Volume V — Labour, Value, Flourishing

A woman seated on the floor by a tall window writing in a notebook, smiling at what she has written. — Plate V.01The Two Ledgers.Two ledgers, kept honestly, will not agree. That is not a fault in the bookkeeping. It is the first true thing either of them tells you.

Nº V.01

What a Person Is Worth

There is a question this volume has to ask before it can ask anything else, and it is the one question in economics that people lower their voices to say aloud.

A woman reading in an armchair in a room of plants, a tall window and hills beyond. — Plate V.02The Third Hour.Every calorie spent has to be replaced, and the replacing is not an interruption of the labour. It is the other half of it.

Nº V.02

Work as Metabolism

You have probably met the claim that shorter hours raise productivity, and you may have met it as a headline rather than as a finding.

A woman in a soft knit sitting on a sofa, drinking from a cup held in both hands, pale window light. — Plate V.03The Statement on the Kitchen Table.A share in the company arrives once a year as a number on a page. What that number is worth to the person holding it is a different number, and almost nobody has been shown how to compute it.

Nº V.03

You have probably been told, at some point in the last ten years, that employee ownership is the answer — and told it by somebody sincere, with a case study and a warm anecdote about a janitor who retired with a million dollars.

A woman in a linen robe standing by a window, looking out, morning light on the wall beside her. — Plate V.04The Hour Before the Shift.Every road in a country is on a balance sheet somewhere. The hour that gets the worker to the road is not.

Nº V.04

Care as Infrastructure

Here is a sentence that will survive any argument about economics: nothing in your firm's output would exist if somebody had not fed, washed, taught, nursed and calmed the people who produced it.

A woman reading on a daybed, the shadows of palm leaves falling across the wall behind her in late sun. — Plate V.05The Twenty-Eighth Month.There is a month in every apprenticeship when the firm stops paying for the learning and starts being paid by it. In Switzerland it is month twenty-eight of thirty-six, and almost nobody — including the apprentice — knows the date.

Nº V.05

Skill, Mastery, and Time

You have almost certainly heard someone say, in a meeting about training, that the problem is people leave.

A woman in a bronze silk blouse writing in a book at a desk, smiling down at the page, lamplight behind her. — Plate V.06The Second Column.An advocate reads the good year. An auditor reads the whole series, including the years nobody quotes.

Nº V.06

The Cooperative Firm, Audited

You have probably been handed the cooperative firm twice, and both times as an argument.

Three colleagues walking together down a sunlit corridor, talking, dried grasses beside them. — Plate V.07The Standing Order.A floor is not an amount. It is the removal of a question — and the question was taking up the room the rest of her life had to happen in.

Nº V.07

Income, Floor, and Dignity

There is a version of this argument you have already heard, probably more than once, and it is conducted entirely in adjectives.

A woman and a man seated facing each other among plants in a glass-walled room, talking with their hands. — Plate V.08The Handover.This is an economic input. It has a price, it has a return, and in most accounts it appears only as a wage that somebody accepted for reasons the ledger did not record.

Nº V.08

Meaning as an Economic Input

There is a version of this chapter that is a poster.

A woman standing at a wooden desk beside a window, looking out, afternoon light on her and the dried grasses. — Plate V.09The Standing Desk at Four O'Clock.The claim run is the only document in the building that cannot flatter anybody. It does not know who joined the programme, and that is exactly what makes it worth reading.

Nº V.09

Health as a Return on Capital

Somebody has put a number in front of you.

A watercolour portrait of a woman in a green shirt and camel jacket among leaves and sunflowers. — Plate V.10Eleven Rungs.Every measurement of a life begins with a person translating a life into a number. The instrument is not the questionnaire. The instrument is that translation, and it is done by the respondent, alone, in about four seconds.

Nº V.10

The Thriving Survey

You want to know whether the people in your organisation are flourishing, and you want to know it the way you know your revenue: as a number you can put in front of somebody who does not share your intuitions.

A woman in a cream shirt dress standing in a sunlit room, looking toward the windows. — Plate V.11Two Dials, One Hand.Two true instruments can disagree, and the disagreement is data. What you do next depends entirely on knowing which of them measures a flow and which measures the stock the flow is drawn from.

Nº V.11

When Flourishing and Output Diverge

This chapter closes Volume V, and it is the one to read if you intend to run anything on the evidence in the ten before it.

The extensions

Three chapters that make the volume usable by practitioners of Luminous Economics and by people inside corporations alike — because they are not different economies, only different vocabularies.

A watercolour portrait of a woman in a tailored jacket among leaves and flowers. — Plate V.E1Her Own Two Ledgers.In a company of nine the employer and the employee are sometimes the same person, and every finding in this volume that sits between those two roles arrives, in her case, inside one skull.

Nº V.E1 · extension

For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics

The eleven chapters you have just read were written for an organisation with a remuneration committee, a claim run, a plan document and somewhere between five and fifty thousand employees.

The chapter

A woman seated on a white rug holding a cup in both hands, a teapot on the wooden stool beside her. — Plate V.E2The Paper Before the Meeting.A remuneration committee sees twenty numbers about people in a year. This chapter is about which four of them can be checked at the size the company actually is.

Nº V.E2 · extension

For the Corporation

You sit on, or report to, a committee that will decide compensation, workforce planning, health spending and what the board is told about its own people.