Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality • Hacker News Board

Re: Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality

#141

Post by kerkeslager » Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

tenpoundhammer wrote: post #132

kerkeslager wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two ways you can close the gap between low-income, in-person work, and high-income, remote work: 1. The straw man you're suggesting: get rid of remote work. This is obviously not universally possible. 2. Pay in-person workers more. Because you know, if someone is essential enough to die for their work, maybe they are also essential enough to be included in the American dream of owning their own home and car…

A few things: Addressing point 1, the commenter never said anything like that. Addressing point 2, right now the US economy imperfectly applies wages to an individual worker based on the demand for their skills. If their skills become more scarce or they develop better skills their wages should increase. If we say pay them more without changing the demand or the skills they have who will pay them more? Where will the…

> A few things: Addressing point 1, the commenter never said anything like that.

Sure, the commenter didn't think anyone was proposing getting rid of all remote work. He just went out of his way to say that we can't get rid of all remote work, because obvious things like that need to be stated on a thread about pay inequality.

> Addressing point 2, right now the US economy imperfectly applies wages to an individual worker based on the demand for their skills. If their skills become more scarce or they develop better skills their wages should increase. If we say pay them more without changing the demand or the skills they have who will pay them more? Where will the money come from?

Pay at the top.

> The simple answer might be to pay the CEO less but their value is also set on Market rates for their skills and demand, so if a chain paid the CEO less they would leave and go somewhere were they got paid more.

Then let them go.

If all the benefits of the CEOs innovation just go to the CEO, then why should anyone else care if the CEO innovates? And it's not just the benefits of the CEO's innovation that go to the CEO, it's the benefits of the innovation of everyone at the company. You seem convinced that CEOs provide more value to the economy than they suck out of the economy, but this is not at all evident.

> Then that chain would have to higher someone else for more than the reduced rate of the previous CEO.

I'm not sure why you think they would have to pay more.

A lot of this handwaving fear about how we have to pay CEOs or we'll lose them, is to prevent a free market which agrees what a CEO is worth from deciding a lower value. But if everyone realizes that people amassing un-spendably large hordes of wealth is not actually a net benefit to society, then the free market is quite capable of pegging the value of a CEO much lower than it currently is.

This is particularly true in the US: we can peg the pay of CEOs significantly lower than they are, while still paying CEOs more than any other nation in the world. Of the Forbes 11 richest people in the world, 9 are in the US.

Pegging the pay of top earners within a company to bottom earners in the company means that CEOs always still have incentive to grow their companies, because they get paid more if they do.

> I also like the idea of paying people at the bottom of the economy more, but the government shouldn't just mandate some people make more and other people make less. We must find a way to either change the skill level or demand for those employees.

This won't help low-income workers. As long as we allow some people to determine their own pay with complete impunity, they'll always decide to pay themselves and not others whenever possible. That's what the incentives cause them to do.

> Artificially changing demand for low skilled employees is a bit scary because it incentivizes investments in automation.

I don't see a benefit in work for the sake of work. If a machine can do something as well as a human, a machine should do it. I don't want to see a future where we keep people doing work that machines could do. I'd rather see a world where machines do all the work, and everyone benefits from that work.

A future where machines do all the work is only scary if you only allow economic models which prevent everyone from benefiting from automation.

Re: Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality

#142

Post by kerkeslager » Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:51 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #135

kerkeslager wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which in turn means whatever those workers are providing will cost more. That's one possibility. Obviously it's one we should avoid. Yes, we have noticed the skulls[1]. Please give me the courtesy of not assuming you've noticed obvious things that I haven't. Another possibility, is we stop paying people at the top literally millions of times as much money as the people at the bottom. An easy way to do this would be…

> Obviously it's one we should avoid. You can't. You don't get to dictate what something costs. > we stop paying people at the top literally millions of times as much money as the people at the bottom You can't do this either unless you own stock in the company and can vote on the compensation it pays. > An easy way to do this would be to cap income of the top earners in a company at, say, 1,000 times income of their…

Okay, maybe I've misunderstood you. I'll try to hear you out. Are you basically proposing worker-owned cooperatives?

Re: Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality

#143

Post by tenpoundhammer » Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

kerkeslager wrote: post #141

tenpoundhammer wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few things: Addressing point 1, the commenter never said anything like that. Addressing point 2, right now the US economy imperfectly applies wages to an individual worker based on the demand for their skills. If their skills become more scarce or they develop better skills their wages should increase. If we say pay them more without changing the demand or the skills they have who will pay them more? Where will the…

> A few things: Addressing point 1, the commenter never said anything like that. Sure, the commenter didn't think anyone was proposing getting rid of all remote work. He just went out of his way to say that we can't get rid of all remote work, because obvious things like that need to be stated on a thread about pay inequality. > Addressing point 2, right now the US economy imperfectly applies wages to an individual w…

Based on your reply I feel like we have fundamentally different world views that can't be resolved in HN comments, but I feel like I understand your view better than I did before. Best of luck to you, thanks for a thoughtful reply.

Re: Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality

#144

Post by sandworm101 » Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #136

andrey_utkin wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe is not a "simplest job", definitely not for a robot, but also for an unskilled labour. I see the way to handle this sort of situation is to embrace "whole node replacement" tactic. I suppose this is already happening in some cases. "Repair robots" is one possible way to accomplish that, but it's not the only way, and in most cases not the cheapest available way. For example, if a fan has failed in y…

Node replacement isn't generally a practical option with large machinery or commercial facilities. And even where it could be possible, robots won't be up to the job for many decades. Show me a robot that can extract a badly rusted bolt.

Show me a robot that can FIND a rusty bolt. The act of cleaning, of scrubbing away the dust and dirt from a work area, is beyond AI at the moment. If that rusty bolt has been painted over it might as well not exist.

Re: Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality

#145

Post by s1artibartfast » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

kansface wrote: post #139

shlom22 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The West will go full communism, and it will make life better for all of us - no more rent, work or paying for groceries and everything will be taken care of so we can be creative in our time

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not!?

I assume it is trolling

Re: Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality

#146

Post by pdonis » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

kerkeslager wrote: post #142

pdonis wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously it's one we should avoid. You can't. You don't get to dictate what something costs. > we stop paying people at the top literally millions of times as much money as the people at the bottom You can't do this either unless you own stock in the company and can vote on the compensation it pays. > An easy way to do this would be to cap income of the top earners in a company at, say, 1,000 times income of their…

Okay, maybe I've misunderstood you. I'll try to hear you out. Are you basically proposing worker-owned cooperatives?

> Are you basically proposing worker-owned cooperatives?

From what I know about them, they would be one example of what I am talking about, yes, since as I understand it, the cooperative makes all the business decisions--what products to build and sell, how much of what to produce, where to locate the factory, what supply chains to rely on, etc.

But I'm not just proposing that we adopt something that already exists, or tweak something that already exists a little. I suspect that if all, or even a significant majority, of people who are currently working for wages adopted the mentality I describe, the entire economy of the planet would look very different.

Re: Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality

#147

Post by windthrown » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #100

nradov wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who does classified work (including software developers) can't do it at home.

Did Snowden work fully remote as an NSA contractor with classified data?

My recollection is that Snowden worked in remote/satellite facilities such as the Operations Center in Hawaii (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunia_Regional_SIGINT_Operatio...), but not from his house.

Re: Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality

#148

Post by rkeene2 » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:23 PM UTC

windthrown wrote: post #147

djsumdog wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Snowden work fully remote as an NSA contractor with classified data?

My recollection is that Snowden worked in remote/satellite facilities such as the Operations Center in Hawaii ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunia_Regional_SIGINT_Operatio... ), but not from his house.

Correct -- his house would not have a link to NSANet, nor have anywhere for open storage of classified material. The VERY best he could have hoped for would be a SME-PED and a vault.

Re: Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality

#149

Post by dang » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:40 PM UTC

bzb3 wrote: post #8

ashtonkem wrote: post #4

The suggestion that governments can close the remote working gap is not very well thought out. A large percentage of low income work is service work that requires physical presence. You can’t make the typical burger joint remote friendly without automating all the jobs away.

They are miserable people who want to make things worse for remote workers because if everybody can't have something then nobody can.

Can you please not take HN threads further into flamewar and/or do the ideological battle thing here?

(Btw, I appreciate that your comments have improved away from this direction in general.)

Re: Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality

#150

Post by unishark » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:45 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #89

spugody wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who defines what a fair wage is?

In a free market, the market does. In most actual cases, some combination of a sort of free market, monopolies over labor (unions) and capital (large corporations), and government regulation does.

It would be better to say the market sets wages to maximize efficiency. With wages being price signals people are supposed to respond to in choosing and changing jobs.

The "fairness" view assumes everyone is born into their jobs somehow and stuck there. If people could choose any job they wanted, fairness is irrelevant because everyone has an equal choice. This is obviously an ideal, but then the opposite extreme is unrealistic too.