America has a truck driver shortage

They are terrible jobs. Years ago I had a class B and drove dial-a-ride buses. All-in-all it wasn't a terrible job because I got frequent breaks between passengers and could get out of the truck on those breaks and hang out at a mall or get something to eat. My counterparts that drove the city buses had to stay in their seat for 8 hours driving in circles around town.

The other thing that people don't realize about those kind of jobs is, for men at least, they are very hard on your prostate. Sitting for such long periods can cause it to swell leading to prosatitus along with a whole host of other bad health effects. All that being said, our jobs were cake compared to long haulers. You would need to pay people $120-150k before you could get a consistent hiring pool.

Agreed, my hope is that it isn't a foreshadow for other industries. Once breaking regs and cheating (whatever that looks like for a given industry) become part of the revenue forecast. It’s pretty hard for market participants to compete without doing those things.

If $1m/year is the price, then that's the price.

If there are alternatives available that use less or cheaper labor, then people will use those instead.

There's no cap for any price. And if the alternatives are cheaper, then maybe that type of business doesn't need to exist in the economy.

That's supply and demand.

The people getting almost infinite amounts of money are making the rules and setting the terms of the dialogue.

Because to do so is a tactic for maximizing the amount of money they get, that being their self interest.

When you see this sort of 'workers are fussy and childish even though they're treated and paid incredibly well!' business, it's safe to read it as 'reality has come knocking, and the reports of wonderful conditions and pay are greatly exaggerated'. It's like asking what's wrong with millenials that they're not buying enough diamonds.

A lot of people are putting forth this notion that the market just isn't offering enough compensation for the jobs, and that's why they're not being filled.

That may be true. It probably is true.

But here's something else to consider: the alternative of not working, especially for people who may do these particular jobs, is fairly competitive. With enough welfare, government assistance, and cheap easy-to-access entertainment, getting a job looks worse and worse (less necessary), so would-be employees won't bother as much at current market rates.

Companies will therefore need to offer higher and higher wages for these jobs to fill them. The same story has been unfolding in China with regards to manufacturing: these "$2/hour" jobs which seem terrible were actually amazing prospects for a half billion rural inhabitants, who were able to move to the city, work and save up money, and provide more for their families than they ever could.

But once those families have higher standards of living, the next generation (their kids) don't need to take these jobs. They could, and they would still make some money, but they don't need to, so they'd rather go to school for the hopes of something better (an office job with AC), or just not work, because saving up marginally more money when you already have most of your needs met on your smartphone and through your parents just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This is the psychology: my family has some stability, I don't need to work like they did. I can aim for something better. This is not a moral judgement - sometimes it's true, sometimes it's not. On the whole it's a good thing.

So what's going to happen in either case is automation through technological progress. These jobs will disappear as companies invest in their destruction. Why not try out this startup's experimental self-driving truck, rather than raise my total truck driver comp. package to $90K? Obviously a ton of reasons for most companies. But the economic pros/cons will shift towards the technology faster and faster.

And then what for the people who need these kind of jobs, what happens when they disappear? In the West, it seems as if we're moving to some kind of income redistribution scheme, based on taxing the owners and producers of the technology. So essentially: increase the welfare. This seems like a relatively stable short-term solution. But what happens when you're left with a large underclass of unemployed people, and a small upper-class of producers? It's not good, and not long-term stable. Look up the Gini Coefficient, one of the most fundamental social science discoveries, and see for yourself:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/08/income-inequ...

All the taxing and redistribution in the world isn't going to help this. We're a global economy now, so unless you trap the rich in one area, they're going to move eventually.

In summary - I see big problems ahead the next few decades relating to these issues, and I don't see a good long-term solution just yet.