"with the psychiatric calamity of workplace Taylorism, people are arguably even unhappier than they were in all of those societies where life was nasty, brutish

"with the psychiatric calamity of workplace Taylorism, people are arguably even unhappier than they were in all of those societies where life was nasty, brutish, and short." This is a fantastic quote. Frederik Taylor is a daunting historical character but applying his methods to all aspects of organizing most of adult life in the industrial nations is just incredibly ... unimaginative and intellectually impoverished. I'm not sure though, would I call the splitting work to simple sub level tasks Fordism or Taylorism, though, and which one causes more anguish: dividing the work to boring tasks (by Ford) or just trying to formalize the individuals work to a level of trivial minutiae and measuring everything (by Taylor) leading asymptotically to micromanagment at all scales. (I'm exaggerating of course.) Based on my understanding of the history I would say the splitting is very much Ford, but Taylor's methods come to play after we have decided on the division labor, after which the token Taylorist comes to the show with a stopwatch and some silly non-value-adding key performance indicator chart and starts to take time. Of course, all of this could be applied properly, I think, but somehow this cargo cult "scientification" through arbitrary measurement is a fantastically tenacious facet of the modern society.