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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

#541

Post by huntie »

JDiculous wrote: post #309
supernova87a wrote: post #36

I don't think low unemployment is the unequivocal positive sign that politicians/ think it is ("We're putting millions of Americans back to work!"). Maybe it's not something to be so proud of. If people are having to come out of the woodwork to take jobs that aren't moving the average wage up, maybe they're doing it because they have to, in order to get by. Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at…

Yes it's a ludicrous notion that working for work's sake is a good thing. I just watched the documentary "American Factory" (highly recommended), and it's pretty clear to me that doing repetitive manual labor work in a factory is grueling, mind-numbingly boring, dangerous, and not something we should be doing if we can automate it - not to mention low status and low pay. I'd bet that most of the politicians idealizin…

I wouldn't act like you're better than politicians when your "expertise" is based on a documentary. My experience is that factory work is not dangerous[1] and companies try to eliminate any danger if it's brought up because any OSHA/medical costs are very expensive. My experience is also that the work is pretty easy. It can be boring but so are most programming jobs. I don't understand how writing CRUD day after day isn't as boring as working in a factory.

As for whether it is something that should be done or not: why should programming be done? How do most apps benefit the average person. I'm willing to argue that FAANG companies have been detrimental to society.

I've also been well-payed at the factories I work at, but $20/hr in rural Iowa goes way further than in LA or wherever. There were quite a few people who had moved from cities to work where I was at.

The idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are. A lot of people were worried that long-term our jobs would be automated or moved to Mexico.

[1] This may depend on what is being done and more importantly on the age of the company.

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

#542

Post by adaml_623 »

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.

I agree. And to be clear I think I think it would be an immediate catastrophe as parents would not be able to work as they would have to take care of their children. Teaching is obviously vastly more important than childcare but teachers on their undervalued salaries provide both of these salaries.

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

#543

Post by quotemstr »

dang wrote: post #507
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…

Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological flamewar. It's predictable and tedious. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Edit: I forgot to mention that we detached the parent comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027960 .

And the parent comment isn't the same thing? If you want to prohibit comments advocating for various lenses through which people ought to see the world, you need to apply this prohibition equality or that prohibition amounts to promotion of one particular worldview. And if you want to do that, you have a responsibly to readers to be straightforward about it.

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

#544

Post by conanbatt »

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,…

I've come to find comments like these ones very frustrating as an amateur economist. In the end, this idealization of how productivity should be used ends up being a proposal of political power: productivity should be what I think it should be, so we must collectively act as if it is.

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

#545

Post by pkaye »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #523
pkaye wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a child to caretaker ratio to maintain. And you have to pay for the caretaker wages and benefits, rent, liability insurance, support staff, etc. So those costs are divided among all who are paying for it. It will not scale any better than that.

What’s the solution? Don’t have children?

The government would have to subsidize it as a cost of keeping society functioning.

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

#546

Post by pdimitar »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #517
pdimitar wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doub…

All of what you said is correct. That being said, the natural process of trying hard to eliminate BS or die is taking way too long. People just like being cozy -- the BS job employees, the managers, the bosses who like the quarterly graphs, everyone.

It's a process that is going at a glacial pace pretty much everywhere, sadly.

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

#547

Post by quaquaqua1 »

ernst_klim wrote: post #514
jlawson wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 program…

>agriculture is way harder than php

an illiterate man can pull potatoes out of the ground.

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

#548

Post by quotemstr »

hacknat wrote: post #465
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,…

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.…

Why do you think caregivers, teachers, and social workers are undervalued? Last time I checked, care facilities, classrooms, and social centers were fully staffed. On what basis can you claim that their pay is too low? Who gets to decide the right salary? You? Why?

A particular job being important in aggregate does not entitle each individual who does that job to a salary higher than people who do some other job that might be less important in aggregate.

Oxygen is very important and it's free. Certain comic books are expensive despite being of very little importance to our survival. The value of a thing is the price of one additional unit of that thing, not some statement about the moral significance of all of that thing in aggregate.

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

#549

Post by vladimirralev »

ikeboy wrote: post #516
vladimirralev wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Real wage increase is the same as nominal wage, bigger than productivity increase. Real wages already have productivity and inflation factored in, so any extra nominal increase would be beyond productivity.

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

Assuming you use the example rich demographic I gave, what would be an example scenario that systemically breaks the 1:1 ratio?

> You can't talk about a single demographic because multiple demos buy the same products.

I know what you mean here but you can bypass the dependencies between demos by letting the system play itself out and taking the numbers when you have access to them. You can pick any demographic or a person and you can get their personal basket, calculate inflation, calculate their purchasing power and how it changes every single tick just from their credit card statements. It doesn't matter what other people buy when you can see the actual purchases for each individual. What other demos buy is already taken into account in the numbers you see in the credit card statements so to speak.

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

#550

Post by trevyn »

playing_colours wrote: post #361

I 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…

>What can we do to counter it?

You may want to keep an eye on the global protest trend.

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