Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

brookings.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 685 posts

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#401

Post by quotemstr »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #395
weberc2 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of economic or physical barriers, we have hordes toxic personalities that try to gatekeep people. It's not all sunshine and roses. I’m skeptical that these are uniquely tech problems; I suspect they occur in relatively even proportion in other industries, but other industries have bigger problems that tech largely doesn’t have, and so they aren’t preoccupied with “toxic personalities”. In particular, the “t…

Here's my take on that: A marginal amount of gatekeeping is necessary for any group to maintain its group identity. The toxicity comes from the overdose, not the act itself. A lot of "nerds" have personal insecurities and downtime. The potent mix of the two leads to more gatekeeping behavior than is necessary. It's for this reason that many people (especially women, PoC, etc.) will be hostilely quizzed when they expr…

You're employing precisely the stereotypes that weberc2 mentions in his comment. You've presented no evidence. You've only invited readers to indulge their animus against your disfavored groups. This kind of rhetoric is unacceptable in other areas of society and it ought to be unacceptable here.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#402

Post by bigcohoneypot »

endothrowho333 wrote: post #212
bigcohoneypot wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of us familiar with science, and not social science can you explain why we can't conclude anything from data without further experimentation? Or is this a claim about the scientific method as opposed to say how art is criticized.

It's not that you can't conclude anything from data, it's just that the things you can conclude from data are limited to only two "scientifically-sound" conclusions: >1). There is a relationship in your data >2). There isn't a relationship in your data From there, you can then setup further experiments to better understand why there is or isn't a relationship -- and perhaps find the opposite is true! It's the same re…

Sorry for being so dumb. Your answer just confused me. Is this standard for data something that is unique to social science? Or is this the same standard?

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#403

Post by weberc2 »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #397
weberc2 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so long as the worker's basic needs are met. So just the one teeny tiny detail of meeting everyone’s basic needs then?

I'm not speaking from a position of ideology. I'm describing the world based on a scientific understanding of human motivation. Sorry if that's incomplete.

I didn’t take your position to be one of ideology (although your position certainly isn’t based on science); I’m pointing out that you responded to the parent’s concerns about meeting everyone’s needs (I.e., “running an economy”) with some stuff about human motivation and the caveat that human motivation will only do the job if basic needs are already met.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#404

Post by mnm1 »

subject117 wrote: post #330

Work, save up, start a business of your own choosing. So many excuses for those unable to achieve this simple formula that our forefathers fought and died for us to have the right to.

It's incredibly delusional and illogical to think that everyone can start and run successfully their own business, and especially so to claim that this was the founding fathers' vision. If that was the case, where would the workers come from? The founding fathers had slaves. Where do I sign up to receive the slaves for my business? Because anyone can build a business on slavery and any society can be successful on the back of slaves.

What about the slaves themselves? What did the founding fathers say about them? Obviously, they cannot start their own business as that would be illegal. What do you suggest for them in your great wisdom? They are not allowed by law to start a business, yet according to you, that's just an "excuse."

What you're advocating also wasn't possible for women until the last few decades. Or Chinese. Or Mexicans. Etc. So why should they work to compete with the established businesses/family wealth that had hundreds of years to grow and slaves to work. All of a sudden, everyone should just compete with them and somehow be on equal footing despite them getting hundreds of years of head start, capital, and free labor?

But yeah, so many excuses for being unable to achieve this almost unachievable formula. Slavery. Oppression. Racism. Violence. Etc. Not to mention the sheer insanity of expecting everyone to be a business owner and therefore none to be a worker. Yup. So simple. Only people deserving of death through destitution couldn't follow such a simple formula.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#405

Post by ShroudedNight »

zchrykng wrote: post #356
turbinerneiter wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true. People do unpaid work all the time. Ask your mom. Humans have compassion. They want to cooperate and collaborate. Also, right now, we have a system that takes from the productive (workers) and gives it to the unproductive (shareholders) - so please chose wisely which argument you want to make.

Where do you think the "unproductive" shareholders got the money they used to invest? Sure, some of them had wealthy families and they are using that, but at root all wealth came from someone who was productive at some point.

> ...all wealth came from someone who was productive at some point.

While this is technically true, this doesn't require that the beneficiary was the productive person. The textbook example of this would be those that accumulate wealth from the increasing value of unimproved land.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#406

Post by rexreed »

shkkmo wrote: post #129
rexreed wrote: post #47

I would like to advance a different opinion. There are many that are proponents of Universal Basic Income (UBI). However, many state that one problem with UBI is that it comes at the expense of personal gratification and economic productivity. I am of the opinion that low wage jobs are a form of UBI. In this manner, individuals are paid a basic income in exchange for their productivity. However, these jobs are not me…

Why does it make sense to force private industry to provide a UBI? A minimum wage job puts a floor on what can be paid and this fundementally distorts the labor market. If a job does not provide enough value to the employer to meet minimum wage it will not exist for very long. This rules out many types of work where the value is hard to capture and pushes all of that work into the domain of either being funded by gov…

This brings up the interesting (to discuss) idea that if a UBI is implemented, there should no longer be a minimum wage as the UBI places a floor on income. In many ways the minimum wage doesn't offer benefit in an economy where the self-employed will participate out of their free will in income generation through service such as Uber, DoorDash, Etsy. Often those self-income sources generate less on a per-hour basis than minimum wage, however, since the income earner is free to stop and start at will the presence of a floor of hourly wage has no impact.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#407

Post by maximente »

zchrykng wrote: post #356
turbinerneiter wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true. People do unpaid work all the time. Ask your mom. Humans have compassion. They want to cooperate and collaborate. Also, right now, we have a system that takes from the productive (workers) and gives it to the unproductive (shareholders) - so please chose wisely which argument you want to make.

Where do you think the "unproductive" shareholders got the money they used to invest? Sure, some of them had wealthy families and they are using that, but at root all wealth came from someone who was productive at some point.

"was productive" is doing a hilarious amount of work in that sentence.

i don't really understand attempts like these to back-propagate some narrative that there was an epic, fair struggle between some set of individuals and one came out on top, ergo that justifies their estate all the way until the modern day owning some ridiculous share of the world's wealth

seems way more likely that once particular individuals amassed slight advantages in power, they just leveraged it into gaining even more ungodly amounts of power, often times using the state itself as a weapon to manifest that outcome

it's almost like you need to have access to capital to really make it big

hmm, that sounds strangely like what's going on in 2020... probably a coincidence though

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#408

Post by wolco »

oliverx0 wrote: post #326
quotemstr wrote: post #312

> We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living No, what we must absolutely do away with is the specious notion that when you take from the productive and give to the unproductive, the productive will keep producing out of the goodness of their hearts. Every attempt at forming a collectivist utopia fails, and that's because collectivism runs contrary to human nature. All atte…

Not sure why you are being downvoted. I strongly resonate with this sentiment.

This whole personal computer business was a result of a collectivist utopia. People made and shared and we ended up getting open source / linux. The industry wouldn't exist without it. This productivity mantra is recent.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#409

Post by DoreenMichele »

majos wrote: post #373
DoreenMichele wrote: post #87

Labor market conditions are not acts of God, nor inevitable. They are shaped by policies, investments, and institutions. This is a point I keep trying to make about UBI and seemingly utterly failing. It isn't "inevitable" that automation will lead to high rates of chronic unemployment. I've been quiet of late on HN. I often am around Christmas time, but I also wonder if I'm just fed up with feeling like it's complete…

To clarify, are you suggesting that current “low wages” or “wage inequality” are not that important because they fail to account for quality of life (food, shelter, entertainment), which is still achievable, especially by global standards, on a “low” American wage?

I'm trying to say something like: When your caterpillar morphs into a butterfly, harping on how your butterfly is "failing to thrive according to standard, well-established caterpillar metrics used globally for the past thousand years and certified as super duper accurate for caterpillars by many respected institutions." is basically gibberish that says damn near nothing about the state of the butterfly's actual health for which we have zero established metrics, having never seen one before.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#410

Post by NTDF9 »

jorblumesea wrote: post #365
aleph_naught wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until the 80's wages and productivity moved in lock step, and since then wages have flatlined due to a various factors (weakening of unions / globalization). Furthermore, we are reaching the limits of what monetary stimulus is able to achieve in driving the economic wellbeing of everyday Americans; history has shown that fiscal stimulus is better at that. A decade of easy monetary policy and balance sheet expansio…

> would be expand the Federal's reserves responsibilities into the fiscal space. This is a very complex solution for a problem we already have the tools to solve. Politicians should just execute proper fiscal policy instead of leaning on the fed for every solution. We already have a decent system for this, which has historically worked, but no one is using it. Other countries are able to execute proper fiscal policy…

> Other countries are able to execute proper fiscal policy without complex central banking paradigms or measures.

Which countries?

Post reply on HN