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Posts Tagged ‘George’

Accumulating Capital Without Currency

17 Oct

It’s one of the first things that anyone asks when I explain the basic premises of technosocialism. If you don’t have some sort of currency and traditional individual-to-individual exchange, how can you accumulate the capital required to undertake any sort of major project? It’s a good question, and one that requires some thinking to solve. But it also involves getting our definitions clear, so let’s get that out of the way first.

By capital, I do not mean the modern idea of a big chunk of money used to get an enterprise started, or the related idea of a chunk of money one wishes to invest. While we’re at it, this essay will include no discussion whatsoever of the government headquarters of nations or the tops of ornamental columns. While ornamental columns can be far more interesting than most people might think, none of these understandings of the word capital are relevent to this particular discussion. The modern automatic linkage between capital and money is not actually required. Adam Smith defined capital as the means to productively maintain a laborer until such time as he could sell his wares, or the money required to purchase the same. In other words, the capital a weaver requires is a loom, enough yarn to weave a bolt of cloth, and enough food to feed himself while doing so. The “or the money to buy it” is almost an afterthought. The money has no purpose other than to be exchanged for the wool and the food, which is the actual capital required for the task.

Great! Less than 300 words into the essay, and we’ve solved the problem. Time to go play computer games. Unfortunately, we’re not quite there yet. While accumulating capital without money turns out to be easy, accumulating capital without the organizing force of a government or corporation is a much trickier problem, and the one that needs to be solved before technosocialism can become a viable system.

Accumulation of capital requires two main types of oversight: decisionmaking and coordination. These functions in our modern system are generally performed by corporate or government beaurocracies made up of people who do little else. One of the primary goals of technosocialism is to reduce this type of unproductive labor as much as possible. Let’s follow the course of a single capital-intensive project through all of it’s various stages to see how the process can be democratised and the need for such beaurocracies eliminated.

Bill lives on the edge of town, and he and a number of his neighbors have noticed a need for a pedestrian bridge across a nearby stream to a park on the other side. He calls up George, who he met while building an earswab factory several essays ago, and asks if he would be willing to figure out a basic design and set of material and labor requirements for the bridge. George draws up some plans and determines that the project will require X amount of wood, steel, and labor. Bill creates an official Civic Proposal in the proposal system and enters the information given to him into that system. The system runs the relevant calculations and lets him know that for the year, the bridge would take .0019% of the city’s wood planks, .024% of the city’s steel I-beams, .0001% of the cement, .0016% of the manual construction labor, and .002% of the skilled construction labor. (I should note that these numbers are completely made up. I have no idea how much of the materials it would take to build a bridge, or what the average steel production of a medium sized city is. It’s just an example.) The system then finds the cost component that most clearly meets the following criteria: largest share of the total project cost with the highest percentage of the city’s resources. In this case, the clear choice is the steel. Steel is a major component in building the bridge, and because it is a fairly fixed resourve, demand for it is fairly high and shortages of it fairly frequent. Thus the iron becomes the “bottleneck” material for the project. Because the bridge will use 0.24% of the city’s iron resources for the year, Bill must now get .024% of the city’s population to add their support to the bridge proposal. And because people are often more willing to support civic projects with their voices than with their wallets, he must also raise pledges from that .024% to cover 10% of the total cost of the project through charges to their personal Consumption scores. For example, as a relatively wealthy citizen and the organizer of the project, Bill might wish to set an example by pledging a significant amount towards the building of the bridge. He might offer a specific amount to be charged against his Consumption score, or he might agree to be charged for 1% of the total cost of the project. Either way, he is accepting personal responsibility for part of the cost of the project. By requireing that supporters have some skin in the game, and that the segment of the population who is requesting the project contribute significantly to its construction, we help ensure that projects are only undertaken when society has a genuine need for them.

So Bill has entered the bridge project into the Civic Proposal system, and he and his neighbors are out looking for supporters and pledging contributors. It turns out that one of the neighbors who gets involved is an engineer with more bridge experience than George, who points out some design changes that strengthen the bridge while requiring less steel. The new plans lower the steel required to .022% of the city’s steel resources. This in turn lowers both the number of people needed as supporters and the amount that must be raised in pledges. But while this is going on, a problem has arisen. Citizens living on the other side of the stream who currently have access to the park are worried that the bridge and the increased traffic it will bring will spoil the look of the park, and they have begun organizing against the bridge project.

Here’s where it gets tricky. It’s important for citizens to be able to oppose projects as well as support them, but balancing the sides fairly can be difficult. The rules need to be balanced such that citizens have the power to prevent disruption and unwelcome change to their communities without giving an activist contrarian minority the ability to halt all progress. This is my way of saying that the numbers in the next paragraph will probably need to be fine-tuned, but it’s the mechanism that’s important.

Imaginary City, where all of these examples take place, has a population of four hundred thousand people. So the .022% of the population that Bill needs to get as supporters works out to about 88 people. So far he has found 60 supporters. and the folks on the other side have found 25 opponents. Every two opponents adds one additional supporter to the number required before a proposal passes. So with a base requirement of 88 plus an added requirement of 12, Bill still needs 40 supporters for his proposal to be accepted.

You’ve probably spotted an inequality here. Supporters are asked to contribute materially by making pledges charged against their own Consumption score. All opponents have to do is say no. This is one of the reasons for the 2:1 ratio. And by increasing the percentage of the total project costs covered by the personal Consumption accounts of supporters, the pro team can increase that ratio. For every 5% of the total pledged beyond the required 10%, the ratio is increased by one. A project where pledges met 20% of the total cost would only have one additional required supporter for every four opponents registered.

So let’s say now that the bridge opponents have stalled at 25, and Bill and his neighbors have found the required supporters and raised the required pledges. Now that the project has general approval (think of an appropriations bill in our current representative system) it’s time to get engineering approval for the plans to build it (think planning permission and building inspectors). This process is very similar to the approval process for the ear swab factory. A number of engineers and architects with relevent experience are randomly selected, and they review the plans for efficiency and structural integrity. Changes to the plan may be suggested at this point, but in this case George’s plans as revised by Bill’s neighbor pass without further alterations. The bridge is now ready to be built.

During the initial planning stage, and again after the plans were revised, exact information about the materials and labor required to build the bridge were entered into the system. Once the plans have been approved, those requirements are automatically sent to the Market. As the materials become available, the labor required to put them to use is automatically entered into the Skills Needed/Available system, which has been described in an earlier essay. Depending on the size of the project, someone may take official responsibility for accepting deliveries, overseeing work, etc., but by leaving most of the simple coordination to the connected computer systems, nealy all of the labor not directly related to the actual building of the bridge can be eliminated.

I don’t want to paint an entirely rosy picture here. Civic constructoin projects are frequently at the heart of corruption scandals in our current system and I have no doubt that people will try to skew things in their favor in the future. To explore this further, let me introduce Greg. Greg is a construction worker, and while he is quite intelligent, he tends to misuse that intelligence to subvert the system and try to get something for nothing. In this particular case, he has a quantity of concrete mix that he bought when he was planning to expand his porch and now no longer needs. There’s a glut of concrete mix on the Market, so he decides that the best way to get rid of it and earn Contribution credit at the same time is to set up a Civic Proposal for a large block of concrete to be placed on a street corner near his house. That way he gets credit for not only his concrete mix, but also for his labor as a construction worker trained in the pouring of concrete as well.

Being the dastardly negative example that he is, he thinks everything through carefully before he takes any actual action. He keeps the project fairly small so that he only needs a half-dozen supporters to approve the project. He finds the supporters (promising to support similarly make-work projects for them in the future) before enterering anything into the system. Once he has everything lined up, he enters the proposal and has all of his corrupt supporters sign up for it within the next minute, getting it approved before any of his neighbors has the opportunity to object. He then get’s a friend who’s an engineer to sign off on the design, and signs up both to provide the concrete and to pour it as soon as the project hits the Market and SNA, netting himself a tidy profit over the 10% he had to put up front.

At least, that’s how he would like it to go. But there are a number of ways that we can stop him. The most obvious is to create a rule that no instigator or supporter of a project can recieve any Contribution credit from that project in any form. They can contribute uncompensated labor or materials to count towards the 10% threshold, but they cannot profit from it. But Greg is tricky, so he sees that rule and has a friend act as the “front man” for the project as far as the system is concerned. So we can’t fully stop him quite that easily. Let’s move on to his next strategy: rushing through the approval process. This one’s easier to find a fully effective solution for.The addition of a waiting period of a week or two between reaching the required number of supporters and recieving final authorization should allow plenty of time for public comment and opposition to form.

Another tactic Greg used to try to rush things was finding an engineer to sign off on the plans instead of getting approval from the panel. Again, easy to stop. Require every project to get approval from a 2/3rds majority of a randomly selected panel of engineers, no exceptions or requests for certain engineers to take certain cases. Make the pool of engineers as wide as possible, by including all qualified people in the country regardless of location. And keep the panel annonymous throughout the decision-making process to avoid bribery attempts or threats.

As for signing up to provide concrete and labor as soon as the needs hit their respective systems, that probably cannot be stopped, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be. If we can stop the creation of make-work projects, and the very structure of the Market and SNA systems ensure that all labor and materials are compensated at market value without any sort of artificial inflation, than the only time there would be significant competition for the opportunity to offer materials or labor would be at a time of massive oversupply of those materials or labor, which by definition would set the price paid for them very low. Because technosocialism guarentees all citizens their basic Material Rights even when they cannot find ways of earning Contribution credit, most people would rather live modestly than scrabble for scarce jobs, and the oversupply would soon correct itself through changes in occupation, switches to intellectual or artistic pursuits, or workers simply taking time off until the market improves.

I’ve done my best to foresee problems that might arise through the human drive for inequality, but it’s a bit like playing chess with myself. It’s an intellectual exercise, but it will nearly always end in stalemate and will never be as interesting or productive as an actual game between two opponents. With this in mind, there are two more features that I’d like to touch on briefly before bringing the essay to a close. First of all, everything described here can be changed and adjusted using the standard technosocialist model of direct democracy. If loopholes are found, they can be fixed as soon as they are discovered by honest citizens. In addition, cases of blatent bribery or fraud can be turned over to law enforcement. How is it possible to have a law enforcement system without a government is a complicated issue, and one which I am conveniently going to leave to another essay.

 
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Technosocialism and the Arts

27 Jun

Let’s look back at our friend Steve, who was doing shift work while trying to make it as a guitarist. What does that mean? How do artists support themselves in a society with no currency? How is Contribution measured when it is nearly impossible to calculate supply and demand for something like music? To put it simply, their reward is determined by the number of people who enjoy their work. When an artist makes a recording, it is it is made freely available to the public. Citizens can then indicate whether or not they like the song as they listen to it, and Contribution credit is awarded appropriately.

Let’s say that Steve eventually records a song that gains a moderate amount of popularity. Bill, George, and Fred all listen to it. Bill doesn’t like it. Apparently he isn’t a fan of fingerpicking guitar. So he indicates that he doesn’t like it, and there is no impact on Steve’s Contribution score from Bill’s having listened to it. George and Fred, on the other hand, both like it. George adds it to a playlist he has put together specifically for fingerpicking guitar. He doesn’t often listen to music, but he does like to listen to guitar while he’s cooking, so out of two hundred song-plays that George hears in a given month, Steve’s song comes up four times. Fred, on the other hand, listens to music constantly while he’s working. He adds Steve’s song to his main “random mix” playlist, and over the same month he hears it forty times out of the 3600 song-plays he hears. So which of them causes Steve to receive more Contribution credit? George. While Fred listened to the song more in absolute terms, George gave it a greater percentage of his “musical attention” for lack of a better term. Since quantifying someone’s enjoyment of any art is more or less impossible, we have to use their behavior as a more easily quantified metric.

So to restate all of this in a drier way with no imaginary people, each citizen’s attention and enjoyment is worth a certain amount of Contribution credit. The ways they choose to spend their time determines how that credit is distributed. There is one other key point: citizens are never charged Consumption credit for non-physical consumption of art. After all, when a book, movie, or piece of music is enjoyed electronically, no societal resources are being consumed except for bandwidth. Infinitely reproducable works of art like these can only improve the societal conversation and people should never be discouraged from participating.

Now how about physical pieces of art? They are actually much easier to calculate Contribution for. Any citizen can add a section to their Profile displaying their artwork. Other people who admire it can subscribe as fans of their artwork. When the artist puts a new piece of work into the Depot system, subscribers will automatically be notified and will have the opportunity to view the work and submit requests. From there, the standard Depot distribution system applies. When it comes to physical art, citizens are charged a Consumption value because they are recieving a physical object which then becomes unavailable to the rest of society.

One place where it gets a bit tricky is reproductions of physical art, eg. posters printed with the image of a painting. While Contribution credit for the artist can be determined the same way that it would be for music or books, Consumption credit for the purchaser becomes more complicated. Generally the best way to handle this will be basing the Consumption charge on the total supply and demand for poster printing regardless of the poster being printed.

There’s a reason that Adam Smith made the division of labor the first major topic he covered in The Wealth of Nations. Given a fixed labor force, division of labor and the production line dramatically increases the material wealth that can be created. Later on in his book, Smith also warns strenuously against the social impact of dividing labor too specificly, because workers acting as nothing but automatic machines rapidly lose pride in and satisfaction from their work, and over time may lose the finer intellectual senses that make us human. So it’s important not to see it as an unmitigated good. But it certainly does have a place in society and it’s important that it be possible under technosocialism. But how to allocate Contribution credit, and how to distribute the goods that are produced? It’s time for another adventure with imaginary people.

Meet Bill, George, and Steve. Bill is an entrepreneur with a great new idea for making cotton ear swabs out of scrap cotton and paper. George is a mechanical engineer. Steve is an amateur guitarist who wants to find a way to improve his Contribution score part time without having it interfere with his music. Bill registers his idea and gets in touch with George through the Skills Needed/Available (SNA) system. Together, they design a largely mechanized facility that takes either raw cotton or scrap cotton fabric, as well as paper that has been sorted for recycling, and with the aid of a small number of workers, turns them into cotton ear swabs. Once the system has determined there is sufficient demand for ear swabs and a randomly selected panel of engineers has confirmed that the design for the facility is sound, the various tasks required to build it are entered into the SNA system. At this point George goes on to other projects, his work as a designer finished, but Bill stays on to supervise the construction and the opening of the facility. While he’s waiting, he creates a profile for the facility in the Manufacturing section of the SNA system. This profile includes primarily the number of people required for the plant to operate, the materials required to occupy a full compliment of workers for a shift, and the quantity of ear swabs that will be produced in that time. He also designs the training program and qualification test for workers to pass before they’re able to work independently in the facility. These training programs and tests can be edited later by workers, but it’s important to have a solid base to start from.

Eventually the facility is finished and ready to begin production. This is where Steve comes in. Because Steve prefers to avoid long-term commitments that might interfere with club gigs he might get or prevent him from working on a song when he has a good idea, he gets most of his work through the Shift Work section of the SNA system. He maintains a full profile on the SNA, which tracks his qualifications, his experience, and his preferences. He can sort through available jobs manually or allow the SNA system to play matchmaker, and point him towards nearby jobs he is qualified to do that require labor. In this case, he is searching in the evening for shift work the next afternoon, and using the system’s matchmaking feature. The system looks through the facilities requiring labor for that shift, and selects several nearby facilities: a match factory where Steve has worked before and on whose equipment he has already been certified, a bakery that needs a one day temp to help move some heavy boxes, and our new cotton ear swab factory. In this case, because it is closer to his apartment and only needs one person to meet its minimum staffing level for that shift, it recommends the ear swab factory. And Steve, who doesn’t feel like lifting boxes all day and prefers something new to yet another shift at match factory, agrees to give it a try. Before his shift the next day, he takes and passes the online certification course on the ear swab factory’s equipment, which takes him about an hour and for which he gets a small amount of Contribution credit.

So the next day, Steve goes in, and he and five other people use the facility to produce 600 boxes of cotton ear swabs. What happens next? If mass-produced consumable commodities like these were placed in the same system as Fred and his handmade hats, they would swamp it and make it far more difficult to find the more individual items. Ear swabs have two important charactaristics that make them work well for this example: they are consumable and thus needed on a regular basis, and they are all largely the same. While there may be occasional specialist types of ear swab, and there may be occasional differences in materials, for the most part they do not come in different flavors, styles, or sizes. So when Bill is entering the facility’s information into the manufacturing system, he can simply categorize the product as (for example) Consumables> Bath & Body> Hygiene> Ear Swabs> Standard. Meanwhile Fred, our craftsman who turns out to have unusually waxy ears, goes through 60 ear swabs per month. He can go through the Recurring Request system and enter his need for 60 swabs per month. If he has previously liked the ear swabs made through Bill’s process better than others, he can specificly request swabs from that facility, but the specificity of his request may mean that he is charged a higher Consumption value than he might be otherwise if there is a great deal of demand for Bill’s ear swabs specifically and a larger supply of swabs from other manufacturers. The system tracks who in society is in need of ear swabs and ships them out appropriately, using the same priorities for people with high Contribution and low Consumption that we saw in the case of Fred’s handmade goods.

But how is the Contribution value attributed when so many people’s work went into producing those 600 boxes of swabs? Bill had the initial idea and supervising the setting up of the facility, George drew up the plans, Steve and his fellows did the actual manufacturing, and the materials were supplied by even more people who don’t get names because they’re only tangentially in the story and I can’t be bothered. Who gets how much Contribution credit?

Let’s start with the suppliers of the materials because they’re relatively simple. The Contribution value of materials supplied to the facility depends on the demand for that facility’s product at the time the materials are contributed. A supplier with two hundred pounds of recyclable paper can choose to bring that to a toilet paper factory or to our ear swab factory. Which he chooses will depend on whether there is more unmet demand for ear swabs or for toilet paper at that time, since that will dictate how much Contribution value he is given for his paper. But the system also needs to track the supplies in stock at each facility. Once a facility has enough materials to produce continuously for a month, it should stop accepting new contributions of that material.

On to Bill and George. The best model to keep in mind here is the current system of royalties in modern art-based industries such as book publishing and filmmaking. Most authors aren’t paid a salary while they write a book, or (usually) given a lump sum for the rights to a book. Instead, they are paid a royalty, or a certain percentage of the book’s cover price, when the book sells. In the case of the film industry, there may be dozens of actors and writers who recieve residual payments when a movie is shown on television, even if the movie was made twenty years ago. Similarly, both Bill and George are given a small amount of Contribution credit for every box of swabs produced, even though they may not necessarily be actively involved in making swabs a year down the line. This way there is still a strong incentive for innovators to bring new processes and products to society without creating the severe inequities that exist in our modern corporate culture.

Now Steve and his comrades. Their Contribution differs from Bill and George’s in that it is partially related to current demand for ear swabs, but it is also related to the current demand for shift-work manual labor. The portion of it determined by demand for the product they are producing helps them choose between different shift-work opportunities, but if too high a percentage of the population is looking for work as manual laborers, the portion of their Contribution that depends on demand for manual labor may encourage them to train in a specialty such as plumbing that will allow them to earn more.

 
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Mass Production

23 Jun

There’s a reason that Adam Smith made the division of labor the first major topic he covered in The Wealth of Nations. Given a fixed labor force, division of labor and the production line dramatically increases the material wealth that can be created. Later on in his book, Smith also warns strenuously against the social impact of dividing labor too specificly, because workers acting as nothing but automatic machines rapidly lose pride in and satisfaction from their work, and over time may lose the finer intellectual senses that make us human. So it’s important not to see it as an unmitigated good. But it certainly does have a place in society and it’s important that it be possible under technosocialism. But how to allocate Contribution credit, and how to distribute the goods that are produced? It’s time for another adventure with imaginary people.

Meet Bill, George, and Steve. Bill is an entrepreneur with a great new idea for making cotton ear swabs out of scrap cotton and paper. George is a mechanical engineer. Steve is an amateur guitarist who wants to find a way to improve his Contribution score part time without having it interfere with his music. Bill registers his idea and gets in touch with George through the Skills Needed/Available (SNA) system. Together, they design a largely mechanized facility that takes either raw cotton or scrap cotton fabric, as well as paper that has been sorted for recycling, and with the aid of a small number of workers, turns them into cotton ear swabs. Once the system has determined there is sufficient demand for ear swabs and a randomly selected panel of engineers has confirmed that the design for the facility is sound, the various tasks required to build it are entered into the SNA system. At this point George goes on to other projects, his work as a designer finished, but Bill stays on to supervise the construction and the opening of the facility. While he’s waiting, he creates a profile for the facility in the Manufacturing section of the SNA system. This profile includes primarily the number of people required for the plant to operate, the materials required to occupy a full compliment of workers for a shift, and the quantity of ear swabs that will be produced in that time. He also designs the training program and qualification test for workers to pass before they’re able to work independently in the facility. These training programs and tests can be edited later by workers, but it’s important to have a solid base to start from.

Eventually the facility is finished and ready to begin production. This is where Steve comes in. Because Steve prefers to avoid long-term commitments that might interfere with club gigs he might get or prevent him from working on a song when he has a good idea, he gets most of his work through the Shift Work section of the SNA system. He maintains a full profile on the SNA, which tracks his qualifications, his experience, and his preferences. He can sort through available jobs manually or allow the SNA system to play matchmaker, and point him towards nearby jobs he is qualified to do that require labor. In this case, he is searching in the evening for shift work the next afternoon, and using the system’s matchmaking feature. The system looks through the facilities requiring labor for that shift, and selects several nearby facilities: a match factory where Steve has worked before and on whose equipment he has already been certified, a bakery that needs a one day temp to help move some heavy boxes, and our new cotton ear swab factory. In this case, because it is closer to his apartment and only needs one person to meet its minimum staffing level for that shift, it recommends the ear swab factory. And Steve, who doesn’t feel like lifting boxes all day and prefers something new to yet another shift at match factory, agrees to give it a try. Before his shift the next day, he takes and passes the online certification course on the ear swab factory’s equipment, which takes him about an hour and for which he gets a small amount of Contribution credit.

So the next day, Steve goes in, and he and five other people use the facility to produce 600 boxes of cotton ear swabs. What happens next? If mass-produced consumable commodities like these were placed in the same system as Fred and his handmade hats, they would swamp it and make it far more difficult to find the more individual items. Ear swabs have two important charactaristics that make them work well for this example: they are consumable and thus needed on a regular basis, and they are all largely the same. While there may be occasional specialist types of ear swab, and there may be occasional differences in materials, for the most part they do not come in different flavors, styles, or sizes. So when Bill is entering the facility’s information into the manufacturing system, he can simply categorize the product as (for example) Consumables> Bath & Body> Hygiene> Ear Swabs> Standard. Meanwhile Fred, our craftsman who turns out to have unusually waxy ears, goes through 60 ear swabs per month. He can go through the Recurring Request system and enter his need for 60 swabs per month. If he has previously liked the ear swabs made through Bill’s process better than others, he can specificly request swabs from that facility, but the specificity of his request may mean that he is charged a higher Consumption value than he might be otherwise if there is a great deal of demand for Bill’s ear swabs specifically and a larger supply of swabs from other manufacturers. The system tracks who in society is in need of ear swabs and ships them out appropriately, using the same priorities for people with high Contribution and low Consumption that we saw in the case of Fred’s handmade goods.

But how is the Contribution value attributed when so many people’s work went into producing those 600 boxes of swabs? Bill had the initial idea and supervising the setting up of the facility, George drew up the plans, Steve and his fellows did the actual manufacturing, and the materials were supplied by even more people who don’t get names because they’re only tangentially in the story and I can’t be bothered. Who gets how much Contribution credit?

Let’s start with the suppliers of the materials because they’re relatively simple. The Contribution value of materials supplied to the facility depends on the demand for that facility’s product at the time the materials are contributed. A supplier with two hundred pounds of recyclable paper can choose to bring that to a toilet paper factory or to our ear swab factory. Which he chooses will depend on whether there is more unmet demand for ear swabs or for toilet paper at that time, since that will dictate how much Contribution value he is given for his paper. But the system also needs to track the supplies in stock at each facility. Once a facility has enough materials to produce continuously for a month, it should stop accepting new contributions of that material.

On to Bill and George. The best model to keep in mind here is the current system of royalties in modern art-based industries such as book publishing and filmmaking. Most authors aren’t paid a salary while they write a book, or (usually) given a lump sum for the rights to a book. Instead, they are paid a royalty, or a certain percentage of the book’s cover price, when the book sells. In the case of the film industry, there may be dozens of actors and writers who recieve residual payments when a movie is shown on television, even if the movie was made twenty years ago. Similarly, both Bill and George are given a small amount of Contribution credit for every box of swabs produced, even though they may not necessarily be actively involved in making swabs a year down the line. This way there is still a strong incentive for innovators to bring new processes and products to society without creating the severe inequities that exist in our modern corporate culture.

Now Steve and his comrades. Their Contribution differs from Bill and George’s in that it is partially related to current demand for ear swabs, but it is also related to the current demand for shift-work manual labor. The portion of it determined by demand for the product they are producing helps them choose between different shift-work opportunities, but if too high a percentage of the population is looking for work as manual laborers, the portion of their Contribution that depends on demand for manual labor may encourage them to train in a specialty such as plumbing that will allow them to earn more.

 
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