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

#631

Post by runeks » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 10:45 AM UTC

aleph_naught wrote: post #302

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…

Up until the 80's wages and productivity moved in lock step, and since then wages have flatlined due to a various factors (weakening of unions / globalization). Furthermore, we are reaching the limits of what monetary stimulus is able to achieve in driving the economic wellbeing of everyday Americans; history has shown that fiscal stimulus is better at that. A decade of easy monetary policy and balance sheet expansio…

> This would enshrine the fed with ability to affect fiscal policy without politics.

By what means would you give this third mandate to the Fed? Surely, politicians give this mandate, through the voters. In which case: how can you say it’s “without politics”? Because politicians create the laws that govern central banks, central banks cannot be said to be politically independent.

I guarantee you, if a central bank — any central bank — stopped monetizing its government’s bonds, the currency produced by its member banks would quickly lose its legal tender status and tax privileges.

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

#632

Post by shkkmo » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 12:37 PM UTC

rexreed wrote: post #406

shkkmo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it make sense to force private industry to provide a UBI? A minimum wage job puts a floor on what can be paid and this fundementally distorts the labor market. If a job does not provide enough value to the employer to meet minimum wage it will not exist for very long. This rules out many types of work where the value is hard to capture and pushes all of that work into the domain of either being funded by gov…

This brings up the interesting (to discuss) idea that if a UBI is implemented, there should no longer be a minimum wage as the UBI places a floor on income. In many ways the minimum wage doesn't offer benefit in an economy where the self-employed will participate out of their free will in income generation through service such as Uber, DoorDash, Etsy. Often those self-income sources generate less on a per-hour basis…

It seems like you could pair a gradual introduction of a UBI with a commensurate reduction in the minimum wage and slowly find the sweet spot for our current economy. It seems like this could be a good form of economic stimulus during downturns.

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

#633

Post by bobbydroptables » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 1:15 PM UTC

sdinsn wrote: post #529

bobbydroptables wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada. I've literally never heard anyone in America discuss Canada's unemployment numbers in any context whatsoever. I think your premise may be off. Canada is also pretty tiny (smaller than California; much smaller GDP than California) so I'm not sure why we would care.

He is saying that people in Canada are less concerned about Canada's unemployment numbers than people in America are concerned about America's unemployment numbers.

If that were the case then the word superiority does not belong in that sentence. No average American has enough thoughts about Canada to have feelings of superiority about our economic statistics.

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

#634

Post by notyourday » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 1:26 PM UTC

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #462

notyourday wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that 60 year old is expecting to live until he is 90 then it is rather funny he or she thinks retirement at 60 is the thing unless that person has enough money to saved to cover half of his or hers lifetime.

Wouldn't it be a third?

If a person is 60 and expects to live until 90 then:

90-60 = 30

30 is 0.5 of 60.

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

#635

Post by CiPHPerCoder » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

rolltiide wrote: post #598

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The carrot-and-stick incentive model doesn't work for fully self-actualized adults. But for those who could be fully self actualized but arent yet and have to exchange time for food and shelter?

I had already covered that with the sentence that followed the one you quote-replied to.

To explain: I said it doesn't work with people who are X. Then I posited that it only works in condition Y. Y covers all cases, including non-X, and therefore answers your question (with respect to what I'd posit).

If your mental model of humanity is deeply flawed, you expect carrot-and-stick motivations to work. It doesn't matter if they're self-actualized.

If anyone is still confused, this might be worth a read: https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivate...

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

#636

Post by weberc2 » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 2:42 PM UTC

wheelerwj wrote: post #609

weberc2 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right that this one metric doesn’t tell the whole story, but no metric does and they aren’t meant to. Of course you need to look at other metrics besides employment to understand how well your society is doing.

Right, but the point is that not only does this metric not tell the whole story, but that it tells the WRONG story. Unemployment isn't a useful metric anymore.

Perhaps, but your rationale (“it’s not meaningful if jobs pay half of what they used to”) supports my interpretation (“not the whole story”), not your thesis (“WRONG story”). Correct me if I missed something; haven’t had my coffee yet.

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

#637

Post by weberc2 » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #401

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my take on that: A marginal amount of gatekeeping is necessary for any group to maintain its group identity. The toxicity comes from the overdose, not the act itself. A lot of "nerds" have personal insecurities and downtime. The potent mix of the two leads to more gatekeeping behavior than is necessary. It's for this reason that many people (especially women, PoC, etc.) will be hostilely quizzed when they expr…

You're employing precisely the stereotypes that weberc2 mentions in his comment. You've presented no evidence. You've only invited readers to indulge their animus against your disfavored groups. This kind of rhetoric is unacceptable in other areas of society and it ought to be unacceptable here.

I don’t know why this is downvoted; this is exactly correct. These were the stereotypes I was referring to, employed without irony.

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

#638

Post by lenkite » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 2:57 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.

No, it wouldn't really be any sort of calamity. Online-Courses/tuitions/bootcamps/home-schooling will take the place of traditional teachers in no time assuming some overlord disappeared them.

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

#639

Post by lenkite » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 3:05 PM UTC

Erem wrote: post #623

quotemstr wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people entitled to a particular set of benefits in exchange for a particular time spent doing some activity? Who gets to decide what benefits should result from that amount of time? You? Why?

> Who gets to decide what benefits should result from that amount of time? You? Why? Practically speaking, voters do because we live in a democracy. It is perfectly fine for a society to decide "a full time job should have to pay enough to cover a person's full-time living expenses", to define all those terms reasonably, and presto enforce it as law.

It is also perfectly fine for the free market to decide this. This is society too and captures relative value far more effectively and adaptably than a fixed one-time vote.

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

#640

Post by ChrisLomont » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

hacknat wrote: post #536

Double_Cast wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wages vary according to marginal utility rather than total utility. The question is not "what if all teachers disappeared", but "what if one particular teacher disappeared".

Wages for public sector workers are legally defined and, at least, in this case, have very little to do with any measure of utility. Our society is horrendous at measuring utility in almost all long term cases.

>Wages for public sector workers are legally defined and, at least, in this case, have very little to do with any measure of utility.

Public sector workers can leave for private wages, and for most comparable jobs, are paid similar wages, perhaps more so when adding benefits of most public sector jobs compared to volatility in private equivalents.

So maybe the wage is not the result of public artificial restriction, but of the value placed on the jobs themselves in the open job market.

Also not US teachers are among the highest paid in the world, certainly the OECD, likely because of Baumol's Cost Disease (which would imply US teachers are intrinsically overpaid, but receive the wages they do because schools must compete with outside even higher paying jobs to attract teachers). So perhaps it's not simply the US or public systems, but this is around the value on such skills worldwide.

So either the entire planet places similar utility on teaching as measured by pay, or the entire planet, public and private, has reached the same wrong conclusion.