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Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality

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

#241

Post by rmrfstar »

nickff wrote: post #224
rmrfstar wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a certain point the ratio is so high that it cannot be explained by differing abilities, and can only be explained by the structure of the market. Let's say a brain surgeon makes $2m/year. That makes sense, they are uncommonly talented. Does it make sense that someone can amass as wealth 50,000 years of brain surgeon economic output ($100bn)? If the distribution of human endowments is Gaussian, as it likely is, th…

You're assuming that the returns to talent are linear, when they are not. Let's say you're hiring a new CEO for Apple; how much is a 0.1% more talented CEO worth? My math says that 0.1% is worth 260 million per year. Even though the 'best' CEO might only be a tiny bit better than the runner-up, the 'best' runs a much larger company, and makes far more money. From this, you can see that the returns to the most talente…

The cult of CEO is deeply troubling to me.

People thought Apple was going to crater after Jobs, and it was fine. It wasn't fine because it has a hyper-capable supreme leader, it was fine because it employs an army of extremely talented hard working people with a reasonably competent leader.

I assure you that Apple has several Tim Cook quality employees earning orders of magnitude less.

It's just so weird to me that we have one group of people priced at replacement cost, and another priced at who knows what? I think you would say they are priced as a multiple on surplus, but I would disagree.

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

#242

Post by triyambakam »

tathougies wrote: post #215
intopieces wrote: post #179

It seems from the comments that a lot of the readers here equate "let's look at socioeconomic inequality" with "let's make sure everyone has the same socioeconomic outcome by bringing down the people who earn more." This is... a leap not found in this article. The idea is to make sure that we realize the knock-on effects of changes in the workforce / society and take measures to make sure people who have the ability…

> Imagine if a single mother working for $20k a year at an office could do that work from home? Imagine if we applied this same kind of get-it-done thinking to wondering why there were so many women raising children on their own without support from the child's father?

I agree. An example from my personal experience is Saiva Siddhanta that recommends couples remain married and only separate in cases of abuse.

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

#243

Post by kubanczyk »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #201
sandworm101 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Anyway technically the physical jobs can be done remotely if latency isn't a concern We all talk about robots, but I have yet to see ANY robot remotely capable of the simplest jobs. At my work, an exaust fan failed overnight. Replacing it is a simple task: a few screws and some basic wiring. Latency isn't the issue. There are no robots with the dexterity to even consider such a job. I'd be amazed if one exists tha…

If a whole plant/shop is ram by robots then you wouldn’t need a fan first place!

Because robots are exempt from the laws of thermodynamics. They just aren't capable of overheating, phew.

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

#244

Post by temac »

Avicebron wrote: post #175
oneiftwo wrote: post #157

Not all work is equally valuable. Not all work is equally doable. Some work requires decades patience and sacrifice before one is competent enough to perform it. Some work is physically or cognitively beyond the vast majority of the population. It doesn't make sense to expect all jobs to have all the same benefits and privelegdes. Even if we pretend that all humans are fundamentally equal in ability, inequality will…

I really can't understand this mindset, it views the system that we have as fundamentally meritocratic and that only hard work matters. This is demonstrably false with a cursory review of how our (the US) education system, economy, and geographic distributions reward and punish people.

On my part I don't consider all inequalities to be fundamentally reducible to a single dimension, so the primary reason I would consider that "inequality is not intrinsically bad" is not so much that it can be "great motivator" [to innovate, if I interpret that as mainly a way to get more money] than that some characteristics are just both plainly dissimilar and impossible to sort, sometimes not even for single individuals considering their taste, even less so for a whole population.

Now it is still interesting to measure a correlation between the income and the ability to work from home and the practical impacts in our current organizations and in specific situations, but this has to be qualified and interpreted very carefully, because I'm not really sure that the conditions for some are specifically worsened in order to be specifically enhanced for others - at least in normal times. Actually, I'm not sure the conditions are even always necessarily enhanced for those who work from home, for example working exclusively from home might be a bad idea for some people; and some companies may have the idea that working from home forever is the new normal, even without pandemic constraints. In that context, that would be one less choice for the workers, compared to a balanced situation. But that has to be completely contextually qualified: it would seem fair to amortize and compensate even otherwise neutral characteristics (not affirming that WFH ability is usually completely neutral) if they become huge disadvantage in specific situations. Because why bother living in a society otherwise?

So it boils down to choice (and I mean root choices: if you have the choice and choose a work occupation that you find extremely fulfilling, but that you can't practice from home, then usually the lack of choice on the work at home subject is only very secondary compared to your original choice of this activity), and in that regard maybe it should be read as a (potential, and very indirect) symptom of real problems rather than a problem on its own: I agree that the ability for individual choices that matter will be greatly improved by e.g. accessible good quality education and health care systems, and the US seems lacking there. The thing is that even if that does not change at all the wage vs. WFH correlation, the overall situation will still be enhanced if that improve the ability for people to chose their job.

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

#245

Post by epicureanideal »

xapata wrote: post #212
gen220 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea, as a kind of spiritual successor to the Federal Aid Highway Act ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_195... ), but for a different kind of transportation. I don't know if our congress could ever come together on something like this in 2020, but I'm sure some highly specific implementation could be found that everyone could more or less agree to. Is there any existing project or…

That sounds like yet another wealth transfer from metro areas to rural areas. I understand that the US government is structured that way, by the creation of the Senate, but as a city-dweller, I'm not a fan. I'd rather pay for people to move, perhaps subsidizing housing where other services have competition and jobs are plentiful.

Having at least some distributed population is a national asset in the event of conflict. Not to mention some people need to live in rural areas due to the nature of their work.

Also, what’s it worth to you to enable rural America to have a similar enough lifestyle to you that you’re both more likely to consider yourselves the same sort of Americans? National cohesion is worth something.

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

#247

Post by tathougies »

rmrfstar wrote: post #232
tathougies wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it make sense that someone can amass as wealth 50,000 years of brain surgeon economic output ($100bn)? If the distribution of human endowments is Gaussian, as it likely is, this level of wealth accumulation cannot be explained by superior productivity alone. Well, yeah, if someone figured out how to operate an 10000 brains at once, then all of a sudden one would think that he ought to make 50000 years worth of…

I like your hypothetical, but I'm going to change it a little . Let's say Amazon records its warehouse workers and captures data which it can use to train industrial robots at some future date. Those industrial robots have $X of economic value. Who created that value? Did the workers whose data enabled it? Did the DARPA/NSF funded university system who pushed the techniques to the point of being production-ready? Or…

Following this line of reasoning, one must be worried about who one ought to pay when one makes a wheel out of dirt. I mean that honestly. As a society, we agree the buck ends somewhere for the most part. That which is freely available or observable knowledge typically doesn't mandate compensative.

Public DARPA knowledge is presumably available to every American citizen (or at least it ought to be, since they presumable paid for it). So is employee behavior.

In general, I'm not sure you should be paid for simply having knowledge. You must apply it. Patents represent a recapture of the process for producing knowledge (however poorly one may argue they do it), but those come with an expiration date too.

That is to say, all knowledge eventually loses its price, and some never had any to begin with.

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

#248

Post by Avicebron »

renewiltord wrote: post #227
Avicebron wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well doesn't that counteract pleasantness in an absolute sense? I would argue there has never truly been a society aimed at equality on a large scale. I don't consider the implementation of communism to have been truly aimed at equality and certainly didn't end that way.

In a POSIWID sense, systems that claim to be equality systems are actually aiming at Gini 1. Therefore, my priors on the outcomes likely if I am to go along with an equality-optimizer are high that I will end up a serf and near zero that I will end up equal participant in the commune. My priors on the outcomes likely if I am to go along with a top-line optimizer are high that he will make out like a bandit, I will ma…

Wouldn't it be Gini 0?

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

#249

Post by jahaja »

aianus wrote: post #221
jahaja wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever enables a dignified existence. It doesn't require much imagination to figure out what's included in that.

Does it include children? How many is considered dignified? Some people have to have 3 just to keep the population steady. If so, is it appropriate for a childless 18-year-old on minimum wage to earn that much (he could probably lease a Ferrari or retire at 38) Is it appropriate for a company to pay a childless person less than a person with children? Why? What if he’s sterile? Seems very tricky to me.

In my country, Sweden, we have a very generous child welfare and parental leave. I have no children though. By your logic I should be envious and bitter? But I'm proud. It's called solidarity and having a healthy society benefits a childless me as well.

It's not tricky, and has been going on for the last fifty years or so just fine.

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