Preface to a Thought-Experiment on Labor, Capital, and Income Distribution

Mark Thoma goes to something called the Business Ethics Blog for an economics thought-experiment:

A Montreal accessories company has taken its policy of using no animal products beyond the rack and has forbidden its staff from eating meat and fish at work.

A former employee says the policy violated her rights as a non-vegetarian….

It’s an interesting experiment for many reasons, none of which deal directly with economics as it is currently taught.  For one thing, it is a dictated change in a contract with workers.  As a standard microeconomics problem, there is a negotiation, the worker’s preferences are examined, and the student is asked to find an economic balance that will satisfy the worker, with the implication that the employer desiring the change with provide compensation. (Note that the standard intermediate or graduate-level microeconomics problem merely teaches math, with dollars and preferences substituted for widgets and variables.)

For another, there is insufficient information to discuss externalities. (Aside to Brad DeLong: it’s not only, or even most importantly, Irving Fisher who is forgotten; Alfred Marshall appears to have been stripped from the curriculum as it transmogrified into a Libertarian Wet Dream.)  Absent evidence, we cannot know if the company had a legitimate reason for banning meat eating. Perhaps chemicals used in their processes combine with some proteins and produce a marginally higher level of cancer in those exposed for long periods. Perhaps the maintenance crew has discovered multiple rat nests because the workers have not been attentive to clean-up requirements, leaving enough pieces of pork, chicken, beef, and tripe around to make the building a desirable habitat. We do not have sufficient information.

We do, however, know that bars that permit smoking produce lung, throat, and other cancers in even the non-smoking bartenders and wait staff.  It may be unlikely that the aggressive hormone and radiation treatment given to meat these days produces a similar effect—radiation and drug treatment, after all, are both perfectly safe—but it is also possible that the company has seen recent research that indicates otherwise and fears for its future health-care costs.

We also do not know whether the company provides eating areas for its staff, or under what conditions it does.  Is there a company cafeteria (or eating spaces on various floors) that provides napkins and utensils to those who bring their own food? Is eating at one’s desk permitted? (I have worked places where it is not.) In such a case, we cannot even model the type of microeconomics problem referenced above, because we do not know the extent to which the workers are being told to give up something. (Smokers having to leave the building has positive externalities for them, such as work breaks others do not get and social networking opportunities that provide compensation.)  We cannot, in short, know the value of the widgets or the identities of the variables.

The question then becomes whether this is an economics problem at all.  And, if we assume it is, what does that mean for other. more standard, problems?  On the Next Rock: capital, labor, and taxation.