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.
We have prosperous people today and while many of them are engaged in some form of philanthropy, we still have lots of poverty and other social ills. So “compassion” alone seems like a weak guarantee.
Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
451–460 of 685 posts
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#452> Market failures abound: Education and health care are out of reach for many, child care is often prohibitively expensive (even as child care workers are woefully underpaid), and decent, affordable housing is scarce in many regions. It’s utterly ridiculous to call these things “market failures.” Every single one of those areas is not a market but is heavily regulated in a way that limits supply. Education mostly a g…
Childcare (aka mom has a child, goes back to work 6 weeks later, pays $x/week for daycare or a nurse) isn’t a government service and it’s very expensive. Why is it so expensive?
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're making a lot of assumptions about ownership. "Your" vast financial resources are just measures of debt (money is not personal property) secured by the government. We can always collectively decide that what you did to accrue that owed debt was not worth its valuation and take steps (e.g., taxation) to correct. "Your" automation process is built on publicly-funded research and using publicly-funded resources; t…
This line of thinking ("we can tax you however we like") is backdrop of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In the book, the creatives/creators go on strike rather than suffer the taxes. Whatever you believe about the reality of that story, successful tax collection is a negotiation, not a diktat. It's probably best to have everyone believe in taxes, so it's important to have a discussion around it.
Generally-speaking, I'm betting that the wealthy would rather live in a world where they still have essentially unfettered freedom of movement and resource access with slightly less collective wealth, than one in which they have to hold back their gifts and always have to be looking over their shoulder.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#454Earlier 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.”
I was a business analyst at my previous job. My core function was to gain a deep understanding of what the various people in an organization did, where the input for their work came from and where the output went, and why.
Here's an example that actually embodies an extremely common scenario:
I worked with a customer whose clients filled out and submitted online forms at the customer's website. They had a clerk who would, once per hour, print all the forms that had been submitted, then take that stack of paper and place it on an unoccupied desk in a room on the other side of the building. She would then walk back to her own desk and twiddle her thumbs for the remainder of the hour.
After a lot of interviews and digging, I found out the reason for this bizarre process: the unoccupied desk on the other side of the building used to be occupied by another clerk, whose job was to sort the forms based on their destination department, then walk to them to those departments. She would then come back to her desk and twiddle her thumbs for the remainder of the hour.
Here's the thing though: she had retired 5 years ago. The stacks of paper that were being piled on her now unoccupied desk were simply shredded regularly by a third clerk about once a week, and it took that clerk four hours to shred everything because she was required to keep an Excel spreadsheet of how many of each form was being shredded. That Excel spreadsheet was then saved to a network drive, where it wasn't accessed by any user, ever.
You might be thinking, "wow, that's pretty crazy, but stuff like that is probably pretty rare." You would be very wrong. I charted out insane processes like this for ten years. Every company has boatloads of them. Bullshit jobs are not only invented, but they are also retained long after they are made redundant and completely unnecessary.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are private schools supposed to offer better service at a lower cost, when public schools are effectively free? This is hardly a market. Even if people wish to move their children out of public schools en masse, it's not like governments are going to reduce property taxes accordingly.
> public schools are effectively free It's actually even worse than that because you pay for public education even if you don't use it. So in that regard, if you send your kids to private schools, you're paying for their education twice. This makes it very difficult to compete, and as a rayiner pointed out, isn't a real market. I think the best solution to this is vouchers, which is a nice blend of public dollars but…
The problem lies with evaluating the quality of education. Children aren't very capable of evaluating the quality of their own education (and if they are they often aren't taken seriously or they don't have any choice in the matter anyway), and parents are too far removed or often don't know the subject matter very well themselves. The only way (and even that is an inaccurate way) to evaluate schools is by doing statistical analysis on outcomes. The crucial point is: the only data you have is outdated by years, perhaps even a decade or so. Education is a strongly reputation-based sector for a reason: reputation is the only way people have to evaluate your product. I don't believe there's a way around this.
In a for-profit corporation, particularly in a publicly-traded one, there's often pressure to optimize profits on the short term. So if I'm the unscrupulous CEO of a for-profit school, I can always deliver very easily by simply cutting costs even if it dramatically hurts the quality of the education, confident in the knowledge that by the time the effects start getting noticeable I'm long gone. The short term profit motive of a publicly traded corporation works perversely here: there's always the temptation to sell the reputation you built up yesterday to turn a bigger profit today; no one will be any the wiser until it's too late (and they paid a lot of money for sub-par education).
Of course public or non-profit institutions are also vulnerable to bad management, but at least no one has a strong incentive to gut their expenses, as no one stands to gain.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
These jobs may be bullshit in the feelings they induce in people performing them, or the meaning those people give their jobs, but they are probably not bullshit in the utility they have for the organizations that pay for them.
Could be but I am not so sure. There is something I've seen in at least 10 organisations I worked for: middle managers are afraid their budgets will be reduced if they fire someone and never re-hire the position, so they actively go out of their way to think of a very niche and, yes, bullshitty, activity for them to do. Seen it happen many times and it made me cynical about the whole "there are no bullshit jobs" meme…
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
My mom and i were just discussing my dog's visit to the veterinarian. She said that her father would never have taken a dog to the vet for those symptoms, but my dog got a blood analysis and a stomach X-ray. I spent a lot of money on all this, which paid the vet and their staff and the lab and the equipment manufacturers. Conclusion: increased wealth creates increased opportunity to work.
Medical is a special market due to emotional heartstrings. At a certain point, people will pay anything when death or health are involved. At a political / social impact / behavioral hacking level, there's probably an argument to make near human grade medical services for domestic pets free, as it would likely assist with the reduction in human population growth (aside from companionship, etc.). I am consistently ama…
This makes me wonder how much other countries indirectly benefit from the regulatory oversight that exists in the west. It's the regulatory oversight, compounded with capitalism, that produces medical equipment. Then the oversight over its usage probably adds to the cost of deploying the equipment.
Does the lack of, or reduced, latter oversight contribute in any major way to the pricing discrepancy for procedures for which that medical equipment is necessary?
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#458Labor 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…
A lot of what you're saying rings true to me. There are basically two 'tracks' of things that people use in life. Material goods like food, water, entertainment, etc are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. On long enough time scales this is true compared to wages. For the most part even the worst of jobs is sufficient to pay for that sort of thing. I can't speak about healthcare as that's a particularly America…
Real estate goes through cycles shorter than 30 years and it was not more expensive in 2012 than in 1990.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#459I see the future as grim anti-utopia: Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs obsolete. Therefore, we will end up with high unemployment, low pay jobs, and fierce competition for decreasing number of available positions. The owners of businesses will mostly benefit from the automation. It would be a good solution to introduce convenient life long education and universal basic income. S…
> Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs obsolete. In 1000BC men and women did flour of wheat manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete. In 1000AD men and women did butter of milk manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete. In 1500AD men and women did threads of fur manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete. In 1940s women did manual calculations and typing f…
In the old days even the dumbest man could carry grain from one place to another or push a plow. Even the dumbest woman could churn butter or milk a cow when told to.
These low-IQ individuals do not have the mental capacity to switch to Python programming - regardless of education.
So the "IQ floor" of the economy is rising. The result is that the high IQ people are fine, but low IQ people end up simply unemployable at any job. It's only in the last 50 years that the IQ floor rose above an undeniably noticeable chunk of the population. 10% of people are under IQ 85, which is too dumb to join the US army (by law). Too dumb to be trusted with powered construction equipment.
Leftists can't conceptualize this problem because of their egalitarian worldview, and rightists either talk about bootstraps or might not even care, seeing it as a sort of justified Darwinism.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#460Earlier 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…
A profit oriented system doesn’t make outcomes irrelevant. A grocery store could maximize their profit margins by selling rotten fruit at the same price as fresh fruit, but of course no one would buy it. Maximizing your profit margin is one strategy for increasing profits, but growing market share by producing higher quality outcomes is another (arguably more common) strategy. This is the case because markets have co…
This argument falls on deaf ears to be honest, considering Amazon deals with a very similar situation due to rampant fakes and yet it's more profitable for them to simply do nothing.
The problem is that for-profit industries only work when the consumer and business interests are aligned. In education the best way to earn a profit is by offering a low quality degree and spending the least on teaching, facility etc. That's the entire reason why McDegrees exist. Considering schools are also highly tied to physical locations, there's less possible competition than you think.