Tej Parikh (“Taylor Swift and a fallacy vexing economics today”, Opinion, July 26) puts his finger on the problem, but only on part of it. Some activities are worse than merely “zero sum”.
I remain amazed by the amount of time I spend dealing with organisations down the telephone while trying to sort out what should have been simple matters. Those on the other end have now become so proletarianised they cannot respond to difficulties — the “accountability sink” as the FT’s Tim Harford explained earlier (Magazine, Life & Arts, June 15). The matter has to be escalated — at my insistence — to someone else, and often several times. Eventually someone realises what has gone wrong, and refers the matter back down the chain.
A large amount of highly paid executive time has been expended — to say nothing of the “shadow work” (“The real cost of shadow work”, Opinion, January 30, 2023; and “We are all secretaries now”, Opinion, March 28, 2023) that I have undertaken. At this stage, we are back where we started — nothing has yet been resolved. The employee now starts again. I call this “negative productivity”. It’s about time we tried to measure that too.
Bernard H Casey
Social Economic Research, London and Frankfurt