The manager’s exercise of central planning over his small province of tyranny is therefore not simply a better means to an end, as Coase thought, but a reflection of how the economy actually works. The adversarial relationship between bosses and workers that capitalism creates is no accident of markets merely introducing transaction costs that are best avoided through planning. Yet for mainstream economists, the confrontation between workers and managers only comes up in the context of “shirking.” The GPS device in the UPS driver’s truck, the call center badge that monitors washroom breaks or the white-collar worker’s app that tracks web browsing history are the sticks requiring one does as one is told; the bonuses are the carrots.

Shirking, however, is a very rational response for someone who has little or no say over their work, often has no deeper sense of collective responsibility and knows that the profit from what they do ends up in someone else’s pocket. Shirking is not an innate tendency toward laziness, but rather the way people are under capitalism. Any complex society will have people with different, sometimes-conflicting interests who need to cooperate toward common goals. Humans have embarked upon and accomplished projects in common, from the mundane to the spectacularly ambitious, long before the advent of capitalism and its subtly coercive labor market—indeed, often involving much more explicit coercion. Across history, however, people have also found ways to plan and act together without bosses to tell them what to do.