everybody loves freedom

I've been thinking about this for a while, but somehow I've never really managed to crystallize it, until I was lying in bed after the Spain-Tunisia match. Strange things occur at 5am, alright.

One of the basic tenets of labour economics is that workers like leisure. Leisure time makes workers happy, because they can do stuff they like, presumably including doing nothing at all. But they have to eat, and so they have to work.

So far I've always looked at matters from the perspective of the manager: I have a worker who has this set of preferences for work and leisure, how do I extract the most out of him without him quitting on me? I've never really considered the situation where both the manager and his workers like free time, until recently.

If you were a worker and you had a boss who liked to skive too, you would expect to be saddled with more than your fair share of work. Obviously your boss can't throw everything to you, much as he would like, because a) you would quit and b) there are bound to be some tasks that are beyond your capability to handle, or require him to handle in person. The rest of his work is his to arrow though.

Presumably, your lazy boss isn't stupid: he figures that he should assign work to the most capable subordinates. He also knows that his subordinates are likely to be disgruntled about the workload unless he can motivate them to take it on the chin. Methods of motivation smother the management sections of most bookstores, so I'm not going to go into detail. For simplicity let's just assume that there are only two forms of motivation: ego ('you're the @*($^#$ best guy I have!') and money ('want a higher bonus? Finish that assignment!')

In such a scenario, what's your logical best bet as a worker? My guess would be that you'd only work (or show yourself capable of working; there's a fine difference) as much as you get rewarded. You won't go on strike, because you still need to pay off your car loan, but you won't play the fool either. That's economic orthodoxy. Maybe you liked being praised more than that fat cheque, so you're willing to work more for words than moolah. Or vice versa. The tricky bit has to be matching the reward with the worker. I would think most people prefer money to blandisments, so I assume that'd be the more effective reward.

On the other hand, if there's a situation where wages are frozen, the manager has to resort to less effective methods of pacifying his workers, like boosting their egos. I figure ego as a motivational tool is only of limited use, since there's only so much bullshit a guy can take before he realises he's being set up for slavery. Which implies that ego-boosting only works until the worker sees through it, after which it becomes totally ineffective since the sucker now realises his manager's ulterior motive. 

Hang in there. I'm coming to the point.

The way I see it, life as an NSF officer has a few similarities with the previous paragraph. Among all the 2LTs, wages are equal. There's hardly any other form of reward for work, so people resort to appealing to ego, or 'pride'. However, many NSFs have already had their egos deflated by the OCS experience, or by the sheer volume of work they have to handle, and are consequently cynical about belief in 'pride'. Which means that there's hardly any avenue of reward left. However, since NSFs can't quit, and face rather punitive punishments for being too lazy, there's a need to maintain a minimum acceptable standard of work.

I believe that may explain why NSFs generally are a cynical bunch who try to get away with as much skiving as possible. Personally, ever since I caught on that the only reward for good work was more work, I've kind of decided that mediocrity has its merits. I want to avoid the sticks (in the army, they have huge sticks), but there's not much point in chasing after the carrots, since the carrots don't exist. Ultimately, I've realised that Scott Adams was right: leadership is a form of evil, since no one would need to convince you to do things that are obviously good for you.