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

431–440 of 685 posts

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

#431

Post by lwneal »

rayiner wrote: post #346
tempsy wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not talking about service jobs. I wouldn’t consider service workers to be rent seekers at all. I’m actually referring to mostly white collar ones, a lot of administration jobs, finance, government, etc

> I’m not talking about service jobs. This thread is about low wage workers. > I’m actually referring to mostly white collar ones, a lot of administration jobs, finance, government, etc Why, because you don’t understand what they do? Imagine explaining to those people that Google has “engineers” who just maintain the source repository. I bet they’d think it was a “bullshit job.”

The book "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber defines five types of jobs, two of which are "goons" and "box tickers". Goons include hired people who lobby aggressively on behalf of their employer: lobbyists, corporate lawyers, PR specialists. Box tickers are those who use paperwork and process to appear to be busy, even though the real useful work would continue without their intervention.

It's no secret that the top-5 tech firms hire large numbers of lobbyists and corporate lawyers [1].

And I don't think it is a stretch to say that some well-paid engineering positions include work such as maintaining built-in-house duplicates of open source software, or enforcing arbitrary coding standards, that could be considered "box ticking". Present company excluded, of course.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/us/politics/amazon-apple-...

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

#433

Post by swagasaurus-rex »

majos wrote: post #360
_23sd wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has an agenda but be especially careful of real estate as an economic barometer. There’s so much speculation going on that the level of distortion can often seem criminal in retrospect. A recent example: Manhattan developers seem to be keeping thousands of new, unsold condos off the market. I don’t think it’s difficult to imagine why. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-06/manhattan...

Re: unsold condos, anyone want to try explaining how withholding stock makes sense? I understand flooding the market would depress prices further, but I don’t understand what market would buy up all this stock. If these units can’t sell in what seems to be a nicely growing market, isn’t it going to be a long time before they sell at all? Like, so long that just sitting on them and paying taxes doesn’t make sense?

The calculation: Prices will skyrocket from lack of supply more quickly than the taxes paid on the units.

Development and renting it out locks you into contracts where you can't flip as quickly (low liquidity). So you don't develop or use the land, just wait for your investment to accrue.

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

#434

Post by ngold »

rayiner wrote: post #318
contingencies wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, perhaps, has society failed to adapt to present technological reality due to entrenched interest in the social status quo? When so many people in the world live happily on so little, it is undeniable that we could provide for all of our basic needs if there were political will. Without education, that would likely result in a population boom, however.

I mean yes, we could all live like people do in Bangladesh and reduce the work force dramatically. I fail to see how this would be desirable.

The one war america fought but never bothered winning. The war on Poverty.

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

#435

Post by corporate_shi11 »

If - in America - we stopped bringing in millions of poor and uneducated young working age people every year - legally and illegally - wages would rise. This is common sense and supported by research [0].

[0]: https://cis.org/Report/Wages-Immigration

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

#436

Post by lazyjones »

contingencies wrote: post #274

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because,…

Technological breakthroughs mean that goods become more affordable, not that the inventors must be punished by making them support people who aren't productive.

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

#437

Post by DoreenMichele »

ngold wrote: post #434
rayiner wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean yes, we could all live like people do in Bangladesh and reduce the work force dramatically. I fail to see how this would be desirable.

The one war america fought but never bothered winning. The war on Poverty.

I so hate the phrase "war on poverty." It tends to de facto turn poor people into The Enemy in the mind's of far too many people.

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

#438

Post by nitwit005 »

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…

Look around and you may notice your work supports the elderly, the sick, the hungry, and so forth. Sure, we're not a "collectivist utopia", but we're diverting a ton of money to the non-productive without our economies collapsing, or turning to "atrocity".

Ultimately, it's likely that if specialization and automation continue there will be more and more people who can't contribute much of significance to the economy. Unless you plan to execute them, we'll probably have to support them with taxes, because no one will want to hire them at a livable wage.

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

#439

Post by lazyjones »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #345
rolltiide wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I also perceive the same things I wonder if there is adequate incentive for the one to create something that provides for others Simply taking their economic output is not incentive

Take a look at all of the open source projects listed here: https://paragonie.com/software Especially random_compat (145 million installs) and sodium_compat (6.5 million installs + WordPress 5.2). My revenue for all of this OSS work was precisely $0.00. When was the last time any of us looked something up in Encyclopedia Brittanica instead of Wikipedia? The carrot-and-stick incentive model doesn't work for fully self…

You're talking about a niche of products with marginal cost = 0 for production, distribution.

Call me when you start building houses for free. ;-)

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

#440

Post by ngold »

Proziam wrote: post #424
jpalawaga wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controversial opinion: I think everyone should have access to good education, and I don't see why a public system is incapable of providing it. Private systems aren't outcome orientated, they're profit orientated. If a public school and a private school are both given $n to educate a kid, the private option will maximize the proportion they get to keep. Elite schools are a different story because they have significan…

I am one that actually agrees with the spirit of what you're saying. Unfortunately, where I have to admit shortcomings with that philosophy is that there's no evidence that the government of the United States can reliably yield good education for students. My own public schooling was a nightmare, and I know many who had an equally bad experience. Part of this is due to the fact that there isn't (and probably shouldn'…

Let's not forget that george jr. And Biden made college debt slavery a thing. And no child left behind was meant to cripple public education. So you have poor uneducated kids mad at the system voting conservative. And then you have kids that escaped and went to college to only strap them with so much debt, they to become conservative. Saying, well I had to pay, why do they not have to have decades of their lives paying back bad faith loans?
Post reply on HN