Pelsmin Guest Post: The Paradox of India

Frequent commenter/long-time reader Pelsmin is visiting India, and shared these thoughts.  More below the fold...

THE PARADOX OF INDIA

This week I visited Bangalore to tour facilities of my new employer, an outsourcing engineering firm with most of our employees based in India. Companies use us to develop technology better, cheaper and faster.

When President Obama rails against un-patriotic American companies “outsourcing” their work, he’s referring to our customers. And incidentally, he means “offshoring.” Outsourcing is the completely un-objectionable process of allowing another firm, possibly based across the street, to handle non-core business activities. Peter Drucker championed the concept half a century ago and it has led to vast improvements in competitiveness and productivity, and countless American job gains.

 Offshoring can be done without outsourcing, by changing the location of a company’s own employees to India, and outsourcing can be done without offshoring, by transferring work from your own employees to more productive labor situated in the US. They may originate from another country. Think H1 visa.

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The Left in NC Discovers Anew An Ancient Truth

It's fun to watch when the little kids discover something on their own.  They remember it better that way, that's a rule of teaching.  So, even though all the grown-ups knew this all along, it's better to let the younglings figure it out.

It appears that the Progressives, the Left, whatever you want to call them, in North Carolina have "discovered" that regulation, even regulation that the regulator says is benign, can be harmful.  It's intrusive, it makes everything more expensive, and it has a chilling effect on people being willing to use your product.

Now, the Prog-Left has discovered this truth about abortion clinics in NC.  Regulating abortion clinics is going to make it much more difficult, more scary, and more expensive to get an abortion, or even to get counseling.  Abortions are legal, but regulations will make it harder for customers to obtain them, and it will be impossible for businesses to provide this otherwise legal service.  It's like someone is saying, "Oh, you can do this, but we are just going to regulate it," as a way of actually outlawing the activity.

Let's hope they take this deep insight and apply to other kinds of small businesses.   The same thing, THE SAME THING, is true for all the regulations, from petty to draconian, that you folks want to impose on businesses of all kinds. Because the Prog-Left has always pretended (until now, when they actually care about the business) that regulations are a benefit, rather than a harm.  Sauce for the goose...

Employee Award Programs

The Dirty Laundry of Employee Award Programs: Evidence from the Field 

Timothy Gubler, Ian Larkin & Lamar Pierce
Harvard Working Paper, February 2013

 Abstract: Many scholars and practitioners have recently argued that corporate awards are a "free" way to motivate employees. We use field data from an attendance award program implemented at one of five industrial laundry plants to show that awards can carry significant spillover costs and may be less effective at motivating employees than the literature suggests. Our quasi-experimental setting shows that two types of unintended consequences limit gains from the reward program. First, employees strategically game the program, improving timeliness only when eligible for the award, and call in sick to retain eligibility. Second, employees with perfect pre-program attendance or high productivity suffered a 6-8% productivity decrease after program introduction, suggesting they were demotivated by awards for good behavior they already exhibited. Overall, our results suggest the award program decreased plant productivity by 1.4%, and that positive effects from awards are accompanied by more complex employee responses that limit program effectiveness.

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