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Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

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Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#321

Post by graeme »

zozbot123 wrote: post #297
graeme wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a global scale, ownership of assets isn't really savings. Imagine an island society, with a bunch of 40 year old workers. You own the company that gets all the profit from their labour. So, you have a real resource, which you could trade with other places. Now of course this island has no children. How do you feel about your investment once the workers reach age 80. It wouldn't produce very much. In fact you'd nee…

Savings are invested into creation of long-lasting capital goods that are just as real as grain reserves or oil stockpiles, and that yield a positive return over the original investment - companies being "massively more productive per worker" isn't the exception, it's (hopefully) the rule. Yes there is risk involved and some investments won't work out, but that's why you diversify and make conservative assumptions. (…

Wouldn't all of that be true for my island society too, as long as the population was stable?

Such a society would nonetheless face much difficult if the worker/retiree ratio changed from 100:0 to 20:80. That's true regardless of individual productivity level: case two is harder than case 1. Regardless of capital stock such as ports, rail lines, buildings, etc

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#322

Post by wasdfff »

throwawaymsft wrote: post #232
wasdfff wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can’t see how a CEO being compensated 1000x more than whoever cleans their office is a problem? Money flows like a river, and when every executive diverts egregious amounts of money that they’d never spend in their lifetime into their little pools, theres less money flowing downstream along the river. Do you really think that Bill Gates needed to become one of the richest men on earth to proselytize ms dos? Be…

Do I care if someone has 1000x the artistic talent I do? Is there a shared river of inspiration we're all drinking from? You seem to believe there's a fixed pile of money in the world that every human competes for (e.g., 16th century Mercantilism). Go into the woods and turn a tree into a chair. Where did that value come from? Will it run out?

Eventually you will run out of wood to make chairs or people who want chairs, you can’t make infinite value as every product ever made requires commodities going in one end and customers with disposable income on another.

The problem is when a company makes x, ceo takes 0.1x in compensation, while everyone else on the payroll combined also takes 0.1x in compensation just because they didn’t show up to work with the same provenance as the ceo. For a company, there is very much a fixed pile of money that every employee competes for.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#323

Post by vkou »

nostrademons wrote: post #303
grigjd3 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In higher ed, at least, we have an abundance of people with PhDs that could theoretically teach at a college level - which is why a single tenure-track job will have 300 applicants. Not saying that supply and demand aren't involved here, but a simple application of supply and demand like you suggest isn't an adequate description.

Don't many of them actually teach (for bargain-basement wages)? At least, most of my friends who went to grad school had to teach undergrads at some point. There's probably some artificial barriers to entry for education as well - it's hard to explain how Ph.Ds have no job prospects at the same time that college tuition keeps on rising. And I suspect that has to do with college's role as a signaling device for job pr…

Teaching is not the expensive part of University education.

Housing (which you have to procure from the University for at least two years), amenities, and administration, is.

You can provide a world-class education by having professors use a whiteboard to lecture to students in cargo containers, or prefabs, for a fraction of the price of a modern education. But then you don't get the 'college experience' of paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for living in a hotel, surrounded by underage boose, drugs, and parties.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#324

Post by mdorazio »

fastball wrote: post #244
wonderwonder wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that... is that really your argument? That everything is fine because these people in line at the food bank are able to get free food so that their children don't starve to death? So we can ignore the massive wealth disparity and the vast number of people living in poverty because we don't force them to die of hunger. That's very magnanimous of you. Imagine what they could accomplish with both free food and knowle…

I was responding to your complete lack of an argument ("FOOD BANKS EXIST!?!!") in turn. Seems like the best way to respond to people who interject completely useless comments into conversations. If you want to have an actual discussion we can, but I doubt it will be productive, as it is already very clear that you either lack the critical reasoning skills to recognise the difference between wealth disparity and pover…

Ad hominem attacks are an extremely poor choice for comments and have no place on this site.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#325

Post by wasdfff »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #173
wasdfff wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can’t see how a CEO being compensated 1000x more than whoever cleans their office is a problem? Money flows like a river, and when every executive diverts egregious amounts of money that they’d never spend in their lifetime into their little pools, theres less money flowing downstream along the river. Do you really think that Bill Gates needed to become one of the richest men on earth to proselytize ms dos? Be…

Gates is not the best example as he does tremendous good with his fortune unlike the kochs who spread lies with their earnings

The Gates foundation does do tremendous good. However, certainly Bill Gates pays for a good deal of luxury premium in his life that ultimately is a dollar that could have gone to the gates foundation instead of, say, luxury airfare (unless Gates does indeed fly economy). Maybe that’s also a dollar that could have gone to employees at the bottom of his payroll who struggle to exist in Seattle.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#326

Post by wasdfff »

throwawaymsft wrote: post #320
hoaw wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is hard to make that into a constructive argument. Either you care and the 'allocation' is unfair. Or you don't care, which means that the market doesn't work since you caring is what is supposed to allocate resources fairly, and it is still unfair.

The word 'allocate' presupposes a fixed pie that we're expected to split in a zero-sum game. That works for redistributing the fraction of wealth captured in taxes. But the parent's argument is about the process of accumulating wealth itself being zero-sum somehow. Thinking "someone earned money which would have gone to me otherwise" is like thinking "someone got in shape and that physical fitness would have gone to…

Where does the dollar come from? A printer in a U.S. mint building. Every single one. No dollar can come into existance without being printed in one of these buildings. This is not like working out or singing a song, you can’t will money into existance and into your pocket, ultimately someone in charge of a larger pile of money wrote you a check. There is a finite amount of money in the world.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#327

Post by matchbok »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #185
threwawasy1228 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just doing this calculation the other day, for a bit of background I am in an area of the Midwest, close to Toldeo and am graduating in May. I interned in NYC last summer and sublet there. So I was trying to decide whether to move out that way or stay in a smaller Midwest city to start my career in. When you factor in cost of living, rental costs, junior level developer salaries, taxes, and transportation costs…

I went from living in the city and commuting via rail, walking to the grocery store, etc, etc to owning a house an hour out of the city, commuting via car, etc, etc. The mortgage payment is about the same as my rent. Even after all the additional costs of home ownership I am able to save more money. Then there's the quality of life improvements. I have 1500sf instead of <500. I don't have to plan my grocery shopping…

Yup, it's all about the trade off. Space, cheap rent, 2 hr commutes vs high rent, 20 min commutes, walkability. I'd imagine it changes over time.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#328

Post by scarface74 »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #311
Bartweiss wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people? An interesting touchstone for the article: high-rent cities in the US have started to see restaurant turnover not from 'normal' financial failures but from labor shortages. For midrange restaurants that aren't either selling luxury or exploiting captive demand (e.g. lunch for nearby offices), there's no price point where they can…

Re. failing restaurants, that's a result of bad business planning. If you can't find staff, pay more, pass those costs on to customers. If people can afford to live in high-rent areas, they can afford to pay more for food.

But once you pass the rising costs to customers, you’re in the bracket of the high end restaurants.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#329

Post by kelnos »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #311
Bartweiss wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people? An interesting touchstone for the article: high-rent cities in the US have started to see restaurant turnover not from 'normal' financial failures but from labor shortages. For midrange restaurants that aren't either selling luxury or exploiting captive demand (e.g. lunch for nearby offices), there's no price point where they can…

Re. failing restaurants, that's a result of bad business planning. If you can't find staff, pay more, pass those costs on to customers. If people can afford to live in high-rent areas, they can afford to pay more for food.

The reality doesn't agree with you. In SF, for example, fine dining is doing well, while the mid range is slowly failing and being replaced by fast casual, where they focus on fast turnover. The only way to pay the bills seems to be to either be super high end (fewer customers overall, but at a much higher service level and price point), or just above fast food, where you serve a reasonable-quality menu, but items that can be prepared quickly, and served without waitstaff.

Restaurants that try to charge "too much for their station" don't last here.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#330

Post by kelnos »

Bartweiss wrote: post #316
Mikeb85 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re. failing restaurants, that's a result of bad business planning. If you can't find staff, pay more, pass those costs on to customers. If people can afford to live in high-rent areas, they can afford to pay more for food.

I don't disagree, exactly - I'm strongly opposed to most rent-control measures other than scrapping protectionist zoning rules. But I do think can versus will is a thorny question. Restaurant and delivery dining are highly elastic in general, and big cities aren't necessarily an exception. People who can stably afford to live in downtown SF, NYC, LA, Boston, etc. are still frequently paying >33% of income in rent, an…

> I realize that we can label all of this as free markets doing their thing; maybe mid-tier restaurants with lots of staff are just an inefficient use of valuable urban space.

That would assume that the real estate market is a free market, which in many cities is a laughable idea.

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