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What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

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Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#201

First, there are plenty of jobs, but not enough people that have decided to develop themselves enough to have the skills to do them. For example (a real life one, unfortunately for me): I need a biopsy of a mass near my heart, but the current waiting time for this procedure here in Seattle (at both major hospitals) is two months. What we do have is plenty of regulations that constrain the supply of physicians, servic…

I feel for you - this kind of thing just shouldn't happen.

I think that medicine is a bad example of the point you are trying to make though... It has a lot of embedded costs and roadblocks that aren't really related to regulation.

For example - the procedure you describe is highly specialised, and can only be learnt in certain places. Say there are 4 people that can do this procedure at a hospital. Attracting a doctor who can do the procedure is often a complicated task. In a highly specialised field thay may need to be incentivised, which also costs money. It is very difficult to control where doctors work - they invariably want to work in large established centres, which are already saturated (and so they don't work full time, they end up taking small bits of work here and there). This problem isn't necessarily solved by training an order of magnitude more - increasing the true training capacity of the health system is actually very hard, and takes a long time. Pumping up the inflow of trainees at one end just means that competition increases, doctors spend more time optimising for selection onto programs and working in certain places rather than doing their training. They also develop a sense of entitlement due to the high debt and difficult and competitive training ie they feel like they should be able to work wherever they want to work, not where they are forced to go.

There is limited space in the endoscopy suites usually - increasing capacity means building a new suite, buying all the equipment, paying the nurses, rostering another anaesthetist. The added cost is easily more than a million dollars just to get started, without the doctor even doing any procedures. There could also be other bottlenecks like sufficient recovery areas and clerical staff. This high threshold means that an overloaded service will languish for long periods before capacity is increased.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are sports economics zero-sum? Both teams get paid for playing. If one team loses, they don't give money to the other team.

Most sports are zero-sum in the sense that over a given set of matches, the number of wins has to equal the number of losses. Obviously not every sport is that way. A major marathon might have one male and one female winner among 30,000 entrants.

[deleted]

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are sports economics zero-sum? Both teams get paid for playing. If one team loses, they don't give money to the other team.

Most sports are zero-sum in the sense that over a given set of matches, the number of wins has to equal the number of losses. Obviously not every sport is that way. A major marathon might have one male and one female winner among 30,000 entrants.

Your ignoring golf for example where the winner / loser split is not 1:1. Also, regular session games in many sports are simply gateways to playoffs so the number of winners = slots in playoffs.

More importantly it's entertainment. A close game is better in the long term than annual blowouts. Making the occasional loss highly valuable.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#204
post #4

Is the "infinite work hypothesis" finally ending?? The answer to "what happens to workers being replaced" has always been "they'll find jobs elsewhere, every time you make a job redundant you create other new jobs", what I've seen called the "infinite work hypothesis" where there will always be new work and the problem is agility, job training, not demand.

>> every time you make a job redundant you create other new jobs That is false on its face. If you buy a robot to replace a welder, you indirectly employ the people who design, build, and maintain that robot. True, and those are higher paid jobs than the welder. But at the end of the day, the person running the factory where said robot is used did an analysis and concluded that it was cheaper to buy the robot than to…

Yes, but now lower prices for welded goods mean some combination of people can afford to buy more stuff, and more capital is available for ventures that previously wouldn't have been funded.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#205

First, there are plenty of jobs, but not enough people that have decided to develop themselves enough to have the skills to do them. For example (a real life one, unfortunately for me): I need a biopsy of a mass near my heart, but the current waiting time for this procedure here in Seattle (at both major hospitals) is two months. What we do have is plenty of regulations that constrain the supply of physicians, servic…

That's like saying there's plenty of room for musicians if you're Mozart. The amount of investment required to develop yourself for a target field has grown astronomically, but that's been coupled with a push down in wages. I know lawyers who spent a fortune for their degree, passed the Bar, and make barely more than minimum wage. Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this.

> barely more than minimum wage.

I hear this all the time, but when I want to employ a lawyer they want $400/hr.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying there's plenty of room for musicians if you're Mozart. The amount of investment required to develop yourself for a target field has grown astronomically, but that's been coupled with a push down in wages. I know lawyers who spent a fortune for their degree, passed the Bar, and make barely more than minimum wage. Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this.

>Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this. Neither regulation nor automation is causing this. Political-economic suppression of labor and productive enterprise in favor of rent-seeking is causing this. Let's imagine an alternate universe in which different political choices were made. For instance, in the alternate universe, Elon Musk started a techno-progressive political party and swept into power…

See also housing crisis in the UK.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying there's plenty of room for musicians if you're Mozart. The amount of investment required to develop yourself for a target field has grown astronomically, but that's been coupled with a push down in wages. I know lawyers who spent a fortune for their degree, passed the Bar, and make barely more than minimum wage. Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this.

>Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this. Neither regulation nor automation is causing this. Political-economic suppression of labor and productive enterprise in favor of rent-seeking is causing this. Let's imagine an alternate universe in which different political choices were made. For instance, in the alternate universe, Elon Musk started a techno-progressive political party and swept into power…

> Putting aside how [President] Elon Musk pays for it all,

facepalm you can't compare the side effects of a massive government spending plan without looking at that!

It'll all come out eventually. Either we borrow, and tax our future generations, or we tax more businesses now, which would also repress business activity and American competitiveness.

There's a few items that could be solved with the market. Like: Remove city's zoning laws with a federal mandate, to encourage the market to build urban housing. You don't need the gov. to do it, just remove the limitations. Disallow internet providers from offering kickbacks to condo/apartment managers to open up the market. We should probably tax semi trucks & cars with snow tires more, because they're the ones that cause 90% of the damage to highways.

In order to justify light-rail & subway construction, we really need to look at the costs involved. And the costs are getting out of hand, and are way more expensive in the US than in other countries. http://www.citylab.com/commute/2011/11/1-billion-doesnt-buy-...

Your Massachusetts background is showing.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying there's plenty of room for musicians if you're Mozart. The amount of investment required to develop yourself for a target field has grown astronomically, but that's been coupled with a push down in wages. I know lawyers who spent a fortune for their degree, passed the Bar, and make barely more than minimum wage. Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this.

>Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this. Neither regulation nor automation is causing this. Political-economic suppression of labor and productive enterprise in favor of rent-seeking is causing this. Let's imagine an alternate universe in which different political choices were made. For instance, in the alternate universe, Elon Musk started a techno-progressive political party and swept into power…

Not just that; Americans want choice or at least the illusion of it, especially in healthcare.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#209
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not the money to pay for these jobs....But in most countries they receive social welfare while out of work. See the contradiction here? We could put these people to work engaging in labor that is valuable, but not as valuable as the cost of their welfare. I.e. pay them $7.25/hour to do $5/hour worth of labor (net cost to society = $2.25/hour). Yet we don't. Instead we pay them to play video games (net cost to soc…

Bring back the CCC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps

I would like to see something like that. Not as a replacement for welfare or unemployment compensation, but as a program where anyone who needs a job right now for whatever reason can get one easily.

In the Portland area we have a large park (many square miles) that's being over-run by English ivy, and that's not going to be fixed without a lot of people going out and pulling it up by hand. If the city were to pay a bunch of workers with nothing better to do minimum wage it might be a lot cheaper than paying a team of regular permanent employees, and it could address part of the unemployment (and possibly some of the homelessness) problem.

Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying there's plenty of room for musicians if you're Mozart. The amount of investment required to develop yourself for a target field has grown astronomically, but that's been coupled with a push down in wages. I know lawyers who spent a fortune for their degree, passed the Bar, and make barely more than minimum wage. Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this.

>Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this. Neither regulation nor automation is causing this. Political-economic suppression of labor and productive enterprise in favor of rent-seeking is causing this. Let's imagine an alternate universe in which different political choices were made. For instance, in the alternate universe, Elon Musk started a techno-progressive political party and swept into power…

Musk is just your stand-in for techno-progressive visionary, but given that you included Hyperloops this hypothetical platform should also include solar panels for every roof, the nation's powergrid rehauled to support electric vehicles, and a new Space Race...
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