To introduce you to Venning's Law: the correct answer to any question containing the word “surely” is “no.” This is one of the lesser known laws about how the world works. It's even one of those I might be responsible for -- this explains why it isn't well known.
John Venning taught me English at school and then went on to become merely the head of English at one of the best schools in England -- as you can see, that career arc peaked early with that possibility of educating me.
The law came from just a passing remark in a class one day. But it has stuck with me and I've now been repeating it for decades. Anyone saying “but, surely” is avoiding having to make their case and is instead trying to insist that it's just obvious.
Which brings me to this, in this newspaper: “Even so, productivity isn’t the only thing that we care about, surely.” And the answer is, well, yes it is. That is, the claim that we care about other things is untrue, the answer to that question is “no.”
Now we do need to be careful here. Of course we care about other things than productivity -- a baby's smile is worth more than most of what we all do at work after all. But when we consider work, then yes, we really do care about productivity. To the near exclusion of everything else.
As Paul Krugman -- and he does, after all, have a Nobel in this subject of economics -- has pointed out, productivity isn't everything. But in the long run it's pretty much everything.
To take a step back into the real economic basics. Everything that is produced is consumed. The price of everything that is bought becomes an income to someone.
This is just the truth. For we define it that way when we work out gross domestic product, ie, GDP. Production equals income equals consumption. We've just defined it that way at the start so it must be true.
Which means that the average wage in a country, in an economy, is defined by the average amount that each worker produces -- the productivity of labour. How much we can each consume depends upon how much each of us can and do produce -- another point that Krugman is known to make.
How much we each produce in our work is the productivity of our labour. That's a definition, one of those things that simply is true because that's where we started from. So, yes, we really do care about productivity. Because that's what defines our living standards.
Higher productivity means higher wages, means higher consumption. For the obvious reason that if we produce more per hour we work, then we can consume more for each hour that we work.
Which is the same statement that our incomes are higher -- we have agreed that this last point is true simply because that's how we defined it all at the start.
Now, Becca Clarke -- the author of the original article -- is a postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Economics, the same university I learned my economics at. She's a lot further up the academic ladder than I ever got.
But it's still true that she is, here, wildly wrong. Because as far as work is concerned, then, yes, productivity is, in the long run, just about the only thing we care about.
She wants to talk about gender equality and other such things. Work/life balance, making a better society, and all that sort of stuff. Which is great -- I'm all in favour of a better life in that more rounded sense too.
The thing that economists keep pointing out is that all of those desirable things come from being rich. Getting rich means high productivity of labour. Because when we each produce more per hour -- and can then consume more per hour, have higher incomes per hour of our work -- then we can spend that higher income as we wish. Decide upon our own consumption. On such things as gender equality, for example.
The reason productivity really is pretty much the only thing we care about is that high productivity is exactly, specifically, what opens up that possibility of a better life more generally to us. It's also the only thing that does -- which is why, yes, really, that is pretty much the only thing we care about in the long term.
Oh, and yes, John Venning was right. Whenever anyone says “but, surely” they're glossing over the same gaping hole in their argument.
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.
