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The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess

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Re: The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess

#191

Post by prolly_a_moron »

kamaal wrote: post #179
pyrale wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Inequality is the result of reaping the rewards of your own work: someone is more effective, so they earn more. Why is it bad? How can any market economy even function without it? Let us make an experiment and drop Paul Graham in a rainforest to see how much value he manages to extract. Then, once he has starved to death or died from some random infection, let's think again what makes IT jobs more valuable than gar…

We can't have a debate from the position of exceptions. The point he and Mr Graham are trying to make is simple. People are not same, and by that definition are not equal. The fact is that this inequality manifests itself in far more different ways before it appears as income/wealth inequality. Far before some one is rich and poor, they are good and bad at playing the piano, writing a book, programming or anything fo…

>Far before some one is rich and poor, they are good and bad at playing the piano, writing a book, programming or anything for that matter.

You attribute far too much of a person's wealth accumulation with skill. Is Bill Gates the best programmer of all time?

>People are not same, and by that definition are not equal.

It's hard to argue with this, but I don't see it coming up much in the gender or race discussions. I wonder why.

Re: The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess

#192

Post by lr4444lr »

seanhandley wrote: post #59

As a European (used to free healthcare, statutory maternity leave, and 25 days paid leave per year) it shocked me on first visiting America how third-world it actually feels regarding what people consider a "normal" work/life balance. People work incredibly hard, long hours and often with very little to show for it. It's surreal.

Have you left the major urban areas? There may not be a big social safety net, but the work life balance and cost/size of property is very varied across our great landscape.

Re: The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess

#193

Post by iicc »

alkonaut wrote: post #112
J-dawg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to disagree with the parent comment (because overall I prefer the European way) but we do have it worse in some ways. Salaries for professionals are markedly lower, we live in much smaller houses etc. I get the feeling that when you're winning at life in America, you're really winning. But when you're losing you're really losing. In Europe the ups and downs of life are more smoothed out.

> Salaries for professionals are markedly lower, we live in much smaller houses etc. This is an age old debate, and it's very hard to compare one vast continent to another. Regional differences between US cities and European cities are at least as large or larger than the difference between the avereages of US and European salaries/living standards etc. The difference between central manhattan and rural Apalachia is…

>...doctors who can basically make a killing in the US but not in Europe.

Arguably that's due to constrained Supply - http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/03/the_high_price.h...

Re: The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess

#194

Post by ZeroGravitas »

dukeluke wrote: post #189
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though weirdly in modern American politics, there's some degree of inversion there, with the "coastal liberal elites" voting for "socialist" healthcare and the unemployed coal miner with black lung disease voting against it.

This is overly generalizing a complex issue. In America, we have a two party system that has basically been taken over by lobbying and gerrymandering. Both sides are different socially, but identical fiscally. Propaganda has been spread massively, amplifying everyone's natural us-vs-them mentality. Plus the populist politician on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders, was suppressed and basically not allowed to be the…

"Both sides are [...] identical fiscally"

That's not true, and exactly the kind of misleading statement that leads to people voting against their own interests.

Re: The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess

#195

Post by conanbatt »

llamataboot wrote: post #78

Waiting for the inevitable HN critique about "voluntary work" and "why should anyone have the right to tell someone else to work less" without a complete understanding of what voluntary means in a world with massive structural inequalities. Or as the anarchists say, "Work 50 hours or starve" isn't a choice, it's a threat. (edit: nitpick misspelling)

> "Work 50 hours or starve" isn't a choice, it's a threat.

Damn nature, we'll get back at her somehow, we will.

Re: The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess

#196

Post by dalbasal »

This article, and most discussions on this topic are all rich with sub-text.

It offers to connect drivers with an insurance broker, and helpfully notes that “the Affordable Care Act offers many choices to make sure you’re covered.”

..a lot of sub-text here, for example.

One piece of the sub-text coming up in my internet & human bubble is "technological unemployment" which I have a slightly different take on then a lot of what I read. I think we're seeing it already and it manifests mostly as wage disparity, not unemployment.

On the subtext of that quote, it seems to be on the side of what we generall call "labour socialism" in Europe. The idea that laws should focus on increasing low leverage emloyees' bargaining power and/or mandated benefits.

IMO, this is a dated position. We've seen relatively consistent success with government provided primary services: health, education & transport. This gets called welfarism, though I think centralism is a better term. We have not seen that kind of success in the labour-socialist sphere. In fact, example like France suggest a problematic trade-off between "good" employment and unemployment. I think the main problem is labour-socialism's tendency to corporatism.

I would really like to see employment (including the gig economy) be free-er but suplemented with free or subsidized basic services (health & education mostly) and a basic income. If housing prices are not pathological (as they often are), the gig-worker would be a lot better off. Instead of chasing our tail trying to force uber (or regular taxi companies) to provide stabilty, the state can just subsidize the citizen and provide stability on some fronts. It doesn't even require "big government" for the most part.

In most of west Europe, we should be able to implement this relativley easily. Redundant conditional welfare benefits (dole, pensions) already spend 25-40% of what a UBI would cost. Another 25%-40% could be taxed back as income tax without disadvantaging workers (IE, your UBI is >= tax increases). That's most of the way to funding it. This remaining gap mostly represents the uber driver, workers earning well below national average dealing with insecurity and on the wrong end of employer provided benefits (like health insurance).

I don't think the US can do it anytime soon though.

Re: The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess

#197

Post by coldtea »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #128
coldtea wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, you know, this whole interpretation is misleading statistical BS, and as the caption says "Factors such as unpaid absenteeism, labor turnover, part-time work, and stoppages cause average weekly hours to be lower than scheduled hours of work for an establishment" -- and lowly paid part time work has replaced steady full time employment in many sectors. (As for the per capital consumption, does it add mr. Gates wit…

All the factors you cite mean the number I provided is an overestimate. If you have any evidence we work harder than before, cite it. Even so I'm sure they will be an increase in Joe Average's consumption, but is that because Joe Average has more buying power than a worker in the 60s, or because they have to spend more to stay afloat, as everything's more expensive, That's definitely not the case, since the numbers I…

>That's definitely not the case, since the numbers I cited are adjusted for inflation.

Inflation adjustment doesn't take into account costs that are prevalent in an era but totally absent in another: like internet access, cellphone bills, and such. Nor how much one not puts into their retirement account / savings to spend on daily needs.

If it was just supposed to be relative to the past, we would all be content for living better off than the pilgrims. Who needs a fridge, for example, when they didn't have any either? So, if we have fridges now and stuff, and even the garbage man has a cellphone, it's all dandy.

Empirically, people older than you that have lived throughout those decades know the numbers a bogus as an indicator of purchasing power, whether they were inflation adjusted or not. One could buy a house with a regular blue collar job as a household's single earner back in the 50-60s. Today, and for a few decades, not so much. Same for things such as college education. You could pay for it back in the day by working laughable gigs by today's standards.

So whether you can have "avocados" or not, if you can't as easily have a house, an education, or a steady job, is a moot point.

Note how: "after adjusting for inflation, today’s average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power as it did in 1979, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then. In fact, in real terms the average wage peaked more than 40 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 has the same purchasing power as $22.41 would today".

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...

Re: The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess

#198

Post by anamoulous »

jacquesm wrote: post #145
cmdrfred wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We both have health insurance, we make too much for Obamacare but we costed it out and we can afford for one of us to stop working if we had to.

Excellent. Make sure you keep a sharp eye on that and the future developments, this is one of those little things that can really ruin your life. It's bad enough to have a serious health issue, if it gets compounded by a financial crisis then you can go from 'ok' to 'really bad' in a surprisingly short time when there is no safety net.

What gives you the right to be so imperious about this?

Re: The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess

#199

Post by vidarh »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #118
wiz21c wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe about really winning/loosing is inequality. I generally think that inequality is bad for populations (you may disagree, but usually, those in favor of inequality are those on the right side of it)

I recommend reading: http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html Inequality is the result of people earning different amounts, such being compensated in proportion to the value they generate - rather than everyone earning the same irrespective of that. Inequality is the result of reaping the rewards of your own work: someone is more effective, so they earn more. Why is it bad? How can any market economy even function without it?…

This idea is based on the fantasy that people are compensated purely for what they do, and not also for their starting point, who they are, who they know, and so on.

The reality is that if you were born somewhere poor, odds are overwhelmingly that you would earn a tiny fraction of what someone born somewhere where they are provided proper education and an environment where better alternatives are available.

So maybe you are compensated in proportion to the value you generate, but the problem with this is that this is only superficially connected to the effort you put in and how effective you are.

Some people who do well do so in part because they put in exceptional effort, but the biggest predictor of your earnings and success in life is how where you live and how wealthy your parents are.

This is the problem we have with inequality: It has very little to do with effort or skills, and a lot to do with pure chance.

Re: The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess

#200

Post by Accacin »

alkonaut wrote: post #136
J-dawg wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whereas in Europe it's normally free While we're correcting misconceptions, in the UK it's most definitely not free. But I believe it's still a lot cheaper than the US. The universities are capped on the fees they can charge, and your student loan is regulated by the government (you only start paying back when you're earning over a threshold).

When I look at the UK from Scandinavia, it seems to me that it's basically "50/50 continental Europe and the US". Wage inequality, parental leaves, employment security, higher education etc.are decidedly "non-european" in the UK. So yes when I talk about "Europe" in the context of "Europe vs US" I think the UK needs to be considered separately.

Wage inequality and higher education I agree with, but we do quite well with parental leave don't we (the UK)?
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