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August 11, 2005
Boredom on the job
Here is Brad DeLong's take on Wonkette's take on a story in yesterday's Washington Post about boring jobs -
Boredom: An Interdisciplinary Approach:
Wonkette reports that the Treasury Department was underutilized (to say that it was out-of-the-loop would be to falsely imply that there was a loop) during the first Bush administration.
What Wonkette was referring to was how the Post story Boredom Numbs the Work World starts:
When Bruce Bartlett was the deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury under George H.W. Bush, boredom occasionally drove him from his cushy Washington office to seek relief at the movie theater. One afternoon, he ran into a friend who was a senior official in another department.
"It was kind of awkward," he said.
. . .
Bartlett's problem was that he was deputy assistant secretary for economic policy when the president "just didn't care about economic policy, only foreign policy. . . . Because the White House didn't want to do anything, there wasn't anything we could do," he said.
That problem -- a lack of autonomy and a job that has very specific instructions -- hits workers from the highest to lowest echelons of the working world. Many spend their days surfing the Internet, writing e-mails or taking care of personal business.
Of course, Brad describes how that was all different when he had Bartlett's job under the Clinton Administration.
[In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I once went to a movie in the middle of the day when I was a Senate staffer. But, I was with a senior US trade official and we were researching the movie Rising Sun about US-Japan economic relations.]
Political digs aside (I leave this to Wonkette and Brad), the Post story makes an excellent point: the title and level of a job doesn't mean it isn't boring. Being "promoted" up to a nothing job is a long standing way of getting rid of someone without firing them.
More important than the title of a job is the degree to which a person can use their own initiative - a key feature in the I-Cubed Economy. Just as every job can be boring, most jobs can be challenging if set up that way. This is why I normally recoil at the notion of a separate creative or innovative or "thinking" class. It is more in how the job is structured than just in the nature of the task. Granted there are boring jobs - paint-drying watcher, for example. But most jobs are boring based on how they are set up, not necessarily because of the task.
If we structure jobs to be interesting, we will get better productivity. That is the information economy path.
If we structure them in a ridge fashion with no autonomy and very specific instructions, then they will be boring with static productivity (since productivity increase only occurs in that situation when someone outside changes the instructions). That is the industrial age path. It no longer leads to economic prosperity in this new economy.
So, that is my new policy prescription: eliminate boring jobs and boost productivity!
Posted by Ken Jarboe at August 11, 2005 12:56 PM
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