Joshua Cohen

TL;DR: Social science on “deliberative democracy” offers reasons for optimism about citizens' capacity to avoid polarization and manipulation and to make sound decisions and empirical evidence shows that the gap can be closed.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors study the effect of worker turnover on the ability to coordinate by weakening knowledge sharing and relationships among assembly line co-workers and find that using inventories in production planning can keep workforce utilization high, hence raising the marginal returns to productivity and motivating self-interested firms to retain workers.

Abstract: Product reliability is a key concern for manufacturers. We examine worker turnover as a significant but under-recognized determinant of product reliability. Our study collects and integrates (1) data reporting factory worker staffing and turnover from within a major consumer electronics producer's supply chain and (2) traceable data reporting the component quality and field failures---i.e., replacements and repairs---of nearly 50M consumer mobile devices over four years of customer usage. Devices are individually traced back to the factory conditions and staffing, down to the assembly line-week, under which they were produced. Despite the manufacturer's extensive quality-control efforts including stringent testing, each percentage-point increase in the weekly rate of workers quitting from an assembly line (its weekly worker turnover) is found to increase field failures by 0.74-0.79%. In the high-turnover weeks following paydays, eventual field failures are strikingly 10.2% more common than for devices produced during the lowest-turnover weeks immediately before paydays. In other weeks, the assembly lines experiencing higher turnover produce an estimated 2-3% more field failures on average. The associated costs amount to hundreds of millions USD. We demonstrate that staffing and retaining a stable factory workforce critically underlies product reliability and showcase the value of traceability coupled with connected workplace and product data in supply chain operations.

TL;DR: Autoworkers who left work had a higher risk of suicide or overdose than active employees, and those who left before retirement age had higher rates than those wholeft after, suggesting that leaving work early may increase the risk.