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

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

#511

Post by tomp »

ookdatnog wrote: post #455
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…

I like to think I'm not too ideological about which sectors should be public and which should be private (this is not a moral question as far as I'm concerned). I think some sectors work better privately and others work better publicly. Essentially I think letting the free market do its thing is a good idea if I can be confident that the profit motive broadly aligns with public interest (and using regulation where it…

Maybe there's a way to align incentives? E.g. schools are (partially) government-funded, but the funding is a function of the taxes that people who have attended the school pay.

Still there are a few issues that would need to be fixed, off the top of my head: (1) the function should simply be a mean, to make schools focus on desired outcomes (e.g. the minimal (or 5th percentile) education) - otherwise they'd just focus on producing a few outliers, like VCs; (2) there needs to be a "default" funding available (e.g. average of all schools) to enable innovation (starting new schools); (3) there needs to be some funding available for "non-profit" education (e.g. art) but maybe there should be a limit on the number of people that can attend such schools (for free).

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

#512

Post by dang »

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.

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#513

Post by hacknat »

carlmr wrote: post #499
hacknat wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You’re assuming they we

a. Are accurately pricing teacher pay (if the upper bounds of private schools are any indication, we are not)

b. The downstream effects wouldn’t be catastrophic.

Certainly most American parents could not afford to properly educate themselves enough to do this job, let alone educate their children.

Finally, a miseducated generation of children would probably end up costing us trillions of dollars in incarceration, health care, etc.

You must think about the nth order effects of these things. Hence our completely inaccurate valuation of them.

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

#514

Post by ernst_klim »

jlawson wrote: post #459
ernst_klim wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The problem is that the old jobs didn't require high IQ but the new jobs increasingly do. 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…

> So the "IQ floor" of the economy is rising

I bet this is a wrong implication. Agriculture is way harder than writing php.

> The result is that the high IQ people are fine, but low IQ people end up simply unemployable at any job

Even if this implication were true, there is a whole bunch of new jobs that don't require you to be smart.

You could do sports, train people, be a waiter or a beauty blogger or a web programmer or a politician. I would dare say that the amount of stupid work is growing.

And avg person is not dumb at all, never was. The dumbest few always would find some way of doing some service job, especially when service field is growing. All kind of grooming does not require you to be especially smart, even chimps can do that.

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

#515

Post by turbinerneiter »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #473
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.

Compassion and taxation for redistribution are so much different because the first is the will of the person, the second is by coercion. No idea why you put them side by side in your comment, they are opposites.

Tax is not coercion, we live in a democracy. You pay tax because society has decided to fund certain things via contributions from all. It's like the membership fee in a club used to pay for the clubhouse. If you don't like it, stop using the facilities and leave.

I pay my taxes willingly to fund schools, hospitals, police, justice - all the basic infrastructure needed to maintain civilization. I vote to influence the priorities with which this money is spent.

Have you all forgotten how to nation or what?

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

#516

Post by ikeboy »

vladimirralev wrote: post #506
ikeboy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>one thing is unequivocal, the moment real wages go up the inflation catches up Hard disagree. Inflation is affected by wages, but it's not a 1:1 relation and I'm not aware of anyone seriously making that claim. Of course there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages , but not seriously advocated today as far as I know. >Inflation is further segmented by demographics This is actually a really interesting po…

> Hard disagree. Inflation is affected by wages, but it's not a 1:1 relation I am talking about "real wages" to avoid the gotchas associated with nominal wage and inflation definitions. I think this makes the controversy go away. When you extend the nominal wage growth beyond the productivity gains in real terms, any extra purchasing power from a nominal wage gain will have no real basis and thus instantly triggering…

Now you're changing your claim. You're not talking about real wage increases, you're talking about an increase that's bigger than the productivity increase.

Even that doesn't necessarily increase inflation 1:1. Your models are off.

You can't talk about a single demographic because multiple demos buy the same products. The demand curves have multiple customers.

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

#517

Post by bryanrasmussen »

pdimitar wrote: post #414
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #336

Earlier 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…

I do not doubt that there must be some jobs that are bullshit, I might also assume some companies have more than others because those companies are broken in some way, or perhaps so profitable in some specific divisions that they can afford to have plenty of bullshit around and not even notice it. Finally it might be that some jobs are bullshit part of the time and other parts of the time really important.

But I doubt the distribution can be so high as people are always insinuating in these bullshit jobs subthreads.

Given the desire to always cut the useless non-profit parts of a business there will always be some pressure to find and eliminate bullshit, even as there may be some countervailing pressures to create bullshit. I think though that the feedback loops of capitalism are such that if you end up with too much bullshit at a company over time there would have to be a correction, leading either to the elimination of most of the bullshit or the downfall of the company.

If one believes most jobs or a great proportion of them are bullshit then that person should refrain from complaining about MBAs and their cost cutting measures getting rid of jobs - because probably those jobs were the bullshit ones.

(on edit - assuming bullshit jobs are a disease of the employment place I think for the sake of analogy the percentage should be the same as the flu, so 5 to 20 percent in a company, if a company has 20% or more bullshit jobs that company has an epidemic on its hands and needs to do something. If it's 5% ah, that you can live with.)

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

#518

Post by dang »

simple_phrases wrote: post #340
dang wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see a lot of protestant mentality here Please keep religious flamebait off this site. It leads to religious flamewars, which we seriously don't want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang, please try to read charitably into the comments you choose to moderate. The concept of Protestant work ethic in the US is centuries old and is effectively divorced from any religious associations it might have had in the 1600's.

It's not centuries old, but comes from Max Weber's surprisingly readable and brilliant book on the topic. But from a moderation perspective we have to look at effects, not intent. If you lead with a comment like that, the odds of somebody getting triggered—for whatever reason—and taking the thread into flamewar go way up. This is not a deep or very interesting point, it's just basic fire prevention.

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

#519

Post by dang »

_0uto wrote: post #287
dang wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see a lot of protestant mentality here Please keep religious flamebait off this site. It leads to religious flamewars, which we seriously don't want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I didn't mean to start religious discussion, rather used this term as in writings of Mark Weber (value of hard work etc.). This is more about set of principles that shaped Western and American societies, not really being related to religion anymore.

Alas, it's still related enough to religion to easily lead to religious flamewars on the internet. The burden is on the commenter to pack the point in less flammable packaging. "Protestant mentality" is too generic a phrase not to have religious associations for many readers. If you said "Protestant work ethic" that would have been better, and if you had made it clear that you were referencing Weber, there would be no problem. Far fewer internet users are likely to start a flamewar against Weber.

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

#520

Post by dang »

alpineidyll3 wrote: post #195
_0uto wrote: post #31

I see a lot of protestant mentality here in comments valuing any kind of even inhumane labour which does not allow to meet basic needs over not having a job, but also not suffering from hunger thanks to the social support system. In my opinion, we as a society should aim to work less and less, collectively making use of automation and technological progress. But it will be hard when we label this as being lazy and no…

Conservative perspectives often involve some sort of built-in need to proselytize, because they view life as a triumph of ego over intrinsic human weakness. There's an idea that all people need to hear the message of personal responsibility. Sadly data is weaker than any bias of perspectives, and people find it impossible to think causally without some larger brittle philosophical framework.

Please don't take HN threads further in generic ideological directions. It leads to generic ideological flamewar, which is tedious and which we don't want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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