It's interesting that the deviation went down when the pay scale was 'fixed.' Makes you wonder if it was the same workers that were productive or not. Maybe it was a good opportunity to make a good wage if you were willing to take social flak.
I'd like to point out that this is coincidental. The standard deviation might have gone up to the benefit of the (hardest) workers. The farmer would probably still been better off too.
Another interesting thing that you can clearly see in your numbers what a blow to the farmer (and advantage to the workers)it is to have weak workers. They set the pay rate.
The next con could be to collectively hire bad workers.
Oh, the standard deviation did go up, just not enough to account for the increased average. The deviation went from 3.13 to 4.10, but the number which matters for the hardest working is ratio between them and the least working, which went down from 9:2 to 5:2.
With manual labour there is a limit on the amount of fruit that one person can pick per hour, hour after hour. That caps how much the most dedicated person can work, they simply can't work any harder without inventing better tools to do the job. (Which is where us technologists come in :-)
Essentially, it is harder to be 5x more productive than someone motivated than someone unmotivated, so when everyone is motivated and the pay is kept to the minimum, it is not a coincidence that the hardest workers will get paid less.
Welcome to the free labour market, I guess. PG has an essay recommending to work where your (presumably) better than average productivity can be easily measured, so that you can be remunerated fairly for it. This seems to be a corollary: don't work somewhere where it is hard to work more productively than everyone else, or you'll get shafted if they start working just a little harder.
Minimum wage is the regulation that's causing all the trouble here.
Without minimum wage, Many of Farmer Smith's problems would have gone away. He could just pay the lowest rate at which he could still get enough workers to pick his fields. He still might have to adjust the rate by field, bit once that's done he wouldn't have to worry about motivating workers.
It's interesting that the deviation went down when the pay scale was 'fixed.' Makes you wonder if it was the same workers that were productive or not. Maybe it was a good opportunity to make a good wage if you were willing to take social flak.
I'd like to point out that this is coincidental. The standard deviation might have gone up to the benefit of the (hardest) workers. The farmer would probably still been better off too.
Another interesting thing that you can clearly see in your numbers what a blow to the farmer (and advantage to the workers)it is to have weak workers. They set the pay rate.
The next con could be to collectively hire bad workers.