I wonder how much you know about Germany? Health insurance is public AND private. You only get to opt-in to a private plan if you make over a certain amount of money. I never said that you didn't have to pay for insurance. But in Germany you pay a % of salary and nobody is uninsured - IIRC if you're poor, the cost of the insurance is subsidized. If there's a smaller # of uni grads in the population (citation needed), maybe more people go into the trades than here, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Unemployment is much lower in Germany than in, for example, the US.

My point in all this is that being what a US reactionary would consider a "socialist" country does not translate into necessarily having a basket case economy. A prior poster mentioned Canada as a similar example of what a US wingnut would describe as a "socialist country" that's doing relatively well.

Germany likewise is roaring along whilst providing worker protections, ensuring that everyone has health insurance, and, if I understand correctly, free university educations for a large segment of the population.

I strongly suspect that that's what my wealthy Republican friend will be doing: sending his kids to Socialist in-state public schools (oh the irony). As you say they cost a small fraction of what private unis cost and if I understand correctly the two top schools in Washington state are quite good.

His health plan was changed so that his defense-contractor MegaCorp employer, that feeds almost exclusively at the trough of the Socialist military, could make more money. There's absolutely no question that this fantastically huge and wealthy company couldn't have maintained funding for the current plan. They simply chose not to, because In These Tough Economic Times, they can get away with it.

Oh there's plenty of social mobility. For most people, it just happens to be downwards. I was surprised to discover recently that a friend of mine, a staunch Republican, had his Cadillac-plan health insurance cut by his defense-contractor employer and replaced with a bare-bones high-deductible plan. The shit is really starting to trickle uphill if it's reached his level. He's got a couple of girls who'll be going to college in a few years so it'll be interesting to see how that plays out, to see how many hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt he'll let them take on.

I really should get a Mother Jones subscription soon. I like getting a couple of thought-provoking mags a month. But I also buy hardback books (used, the older the better). I sometimes wonder if a good tablet would turn me into an online reader, but I don't think so. I like the feel of paper magazines and they're disposable - if I spew food or beer on one while I'm eating+reading, no matter. If I drop a magazine and step on it, it's still good. If I drop a phone or a tablet and step on it, the results are worse. I have data.

When I spent some time in Germany recently, I could -not- find a decent, hoppy beer. I'm used to, and love, American IPAs. The stronger and more bitter, the better. The closest to that I could find in DE was Jever, and that was just a shadow of the beers that I'm used to. The Bier store people hadn't a clue what I was talking about when I tried to describe massively hoppy beer. I'm tempted to take them some (if that's possible) when I go back. I did read some lamenations in Germany about the state of the brewing scene there. The gist of it seemed to be that the "purity laws" were preventing beer innovation in the country. You're right, the quantity and quality of craft brews here in the US is astonishing. The varieties available seem to have mushroomed over the past few years. Now if only the really innovative stuff came in 12oz bottles instead of $8 20oz bottles.

I think that one of us is misunderstanding the point of ROWE. To quote from the referenced article:

"“In a Results-Only Work Environment, people can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done.” This is not simply company-sanctioned flextime. A true ROWE has unlimited paid vacation time, no schedules, no mandatory meetings, and no judgments from co-workers and bosses about how employees spend their days. In other words, managers trust employees to get their work done and do not mandate — or even comment on — when, where, or how it happens. Because everyone is evaluated based on what they accomplish, as opposed to how much time they spend looking busy at their desks, it becomes clear very quickly who is actually getting work done and who isn’t.'

It's not about process or non-process, rules or no rules, standards or no standards. It's about the -manner- in which work gets done. It seems to me you could load as many performance/quality/compliance parameters as you liked into a ROWE-based work culture. You could have processes ... first you do the report, THEN you spell check it, THEN you attach the corporately-mandated coversheet .... even in a ROWE environment. It's not at all clear to me how having to go into an office 9-5 and sit in a cube (or worse, an open floorplan office) is going to help avoid law-breaking or prevent fraud or inhibit any other kind of serious badness that I can think of. I have to believe that the worst corporate offenses in modern times have all been birthed in office settings and probably in very regimented ones as well (banking scandals come to mind).

People ARE doing ROWE increasingly in the form of after-hours work, working from coffeeshops, that sort of thing. If the outputs, the "results", of these endeavors were not valuable and acceptable to their employers then I don't think that people would do this sort of work. If they heard, the morning after a late night working, "Hey cowboy, we can't use the Peterson sales report you put together, you didn't do it here in the office at your desk, how do we know the COO won't land in jail?" then that sort of work would not be happening at all.

You seem to speak of traditional management being about "we've got to watch and control the employees because they're at core a liability". To the extent that ROWE does/would succeed, I think it's because it shifts that mental paradigm to "employees basically want to do good work and contribute and are an asset" and ROWE is a great way to motivate and empower such employees. It requires not just a process shift, but an ideological shift.

To summarize, I don't see how a highly-managed, in-office work environment works to prevent the kinds of problems that you mention. At least not among what most would consider "white collar" employees. Virtually all corporate fraud and abuse to date has been hatched in non-ROWE workplaces. The traditional management approaches carry high costs, both in diminished productivity, and in the productivity-opportunity costs that might result from ROWE-style "empowerment" of employees. I too am a knowledge-worker, and like you I thrive on having autonomy and in being evaluated primarily by the results of my efforts. But I also think that the general approach could be much more widely-applied in the business world and that it's benefits would be immeasurable.

'Jason Fried thinks deeply about collaboration, productivity and the nature of work. He's the co-founder of 37signals, makers of Basecamp and other web-based collaboration tools' http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work.html

It's interesting to me that tech start-ups have adopted many elements of the ROWE concept whereas I've never heard of this in larger tech companies. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-51237128/what-is-a-results-only-work-environment/ I suspect that large companies aren't particularly interested in results, preferring instead to focus on the cult of "management". And the worst of managers, having limited capacities and imaginations, see as their primary strategies control and compliance. The definition of success is not results, but is instead how "tight a ship" they run.

I may have inadvertently been responsible for that. I have mod points and tried to mod you up. When I did so, the Troll label appeared, despite the fact that I selected the "underrated" label. So, thinking that I may have mis-clicked, I posted the comment as a way of un-doing the modding. However, after that, Troll was still there, so maybe someone else gave you that mod? If it was me, may my mod points be revoked, and you have my sincere apologies.

MJ does a fantastic job of investigative journalism, so keep up the good work.

Last week I flew back home to the States from Germany with transfers at Copenhangen, Keflavik, and SeaTac. At Keflavik I bought three of those mini-bottles of booze that you normally see underneath highway overpasses and on frat-house lawns after a party. At SeaTac, the port of entry, there was a huge charade involving standing in long lines to be rudely questioned by TSA and customs (OK, they were decent to me, but the woman employee at the next kiosk was being a complete bitch to an elderly guy, probably not a native English speaker, and who didn't quite understand what she was asking), claiming your checked luggage, having your crotch sniffed by dogs, having to re-check the luggage to your connecting flight, and finally go through a luggage scan and metal detector *again*. The guy helping to run the conveyor kept hollering out to those waiting in line that liquids were verboten. But when I produced the bottles he said fine and put them through. No problem. I was really surprised that they weren't confiscated on the spot, especially since they contained tasty Icelandic booze.

I'm an American coder for a short while in Chermany living. I have found that not all Chermans are fluent in English. People with university educations perfect English speak. But I, in shops and other non-professional places (at least in Berlin), people with no English find. I was at that surprised. That said, it's amazing how much English has been incorporated both into the vocabulary and the culture. I am always advertising in English/Denglish seeing, and it strikes me as very odd that the Cherman culture would is so infected, linguistically, with an alien language. The Cherman people that I with speaking seem to think nothing of it though.