Archives for posts with tag: efficiency at all costs

The surprising reason your eggs will cost more

May 23, 2015 //
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Efficient Market Hypothesis, eh?
The proponents of this hypothesis posit that all participants to the market are perfectly rational and that they all have enough pertinent information about what is going on as to be able to reach reasonable business decisions.
Now consider this: ‘ten percent of the egg producers being wiped out results in a up to 85% hike in retail prices’.
Quite reasonably, don’t you think?
As for efficiency… maybe for the owners of the surviving ‘egg producers’…

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Categories Choices we make, Economy, Food, Frames of mind, Money as goal, Psychology, The kind of world we live in

Two articles that should be read together

November 24, 2013 //
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“Most of us want to believe that automation frees us to spend our time on higher pursuits but doesn’t otherwise alter the way we behave or think. That view is a fallacy—an expression of what scholars of automation call the “substitution myth.” A labor-saving device doesn’t just provide a substitute for some isolated component of a job or other activity. It alters the character of the entire task, including the roles, attitudes, and skills of the people taking part. As Parasuraman and a colleague explained in a 2010 journal article, “Automation does not simply supplant human activity but rather changes it, often in ways unintended and unanticipated by the designers of automation.”

and

“Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. “The project is datafication. Like those other infrastructural advances, it will bring about fundamental changes to society.”

Some of the changes are well known, and already upon us. Algorithms that predict stock-price movements have transformed Wall Street. Algorithms that chomp through our Web histories have transformed marketing. Until quite recently, however, few people seemed to believe this data-driven approach might apply broadly to the labor market.

But it now does. According to John Hausknecht, a professor at Cornell’s school of industrial and labor relations, in recent years the economy has witnessed a “huge surge in demand for workforce-analytics roles.” Hausknecht’s own program is rapidly revising its curriculum to keep pace. You can now find dedicated analytics teams in the human-resources departments of not only huge corporations such as Google, HP, Intel, General Motors, and Procter & Gamble, to name just a few, but also companies like McKee Foods, the Tennessee-based maker of Little Debbie snack cakes. Even Billy Beane is getting into the game. Last year he appeared at a large conference for corporate HR executives in Austin, Texas, where he reportedly stole the show with a talk titled “The Moneyball Approach to Talent Management.” Ever since, that headline, with minor modifications, has been plastered all over the HR trade press.

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Categories Culture, Psychology, Uncategorized