Kokuretaichi “Escaping the Salaryman’s Rut”

We work hard, but life always seems to be in a rush. We work hard, get promoted, and earn a higher salary, but our lives are still stuck in a rut. What is the reason for this?

If this sounds like you, you might want to give this book a try. The book “Rat Race” by Kokure Taichi is a book that explains the “rat race” phenomenon that office workers experience. It explains the root causes of this phenomenon and gives advice on how to get out of it.

“We work hard, but we can’t afford to live hard”

In the beginning of the book, the author analyzes the economics of why we work so hard and still don’t have enough money. It’s because the way we’re currently paid at work is based on the “cost-of-living” method, which means that we’re not compensated based on how much we do or how much we make, but on how much we need to do the same job tomorrow as we did today.

To understand how salaries are structured, the authors say you need to understand two key words: “use value” and “value”. The value of a commodity is close to the concept of “utility” in our everyday language. The concept of value is the concept of what we can get out of a product.

In the case of value, he explains it a bit differently from the usual concept of value that we are used to. In this book, value is the “effort it takes to make things”.

“In economics, labor is a commodity.”

In economic terms, he says, labor can be considered a commodity. Thus, the value of labor can be defined as “the sum of all the things you need to do the same job tomorrow as you do today”.

It includes things like the cost of food, shelter, and clothing. Because our “labor” is valued in this way, it ends up being valued by society based on what is accepted as “this much to recover it”. In other words, salaries are “the cost of reproducing labor.”

“How companies make money”

Chapter 2 of the book discusses how companies make a profit. The bottom line is that the company makes a profit from the “surplus value of the laborer.” In England during the Industrial Revolution, for example, employers profited by working workers to nearly 19 hours a day.

In other words, a company can be seen as buying a day’s worth of labor from a worker, which means that the company is pampering the worker for a day and then profiting from the surplus value of that labor.

“How can we escape the workplace?”

The author makes this point. The bottom line is that companies make profits from the “surplus value of the worker” because they set the value of the worker’s labor as described above. Hence the title of the book, “Rat Race”.

To break out of this cycle, the authors suggest a number of options. The first suggestion is to sell “labor” at a “high price”. Among the use value and value discussed above, not only the use value should be increased, but also the “value” should be increased at the same time.

The process of finding the answer to how we can increase our own value is the core content of this book.

“The profit equation: profit = revenue – expenses”

As you get bigger, your maintenance costs will naturally increase, and vice versa. The book explains how to “increase the satisfaction of the squeeze” with the three concepts of “revenue, cost, and profit,” and the idea is simple. If we say that we make a profit by selling something, the actual profit is “profit = revenue – cost”.

As you can see from this profit equation, there are two main ways to increase our own profit. We can either increase revenue or decrease costs. Within these two methods, he suggests that we should think about what criteria we want to work for the company.

How to lower the required expenses (costs): do things that are less stressful.
Increasing sales: doing something in the long run that accumulates knowledge or know-how that can be used in other things.

The author’s advice is to choose one of two ways. The first strategy is to do what makes you feel less stressed as a way to lower your expenses. One way is to lower the “reproduction cost of labor” by choosing work that minimizes “stress” rather than doing what you like or what you’re good at.

Another way to increase sales is to prioritize and experience work that accumulates knowledge and know-how over the long term and can be applied to other jobs.

“Which strategy to take?”

This book is not about getting out of the corporate world by “starting a business” because working for a company will eventually get you out of the rut.

This book introduces “strategies” for dealing with the company that workers can realistically adopt. The strategy is to choose a job that is stressful, but the longer you do it, the more know-how you gain and can use in other jobs, or to choose a job that may not help you advance in your career, but is so stressful that you rarely need to recover from it.

Finally, he concludes with a memorable quote from the book.

“People overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade.”
“According to Japanese author Akihiro Nakatani, if there are 10,000 people who want to do something, there are 100 who start it and only one who continues it.”

“Escaping the Salaryman’s Rut: A Textbook for Salarymen Thinking of Changing Jobs”