I've dealt with them. Some of them are easy to deal with, some are hard, and some are just assholes. Greater than 90% of them can be dealt with readily; there are a few who cannot be dealt with.
Leadership isn't just part of being a good manager; it's what makes you a manager, by skillset. If you can't program a computer and I give you a computer programmer job, you're not a programmer; you're an idiot in the wrong job. If you're a manager and you're not an effective leader, you're not a manager; you're a fuckoff. Knowing what to do is an important part of management; but managing something requires control over it, and you don't get control over humans without gaining their social acceptance of your ability to lead. You also can't decide what to do if you can't make decisions--and part of being a leader is making decisions when others come to you without direction, since that's when they're coming specifically to *ask* you to lead.
You can't be a leader by programming; you can be a programmer who is also a leader. You don't need to be a manager to be a leader.
Take for example how supply and demand influence price. I.e. more supply means reduced price, more demand means increased price. And 90% of the time, that hold's true, but it's that 10% where it throws the models off, and the cause could be something fickle like masses of people arbitrarily decided that the product has gone out of style and they don't want it anymore no matter what price it is sold at.
I've written theories largely based on cost, and handwaved price as a market economics topic. I believe that's a valid stance.
In my economic theories, the basis of productivity improvement is labor time reduction: if you need 10,000 man-hours to produce food for 10,000 people, each one person must work 10 hours to eat. As Adam Smith observed, you can compartmentalize this: 2,500 people can work 40 hours to feed everyone, and the other 7,500 can do something else. Adam Smith's observation was flawed in that he claimed division of labor was the only way to do this--that you had to add new people handling smaller parts of the task--and thus claimed you couldn't have the *same* people or the *same* number of roles invested in doing different tasks requiring less time and producing the same output. For example: he discounted that a power tool maker could design a better power tool, and discounted that something like cellular manufacture would have any gains (cellular manufacture is a rearranged assembly line to reduce the time spent carrying intermediate products around).
That productivity improvement implies a lot of things. Your theory of "Supply and Demand" has implications such as something called "Scarcity", which I can explain. Scarcity occurs with superlinear growth of labor requirements.
Let me demonstrate.
It takes 2,500 people to feed 10,000 people. It takes 5,000 people to feed 20,000 people. It takes 10,000 people to feed 30,000 people. It takes 30,000 people to feed 40,000 people. It takes 60,000 people to feed 50,000 people.
Somewhere between a population of 20,000 and 30,000, it started taking more people--more labor-hours--to produce additional food for one person. That means you can feed up to 20,000 people with 10 hours of labor invested per person; but when you get to 30,000 people, you're averaging 13 hours of labor per person--which means those last bits of food are averaging a lot more. If it's the last 10,000 people requiring the scaled-up effort, then you're paying 10 hours per person for the first 20,000 and 20 hours per person for the last 10,000.
Eventually, you need more labor than you have available: making things is just impossible.
Scarcity starts when it starts taking more labor per unit output to produce an increased output of goods.
My theories of wealth growth stand not on labor hours, but on labor costs. Labor costs are labor-hours multiplied by labor price. The primary method for reducing labor costs is to reduce labor hours; I recognize that increasing labor price has serious economic effects, and that decreasing labor hours both decreases productive scarcity and decreases labor costs as two separate economic factors. In other words: lowering the labor requirements to produce a good produce one set of effects by the same mechanism as reducing wages, and another set of effects stemming from the addition of available workforce labor. It's self-referential in that second bit: think of it as "like cutting wages plus other stuff you don't get just by cutting wages".
Prices can go as low as costs, sustainably; they can't go any lower in the long run. If it costs $550/tonne to produce rice, you can't sell rice for less than $550/tonne for very long. You can sell it for $1000/tonne if no other market factors drive the price down, of course.
A lot of market factors drive price toward cost. There's direct competition (ten rice suppliers; better push rice down. Oh, we can make it for $180/tonne now, so let's undercut that $550/tonne price and sell it for $200/tonne
Funny, my economic theories predict and explain everything pretty perfectly. Granted, I don't try to predict the stock market or the rise of new nations with economics; you wouldn't use a blowtorch to drive a screw, either.
Modern economic theories are largely stoneage garbage. I dispensed with the term "value" because I decided it didn't have a place in civilized economics; after a while, I started researching economics (because I wrote my theories in a vacuum, having never studied economics myself, and started going back to debunk everything else), and realized all major economic theories are based on explaining the price attached to a good or service. They're all theories of value, not theories of wealth. It's retarded; they really figured out how to fuck up by the numbers.
you are going to average 4 to 5 hours of generation per day best case.
Based on the average solar radiation per square meter per day in my area, measured with satellite and ground station data, combined with the 9.61% loss in my system, accounting for the angle from the horizontal, the azimuth (angle from the north), and the fixed nature of my array, I am going to average:
January: 2.84 kWh per m^2 per day, generating 556kWh.
February: 3.81 kWh/m^2/day, generating 669kWh.
March: 4.50 kWh/m^2/day, generating 843kWh.
April: 5.22 kWh/m^2/day, generating 929kWh.
May: 5.64 kWh/m^2/day, generating 1,003kWh.
June: 6.27 kWh/m^2/day, generating 1,033kWh.
July: 6.06 kWh/m^2/day, generating 1,025kWh.
August: 5.47 kWh/m^2/day, generating 928kWh.
September: 4.80 kWh/m^2/day, generating 802kWh.
October: 4.33 kWh/m^2/day, generating 773kWh.
November: 3.00 kWh/m^2/day, generating 545kWh.
December: 2.33 kWh/m^2/day, generating 454kWh.
That accounts for the size, efficiency, and generating capacity of my array. It accounts for the hours of the day, the average weather, the amount of sunlight reaching the earth, the amount converted by my panels. It accounts for the electrical loss in my inverters, for soiling, for shading (none), for mismatch losses, for losses in wiring.
That's not peak generation during the day multiplied by 24 hours; that's total generation during the day, on average, multiplied by the month.
That's a 7,000 watt system of 28 standard (15%) panels (mine are a touch more efficient), with factory-matched panels and micro-inverters (2 panels per micro-inverter) (meaning no mismatch loss), with no shading, in a fixed rack, at 161 degree azimuth and 34 degrees from the horizontal (optimum spring-fall, near-optimum summer, less-optimum winter), spread over a 1000sqft area, at a latitude of 39.18N and a longitude of 76.67W.
That's a total of 9,560kWh/year on average.
It's 23,900kWh in 2.5 years. At current, my electricity is 11 cents, plus enough taxes and fees to top 17 cents per kWh in total (I computed it at 17.4 cents per kWh last year; it's a bit cheaper now). That's $1,625/year of cost reduction, plus 9.5 SRECs. The exchange price used to hover around $168, about $1600/year; 2015 SRECs are currently $180, and 2014 currently sell for $175, so I'm looking at around $1700/year.
In total, it's $4,063 of displaced electricity costs, $4,302 of SRECs sold to the utility company, and the 30% ITC taking the $12,740 cost down to $8,918 plus the MD $1,000 flat grant. $8,365 recovered in 2.5 years versus $7,918 expended.
The concept of "deserving of higher pay" is flawed. If they could pay managers $8.50/hr and get away with it, they would. The fact is they have something they can market that you can't.
=> is not <=> ; you reversed the logic. You'd make a shitty computer programmer. Your statement is also false.
Computer programming is not leadership. A lot of computer programmers and other technical people envision themselves as leaders because they have a senior position due to their grand mastery of discrete component circuitry and assembly-level memory management. They try to lead by knowing, and by dumping their knowledge onto other people. Leadership is not just being more knowledgeable and thus frequently right where everyone else is wrong; it distinctly requires finding out when your knowledge has aged and getting input from other people to make sure the whole team is moving in the right direction, and not just the direction you envisioned from on high.
As soon as you're in a management position, you're in a leadership position. Management is not looking up from on-high and decreeing what shall be; you can't manage well--you might say you're not managing--by just pointing and screaming and flinging your own dung at everything. You *need* to take in information, you *need* to interact with the people you're managing. That's why middle-managers are supposed to work out high-level goals with their subordinates, who get their information from the teams under them, and who work out specific strategies and assign work with the team: a guy managing programmers must work with the programmers to figure out if and how to carry out business tasks; a guy managing managers must work with those managers to discover if something can be done and what the organization needs to invest to complete the task successfully. Nobody, at any level, can just close their ears and scream their decree and call themselves an effective manager; what you have there is a spoiled crybaby.
there is no leadership outside management
Team leads and technical leads are getting into semi-management positions. They're chimera roles: they're both leaders and engineers. In some organizations, the manager above the team lead also interacts directly with the team; in others, there's a strict hierarchy, and the team lead is expected to exercise all of the authority over the team, directing who performs what work. Technical leads are sometimes a strange mix: they're expected to hold much of the technical discussion and make many of the technical decisions without the functional or project managers present, and then bring the results (the decisions and the information that lead to those decisions) to those managers. In that function, the technical leads aren't team leaders, and they're not the decision-making authority; they're there to make sure the team doesn't stall and muddle waiting for leadership on technical decisions, and to make sure technical decisions are well-considered and presented to management properly.
Management is a technical role. You may not be a "manager" in title, and you'll still find yourself performing as management. Leadership is a particular skill and behavior that doesn't necessarily correlate to your job--you can perform as an organizational and team leader without being assigned that role, and easily find yourself promoted into a management or team lead role because you're helping hold shit together. We need the firm walls between skill sets, even if the roles sometimes become fuzzy.
So yes, a leader can be a computer programmer; a computer programmer can be a leader; but leadership and computer programming are not either thing. A manager can lead a computer programming team without knowing much about computer programming, too; it's probably more effective if he knows something about computer programming, provided he can get over the subject expert problem (subject experts like to micromanage, and often can't recognize new problems without forcing them into the structure of known concepts, so demand everyone do the wrong thing).
What you are describing usually works when a company is doing great. Then management can be upfront about the department's goals and criteria, and in general be transparent on what is expected out of its employees. However reality is such that if there are some problems, being upfront about these often leads to best employees leaving for greener pastures
No, it doesn't.
There is a reason we do work breakdown structures: it seems like a waste of time, because you all think you know what you're doing; but it's gets us a full view of all the work we have to do, so we can understand if we don't have the capability, if it's going to take a lot more work than we think, if we need to hire more people, to consider a smaller target, or whatnot. It lets us organize our work so we understand what we're doing, so we have everything planned ahead, and so we know where our blind spots are and can use rolling-wave planning to further decompose the work in those blind spots as we finish earlier work and come more to understand what we're doing.
There's generally a reason we do everything, even the things the engineers disagree with. There's a reason we make decisions against the team's judgment--hopefully not for incompetence. There are clear reasons for specific processes, for forms, for encryption policies, for software restrictions, firewalls, everything. There's a reason you're not allowed to burn CDs. There's a reason you've been told to use a fully-featured $50,000 commercial software and not a half-functional open source package--requirements and deliverables, other projects requiring those features, future plans, risks and opportunities.
When you hunker down and say "Do what I say and don't question it," you're sending the signal that the employee's expertise is unnecessary. You're also cutting off your ability to use their expertise, which is going to lead to a corporate collapse.
I'm paid more than the help desk and I keep trying to explain to the help desk manager why we need help desk training and training to interact with a help desk. It's another function--one that's cheaper because it's easier to replace and less necessary. There aren't a whole hell of a lot of managers, and good managers are a lot more productive than 2 extra engineers. Part of that is the whole accessible college thing: workforce development is an individual responsibility, not an employer responsibility, so you are worth nothing unless you go to college, so everyone goes to college (free or by loans) and we can pay you less and give you few benefits and replace you with another burger-flipper-with-a-degree if you turn out not to be an obedient little sycophant. We beg and plead and protest for serfdom in this day and age.
Management *is* a leadership position; leadership is not computer programming. It takes a whole understanding of business to understand what's what, and most people miss that so badly they envision everyone above them in the organizational hierarchy as non-working, excess, useless money-sinks which the business would get along better without.
The bigger problem is that management is a legitimate job. I'm studying project management--studying because I studied it and it's being a fucking pain in the ass to get into--and so I know a lot about budgeting, about team building, about managing human resources (e.g. do you hire someone or send your people to training? How do you track skills and competency?), about negotiating contracts and purchases, and a whole lot of other shit. To get rid of the managers is to put the responsibility of critical work onto a group of people who have other shit to do.
My understanding of management also leads me to conclude that everyone should have some understanding of management. I see too many managers just deciding it's an authoritarian chain: you do what I say because I said it. From my perspective, as a manager, it's my job to make sure shit gets done; that means that you need to understand why we do things the way we do, and I need to understand any important facts that will affect how to get things done. If we have a difference in understanding, knowledge must transfer: you must understand that we do these work breakdown structures and risk assessments to avoid doing excess work, missing work, or producing worse output for more effort; and I might learn along the way that I missed some critical information, which changes what work we do, how we do it, and how much time we estimate it will require.
Managers not communicating such information to engineers and other subordinates results in IT people saying a lot of stupid shit about what management should do to fix the shop--most of which would fuck things up a hell of a lot worse. Engineers not communicating to managers results in managers telling engineers to do stupid shit, not caring that it can't be done or that it can't be done in so little time. Impediments to communications are the primary way to fuck up by the numbers.
The manager is a tool for both their superiors and their subordinates. Management *is* a technical job, and half the damn time it's being performed by unskilled idiots.
Just a DIY 7kW array. Price has gone up to $1.99/w, damn. Price includes the inverters, panels, mounting brackets, etc; installation is bolting it to my roof and wiring it, which requires about $100 of breakers and wiring. I have a roofer who can do the installation in around $250-$300, about twice the cost of hiring cheap Mexicans from Home Depot but he's more reliable.
I initially planned on DIYing the whole installation, but engineering and permitting services plus having my roofer actually bolt the racks in is cheap risk balance. The original cost of these things was $1.80/w when I looked 6 months ago, and I figured on wiring and permits--an extra 2 cents/w at around $150 (PV permit is $25 for the whole job!); but I'll probably pay for professional installation to avoid the hassle. I may bring in an electrician to replace my panel, but I'm wary; I need an upgrade (125A or 200A service, since I'll have 100A + 30A), and the current panel was riddled with miswiring and fire hazards (14ga wire on 30a circuits!) by the last professional electrician. All that would add an extra 15 cents per watt to an array this size; it'd be more if the array were smaller, less if it were bigger, since it'd be the same cost to hire out engineering, pay a roofer, and pay an electrician. The biggest cost is the panels, inverters, and mounts.
he is not figuring in the losses from the chargers, batteries
No chargers or batteries; microinverters wired directly into branch circuits.
wiring,
Wiring is 2% standard; I'm considering overbuilding, but it makes little difference. Still, the run is short, and using 8 gauge wiring in a configuration requiring only 10 gauge would diminish the loss a bit. Microinverters sharply reduce the mismatch loss; and there's zero shade.
The total loss is 9.61%; the typical loss assumed is 14.08%, including a whopping 3% for shade cast by trees near the array--obviously irrelevant since my array is higher than anything close enough to cast a shadow (taller than the buildings, outside the shadow of any tree even in winter). It also includes 2% from mismatch, whereas my panel sets are manufacturer-matched panels from the same lot, tested as they come off in sequence and rearranged to pair and group closely together, and attached to micro-inverters so that only two panels need match closely to avoid most of the loss (connecting inverters to a common line, rather than panels to a string leading to an inverter, is the same as connecting the inverter to your main power feed--which happens at the end of the line anyway).
I didn't discount connection or wiring loss, although that's sharply mitigated by other means. I can theoretically get loss as low as 7%, and it's theoretically already halved on wiring due to the use of micro-inverters and a short string (my connection is short enough to use 12-gauge wiring to carry 25-30 amp output, which is usually a 10ga job, and still be code-legal; the actual run is expected to be 150-180 feet and use thicker wiring, but I only have 30-40 feet).
number of hours of peek sunlight
Total insolation month-by-month via satellite data, computed against the received insolation using the azimuth and fixed angle against the horizontal, optimized for spring/fall--which has a vertical angle closer to summer and farther from winter--to maximize collection.
The total production will be around 9,200-9,800kWh per year, offsetting about 18 cents per kWh when including the 8.2-11.6 cent electricity cost plus all the distribution fees and state taxes per kWh. That also provides 9-10 SRECs per year--the state actually uses the 9,800 estimate, rather than readings, to compute this, and gives me 9.8--which sell for $190 each on the exchange, although I usually assume $150 (they're typically around $156-$168, but the demand price has gone up slowly...).
The sales people dance to my tune; I've done all the engineering before contacting anyone, and am actually currently building up a financing plan (401(k) loan for this one). Going to do final system design, sales contact, and hire an engineer to do the final design in March (it's a $12,000 system; $400 for engineering I've already got mostly-right is a control on risk, making sure I get the best I'm going to get).
What good is $1/lb rice over $3/lb rice when we have to spend an extra $8/lb to cover the social welfare costs so the farmers who formally grew the rice can afford to purchase that rice to feed their family?
You're making a false dichotomy. Go back to colonial America--yes, that recent--and even England had no notable welfare system. England implemented old-age pensions and unemployment insurance before the United States, and unemployment insurance was hotly debated because of expense--with people citing old-age pensions as having worked out fine in support; now unemployment insurance is... a tiny, tiny thing. Why do you think that is?
Our social welfare systems in America cost 1.5% of taxed AGI back in 1950--including social security. Back in 1790, such social welfare systems would have bankrupt America--not required 30% of our taxable money, but required 500% of our taxable money. That 1% income tax they levied in 1820 covered some extremely minor functions of government on a small body of people, without the costs of things like communications infrastructure, space-age military, interstate highways, ICBM launch silos, nuclear submarine programs, or military satellite systems. America's navy wasn't England's; wooden ships were expensive, but we relied on militia men and a standing army rather than infinite sea power, since well-armed galleons wouldn't stop invasion from our two fucking huge borders. A standing militia is cheap.
The fact is these systems of $1/lb rice over $3/lb rice have made enough excessive wealth for us to actually implement those social welfare programs and still come out richer. We were once a nation--once a world--of blacksmiths and farmers, with the blacksmiths mostly supporting the farmers with plows and scythes; now farmers are 0.25% of our population. We're reaching a point where our current-model welfare system--the social programs system--is growing out of control in cost, while minimum wage--a good system for the 1900s--is actually threatening to undermine the economy; and, at this point, we can implement a Citizen's Dividend system which will continuously reduce its minimum operating cost (I argue, as a matter of policy, to lock the financing sources and just let the minimum standard of living grow as our nation becomes more wealthy), eliminating both problems and completely ending homelessness and hunger forever.
That's what cheaper rice gets you. It's what every step in history has been: cheaper metal products (blacksmiths go away), automatic elevators (bellhops go away), more food from less land (lots of farmers go away), advanced low-cost materials like plastic (shipping costs drop because fuel needs go down, manufacturing labor drops, and lots of people in many sectors need new jobs), and so forth have steadily cut down the price of a T-shirt from $4,000 (479 labor-hours at $8.25/hr minimum wage, a la 1820, before the power loom entered wide deployment) to $15 (8.6 hours at $1.73/hr) and moved the labor elsewhere. That labor, moved elsewhere, does other things: we still have t-shirts, but we also have rockets that go to the moon, and social programs that keep people from starving.
This is not just (or even mostly) about unit labor costs. Rice farming in Japan is incredibly inefficient.
That's labor costs per unit. That's exactly what I said.
In a good climate with good soil, you may produce 6 tonnes per hectare of rice using a total 10,000 labor-hours. In a bad climate with bad soil, you may produce 2 tonnes per hectare of rice using a total 40,000 labor-hours. That means 1/3 as much rice, 4 times as much labor, 12 times as much labor per unit of rice produced. That labor includes agricultural workers, fertilizer manufacture, water treatment and transport for irrigation, power generation and coal mining for electricity to run the pumps, transport of fertilizer, and so forth. Reduce the amount of irrigation required and you reduce the amount of coal mined, the amount of water treated, and the amount of pumps used to pump water--reducing the labor invested. Reduce the amount of fertilizer, same deal. Get more out of the same land and these things multiply, because you're tending less land.
Again: You can't reduce costs just by reducing labor price. Kicking farmers off the dole, reducing their subsidies, reducing their working hour costs, and so forth will bring labor costs down, but only so far. If you want to reduce labor costs significantly in the long term, you must reduce invested labor hours per unit productive output.
You're right; I keep quoting that per day, but it's per week. 15-20 hours per week. Sahlin and Richard Borshay Lee did studies on modern hunter-gatherer societies to refine their historical projections. It's around 4-6 hours per day.
The USDA Census from 2012 shows 3,233,358 farm operators in the USA. With a US population of 314,100,000 and an agricultural work week of 50 hours, that's approximately 27 working hours per person per year. The fifteen hours of food acquisition per person would total 245 billion hours per year, but the US only spent 8.5 billion hours on farming in total.
That's using the low projection of 2.14 hours per day. As an agrarian society, with modern, industrial farming methods and GMO crops, we save 237 billion hours of working labor time.
In theory, that means 3.5% of our population has to go to work getting food, rather than 38%-50%; in reality, comparing to a 40 hour work week where 15 hours goes to food, it's more like 1.3% of our population has to work getting food, rather than 38%-50%. Anhtropologists argue much of the remaining time was spent on food preparation, but don't always mention things like establishing security for the mud huts, child-raising, weapons and clothing manufacture, and so forth, all much more labor-intensive then (now we have school buildings and brick walls).
I was going to call it that, but the name was taken. Due to the principle of short names (shorter-named papers get more attention and generally draw more credibility), I titled it, "The Growth of Wealth", with the subheading, "A Treatise on the Origins and Development of the Wealth of Nations."
The way to get cheaper rice is for Japan to ratify TPP, kick these farmers off the dole, and buy rice from Thailand or Louisiana for a tenth the price.
Labor may be overpriced; but you can't reduce costs by just reducing labor price. That's a large and important part of my economic theories--it's why I argue for a Citizen's Dividend to replace minimum wage (and our current welfare system), and why a progressive tax system is good--but the primary mechanism of improving wealth is decreasing labor invested in producing goods. Hunter-gatherers could only provide enough food to sustain, at an optimistic estimate, 136 million humans on earth, at a cost of 15-20 labor-hours per day per human fed; now we sustain 7 billion humans, at a labor cost of 27 labor-hours per YEAR per human fed.
In this case, it comes from neither. I comes from massive subsidies, tariffs, and artificial price supports.
That's mercantilism and protectionism, and it actually reduces wealth.
Originally, the earth could support fewer than 136 million humans. We were working 15-20 hours per one person per day as hunter-gatherers, foraging food.
Today, we work fewer than 27 hours per YEAR to obtain food for each one person. We produce more food on less land. In 1970, India produced 2 tonnes of rice per hectare at a price of $550/tonne, scaling to over $3,000/tonne by inflation in 2001; in 1995, India was producing 6 tonnes of rice per hectare, and by 2001 the rice commanded a price of under $200/tonne. That means less labor invested in producing rice--in fact, under 6% as much labor per dry weight of rice (and per calorie!).
With all this free time, we built giant fucking rockets and sent men to the moon.
The total buying power of an arbitrary economy (including the whole universe, although we can theorize a single country like the U.S.) is the total productive output. This makes sense: you can only trade what is produced; and each thing requires labor-hours to produce. It eventually comes down to the minimum cost of labor, with a theoretical bound of however much it costs to keep that labor alive and functioning. That means the cost of labor required to produce food, shelter, clothing, and so forth, whatever your society has provided as "minimum standard of living", is your minimum labor cost.
Currencies hold the same buying power as total productivity. In the case of hard currencies--gold, silver, copper--the labor required to obtain more at any given time compares to the total productivity, which can radically destabilize the buying power of currency when gold mines open up (gold prospectors during the California rush were dropping sizable nuggets for picks and shovels). Fiat currencies are more stable and easily dealt with: they pay for labor, and come into issue by debt or central bank minting. The increase of currency in greater proportion than the increase in production is inflation; a slower currency increase than productivity increase is deflation.
The amount of currency in play is income. If you have $100 trillion but you only make business income and pay wages to the tune of $12 trillion in one year, the amount of currency is, essentially, $12 trillion. Income includes business profits and individual wages.
The buying power of currency, thus, is the total income divided by the total productivity. This lags because it's not a hard feature: it's an elastic market behavior which self-corrects, and so is prone to distortion (e.g. west-coast high prices, low suburban prices) and influence (e.g. cheap shipping means west-coast high prices become west-coast low prices as competition with east-coast cheap products delivers at lower labor costs or lower profit margins than west-coast products). It's also inherently arbitrary: although it self-corrects over time, we can most easily discuss it in more general terms such as the production and income of a fiscal year. You'll always have meaningful numbers, but never absolute, concrete numbers; understanding that limitation is critical.
The total wealth, on the other hand, is the total buying power divided by the total population--the per-capita buying power. Because of constant, absolute economic behaviors, this *always* increases. For one thing, if productivity can scale linearly with population--if 10% more labor-hours worked means 10% more of everything produced--then you can increase population without diminishing wealth. On the other hand, if you hit a super-linear cost situation--10% more labor-hours worked means 5% more of everything--people become poor, and the lowest laborers starve or require more buying power (not just more income, but income worth more labor). Raising the cost of low-end labor creates a sort of feedback loop which slows, then erodes, the economy, and so will tend to force people downward in living standard and put a firm psychological and financial halt to population expansion. This limit on growth is partly "So it is, so it's always been", but also will
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Huawei? Those shape-shifting squid things with the representative on Universal Congress's tribunal?
I've dealt with them. Some of them are easy to deal with, some are hard, and some are just assholes. Greater than 90% of them can be dealt with readily; there are a few who cannot be dealt with.
Leadership isn't just part of being a good manager; it's what makes you a manager, by skillset. If you can't program a computer and I give you a computer programmer job, you're not a programmer; you're an idiot in the wrong job. If you're a manager and you're not an effective leader, you're not a manager; you're a fuckoff. Knowing what to do is an important part of management; but managing something requires control over it, and you don't get control over humans without gaining their social acceptance of your ability to lead. You also can't decide what to do if you can't make decisions--and part of being a leader is making decisions when others come to you without direction, since that's when they're coming specifically to *ask* you to lead.
You can't be a leader by programming; you can be a programmer who is also a leader. You don't need to be a manager to be a leader.
Take for example how supply and demand influence price. I.e. more supply means reduced price, more demand means increased price. And 90% of the time, that hold's true, but it's that 10% where it throws the models off, and the cause could be something fickle like masses of people arbitrarily decided that the product has gone out of style and they don't want it anymore no matter what price it is sold at.
I've written theories largely based on cost, and handwaved price as a market economics topic. I believe that's a valid stance.
In my economic theories, the basis of productivity improvement is labor time reduction: if you need 10,000 man-hours to produce food for 10,000 people, each one person must work 10 hours to eat. As Adam Smith observed, you can compartmentalize this: 2,500 people can work 40 hours to feed everyone, and the other 7,500 can do something else. Adam Smith's observation was flawed in that he claimed division of labor was the only way to do this--that you had to add new people handling smaller parts of the task--and thus claimed you couldn't have the *same* people or the *same* number of roles invested in doing different tasks requiring less time and producing the same output. For example: he discounted that a power tool maker could design a better power tool, and discounted that something like cellular manufacture would have any gains (cellular manufacture is a rearranged assembly line to reduce the time spent carrying intermediate products around).
That productivity improvement implies a lot of things. Your theory of "Supply and Demand" has implications such as something called "Scarcity", which I can explain. Scarcity occurs with superlinear growth of labor requirements.
Let me demonstrate.
It takes 2,500 people to feed 10,000 people. It takes 5,000 people to feed 20,000 people. It takes 10,000 people to feed 30,000 people. It takes 30,000 people to feed 40,000 people. It takes 60,000 people to feed 50,000 people.
Somewhere between a population of 20,000 and 30,000, it started taking more people--more labor-hours--to produce additional food for one person. That means you can feed up to 20,000 people with 10 hours of labor invested per person; but when you get to 30,000 people, you're averaging 13 hours of labor per person--which means those last bits of food are averaging a lot more. If it's the last 10,000 people requiring the scaled-up effort, then you're paying 10 hours per person for the first 20,000 and 20 hours per person for the last 10,000.
Eventually, you need more labor than you have available: making things is just impossible.
Scarcity starts when it starts taking more labor per unit output to produce an increased output of goods.
My theories of wealth growth stand not on labor hours, but on labor costs. Labor costs are labor-hours multiplied by labor price. The primary method for reducing labor costs is to reduce labor hours; I recognize that increasing labor price has serious economic effects, and that decreasing labor hours both decreases productive scarcity and decreases labor costs as two separate economic factors. In other words: lowering the labor requirements to produce a good produce one set of effects by the same mechanism as reducing wages, and another set of effects stemming from the addition of available workforce labor. It's self-referential in that second bit: think of it as "like cutting wages plus other stuff you don't get just by cutting wages".
Prices can go as low as costs, sustainably; they can't go any lower in the long run. If it costs $550/tonne to produce rice, you can't sell rice for less than $550/tonne for very long. You can sell it for $1000/tonne if no other market factors drive the price down, of course.
A lot of market factors drive price toward cost. There's direct competition (ten rice suppliers; better push rice down. Oh, we can make it for $180/tonne now, so let's undercut that $550/tonne price and sell it for $200/tonne
Funny, my economic theories predict and explain everything pretty perfectly. Granted, I don't try to predict the stock market or the rise of new nations with economics; you wouldn't use a blowtorch to drive a screw, either.
Modern economic theories are largely stoneage garbage. I dispensed with the term "value" because I decided it didn't have a place in civilized economics; after a while, I started researching economics (because I wrote my theories in a vacuum, having never studied economics myself, and started going back to debunk everything else), and realized all major economic theories are based on explaining the price attached to a good or service. They're all theories of value, not theories of wealth. It's retarded; they really figured out how to fuck up by the numbers.
Power doesn't corrupt people; power attracts people who are prone to corruption.
you are going to average 4 to 5 hours of generation per day best case.
Based on the average solar radiation per square meter per day in my area, measured with satellite and ground station data, combined with the 9.61% loss in my system, accounting for the angle from the horizontal, the azimuth (angle from the north), and the fixed nature of my array, I am going to average:
January: 2.84 kWh per m^2 per day, generating 556kWh.
February: 3.81 kWh/m^2/day, generating 669kWh.
March: 4.50 kWh/m^2/day, generating 843kWh.
April: 5.22 kWh/m^2/day, generating 929kWh.
May: 5.64 kWh/m^2/day, generating 1,003kWh.
June: 6.27 kWh/m^2/day, generating 1,033kWh.
July: 6.06 kWh/m^2/day, generating 1,025kWh.
August: 5.47 kWh/m^2/day, generating 928kWh.
September: 4.80 kWh/m^2/day, generating 802kWh.
October: 4.33 kWh/m^2/day, generating 773kWh.
November: 3.00 kWh/m^2/day, generating 545kWh.
December: 2.33 kWh/m^2/day, generating 454kWh.
That accounts for the size, efficiency, and generating capacity of my array. It accounts for the hours of the day, the average weather, the amount of sunlight reaching the earth, the amount converted by my panels. It accounts for the electrical loss in my inverters, for soiling, for shading (none), for mismatch losses, for losses in wiring.
That's not peak generation during the day multiplied by 24 hours; that's total generation during the day, on average, multiplied by the month.
That's a 7,000 watt system of 28 standard (15%) panels (mine are a touch more efficient), with factory-matched panels and micro-inverters (2 panels per micro-inverter) (meaning no mismatch loss), with no shading, in a fixed rack, at 161 degree azimuth and 34 degrees from the horizontal (optimum spring-fall, near-optimum summer, less-optimum winter), spread over a 1000sqft area, at a latitude of 39.18N and a longitude of 76.67W.
That's a total of 9,560kWh/year on average.
It's 23,900kWh in 2.5 years. At current, my electricity is 11 cents, plus enough taxes and fees to top 17 cents per kWh in total (I computed it at 17.4 cents per kWh last year; it's a bit cheaper now). That's $1,625/year of cost reduction, plus 9.5 SRECs. The exchange price used to hover around $168, about $1600/year; 2015 SRECs are currently $180, and 2014 currently sell for $175, so I'm looking at around $1700/year.
In total, it's $4,063 of displaced electricity costs, $4,302 of SRECs sold to the utility company, and the 30% ITC taking the $12,740 cost down to $8,918 plus the MD $1,000 flat grant. $8,365 recovered in 2.5 years versus $7,918 expended.
Don't mess with me, man; I'm a lawyer.
The concept of "deserving of higher pay" is flawed. If they could pay managers $8.50/hr and get away with it, they would. The fact is they have something they can market that you can't.
A good manager fixes problems before they happen
That avoids stalls, rework, and all kinds of expensive shit.
Management *can be* a leadership position. Leadership *can be* computer programming.
=> is not <=> ; you reversed the logic. You'd make a shitty computer programmer. Your statement is also false.
Computer programming is not leadership. A lot of computer programmers and other technical people envision themselves as leaders because they have a senior position due to their grand mastery of discrete component circuitry and assembly-level memory management. They try to lead by knowing, and by dumping their knowledge onto other people. Leadership is not just being more knowledgeable and thus frequently right where everyone else is wrong; it distinctly requires finding out when your knowledge has aged and getting input from other people to make sure the whole team is moving in the right direction, and not just the direction you envisioned from on high.
As soon as you're in a management position, you're in a leadership position. Management is not looking up from on-high and decreeing what shall be; you can't manage well--you might say you're not managing--by just pointing and screaming and flinging your own dung at everything. You *need* to take in information, you *need* to interact with the people you're managing. That's why middle-managers are supposed to work out high-level goals with their subordinates, who get their information from the teams under them, and who work out specific strategies and assign work with the team: a guy managing programmers must work with the programmers to figure out if and how to carry out business tasks; a guy managing managers must work with those managers to discover if something can be done and what the organization needs to invest to complete the task successfully. Nobody, at any level, can just close their ears and scream their decree and call themselves an effective manager; what you have there is a spoiled crybaby.
there is no leadership outside management
Team leads and technical leads are getting into semi-management positions. They're chimera roles: they're both leaders and engineers. In some organizations, the manager above the team lead also interacts directly with the team; in others, there's a strict hierarchy, and the team lead is expected to exercise all of the authority over the team, directing who performs what work. Technical leads are sometimes a strange mix: they're expected to hold much of the technical discussion and make many of the technical decisions without the functional or project managers present, and then bring the results (the decisions and the information that lead to those decisions) to those managers. In that function, the technical leads aren't team leaders, and they're not the decision-making authority; they're there to make sure the team doesn't stall and muddle waiting for leadership on technical decisions, and to make sure technical decisions are well-considered and presented to management properly.
Management is a technical role. You may not be a "manager" in title, and you'll still find yourself performing as management. Leadership is a particular skill and behavior that doesn't necessarily correlate to your job--you can perform as an organizational and team leader without being assigned that role, and easily find yourself promoted into a management or team lead role because you're helping hold shit together. We need the firm walls between skill sets, even if the roles sometimes become fuzzy.
So yes, a leader can be a computer programmer; a computer programmer can be a leader; but leadership and computer programming are not either thing. A manager can lead a computer programming team without knowing much about computer programming, too; it's probably more effective if he knows something about computer programming, provided he can get over the subject expert problem (subject experts like to micromanage, and often can't recognize new problems without forcing them into the structure of known concepts, so demand everyone do the wrong thing).
What you are describing usually works when a company is doing great. Then management can be upfront about the department's goals and criteria, and in general be transparent on what is expected out of its employees. However reality is such that if there are some problems, being upfront about these often leads to best employees leaving for greener pastures
No, it doesn't.
There is a reason we do work breakdown structures: it seems like a waste of time, because you all think you know what you're doing; but it's gets us a full view of all the work we have to do, so we can understand if we don't have the capability, if it's going to take a lot more work than we think, if we need to hire more people, to consider a smaller target, or whatnot. It lets us organize our work so we understand what we're doing, so we have everything planned ahead, and so we know where our blind spots are and can use rolling-wave planning to further decompose the work in those blind spots as we finish earlier work and come more to understand what we're doing.
There's generally a reason we do everything, even the things the engineers disagree with. There's a reason we make decisions against the team's judgment--hopefully not for incompetence. There are clear reasons for specific processes, for forms, for encryption policies, for software restrictions, firewalls, everything. There's a reason you're not allowed to burn CDs. There's a reason you've been told to use a fully-featured $50,000 commercial software and not a half-functional open source package--requirements and deliverables, other projects requiring those features, future plans, risks and opportunities.
When you hunker down and say "Do what I say and don't question it," you're sending the signal that the employee's expertise is unnecessary. You're also cutting off your ability to use their expertise, which is going to lead to a corporate collapse.
I'm paid more than the help desk and I keep trying to explain to the help desk manager why we need help desk training and training to interact with a help desk. It's another function--one that's cheaper because it's easier to replace and less necessary. There aren't a whole hell of a lot of managers, and good managers are a lot more productive than 2 extra engineers. Part of that is the whole accessible college thing: workforce development is an individual responsibility, not an employer responsibility, so you are worth nothing unless you go to college, so everyone goes to college (free or by loans) and we can pay you less and give you few benefits and replace you with another burger-flipper-with-a-degree if you turn out not to be an obedient little sycophant. We beg and plead and protest for serfdom in this day and age.
Management *is* a leadership position; leadership is not computer programming. It takes a whole understanding of business to understand what's what, and most people miss that so badly they envision everyone above them in the organizational hierarchy as non-working, excess, useless money-sinks which the business would get along better without.
The bigger problem is that management is a legitimate job. I'm studying project management--studying because I studied it and it's being a fucking pain in the ass to get into--and so I know a lot about budgeting, about team building, about managing human resources (e.g. do you hire someone or send your people to training? How do you track skills and competency?), about negotiating contracts and purchases, and a whole lot of other shit. To get rid of the managers is to put the responsibility of critical work onto a group of people who have other shit to do.
My understanding of management also leads me to conclude that everyone should have some understanding of management. I see too many managers just deciding it's an authoritarian chain: you do what I say because I said it. From my perspective, as a manager, it's my job to make sure shit gets done; that means that you need to understand why we do things the way we do, and I need to understand any important facts that will affect how to get things done. If we have a difference in understanding, knowledge must transfer: you must understand that we do these work breakdown structures and risk assessments to avoid doing excess work, missing work, or producing worse output for more effort; and I might learn along the way that I missed some critical information, which changes what work we do, how we do it, and how much time we estimate it will require.
Managers not communicating such information to engineers and other subordinates results in IT people saying a lot of stupid shit about what management should do to fix the shop--most of which would fuck things up a hell of a lot worse. Engineers not communicating to managers results in managers telling engineers to do stupid shit, not caring that it can't be done or that it can't be done in so little time. Impediments to communications are the primary way to fuck up by the numbers.
The manager is a tool for both their superiors and their subordinates. Management *is* a technical job, and half the damn time it's being performed by unskilled idiots.
Just a DIY 7kW array. Price has gone up to $1.99/w, damn. Price includes the inverters, panels, mounting brackets, etc; installation is bolting it to my roof and wiring it, which requires about $100 of breakers and wiring. I have a roofer who can do the installation in around $250-$300, about twice the cost of hiring cheap Mexicans from Home Depot but he's more reliable.
I initially planned on DIYing the whole installation, but engineering and permitting services plus having my roofer actually bolt the racks in is cheap risk balance. The original cost of these things was $1.80/w when I looked 6 months ago, and I figured on wiring and permits--an extra 2 cents/w at around $150 (PV permit is $25 for the whole job!); but I'll probably pay for professional installation to avoid the hassle. I may bring in an electrician to replace my panel, but I'm wary; I need an upgrade (125A or 200A service, since I'll have 100A + 30A), and the current panel was riddled with miswiring and fire hazards (14ga wire on 30a circuits!) by the last professional electrician. All that would add an extra 15 cents per watt to an array this size; it'd be more if the array were smaller, less if it were bigger, since it'd be the same cost to hire out engineering, pay a roofer, and pay an electrician. The biggest cost is the panels, inverters, and mounts.
he is not figuring in the losses from the chargers, batteries
No chargers or batteries; microinverters wired directly into branch circuits.
wiring,
Wiring is 2% standard; I'm considering overbuilding, but it makes little difference. Still, the run is short, and using 8 gauge wiring in a configuration requiring only 10 gauge would diminish the loss a bit. Microinverters sharply reduce the mismatch loss; and there's zero shade.
The total loss is 9.61%; the typical loss assumed is 14.08%, including a whopping 3% for shade cast by trees near the array--obviously irrelevant since my array is higher than anything close enough to cast a shadow (taller than the buildings, outside the shadow of any tree even in winter). It also includes 2% from mismatch, whereas my panel sets are manufacturer-matched panels from the same lot, tested as they come off in sequence and rearranged to pair and group closely together, and attached to micro-inverters so that only two panels need match closely to avoid most of the loss (connecting inverters to a common line, rather than panels to a string leading to an inverter, is the same as connecting the inverter to your main power feed--which happens at the end of the line anyway).
I didn't discount connection or wiring loss, although that's sharply mitigated by other means. I can theoretically get loss as low as 7%, and it's theoretically already halved on wiring due to the use of micro-inverters and a short string (my connection is short enough to use 12-gauge wiring to carry 25-30 amp output, which is usually a 10ga job, and still be code-legal; the actual run is expected to be 150-180 feet and use thicker wiring, but I only have 30-40 feet).
number of hours of peek sunlight
Total insolation month-by-month via satellite data, computed against the received insolation using the azimuth and fixed angle against the horizontal, optimized for spring/fall--which has a vertical angle closer to summer and farther from winter--to maximize collection.
The total production will be around 9,200-9,800kWh per year, offsetting about 18 cents per kWh when including the 8.2-11.6 cent electricity cost plus all the distribution fees and state taxes per kWh. That also provides 9-10 SRECs per year--the state actually uses the 9,800 estimate, rather than readings, to compute this, and gives me 9.8--which sell for $190 each on the exchange, although I usually assume $150 (they're typically around $156-$168, but the demand price has gone up slowly...).
The sales people dance to my tune; I've done all the engineering before contacting anyone, and am actually currently building up a financing plan (401(k) loan for this one). Going to do final system design, sales contact, and hire an engineer to do the final design in March (it's a $12,000 system; $400 for engineering I've already got mostly-right is a control on risk, making sure I get the best I'm going to get).
$1.82 installed. It will take my 7kW array 2.5 years to pay itself off.
Nobody understands the context of this shit unless they firmly understand what a critical path is and how a scheduling network works.
What good is $1/lb rice over $3/lb rice when we have to spend an extra $8/lb to cover the social welfare costs so the farmers who formally grew the rice can afford to purchase that rice to feed their family?
You're making a false dichotomy. Go back to colonial America--yes, that recent--and even England had no notable welfare system. England implemented old-age pensions and unemployment insurance before the United States, and unemployment insurance was hotly debated because of expense--with people citing old-age pensions as having worked out fine in support; now unemployment insurance is ... a tiny, tiny thing. Why do you think that is?
Our social welfare systems in America cost 1.5% of taxed AGI back in 1950--including social security. Back in 1790, such social welfare systems would have bankrupt America--not required 30% of our taxable money, but required 500% of our taxable money. That 1% income tax they levied in 1820 covered some extremely minor functions of government on a small body of people, without the costs of things like communications infrastructure, space-age military, interstate highways, ICBM launch silos, nuclear submarine programs, or military satellite systems. America's navy wasn't England's; wooden ships were expensive, but we relied on militia men and a standing army rather than infinite sea power, since well-armed galleons wouldn't stop invasion from our two fucking huge borders. A standing militia is cheap.
The fact is these systems of $1/lb rice over $3/lb rice have made enough excessive wealth for us to actually implement those social welfare programs and still come out richer. We were once a nation--once a world--of blacksmiths and farmers, with the blacksmiths mostly supporting the farmers with plows and scythes; now farmers are 0.25% of our population. We're reaching a point where our current-model welfare system--the social programs system--is growing out of control in cost, while minimum wage--a good system for the 1900s--is actually threatening to undermine the economy; and, at this point, we can implement a Citizen's Dividend system which will continuously reduce its minimum operating cost (I argue, as a matter of policy, to lock the financing sources and just let the minimum standard of living grow as our nation becomes more wealthy), eliminating both problems and completely ending homelessness and hunger forever.
That's what cheaper rice gets you. It's what every step in history has been: cheaper metal products (blacksmiths go away), automatic elevators (bellhops go away), more food from less land (lots of farmers go away), advanced low-cost materials like plastic (shipping costs drop because fuel needs go down, manufacturing labor drops, and lots of people in many sectors need new jobs), and so forth have steadily cut down the price of a T-shirt from $4,000 (479 labor-hours at $8.25/hr minimum wage, a la 1820, before the power loom entered wide deployment) to $15 (8.6 hours at $1.73/hr) and moved the labor elsewhere. That labor, moved elsewhere, does other things: we still have t-shirts, but we also have rockets that go to the moon, and social programs that keep people from starving.
This is not just (or even mostly) about unit labor costs. Rice farming in Japan is incredibly inefficient.
That's labor costs per unit. That's exactly what I said.
In a good climate with good soil, you may produce 6 tonnes per hectare of rice using a total 10,000 labor-hours. In a bad climate with bad soil, you may produce 2 tonnes per hectare of rice using a total 40,000 labor-hours. That means 1/3 as much rice, 4 times as much labor, 12 times as much labor per unit of rice produced. That labor includes agricultural workers, fertilizer manufacture, water treatment and transport for irrigation, power generation and coal mining for electricity to run the pumps, transport of fertilizer, and so forth. Reduce the amount of irrigation required and you reduce the amount of coal mined, the amount of water treated, and the amount of pumps used to pump water--reducing the labor invested. Reduce the amount of fertilizer, same deal. Get more out of the same land and these things multiply, because you're tending less land.
Again: You can't reduce costs just by reducing labor price. Kicking farmers off the dole, reducing their subsidies, reducing their working hour costs, and so forth will bring labor costs down, but only so far. If you want to reduce labor costs significantly in the long term, you must reduce invested labor hours per unit productive output.
That's what inefficient *means*.
You're right; I keep quoting that per day, but it's per week. 15-20 hours per week. Sahlin and Richard Borshay Lee did studies on modern hunter-gatherer societies to refine their historical projections. It's around 4-6 hours per day.
The USDA Census from 2012 shows 3,233,358 farm operators in the USA. With a US population of 314,100,000 and an agricultural work week of 50 hours, that's approximately 27 working hours per person per year. The fifteen hours of food acquisition per person would total 245 billion hours per year, but the US only spent 8.5 billion hours on farming in total.
That's using the low projection of 2.14 hours per day. As an agrarian society, with modern, industrial farming methods and GMO crops, we save 237 billion hours of working labor time.
In theory, that means 3.5% of our population has to go to work getting food, rather than 38%-50%; in reality, comparing to a 40 hour work week where 15 hours goes to food, it's more like 1.3% of our population has to work getting food, rather than 38%-50%. Anhtropologists argue much of the remaining time was spent on food preparation, but don't always mention things like establishing security for the mud huts, child-raising, weapons and clothing manufacture, and so forth, all much more labor-intensive then (now we have school buildings and brick walls).
I was going to call it that, but the name was taken. Due to the principle of short names (shorter-named papers get more attention and generally draw more credibility), I titled it, "The Growth of Wealth", with the subheading, "A Treatise on the Origins and Development of the Wealth of Nations."
Not really. I'm working on it.
The way to get cheaper rice is for Japan to ratify TPP, kick these farmers off the dole, and buy rice from Thailand or Louisiana for a tenth the price.
Labor may be overpriced; but you can't reduce costs by just reducing labor price. That's a large and important part of my economic theories--it's why I argue for a Citizen's Dividend to replace minimum wage (and our current welfare system), and why a progressive tax system is good--but the primary mechanism of improving wealth is decreasing labor invested in producing goods. Hunter-gatherers could only provide enough food to sustain, at an optimistic estimate, 136 million humans on earth, at a cost of 15-20 labor-hours per day per human fed; now we sustain 7 billion humans, at a labor cost of 27 labor-hours per YEAR per human fed.
In this case, it comes from neither. I comes from massive subsidies, tariffs, and artificial price supports.
That's mercantilism and protectionism, and it actually reduces wealth.
Originally, the earth could support fewer than 136 million humans. We were working 15-20 hours per one person per day as hunter-gatherers, foraging food.
Today, we work fewer than 27 hours per YEAR to obtain food for each one person. We produce more food on less land. In 1970, India produced 2 tonnes of rice per hectare at a price of $550/tonne, scaling to over $3,000/tonne by inflation in 2001; in 1995, India was producing 6 tonnes of rice per hectare, and by 2001 the rice commanded a price of under $200/tonne. That means less labor invested in producing rice--in fact, under 6% as much labor per dry weight of rice (and per calorie!).
With all this free time, we built giant fucking rockets and sent men to the moon.
The total buying power of an arbitrary economy (including the whole universe, although we can theorize a single country like the U.S.) is the total productive output. This makes sense: you can only trade what is produced; and each thing requires labor-hours to produce. It eventually comes down to the minimum cost of labor, with a theoretical bound of however much it costs to keep that labor alive and functioning. That means the cost of labor required to produce food, shelter, clothing, and so forth, whatever your society has provided as "minimum standard of living", is your minimum labor cost.
Currencies hold the same buying power as total productivity. In the case of hard currencies--gold, silver, copper--the labor required to obtain more at any given time compares to the total productivity, which can radically destabilize the buying power of currency when gold mines open up (gold prospectors during the California rush were dropping sizable nuggets for picks and shovels). Fiat currencies are more stable and easily dealt with: they pay for labor, and come into issue by debt or central bank minting. The increase of currency in greater proportion than the increase in production is inflation; a slower currency increase than productivity increase is deflation.
The amount of currency in play is income. If you have $100 trillion but you only make business income and pay wages to the tune of $12 trillion in one year, the amount of currency is, essentially, $12 trillion. Income includes business profits and individual wages.
The buying power of currency, thus, is the total income divided by the total productivity. This lags because it's not a hard feature: it's an elastic market behavior which self-corrects, and so is prone to distortion (e.g. west-coast high prices, low suburban prices) and influence (e.g. cheap shipping means west-coast high prices become west-coast low prices as competition with east-coast cheap products delivers at lower labor costs or lower profit margins than west-coast products). It's also inherently arbitrary: although it self-corrects over time, we can most easily discuss it in more general terms such as the production and income of a fiscal year. You'll always have meaningful numbers, but never absolute, concrete numbers; understanding that limitation is critical.
The total wealth, on the other hand, is the total buying power divided by the total population--the per-capita buying power. Because of constant, absolute economic behaviors, this *always* increases. For one thing, if productivity can scale linearly with population--if 10% more labor-hours worked means 10% more of everything produced--then you can increase population without diminishing wealth. On the other hand, if you hit a super-linear cost situation--10% more labor-hours worked means 5% more of everything--people become poor, and the lowest laborers starve or require more buying power (not just more income, but income worth more labor). Raising the cost of low-end labor creates a sort of feedback loop which slows, then erodes, the economy, and so will tend to force people downward in living standard and put a firm psychological and financial halt to population expansion. This limit on growth is partly "So it is, so it's always been", but also will