WORK LESS Institute of Technology

LEISURE AS A FACTOR OF PRODUCTION: EPILOGUE

Economists! Wash your hands!

by the Sandwichman

...some of us who have an economic bent of mind get into the way... of thinking too much of the quantity of external wealth produced and too little of the balance between internal and external wealth. – S.J. Chapman

... as if the power of compelling or inducing men to labour twice as much at the mills of Gaza for the enjoyment of the Philistines, were proof of any thing but a tyranny or an ignorance twice as powerful. – Charles Wentworth Dilke

Ignaz Semmelweis was a physician at the Vienna Allgemeines Krankenhaus in the middle of nineteenth century. One day in 1847, his colleague, Dr. Kolletschka, cut his finger while performing an autopsy. Soon afterward, Kolletschka contracted a virulent fever and died.

The sad event nevertheless gave Semmelweis a clue to the mystery that had been bothering him: why did the first division at the hospital, operated by surgeons and medical students, have a much higher rate of maternal death from childbed fever than did the second division, operated by midwifes?

He subsequently observed that doctors who performed autopsies in the morning attended childbirths after washing their hands with only soap and water. In response, Semmelweis instigated a rule that doctors had to wash their hands in an antiseptic solution of chlorinated lime after working with a cadaver. Subsequently the mortality rate in the first division plunged dramatically.

Semmelweis’s methods were rejected by his boss at the hospital, Johann Klein, who refused to renew his appointment as assistant in obstetrics after his first two-year term expired. Semmelweis then went back to his native Hungary where he worked unpaid in a private hospital, obtaining similar clinical results and yet another dismissal. He then wrote a book about his methods that was poorly received by the medical establishment.

There is some suggestion that Semmelweis contributed to his own isolation by being “undiplomatic” and unsystematic in the way he advanced his ideas. That may be so, although there are plenty of truly stupid and reactionary ideas that succeed expressly through the lack of tact, consultation and full disclosure.

Of course in the long run, Semmelweis’s insights were vindicated and the medical profession did adopt appropriate hygienic precautions. I bring up Semmelweis because Chapman’s theory addressed a matter of industrial hygiene. It was contemporary with, and in some sense complementary to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s project of “Scientific Management.” In the decade after Chapman’s theory was published, there was intense interest in the “psycho-physics of work” and the “economics of fatigue and unrest.” It came to be generally accepted that working too much was bad for an individual’s health.

But there’s a macrocosmic dimension to the hygienics of working time that hasn’t been widely grasped -- the plausible proposition that too much market activity may be bad for society and for the environment. That “thinking too much of the quantity of external wealth produced and too little of the balance between internal and external wealth” can be as bad for society as for individuals. That “compelling or inducing men to labour twice as much” may be as much an incubator of tyranny and ignorance as a symptom.

The fevers of global warming, peak oil and the war in Iraq may have as their proximate causes the “addiction to oil” but underlying that specific item of consumption is the unreflective pursuit of economic growth for growth sake. There hasn't yet been a “macroeconomics of fatigue and unrest” but perhaps there should be one. S.J. Chapman’s theory has an important contribution to make to such an macroeconomics.

Posted by sandwichman at February 4, 2006 08:53 AM