“The logic works in the same direction as when applied to ethnic minorities, giving rise to occasions when many on the left find themselves – uneasily or otherwise – defending practices they would regard as sexist or homophobic in other contexts.”

Oh hai Nick Cohen.

Erm, regarding the article…again this one is confused I’m afraid.

What are you trying to say about bonus culture? That it’s on a par with benefits culture? Because people will legitimately reply that it’s manifestly not: the bankers pay themselves bonuses out of their own money…the benefits dependent class by definition don’t.

Hence when you write:

“Some magical alloy of legerdemain and chutzpah allows many of the biggest critics of dependency culture simultaneously to get away with boosterism and apologies for bonus culture.”

Is it legerdemain and chutzpah? Or is it just a coherent and reasonable complaint given the above distinction between the two groups?

If you want to say something about bonus culture and how it is harmful because it promotes financial risk, or is morally repugnant because it represents one of the sharp ends of gross inequality, then i’m all behind you. But what on earth does this have to do with benefits culture?

If there is a connection, you haven’t made it. You’ve just jumped from talking about one kind of “culture” to another, and then back again, without making a case for why they may be connected in terms of social attitude or anything else….

While it is now self-evident that the way the bonuses are calculated has caused a fair degree of the problems we face today.

(although no one actually forced consumers to borrow beyond their means either)

However, the idea that paying people for their performance is too important a principle to throw away.

Indeed, it has long been the mantra of the left that the workers are denied the fruits of their labours by fat cat bosses.

The RMT just ran a series of strikes demanding that the employer pay higher wages due to the firm having recorded more profits, even though the rise was demonstratively nothing to do with efficiency improvements by the front line staff who were on strike.

So the principle that staff should be paid a profit share is proven by the RMT.

And yet we have an industry that does pay its staff a good percentage of the recorded profits, and should be applauded by the left, but is instead demonised.

By all means change how the profits are recorded to make them more aligned with a long term stability for the financial systems, but don’t try to stop companies paying their staff a decent chunk of their profits.

Otherwise, the RMT will be after you!

I love the idea that anthropologists have 164 words for culture, as per the old Inuit canard about snow.

“the bankers pay themselves bonuses out of their own money…the benefits dependent class by definition don’t.”

Well… not really.

Employers pay their employees bonuses out of company money. It would be a highly unusual system in which an employee decided their own level of remuneration – particularly for public companies, where that kind of thing is generally decided by a board of directors for the senior management, an by senior management for the lower-level employees.

I think Dave Osler is right to draw a line between ‘bonus culture’ and ‘benefit culture’. They’re two sides of the same coin – and the same arguments can be applied equally to both.

It’s disingenuous, though, to suggest that financial rewards act as incentives to game the system when they take the form of bonuses, but not when they take the form of benefits. In truth, benefits are just as much of an incentive to live off the state handouts as bonuses are to take high risks and reap short-term rewards.

“But in current popular British usage, the term conjurs up a notion of an internally coherent set of beliefs that justify given social arrangements to participants within a particular social structure.”

Does it?

“By elevating current City practice to the status of a bona fide culture, we are implicitly saying we should leave well alone ”

I don’t think anyone is using the phrase, in this context, to say anything of the kind. It’s on a par with useage of the phrase “blame culture” and, as such, is used in a generally derogatory manner. When did you last hear anyone say that “blame is part of an organisation’s culture and should, therefore, be left well alone”?

“Dependency culture” has similarly negative connotations and I’ve never heard anyone use it in any way resembling “it’s part of their culture and should be left well alone.”

As Paul says, there are reasons to criticise “bonus culture” but I don’t think they include the way in which the word “culture” is used in this context.

Well, I think the cultural meme probably is right…

What I’ve noticed about living on an occupational pension and benefits is that there’s someone missing from my life. A boss. In my experience, a boss is an angry human being – angry with me for insisting on being paid and refusing to work for them for nothing. A boss, in my experience, is someone who regards every penny of my pay as a penny stolen from them.

How much would you have to pay me to return to a situation where my financial security is dependent on Mr (or Ms) Angry? There isn’t enough money in the country.

Perhaps your experience of bosses is different. Perhaps your boss is different. Or perhaps you are in denial.

This article is hopelessly confused:

‘That must be why the systematic trend to towards paying astronomical rewards to selected players in the financial services sector has become elevated into something called ‘bonus culture’. The suggestion here is of some kind of permanence, regularity and legitimation.’

Or:

‘On the other hand, the concept of ‘dependency culture’ has for several decades now been a mainstay of rightwing attacks on the welfare state as conceived by social democracy.’

Which is it?

If the term ‘culture’ lends legitimacy, then the term ‘dependancy culture’ couldn’t be used to attack people on benefits.

Make up your mind: either we criticise BOTH ‘bonus culture’ and ‘dependancy culture’ or we criticise NEITHER.

Oh, and there are about seven Inuit words for snow, depending on how you define ’snow’, and how you define Inuit: considerably fewer than in English.

Have there there ever been ANY LibCon articles which have suggested ANY benefit claimants have ANY obligations to look for work at all?

Weren’t there any poor people in non capitalist times?

@ paul sagar

Because people will legitimately reply that it’s manifestly not: the bankers pay themselves bonuses out of their own money…the benefits dependent class by definition don’t.,

Nope, you’re wrong.
The bankers pay themselves/are paid out of shareholders’ money.Benefit claimants are paid out of taxpayers’ money. In both cases it isn’t ‘their’ money, though with the caveat that all benefit recipients have paid indirect tax, and many, many have paid direct income tax. This makes the benefits dependent ‘class’ (what a strange term to use) claim of ownership to their respective pot of money marginally stronger. All the rest boils down to debate of whether the bankers or benefit recipients merit/deserve/have earned their money, and to checks & balances in their respective systems, and I’d strongly argue that the scrutiny and objective oversight is far more stringent (to the point of unjustly punishing vulnerable and sick claimants) for benefits recipients than bankers.

Paul,

What are you trying to say about bonus culture? That it’s on a par with benefits culture? Because people will legitimately reply that it’s manifestly not: the bankers pay themselves bonuses out of their own money…the benefits dependent class by definition don’t.

Any other industry and I’d make this very argument. But given the amount of tax that banks have swallowed up, I’m not sure it applies any more. I really don’t understand why lefties are so complacent about banking as an industry: all of their proposed changes seem to be tinkering around the edges, taxing bonuses more highly perhaps, or having ‘more regulation.’ But we libertarians have been saying for years that the entire industry is corrupt to the core and needs to be replaced with a fundamentally different model in which there is no government granted privilege to favoured firms (a model, incidentally, which would almost certainly reduce inequality – not, of course, that that’s the reason we propose it).

Dave – what evidence do you have that “capitalism” (pretty big term for a set of institutions that nearly every society has at least a piece off) is the cause of unemployment? Cos the evidence we have seems to count against that hypothesis: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090317095020.htm

> (although no one actually forced consumers to borrow beyond their means either)

I would argue it all depends on how you define “forced” here.

The huge increase in rents relative to wage inflation (a result of the changing of right-to-buy rules) and the lack of rented housing available (a consequence of decades of council house sell offs) have made a mortgage a financially crippling necessity for many, both in the UK and the US. Hence the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

> Dave – what evidence do you have that “capitalism” (pretty big term for a set of institutions that nearly every society has at least a piece off) is the cause of unemployment?

Sure, a “flexible labour market” i.e. one where employees have few rights and can be hired and fired on a whim will reduce the overall number of unemployed at any given time, but it will also lead to lower pay, longer hours and more people on temporary and short-term contracts. It’s quality versus quantity.

If capitalism and capitalists are so dynamic and entrpreneurial, why is it that the workers are the ones who always have to be “flexible”?

Simple: flexible labour markets are what allow capitalists to be dynamic and entrepreneurial. If they can’t hire staff without taking on excessive requirements to retain them indefinitely, they won’t be able to hire staff at all.

And overall, people are better off (life satisfaction wise) having greater access to more jobs than bickering over who gets to keep a handful of highly privileged and protected jobs: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2005/04/the_joy_of_mark.html

Not that you can’t, to some extent, have the best of both worlds. Denmark has a big welfare state AND flexible labour markets so they often keep a lid on unemployment while still providing some basic income and service guarantees to their citizens.

Total bonuses to those in financial services reached £7.6bn in the five-month period between December 2008 and April 2009, which is regarded as the peak season. But in back of an envelope terms, you can double that figure for the full year, and you come to a total considerably higher than the annual £11bn cost of jobseekers’ allowance.

What’s the tax revenue from the financial services?

Lilliput@10

There were plenty of poor people before capitalism, there was also child labour, the burning of women as witches, very short life-expectency and slave ownership. Is it relevant?

@12 Dan: But we libertarians have been saying for years that the entire industry is corrupt to the core and needs to be replaced with a fundamentally different model in which there is no government granted privilege to favoured firms (a model, incidentally, which would almost certainly reduce inequality – not, of course, that that’s the reason we propose it).

I think there’s an argument to be made that equality should be more highly valued by those that value freedom as the highest ideal. Someone born with little money has less freedom than someone born with more– levelling the playing field can increase the freedom of those previously at the bottom.

I don’t think stopping the state intervention, and leaving the system as it is too rigidly hierarchical (and thus leaving the poor without the freedom of those higher up) is the right course.

“Freedom in Capitalist society remains about the same as freedom in ancient Greek republics- Freedom for slave owners” (Lenin). A little extreme of course, but it sums up my point. Removing the state intervention and thus leaving the system as it is isn’t the best way towards true freedom.

Someone born with little money has less freedom than someone born with more– levelling the playing field can increase the freedom of those previously at the bottom.

Freedom from what?

@21, ukliberty Freedom from what?

Poverty reduces hundreds of freedoms, such as the freedom to move house, to eat, to travel etc.

What I mean is that (in my opinion) the government still has a job to do reducing inequality and closing the gap. Removing the hand of the state isn’t the best choice at this point in time, speaking long-term.

@ Newmania. Really? Some of what you say has merit, but just to stir it up a bit:
a) I suspect it is the profits rather that are the bonuses that are the issue And proportionality? Oh, and also the small matter of bonuses being paid for failure. Shareholders and stakeholders (i.e. those whose money it actually is) still don’t have enough say on how much of the gross profit gets paid out as bonuses, and as for paying bonuses when loses are made…
b) Its hard to see why anyone would especially object to an employee negotiating a lucrative deal Ah, but if it appears their reward is unmerited? Oh, say many, then that’s just the politics of envy. Okay, then, say it is: so, then the resentment of those on benefits with no real ailments and no intention of working is also the politics of envy. Two sets of folk ‘getting away with it’. Either condemn both or neither. Just because one’s easier to clobber, doesn’t mean they are more deserving of being clobbered.

20,

I think there’s an argument to be made that equality should be more highly valued by those that value freedom as the highest ideal. Someone born with little money has less freedom than someone born with more– levelling the playing field can increase the freedom of those previously at the bottom.

I don’t think stopping the state intervention, and leaving the system as it is too rigidly hierarchical (and thus leaving the poor without the freedom of those higher up) is the right course.

Well obviously I disagree with your conception of freedom. We don’t need to call wealthy people ‘more free’ – we already have a perfectly good word to describe them – it’s ‘wealthy.’ Freedom is not ability, or wealth, or equality, it’s freedom.

But anyway I didn’t write that comment to get into arguments with left-liberals about the concept of freedom, which we are bound to disagree on. My point was rather that the monopolization of banking by a small elite doesn’t seem to do anything to further anyone’s goals, even yours. If you’re seriously saying that the current system of banking (bonuses, bailouts and all) is somehow ‘levelling the playing field’ or ‘increasing the freedom of those at the bottom,’ then fine, but I suspect, from the kinds of things I read on this very site, that not many people do actually believe that it is that kind of institution. So I do think it is a shame that the kind of proposals from the left are merely tinkering around the edges rather than seeing the banking sector for what it is, a corporatist scam.

“Freedom in Capitalist society remains about the same as freedom in ancient Greek republics- Freedom for slave owners” (Lenin). A little extreme of course, but it sums up my point. Removing the state intervention and thus leaving the system as it is isn’t the best way towards true freedom.

They’d revoke my libertarian membership if I didn’t make the obvious point here: How did this ‘freedom’ work out for the folks that Lenin was in charge of?

Joel,

Poverty reduces hundreds of freedoms, such as the freedom to move house, to eat, to travel etc.

Freedom to own a car, or boat? Freedom to own a fleet of super-yachts?

By elevating current City practice to the status of a bona fide culture, we are implicitly saying we should leave well alone . It’s a banker thing, baby, you wouldn’t understand.

Oh come off it. People talk the same way bout “gun culture and “knife culture”, and I don’t hear anyone suggesting we should leave that well alone.

@20, Dan But anyway I didn’t write that comment to get into arguments with left-liberals about the concept of freedom, which we are bound to disagree on. My point was rather that the monopolization of banking by a small elite doesn’t seem to do anything to further anyone’s goals, even yours. If you’re seriously saying that the current system of banking (bonuses, bailouts and all) is somehow ‘levelling the playing field’ or ‘increasing the freedom of those at the bottom,’ then fine, but I suspect, from the kinds of things I read on this very site, that not many people do actually believe that it is that kind of institution. So I do think it is a shame that the kind of proposals from the left are merely tinkering around the edges rather than seeing the banking sector for what it is, a corporatist scam.

Oh, no; that’s not what I suggested at all. The current system is hugely flawed, operated by corporate greed and irresponsibility, which the bonuses represent. I never defended the system as it is. What I was talking about was the value of more equality to true freedom for all.

@20, Dan They’d revoke my libertarian membership if I didn’t make the obvious point here: How did this ‘freedom’ work out for the folks that Lenin was in charge of?

Not well. But I’m not a Leninist, and not a Communist, so the question is a little misplaced I think.

The logic works in the same direction as when applied to ethnic minorities, giving rise to occasions when many on the left find themselves – uneasily or otherwise – defending practices they would regard as sexist or homophobic in other contexts.

You like bursting out of Bengali weddings, then, with your press officer on speed dial, Dave Osler?

‘Poverty reduces hundreds of freedoms, such as the freedom to move house, to eat, to travel etc.’

If you want people out of poverty, put some effort into getting them into work: then they’ll have the ‘freedom’ to move house or travel.

The benefit system is not there to make people wealthy, and it couldn’t, even if that was desirable. Do you really think the benefit system can afford to pay for people’s houses, or for holidays? Should I pay tax to fund a lifestyle I can’t afford for myself?

Nick@13
‘Capitalism causes unemployment’ is a truism which cannot be denied, because employment (the selling of labour) emerged with and as a direct result of capitalism. Prior to the capitalist epoch there were landless peasants, this was the nearest thing to unemployment, there were landed peasants and various other economic relationships such as patronage
Capitalism is a specific mode of production within which there are specific social relations like no other time, and, of course, there are institutions which support this.
Freedom, initially meant the removing of feudal ties or any other relationship within’ an economic sense’ other than that of a money nexus. So the idea of ‘nobel oblige’, the moral obligation which a feudal lord or landlord had,disappeared’

In the bonus culture bankers are incentivised to make more money for their company. What are claimants incentivised to do in the benefits culture? With up to 95% marginal tax rates, it certainly isn’t ‘find work’.

Now I’m not suggesting people have all benefits removed. After all, a minimum level of income is required in order to live. There are many though who are simply reluctant to work and the welfare trap provides yet another handy excuse for them to not try.

Mark@32
Welfare is a massive topic so to attempt to address it in a post is impossible;- benefits are a massive boost to the economy and a large proportion goes back into the tax pot, The top earners would, if given the tax they pay towards benefits, largely save, whereas benefits given to the poor are generally spent.
Most benefit recipients work eg those who receive child allowance and those who receive tax credits, Employers would have to pay their workers far more than they do now in order to equal current spending levels if benefits were withdrawn or decreased. The private sector definately benefits from benefits,

“benefits are a massive boost to the economy and a large proportion goes back into the tax pot”

Er, you seem to be missing one tiny point. Benefits are a (very inefficeient) redistribution of taxation. It the benefits bill were lower, then the tax take would in theory be lower, meaning that working people would spend more of their incomes which would be a genuine boost to the economy. Your point about marginal propensitys to spend/save is valid, but the biggest impact of taxation (as a proportion of income) is on low/average earners, who pay proportionataly far more of their income in tax than the top earners, most of whom would barely notice if, for example, VAT doubled overnight.

This left wing obsession with high taxes on “the rich” as a form of robin hood style wealth redistribution plays well with Islington guardinistas and the left wing media elite, but it’s actually Mr Average, not Mr Hedge Fund Manager, who bears the brunt of welfare largesse (and it always has been, irrespective of which party is in power)

Welfare as originally conceived (a short term safety net providing a subsitence standard of living) has been expanded massively to the point where people on benefits now consider they have the “right” to houses/cars/holidays/take away food, in other words to have a standard of living equal to (or in many cases higher) than people who actually worked to provide them with those benefits in the first place.

Following your argument to it’s logical conslusion, perhaps we should all give up work and provide even more of a “massive boost to the economy” ?

Uk Liberty – You’ve hit on a good point. This poisonous notion that freedom and fairness are somehow separable from individual economic reality. How it’s “unfair” that some people cannot afford to own a home, or how its a “restriction on someones freedom” that they can only afford butlins and not an all inclusive 5 Star holiday in the caribbean.
By that logic it’s “unfair” that I can only drive a ford, rather than a ferrari, and its a “restriction on my liberty” that I can only afford the bog standard villa at centre parcs rather than the flash one with the jacuzzi.
All of these arguments lead ultimately to one place and one place only, we should all live in the same houses, drive the same cars and get paid the same salary, irrespective of effort or ability.
It’s called communism and it didn’t work…….

Matt@34
I don’t think I mentioned whether benefits were efficient or inefficient, I probably agree that they are, inefficient. It would be much more efficient if the minimum wage reached the standard of existing wages plus the tax credits received, consequently targetting those who work. Also universal child benefit might be looked at for those who have an above-average income. This would lower the net tax bill for everyone.
This would also bring wages up for all, consequently, those who are currently better-off being unemployed would have a real incentive to find a job.
We all pay tax including benefits recipients, I didn’t think it was necessary to mention everyone.
Further, I don’t think that there was any logic in my post which would conclude that we all should give up work

Mark @32

A more tangible ‘excuse’ for not working is the proportion of our economy that has been outsourced within the last forty years. It is just as well that many of these people do not want to work, for a significant proportion of them there is little prospect of them working anyway. If you want the three million currently unemployed and the alleged incapacity claimants who could or should work, to find work, then you are going to have to create 5 million jobs. There is no point taking a big stick to the unemployed unless there jobs out there for them to fill. Creating millions of jobs will solve the unemployment problem overnight.

How you do that is a different thread.

Hiring now at your local McDonalds (and have been for as long as I can remember)

Matt @ 38

Not four and a half million people though. I don’t see many McDonald’s shutting down through lack of staff willing to take up jobs, do you?

Perhaps we need to to force them to take on only unemployed people?

Jim@37

If you have not already done so, try reading Andre Gorz ‘The Politics of Time’
Using his model, it would be easy to assimilate 5 million people into our economy.

No Jim but the wait for a burger has definately increased, when McDs first came to these shores one of their selling points was that if you had to wait more than 5 minutes you got your order free, whatever happened to that ?
The serious point I’m making is that a lot of people just won’t do menial jobs, partly because they (correcty) perceive the difference between benefits and a menial pay packet to be too small, and partly because they fail to see that having a job, any job is the first step on the road to a better job. People seem to expect to just walk off the streets into a cushy £25k a year job, the notion that you might have to work quite hard for quite a long time to get a decent job seems to be alien to them.

Matt @42

Oh, I agree there are lazy people who do not want to work. The problem is of course, that while there is a surplus of labour of up to 6 million (see previous posts) then there is little point in trying to force them into work that does not exist. The fact that wages are hardly better than benefits seems to point out how slack the labour market is. Which is exactly the point of many of the policies perused by both Labour and the Tories have initiated over the years.

The welfare state was supposed to be a safety net. On that much, we agree, but by the same token, the welfare state was conceived at a time when full employment was the economic aim of all the major political Parties.

The use of the welfare system as a suppository for surplus labour is a Tory construct.

We now have an economic strategy that requires that unemployment form part of the political infrastructure. Given that unemployment is a permanent feature of the economy, it stands to reason that those with least to offer potential employees will find themselves unemployable.

Take away the benefits for a second. You find high levels of unemployed people in every major free market run city in the World. Whereas we have council estates, other cities without welfare systems have shantytowns and squatter camps. In Johannesburg and San Paulo there are people living in little better than huts, cobbled together with scrap. Surely these people are not dissuaded from taking on menial tasks, such as street cleaning because they enjoy a better standard of living not working. So what do they need to encourage them to work?

But they are rather a lot lower when you have more flexible labour markets. And if welfare was consistently designed so as not to create high marginal rates of tax (i.e. something like a Citizens Basic Income or something that tracked it successfully), then you might see it even lower than that.

Nick

I am not sure I agree with you that unemployment is a lot lower in economies with ‘flexible’ labour markets. Surely unemployment is higher when you can throw people onto the dole on a whim?

It’s a myth that employers can, or want to, throw people on the dole at a whim. In all but the most extreme cases,thanks to the adoption of EU employment law, sacking someone on the spot is likely to put an employer before a court. This anachronistic image of the scrooge like victorian factory boss sacking people on a whim is a million miles from the reality of the modern employment market.

If there reallly are 6 million people in need of work then why do govt keep telling us that we need foreign labour to plug gaps in the labour market – it doesn’t make sense.

[46] No of course they don’t Matt – but there are many ways to skin a cat as you perfectly well know. Let’s say an employer wants to get rid of X (either because they dislike X for any reason or none or X’s job doesn’t really exist any more or “needs” to be outsourced).

They can humiliate X in front of colleagues. They can give the nod’n'wink to others to bully X. They can mislay X’s requests for leave, or remove their car parking space. They can claim that X’s sick record is such they need a doctor’s note for all sickness absence. And so on and so on. In fact, all these practices are going on in a workplace near you, right now.

What proportion of employers are evil, Mike?

[48] Well, I guess you take the proportion of human beings who you consider “evil” and then apply a correction factor as to whether you think the possession of power brings out the best or the worst in people…

IOW you don’t have a clue?

Mike @ 47

Or they could just sack them if they have served less than two years. That means they pay no redundancy pay or access to tribunals. Or they could just phone the relevant agency and have them dismissed. ‘Temps’ have no recouce to the law either.

Or they could just sack them on the spot, the lowest paid workers have no-one to turn to as no-one is interested in fighting their corner.

Matt

If there reallly are 6 million people in need of work then why do govt keep telling us that we need foreign labour to plug gaps in the labour market – it doesn’t make sense.

That is a question better suited to the CBI as they are the ones importing labour.

[51] Thanks, Jim.

[46][50] Actually, it isn’t necessary for someone to be “evil” for them to treat their staff in that way. Rationality is sufficient motive.

The more effective workers turn out to be the ones who are still reporting to the line manager who hired them. They’re much easier to motivate than the staff managers inherit with the job. The rational manager will therefore seek to get rid of the latter by the methods I mentioned earlier.

Mike, the ‘rational manager’ has a few more means at his disposal than bullying or humiliating his ineffective employee in order to get rid of him – and more efficient, too. Dog knows what happened to you when you were working but you seem to have a strange view of the workplace.

[55] Well, I did work in local government…

With the enormous increase in fixed-term contracts, temporary posts and agency working, on the whole, UK employers do not find it difficult to get rid of staff in an entirely legal manner.

Ukliberty @54

I think you will find that Mike’s ’strange’ views of the workplace is shared by thousands of people who find themselves in that position.

The labour laws are so lax that such abuses are common among those on the bottom rungs of the employment ladder.

About 10 of the temps I worked with in my job were sacked with an hours notice in January. I was lucky enough to be kept on but I could still be unemployed if I hadn’t been lucky.

Later, one of my permanent colleagues, who questioned why she was threatened with redundancy if her hours weren’t reduced one week, when new staff were taken on the next, was told in no uncertain terms that she better “not question management” and start looking for a new job. And soon.

Now the 10 temps they were taken on a temporary basis and an hours notice is all they were entitled too but it’s hardly fair is it? Lying to staff about redundancies isn’t justifiable is it?

It’s class war and we’re losing.

[58] Quite so.

No doubt the apologists for “free” markets (no labour market ever is, has been or could be “free” in the sense economists use the word, although I suppose self-employed computer geeks approximate the closest, especially if they’re multi-lingual – but I’ll return to them) will be along soon enough to say that such an example is one of malpractice and means nowt.

It isn’t. It’s structured into the system. Remember that the directors of a PLC have a legal duty to maximise shareholders’ returns. And consider that it’s likely that a sadist will work as a line manager for less than a normal person because he receives a non-pecuniary benefit, i.e. the opportunity to obtain pleasure by abusing staff. (At least, liberal economic theory posits this.) Thus capitalism actually selects for sadists as line managers.

And those computer geeks? Not a free market in labour at all, if you listen to their employers. Damnable monopsonists – as bad in their own way as Arthur Scragill. WTF haven’t we produced twice as many geeks as we need? That would bring them into line.