Painters vs. Artists

People in society often make simplifying assumptions about each other in order to make decisions, such as the notion that the most important factor in a work crew (in whatever discipline) is the number of people it contains.  At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not convinced that the complexity of human interactions should not be reduced to a game of numbers.  As it is our mission to help world citizens, we will take some time now to explain what we mean by this.

In some jobs, increasing the number of workers does create a nearly linear increase in productivity, and what's more, any able-bodied adult can generally contribute about as much to the outcome as any other outcome.  That is to say, the participants are completely interchangeable and the work is nearly completely parallelizable.  If, for instance, you give paint brushes to 5 capable adults and ask them to paint a wall it will generally take about twice as long as giving brushes to 10 capable adults and asking them to paint a similarly-sized wall.  As another example, adding a second clerk at a fast food counter will generally double the order-processing speed, but this example has a subtle difference: not all fast food employees will be equally efficient with taking orders and processing payment.  In this case, taking the employee who was trained as a janitor and asking him or her to run the register would be less efficient than an employee specifically trained for this purpose.

The difference becomes more pronounced as the skills required to perform a task well become more difficult to acquire.  When you talk about a task such as carbon-dating a fossil, a person trained for the task is nearly infinitely better at performing the task than a standard wall-painting adult.  The realm of art is another where skill is required, but more importantly, where throwing more people at a task rarely makes it go faster.  Few are the paintings that were completed in half the time because two great artists collaborated.

Some world leaders, generally those who don't have an enlightened form of government like the GNU Public Dictatorship, tend to view people as interchangeable minions and compare themselves to other world leaders by the number of people they subjugate, not by the quality thereof.  At the GPD, we promise to evaluate not just your number, but also your value to society before we boast to other world leaders, but, more importantly, we will use you where you are most productive, and not ask you to restore a fresco in a Spanish church without ensuring that you have been properly trained to do so.