Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay • Hacker News Board

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

#491

Post by hacknat » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

7thaccount wrote: post #479

hacknat wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also it is a total lie and a very narrow definition of utility. Arguably, we’ve actually under priced some of the most important labor in our society (caregivers, teachers, social workers, etc), and over priced some of the dumbest (sorry, but if Uber disappeared tomorrow, society would be moderately inconvenienced, but little else). Finally, nothing in evolutionary biology teaches us that human beings ought to work.…

I think work is pretty important to being human, but working 40-60 hours a week is absurd. 30 seems like a sweet spot to me. If we could remote, do only 30, and reduce pointless meetings than I bet we'd have a lot more time for the things that make us happy like family, side projects, exercise, and Netflix.

Why do you think work in and of itself is important? Being useful to your community is absolutely important, but our definition of that utility is absurdly narrow in this market economy. In fact, sometimes what we value and what is useful are totally orthogonal (again teachers are probably undervalued way too much, because we are poor long term thinkers).

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

#492

Post by nitrogen » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

majos wrote: post #347

nitrogen wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t even have the technology to replace the guy taking drive through orders Yeah we do, touchscreen menus (or ATM style pushbutton menus in places with bad weather). There are factories that assemble frozen mini burgers for supermarkets. There are pizza vending machines out there. So an entire fast food restaurant could be turned into a vending machine with current technology.

If you think the technology is there, what explains its lack of adoption? I don’t think McDonalds et al. are in the business of leaving easy optimization on the table. (My own guess is that touch screens are still more expensive and buggy than humans, and machine-made food still trades off novelty to be profitable. But I don’t know.)

McDonald's already uses touchscreens in some locations. I'm guessing the rest comes down to tradition and the availability of cheap labor preventing the motivation to turn existing technology into a packaged franchise of automated restaurants.

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

#493

Post by jasonsamoa » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

m0zg wrote: post #488

jswizzy wrote: post #327

Pay is going up despite all these ignorant commenters https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/upshot/minimum-wage-boost...

They aren't "ignorant". They just can't admit Donald Trump did something positive. So they engage in logical contortionism like "tax cuts didn't help the middle class" (they did), "low-earner wages aren't growing" (they are), "he will start WW3" (he won't - he's the least militarist president since Jimmy Carter), "low unemployment doesn't matter" (it does - how else do you expect to create upward pressure on wages?),…

Is there a hacker news type forum for people not in the liberal bubble but interested in computer science and entrepreneurship?

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

#494

Post by endothrowho333 » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

bigcohoneypot wrote: post #402

endothrowho333 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

See dmwallin's sibling comment for more info.

It's standard for all data, but must be enforced more strictly in social sciences where controlling for all variables (let alone knowing what they all are!) is impossible, and your correlations are more likely to be pure chance.

See: reproducibility crisis in social sciences

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

#495

Post by AdrianB1 » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

fzeroracer wrote: post #460

knubie wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. 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 in…

I think Amazon is a bad example. First, because the Amazon problems are fairly recent on the scale of human reaction, let's see how it will go in 3-5 years. Look at Facebook drop in users after the scandals like Cambridge Analytica, it is real and this is where Amazon is heading to. Sooner or later, the market is fixing problems, even if sometimes it's slow and painful.

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

#496

Post by tomp » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

jpalawaga wrote: post #400

nostromo wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

> Private systems aren't outcome orientated, they're profit orientated

Based on what I've read about the US education system (primary schools), one of the main problems is the "no child left behind" policy, which makes the public system not "outcome oriented" either - kids simply have no incentive to even try (and are disruptive instead), as there's no valuable outcome to achieve - the (fake) "outcome" is the same for everybody (finishing school), regardless of their actual level of education.

It's a hard problem.

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

#497

Post by AdrianB1 » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

_23sd wrote: post #320

wufufufu wrote: post #136

I hear agreement that the economy is good, but also that jobs are paying less for more work and that income inequality is larger than ever. At the same time, the housing market where I live is absolutely exploding. I feel like I'm missing something about the real condition of the economy...

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...

It is extremely simple to see why: flooding the market will lower the prices and reduce the profits, waiting and selling at high price can be more profitable, it's a simple math comparison between the options.

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

#498

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 9:28 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #308

tempsy wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? No it’s not. He is exactly right that we’ve invented a lot of “bullshit jobs” that don’t add anything of value to society and would not change anything if they were gone tomorrow e.g. How many jobs out there just prop up rent seeking?

The whole idea of “bullshit jobs” is ignorant. You’ve got armies of managers and bean counters trying to squeeze nickels out of processes, and yet we are supposed to believe that we’re keeping all of these people employed for no reason? It’s the same sort of juvenile thinking that causes someone to look at a vast legacy codebase and decide “oh we could easily rewrite that.” The reality is that automation is progressi…

[deleted]

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

#499

Post by carlmr » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 9:30 PM UTC

hacknat wrote: post #490

carlmr wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if Uber disappeared tomorrow, society would be moderately inconvenienced, but little else If you inconvenience 100 million people by costing them 15 minutes more a day, or a few dollars more for lack of competition, then the cost per person may be low, but the cost altogether will be high. This is the essential problem I see with the articles, they say so many jobs are useless, but often they're useful but only a sm…

Totally, but now play the same scenario in your head if all the social workers or teachers disappeared tomorrow. Uber would be a societal inconvenience, but losing all of our teachers would be a catastrophe.

Many people don't have children, many people with children don't have children in school age. They will not be inconvenienced in the slightest by a lack of teachers (at least in the short term).

The effect of teachers is concentrated in a smaller age group, so to those that need the service, the need is very apparent. Parents could teach their kids themselves, this would cost them time and energy.

Of course it would cost them more time than lack of Uber, however what if we add up all the teacher pay and divide it by time and money (opportunity costs) saved and do the same for Uber drivers? Could this be a similar number? I'm not sure, but I think there might be some surprises there.

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

#500

Post by WrtCdEvrydy » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

itronitron wrote: post #441

pdimitar wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... "I gathered savings and wanted to rest for half a year" is suspicious? Maybe I am misunderstanding here.

This is hopefully a specifically US thing, some companies' HR departments are extremely risk averse and will likely interpret that as you were in prison or rehab for six months. I once, as an intern, had an HR assistant bring my application for a permanent position back to me because she wanted an explanation for why I was unemployed between June and August of the previous year (a year in which I was enrolled at a un…

Honestly, would have put 'Student at Blah' during those three months from there on.