workers retired in the next two years.75 With

He came through with an offer of a job. The starting salary was $10,000 a year. “That is absolutely terrific,” I said. “But there’s only one problem.” “What’s that?” “I need $10,500.” “I’m sorry,” he said. “What do you mean?” “I need $10,500 because I heard there’s another person graduating from Yale who’s making $10,000, and I want to be the highest-paid person in my class.” “I don’t care,” said Bill. “I shouldn’t be paying you anything at all. It’s $10,000!” “Then I won’t take the job.” “You won’t take the job?” “No. I need $10,500. It’s not a big deal to you, but it’s a really big deal to me.” Donaldson started laughing. “You’ve got to be kidding.” “No,” I said, “I’m not kidding.” “Let me think about it.” Two days later he called back. “Okay. $10,500.” And with that I entered the securities business.

The interim had an interesting if musty mind; he identified as a Christian Unitarian, a dwindling, more conservative branch of the denomination rare in California. I enjoyed him, but nobody else at the AUUCC liked him very much. Or at all. To hear him tell it, the churches that he’d previously served were all in dire shape when he arrived. He’d mopped up after “negotiated settlements” and all manner of ecclesiastical and clerical dysfunction. While I thought that Sparlo had made us into a strong, sane, healthy church with a board that functioned like an intelligent, reasonable brain and an endowment the envy of many, the interim, who was used to coming in and fixing things, found deep problems where we saw none. He found it ethically objectionable, for example, that a powerful lay leader was the church’s salaried secretary. “That Belinda Bauer knows too much,” he once told me over pho. “She thinks she runs the church.

Under Putin, resources once again began to be allocated to the police, but there was no substantive reform. Instead, it was during the single term in which he retreated to the position of prime minister (as the Russian constitution forbade anyone serving three consecutive terms as president), with his client Dmitry Medvedev as titular president (2008–12), that this process began. A lawyer by training, Medvedev appreciated the problems with Russian law enforcement. He introduced a new Law on the Police in 2011, which not only changed the force’s name back to politsiya, “police,” but also mandated compulsory re-accreditation of all serving officers, with the aim of cutting the size of the force by 22 percent to 1,106,472 officers. At the same time, salaries were to be increased by 30 percent.

In each case, the answer is the same: we clergy (I speak as part of the problem) are caught in a tangled web of conflicts of interest, most (if not all) involving money. Because of my years in parish ministry, I feel the pain on all sides. I understand why a large percentage of our pastors become the kinds of company men we considered in the previous chapter. They must constantly negotiate among their own moral and spiritual instincts, the interests of their institutions, their personal concerns about their own salaries and retirement accounts, and professional and social status.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am. What happens next is that the rewards get real. You reach for the next rung of the ladder, and this time it’s a job with a salary in the Chicago offices of a high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin. You’re back where you started, in the city where you were born, only now you go to work on the forty-seventh floor in a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to high school, peering mutely out the window at the people who strode like titans to their jobs. Now you’re one of them. You’ve worked yourself out of that bus and across the plaza and onto an upward-moving elevator so silent it seems to glide. You’ve joined the tribe. At the age of twenty-five, you have an assistant. You make more money than your parents ever have. Your co-workers are polite, educated, and mostly white. You wear an Armani suit and sign up for a subscription wine service. You make monthly payments on your law school loans and go to step aerobics after work. Because you can, you buy yourself a Saab. Is there anything to question? It doesn’t seem that way. You’re a lawyer now. You’ve taken everything ever given to you—the love of your parents, the faith of your teachers, the music from Southside and Robbie, the meals from Aunt Sis, the vocabulary words drilled into you by Dandy—and converted it to this. You’ve climbed the mountain. And part of your job, aside from parsing abstract intellectual property issues for big corporations, is to help cultivate the next set of young lawyers being courted by the firm. A senior partner asks if you’ll mentor an incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course you will. You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes. You don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip. Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law student who’s busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he’s black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing—just the name, and it’s an odd one. Barack.

Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This is what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they’ve inherited. And we’re either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths, just like I did with my brother, or we’re absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up. I’m in suicide prevention now. I’ve had fifteen relatives commit suicide over the course of my life, not counting my brother. I had one community I was working with recently in South Dakota tell me they were grieved out. That was after experiencing seventeen suicides in their community in just eight months. But how do we instill in our children the will to live? At these conferences. And in the offices. In the emails and at the community events, there has to be an urgency, a do-whatever-at-any-cost sort of spirit behind what we do. Or fuck the programs, maybe we should send the money to the families themselves, who need it and know what to do with it, since we all know what that money goes toward, salaries and conferences like this one. I’m sorry. I get paid outta that shit too, and actually, shit, I’m not sorry, this issue shouldn’t be met with politeness or formality. We can’t get lost in the career advancements and grant objectives, the day-to-day grind, as if we have to do what we do. We choose what we do, and in that choice comes the community. We are choosing for them. All the time. That’s what these kids are feeling. They have no control. Guess what kinda control they do have? We need to be about what we’re always saying we’re about. And if we can’t, and we’re really just about ourselves, we need to step aside, let somebody else from the community who really cares, who’ll really do something, let them come in and help. Fuck all the rest.

In the longer term, business itself will be harmed by shifting from R&D to financial manipulations. In earlier days, that might have been a concern. But managerial ethic has shifted from the time when viability of the firm was a serious concern to today’s focus on gain tomorrow. The long-term prospects for the firm become lesser considerations—or for human society generally. Nothing could reveal this shift with more brilliant clarity than a matter already discussed: the virtually reflexive decisions to race toward destruction, with eyes open, if it yields short-term gain. Right now profits are spectacular and CEO salaries have skyrocketed to the stratosphere, dragging other managerial rewards with them, while for the general population, real wages stagnate, social spending is meager, unions and other interferences with “sound economics” are dismantled. The best of all possible worlds. So why care if my firm will go under after I’ve moved to greener pastures, or for that matter, why care if I leave to my grandchildren a world in which they have some chance for decent survival? Capitalist mentality gone insane. There is, of course, the usual problem. The rascal multitude. They’re not too happy about the undermining of functioning democracy and basic rights. I should add the same is true in Europe. In fact, even more so. The attack on democracy in Europe is even sharper than here. Significant decisions about society and politics are out of the hands of the population. They’re made by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels: the IMF, the Central Bank, the European Commission. All of this, all over the world, is leading to anger, resentment, and bitterness. You see it right now in the Yellow Vest movement in France, but it’s everywhere. In election after election, the centrist parties are collapsing. It’s happening here, too. Parties happen to be keeping their names in our rigid two-party system, but the centrist elements are losing their grip.

Page 1-2 One of the most serious concerns of the Thai government for the past forty years or so has been the presence within the national society of an economically powerful minority group whose way of life is alien, and in some respects incompatible, to the Thai way of life. How to assimilate this minority, or at least to reduce its influence nationally, is a question which has troubled a succession of Thai monarchs and prime ministers. To speak of the Chinese minority as constituting a problem is only to recognize this concern felt in varying degrees by all Thai political leaders. Yet, the Chinese living in Thailand are peaceful and self-disciplined, a thrifty and very industrious people who have made significant contributions to their adopted land—to what extent, then, can they be regarded as a ‘problem’? While the Chinese problem has many dimensions, at is first of all an economic problem, and it is precisely this aspect which looms largest for the Thai. As they see it, the Chinese, welcomed into the Kingdom years ago by a generous government, have since that time subtly undermined the livelihood of the Thai people themselves. They have driven the latter from various skilled crafts, monopolized new occupations, and through combination of commercial know-how and chicanery have gained a stranglehold over the trade and commerce of the entire Kingdom. The Thai see the Chinese as exploiting unmercifully their advantageous economic position: the Thai are obliged to pay high prices to the Chinese for the very necessities of life, and on the other hand are forced to accept the lowest price for the rice they grow. Through deliberate profiteering, according to standard Thai thinking, this minority has driven up living costs, hitting especially hard government employees on fixed salaries. It is also charged that profits made by the Chinese go out of the country in the form of remittances to China, which means a continuous and gigantic draining away of the Kingdom’s wealth. To protect their favored economic position, one hears, the Chinese have not hesitated to bribe officials, which in turn has undermined the efficiency and morale of the public service. Efforts to protect the economic interests of the Thai people through legislation have been only partially effective, again because of Chinese adeptness at evasion and dissimulation.

Her problem, I surmised, had been loneliness. Many wives dealt with the challenges of parenting, housekeeping, and socializing, but for much of the year, Mama had faced those challenges alone. Then Papa would come home, upsetting established routines, countermanding Mama’s orders, and expecting to be obeyed in all things by a woman who’d managed his estate and household for him without benefit of a salary.

We need to stop thinking we can "rescue" the world from problems we helped create. Haiti has no money because the United States, France, and other colonial powers stole it. When we buy a twenty-dollar shirt that a Haitian was paid pennies to make, we are continuing to steal from them. When a U.S. aid worker in Haiti is paid a salary equivalent to that of fifty Haitians, we are continuing to steal from them. This is not aid. Aid is reparations. Relief is overthrowing a system of colonial domination, and eliminating debt. Support is standing in solidarity with Haitians ... [who] are organizing and fighting and leading their own struggles for an end to colonialism.

If a prospective employer tells you your compensation is above their budget, it’s not your problem. Your above-average pay is a validation that you are an above-average performer. Don’t apologize for being the best talent. You have reached there with hard work and determination. Don’t undersell. Mediocre salaries will only get them mediocre talent.

How Do You See Rich People? One day, I was eating in a swanky restaurant with a friend—a friend who, ever since I could remember, was permanently in financial lack. Financial problems stuck to him like glue. And his friends avoided him like the plague because he kept borrowing money and never pay them back. While munching, he looked around the nicely decorated room and said, "The owner of this restaurant is probably cheating. He's probably not paying his taxes. He's also probably not paying the right salaries to his waiters. And he's also probably..." I cut him mid-sentence and asked, "How do you know?" I figured he probably had inside information. But he said, "Isn't it obvious? He's so rich. He must be cheating." That day, I realized why my friend was poor and always buried in debt. Although on the outside he wants to get out of poverty, on the inside he wants to remain poor. Subconsciously, he was resisting wealth. His subconscious found a way to avoid becoming rich. Because according to his belief system, all rich people are bad people—and he didn't want to be bad. Do you want to gain a prosperity mindset? Stop judging all rich people as crooks. Some rich people are very good people. When you see a friend becoming rich, share in her joy. Be happy for her. When you do that, you're telling yourself that it's also OK for you to become rich.

difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

It was a great job for a while,” Jim said with trademark understatement. For a while? At Jim’s salary, with the stock options still ahead of him, he was closing in on “pay off your parents’ mortgage and start a foundation” territory. What more could one person possibly want from a job? Well, for Jim Koch, it wasn’t about more; it was about different. In the beginning at BCG, Jim was being paid to learn about business strategy, product categories, organizational issues, and business problems. But once he entered management, his job became . . . well . . . boring. He was selling BCG’s services rather than diving into problems and finding solutions. “The learning stopped,” he said. “And then I had this epiphany. I asked myself, ‘Do I want to do this the rest of my life?’ And the answer came back: ‘No.’ And the corollary to that was, ‘Well, if I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life, I probably don’t want to do it tomorrow.

Life as an Enron employee was good. Prestwood’s annual salary rose steadily to sixty-five thousand dollars, with additional retirement benefits paid in Enron stock. When Houston Natural and Internorth had merged, all of Prestwood’s investments were automatically converted to Enron stock. He continued to set aside money in the company’s retirement fund, buying even more stock. Internally, the company relentlessly promoted employee stock ownership. Newsletters touted Enron’s growth as “simply stunning,” and Lay, at company events, urged employees to buy more stock. To Prestwood, it didn’t seem like a problem that his future was tied directly to Enron’s. Enron had committed to him, and he was showing his gratitude. “To me, this is the American way, loyalty to your employer,” he says. Prestwood was loyal to the bitter end. When he retired in 2000, he had accumulated 13,500 shares of Enron stock, worth $1.3 million at their peak. Then, at age sixty-eight, Prestwood suddenly lost his entire Enron nest egg. He now survives on a previous employer’s pension of $521 a month and a Social Security check of $1,294. “There aint no such thing as a dream anymore,” he says. He lives on a three-acre farm north of Houston willed to him as a baby in 1938 after his mother died. “I hadn’t planned much for the retirement. Wanted to go fishing, hunting. I was gonna travel a little.” Now he’ll sell his family’s land. Has to, he says. He is still paying off his mortgage.7 In some respects, Prestwood’s case is not unusual. Often people do not diversify at all, and sometimes employees invest a lot of their money in their employer’s stock. Amazing but true: five million Americans have more than 60 percent of their retirement savings in company stock.8 This concentration is risky on two counts. First, a single security is much riskier than the portfolios offered by mutual funds. Second, as employees of Enron and WorldCom discovered the hard way, workers risk losing both their jobs and the bulk of their retirement savings all at once.

VPs of Administration and Finance represent the interests of that business vertical. They are also strongly partial to the systems used by that business vertical. For example, within a medical university, they cannot be expected to also represent marketing; advancement; communications; business development; client relations; disease control; provost; faculty; student life; or other departments. Think about your enterprise: How can the person overseeing finance be impartial or well-informed across all your departments? Under many organizations' reporting structures, the CIO is expected to develop relationships with these other business verticals, but since they report to the CFO they are excluded from the very cabinet meetings where leaders congregate. Even when CIOs are invited, they are not considered of equal rank -- because they are not. Everyone views the CFO as the final authority for IT decisions, leading to some serious problems. In these organizations, finance drives strategy instead of strategy driving finance. IT is seen as a cost center and there is a perennial pressure to cut costs and reduce expenditures -- often at the detriment of strategy. Cybersecurity may be non-existent in these organizations. Setting appropriate salaries for CIOs and people reporting to the CIOs becomes impossible.

Back in school, he set out to write another dissertation. He found another interesting question: How much is a human life worth? He also found a clever way to approach the problem. He compared the salaries for risky jobs—coal miner, logger, skyscraper window-washer—to the life expectancy of the people who did them. From the data, he backed out what Americans needed to be paid to accept an expected reduction in their life span. If you could calculate what people needed to be paid to accept a 1 percent chance of being killed on the job, you could, in theory, work out what you’d need to pay them to accept a 100 percent chance of being killed on the job. (The number he came up with was $1.4 million, in 2016 dollars.) Later he’d think of his methods as a little silly. (“Do we really think people make this decision rationally?”) But older, more successful economists were happy to assume that, say, America’s coal miners made some inner calculation of the value of their lives, and charged accordingly.

The difference between politicians and us voters . To politicians its all fun and games. Flexing power and chess moves. To us it is our lives and reality. No matter which decision they take. That won’t affect their salary, job, or lifestyle. But every decision they make it affects our lives, jobs, and lifestyle. Until we are all in the same boat and share the same problems with them. They won’t understand our suffering and won’t solve our problems. They will make decisions that doesn’t favor us. They won’t have our best interests at heart.

We’ve been against performance reviews from the beginning. The first problem is that the feedback goes only one way—downward. The second difficulty is that with a performance review you get feedback from only one person—your boss. This is in direct opposition to our “don’t seek to please your boss” vibe. I want people to receive feedback not just from their direct managers but from anyone who has feedback to provide. The third issue is that companies usually base performance reviews on annual goals. But employees and their managers don’t set annual goals or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) at Netflix. Likewise, many companies use performance reviews to determine pay raises, but at Netflix we base salaries on the market, not performance.

In the spring of 1935, an editor at the New York publishing house Macmillan, while on a scouting trip through the South, was introduced to Mitchell and signed her to a deal for her untitled book. Upon its release in the summer of 1936, the New York Times Book Review declared it “one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer.” Priced at $3, Gone with the Wind was a blockbuster. By the end of the summer, Macmillan had sold over 500,000 copies. A few days prior to the gushing review in the Times, an almost desperate telegram originated from New York reading, “I beg, urge, coax, and plead with you to read this at once. I know that after you read the book you will drop everything and buy it.” The sender, Kay Brown, in this missive to her boss, the movie producer David Selznick, asked to purchase the book’s movie rights before its release. But Selznick waited. On July 15, seeing its reception, Selznick bought the film rights to Gone with the Wind for $50,000. Within a year, sales of the book had exceeded one million copies. Almost immediately Selznick looked to assemble the pieces needed to turn the book into a movie. At the time, he was one of a handful of major independent producers (including Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, and Walt Disney) who had access to the resources to make films. Few others could break into a system controlled by the major studios. After producing films as an employee of major studios, including Paramount and MGM, the thirty-seven-year-old Selznick had branched out to helm his own productions. He had been a highly paid salaried employee throughout the thirties. His career included producer credits on dozens of films, but nothing as big as what he had now taken on. As the producer, Selznick needed to figure out how to take a lengthy book and translate it onto the screen. To do this, Selznick International Pictures needed to hire writers and a director, cast the characters, get the sets and the costumes designed, set a budget, put together the financing by giving investors profit-participation interests, arrange the distribution plan for theaters, and oversee the marketing to bring audiences to see the film. Selznick’s bigger problem was the projected cost.

H. Srikrishnan, then head of transactional banking and operations, gave me an example, ‘We looked at funds transfer—which was manual—such as MTs (mail transfers) and TTs (telegraphic transfers). When we implemented a centralized banking solution, the key things we could do were to sweep across multiple locations and get the balances of customers or transfer funds from one location to another using core banking. Those were big problems we solved.’ HDFC Bank was thus the first among Indian banks to have a centralized system. Whilst foreign banks like Citibank had centralized systems, they lacked the branch strength to fully leverage them. It is worth remembering that in the mid-1990s, banking didn’t really exist in the form that we know of today. Customers could open bank accounts, but the whole gamut of products (home loan, car loan, etc.) and services (Internet banking) was just not available. Salaries would still be paid by cheque and employees would have to take time off from their jobs to go to the bank, write a deposit slip, hand it over to the teller and then wait for the cheque to get cleared. Also, the employer would have to take time off to sit and sign numerous salary cheques to be given to all the employees. Compare this to the instant, online credit of salary today and a notification by SMS and email at the end of every month! HDFC Bank’s centralized technology platform allowed it to kick-off a revolution in how employees were paid their salaries.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “in the last few years, student loan debt has hovered around the $1 trillion mark, becoming the second-largest consumer obligation after mortgages and invoking parallels with the housing bubble that precipitated the 2007–2009 recession…the proportion of the U.S. population with student loans increased from about 7 percent in 2003 to about 15 percent in 2012; in addition, over the same period, the average student loan debt for a 40-year-old borrower almost doubled, reaching a level of more than $30,000.” Grad students incur even more debt, and the salaries, especially in education, aren’t usually high enough to make that master’s degree (which is a great academic boost) a worthwhile return on investment financially. If it turns out that college isn’t for you or if problems prevent you from graduating, you can end up with lots of debt and no degree to show for it. Having hours toward college doesn’t qualify you for a job that requires a degree, so you could end up with the debt and without the necessary letters behind your name. In contrast, blue collar training requires fewer years and costs less than a college degree; in some fields, you learn on the job while being paid.

The report by the Community Service Society cites an official of the New York City Board of Education who remarks that there is “no point” in putting further money “into some poor districts” because, in his belief, “new teachers would not stay there.” But the report observes that, in an instance where beginning teacher salaries were raised by nearly half, “that problem largely disappeared”—another interesting reminder of the difference money makes when we are willing to invest it. Nonetheless, says the report, “the perception that the poorest districts are beyond help still remains.…” Perhaps the worst result of such beliefs, says the report, is the message that resources would be “wasted on poor children.” This message “trickles down to districts, schools, and classrooms.” Children hear and understand this theme—they are poor investments—and behave accordingly. If society’s resources would be wasted on their destinies, perhaps their own determination would be wasted too. “Expectations are a powerful force …,” the CSS observes.

Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a large research staff to study the problem.

Mr. Nelson Morris, twenty-six years old, endowed with a salary of $75,000, admitted that neither he nor Mr. Ferris, who determined employees' wages, ever visited their homes. Mr. Morris said he had never looked over a budget showing the cost of living for a laboring man with a family. The plain truth is that this newer generation of industrial lords grew up in luxury, apart from the toilers who earn their profits for them. To them the workers are like machinery, to be bought at the cheapest price attainable, to be run at the highest possible speed the longest number of hours, to be scrapped when worn out and replaced by new" [New York Evening Mail, ca. 1918].

The result is that CEOs are often rewarded for pure luck; when the stock market valuation of the firm goes up, even if it is due to pure chance (e.g., world crude oil prices went up, the exchange rate moved in the firm’s favor), their salary increases. The one exception, which in some ways proves the rule, is that CEOs of companies where there is a single large shareholder who sits on the board (and is vigilant because it is his own money on the line) get paid significantly less for luck than for genuinely productive management.56

CONCLUSION: THE CENTRAL BANKER AS JUDGE This breakdown of the Ulysses/punch-bowl function of the Federal Reserve doesn’t mean that separating some of the Fed’s functions from the day-to-day of electoral politics is unnecessary in the face of deflationary, rather than inflationary, pressures. In fact, the very opposite could be true: if there is a partisan movement in favor of economic policies that could result in a deflationary spiral, we would face the Great Depression redux. Keeping the power to trigger such a consequence away from partisan politics seems like a desirable goal for the institutional design of central banks. But it also requires a different theoretical frame. It may be that the frame for independence is one that we already widely accept in society: judicial independence. The U.S. Constitution gives the federal judiciary life tenure and effective budgetary independence (that is, while they can’t print their own money or raise it independent of congressional appropriations, the Congress cannot constitutionally lower judicial salaries). The reason is so that, to the fullest extent possible, any determinations that favor politicians occur either because the law compels it or because the judge and the politician share the same worldview. The idea that the judge is currying favor with the politician in hopes of further appointment or out of fear of getting her salary removed are taken off the table. It’s not a perfect system, but it is one that most recognize as an important balance between democratic values (the politician gets to appoint the judges from the polity) and some degree technocratic, objective judgment (the judges decide the cases, not the politicians).26 The crisis and the reactions to unconventional monetary policy suggest that the Fed is often performing a delicate adjudicative function, not a simply technocratic one. The problem with the technocratic, Ulysses-contract view of central banking are the two fractured constituencies mentioned above. While most economists have endorsed the Fed’s approach to postcrisis monetary policy, the “technocratic” view has been far from uniform. And, again, the populists aren’t clearly clamoring for prosperity by way of inflation, contra that Ulysses/punch-bowl view. At least in a crisis, and arguably in other times as well, the central bank isn’t

The circle between Madison Avenue and Wall Street was complete; they were inexorably linked, in a relationship developed in ten short years, during which the ad men had created an ambience invaluable to the continuing popularity of stock speculation. The limitless, desirable, and expensive goods coming onto the market—often products of companies quoted on the Stock Exchange—could only be sold by determined advertising campaigns. If those campaigns failed, the market would slump. To maintain his place in consumer society, a man was told he needed a car, radio, icebox, and refrigerator; his wife required a washing machine, automatic furnace, and one of the modish pastel-hued toilets. To complete their domestic bliss they would have the latest in bathrooms: a shrine of stunning magnificence, containing, among other items, “a dental lavatory of vitreous china, twice fired.” To buy it would cost the average American six months’ salary. But paying was no problem; there were the installment plans. It was also part of the advertising philosophy that it was no longer enough to buy a car, radio, or refrigerator. People must have the latest model—junking the old one, even though it was still useful. Failure to do so would cause factories to close from the Atlantic to the Pacific, ending what some newspapers called “the golden era.” To protect it, they told their readers, was the patriotic duty of every American; one way to express that was, “to buy until it hurts.

Want to clear that people like me are always looking for the worth not for salaries. Beside from your all good things, I found the mismatch of salary & worth pair, so I decided to move on. But frankly I missed you, I have said already. If you remember I said you that I can come there on maintenance day (on Friday) and I can help you in any work without any expectation. That option could have been better for me & you too. Anyway, I got the point about recovery management now. If you don’t have any problem, then you can send more information about the same (externalwork30@yahoo.com). I would like to work for the employer like you. Side by side I’ll get another experience. Let’s hope for the best.

Cancer and the autoimmune diseases of various sorts are, by and large, diseases of civilization. While industrialized society organized along the capitalist model has solved many problems for many of its members — such as housing, food supply and sanitation — it has also created numerous new pressures even for those who do not need to struggle for the basics of existence. We have come to take these stresses for granted as inevitable consequences of human life, as if human life existed in an abstract form separable from the human beings who live it. When we look at people who only recently have come to experience urban civilization, we can see more clearly that the benefits of “progress” exact hidden costs in terms of physiological balance, to say nothing of emotional and spiritual satisfaction. Hans Selye wrote, “Apparently in a Zulu population, the stress of urbanization increased the incidence of hypertension, predisposing people to heart accidents. In Bedouins and other nomadic Arabs, ulcerative colitis has been noted after settlement in Kuwait City, presumably as a consequence of urbanization.” The main effect of recent trends on the family under the prevailing socioeconomic system, accelerated by the current drive to “globalization,” has been to undermine the family structure and to tear asunder the connections that used to provide human beings with a sense of meaning and belonging. Children spend less time around nurturing adults than ever before during the course of human evolution. The nexus previously based in extended family, village, community and neighbourhood has been replaced by institutions such as daycare and school, where children are more oriented to their peers than to reliable parents or parent substitutes. Even the nuclear family, supposedly the basic unit of the social structure, is under intolerable pressure. In many families now, both parents are having to work to assure the basic necessities one salary could secure a few decades ago. “[The] separation of infants from their mothers and all other types of relocation which leave few possibilities for interpersonal contact are very common forms of sensory deprivation; they may become major factors in disease,” wrote the prescient Hans Selye.

no more stolen moments, let alone hours, in which to discover each other . . . from now on, they were formally betrothed, and that betrothal had its own rules. Maddening, perhaps intentionally so. Luci filched another stuffed date from the tray a sleepy maidservant was carrying back to the kitchen, and followed her father into the library. Her uncle and grandfather, already relaxed in chairs by the fireplace, looked up as she came in. "Luci, you should be in bed." "Papa, I'm not sleepy." He raised his eyebrows at her, but she didn't move. "Papa, I had a message cube from Esmay today." Her uncle Casimir sighed. "Esmay . . . now there's another problem. Berthold, did you get anywhere in the Landsmen's Guild?" "Nowhere. Oh, Vicarios won't oppose us, but that's because of Luci, and his support is half-hearted. It would be different if she hadn't left so young, I think. They don't really remember her, and even though they awarded her the Starmount, and consider her a hero, they do not want a Landbride—any Landbride but especially our Landbride—connected to an outlander family. Cosca told me frankly that even if she moved here, and also her husband, he would oppose it. Nothing good ever came from the stars, he insisted." "And the votes?" "Enough for a challenge, Casi, I'm sure of it. No, the only way out of this is for Esmaya to come and talk to them herself." "Or resign." "Or resign, but—will she?" Luci spoke up. "She mentioned that in her cube." "What—resigning? Why?" "Her precious Fleet seems to think about us the way the Landsmen's Guild thinks about them. She says they have some kind of regulation forbidding officers to marry Landbrides." Her father snorted. "Do they have one forbidding officers to be Landbrides? How ridiculous!" "Are you serious?" Casimir asked. "They have something specific about Landbrides? How would they know?" "I don't know," Luci said. "That's just what she said. And she said why didn't we take in all those women brought back from Our Texas—she was sure they'd fit in." A stunned silence, satisfying by its depth and length. "She what?" Casimir said finally. "Aren't those women—" "Free-birthers and religious cultists," Luci said, with satisfaction. "Exactly." "But—but the priests will object," Berthold said. "Not as badly as the Landsmen's Guild, if they hear of it. Dear God, I thought she had more sense than that!" "She is in love," Luci pointed out, willing now to be magnanimous. "Apparently Fleet is taking Barin's salary to pay for their upkeep—at least some of it—and Esmay's trying to help him out. Nineteen of them, after all, and all those children." "At our expense." Casimir shook his head. "Well, that settles it. She'll have to resign, as soon as I can get word to her. The Trustees will certainly not approve this, if I were willing to let it be known." He gave Luci a hard look. "You didn't tell Philip, I hope." "Of course not." Luci glared at her uncle. Esmay might not have any sense, but she knew what the family honor required. "I hope she does name you Landbride, Luci," Casimir said. "You'll be a good one." Luci had a sudden spasm of doubt. Was she being fair to Esmay, who after all had had so many bad things happen to her? But underneath the doubt, the same exultation she had felt when Esmay gave her the brown mare . . . mine, it's mine, I can take care of it, nobody can hurt it . . . "I wonder if we could place an ansible call," Casimir said. "Surely it's not that urgent,

Guess what the first consideration was of the graduating class of 2014 when looking for a job.1 Nature of the work. Salary and the friendliness of co-workers come in second and third, to complete this completely dysfunctional job-seeker trifecta. The problem with this scenario is that there is no way to know the real “nature of the work” before you have gotten very close to actually getting the job. It’s impossible. Since so many job descriptions are dysfunctional and inaccurate, most people rule out a job as not being “right” for them before they’ve even applied (and before they actually know what they’re rejecting). It’s a nasty chicken-and-egg problem that can severely shrink your potential opportunities. That’s why the most important reframe when you are designing your career is this: you are never looking for a job, you are looking for an offer.

When evaluating a new client for degree of independence, I consider four factors: 1. Emotional issues: Does the person have good resources within himself or herself for coping independently with emotional issues that come up, or does he or she turn to parents not only for advice, but for cues as to how to react to the event in question? 2. Financial issues: Does the adult child earn an adequate living on his or her own, or does he or she rely heavily on parental input for things such as job contacts, supplemental funds, or housing? 3. Practical issues/interactive situations: Can the person manage day-to-day living, finances, nutrition, exercise, and housekeeping? 4. Career/Education issues: Does the person have a rewarding job or career that is commensurate with his or her abilities and offers the potential for further success? Is the person willing to learn new things to increase his or her productivity or compensation? These are the basic skills of living, many of which are addressed in the social ability questionnaire. Just as there are levels of social functioning, so too there are levels of independent functioning. All three of the following levels describe an adult with some degree of dependency problems. A healthy adult is someone who is independent financially, is able to manage practical and interactive issues, and who stays in touch with family but does not rely almost solely on family for emotional support. Level 1—Low Functioning Emotional issues: Lives at home with parent(s) or away from home in a fully structured or supervised environment. Financial issues: Contributes virtually nothing financially to the running of the household. Practical issues: Chooses clothes to wear that day, but does not manage own wardrobe (i.e., laundry, shopping, etc.). Relies on family members to buy food and prepare meals. Does few household chores, if any. May try a few tasks when asked, but seldom follows through until the job is finished. Career/education issues: Is not table to keep a job, and therefore does not earn an independent living. Extremely resistant to learning new skills or changing responsibilities. Level 2: Moderately functioning Emotional issues: Lives either at home or nearby and calls home every day. Relies on parents to discuss all details of daily life, from what happened at work or school that day to what to wear the next day. Will call home for advice rather than trying to figure something out for him- or herself. Financial issues: May rely on parents for supplemental income—parents may supply car, apartment, etc. May be employed by parents at an inflated salary for a job with very few responsibilities. May be irresponsible about paying bills. Practical issues: Is able to make daily decisions about clothing, but may rely on parents when shopping for clothing and other items. Neglects household responsibilities such as laundry, cleaning and meal planning. Career/education issues: Has a job, but is unable to cope with much on-the-job stress; job is therefore only minimally challenging, or a major source of anxiety—discussed in detail with Mom and Dad. Level 3: Functioning Emotional issues: Lives away from home. Calls home a few times a week, relies on family for emotional support and most socializing. Few friends. Practical issues: Handles all aspects of daily household management independently. Financial issues: Is financially independent, pays bills on time. Career/education issues: Has achieved some moderate success at work. Is willing to seek new information, even to take an occasional class to improve skills.

Want to clear that people like me are always looking for the worth not for salaries. Beside from your all good things, I found the mismatch of salary & worth pair, so I decided to move on. But frankly I missed you, I have said already. If you remember I said you that I can come there on maintenance day (on Friday) n can help you in any work without any expectation. That option could be better for me & you too. Anyway, I got the point about recovery management now. If you don’t have any problem, then you can send more information about the same (externalwork30@yahoo.com). I would like to work for the employer like you. Side by side I’ll get another experience. Let’s hope for the best if you don’t have any problem.

Did you ever tell your previous employer any of your thoughts on ways they could improve?” If he says “Yes, but they never listened to anyone,” or “Yeah, but they just said ‘Mind your own business,’” this may tell more about the style of his approach than about managers at his last job. Most employers react well to suggestions that are offered in a constructive way, regardless of whether or not they follow them. Another unfavorable response is, “What’s the use of making suggestions? Nothing ever changes anyway.” Some applicants will accuse former employers of stealing their ideas. Others will tell war stories about efforts to get a former employer to follow suggestions. If so, ask if this was a one-man undertaking or in concert with his coworkers. Sometimes an applicant will say his co-workers “didn’t have the guts to confront management like I did.” “What are some of the things your last employer could have done to keep you?” Some applicants will give a reasonable answer (slightly more pay, better schedule, etc.), but others will provide a list of demands that demonstrate unreasonable expectations (e.g., “They could have doubled my salary, promoted me to vice president, and given me Fridays off”). “How do you go about solving problems at work?” Good answers are that he consults with others, weighs all points of view, discusses them with involved parties, etc. Unfavorable answers contain a theme of confrontation (e.g., “I tell the source of the problem he’d better straighten up,” or “I go right to the man in charge and lay it on the line”). Another bad answer is that he does nothing to resolve problems, saying, “Nothing ever changes anyway.” “Describe a problem you had in your life where someone else’s help was very important to you.” Is he able to recall such a situation? If so, does he give credit or express appreciation about the help? “Who is your best friend and how would you describe your friendship?” Believe it or not, there are plenty of people who cannot come up with a single name in response to this question. If they give a name that was not listed as a reference, ask why. Then ask if you can call that friend as a reference.