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How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

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Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#31

Post by pgsimp »

sunstone wrote: post #18

Sure, and universal health care helps even more but it doesn't fill the pockets of the members of the medical associations the way private health care does. Regulatory capture in its rawest form.

Wait, what - you say it is "regulation" that there is no universal health care? How so? It seems to me "universal health care" would be the regulation.

What is stopping people from getting together and forming their own "universal health care" group? There must be millions who are in favor of it? Get 100 million people together, and offer health care to each other. What's stopping you?

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#32

Post by alexashka »

I wish we'd frame it as 'it sucks to live among people who are living in poverty'. It doesn't matter to me whether they are 10% more or less productive - that's not a compelling argument for me or anyone besides middle management really.

To me, the very mindset of boiling humans down to 'productivity' aka profit is a toxic way to look at life. We're well past needing to force people to work the fields for food, so why are we still treating human productivity as a valuable metric?

It probably comes from 'the free market is the best we've got, free market success is decided by profit'. Well yes, but remember why we're using the free market in the first place - winning at any cost was never the goal. The goal was to improve the quality of life within a society by letting supply and demand guide people's choices. It's turned into a strange ideology of celebrating winning and viewing anyone who isn't winning as a loser, rather than your teammate, your neighbour, dare I say your friend.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#33

Post by mulmen »

esotericn wrote: post #10

This is going to sound egotistical, but it's not intended that way, just the experience of your average prole. The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in. When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely kil…

Thanks for sharing, your experience resembles my own.

Can you explain your change of heart? You mention it happened in the last year but I’m not sure why. If anything this last year has motivated me to do even more. And I believe we can and will, but I am in a good place professionally.

Are you speaking more personally than professionally?

It sounds like maybe you did achieve some of what you set out to do but maybe you don’t think it was enough?

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#34

Post by Mountain_Skies »

throwanem wrote: post #15
fatsdomino001 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.

I've heard this claim before, but I've never seen it substantiated. Would you like to do so?

The difficulty is going to be around definitions. There are claims that communism has killed X million people, where both the definition of communism and what constitutes cause are very loose. On the flip side you have people who advocate for communism who claim it's never been tried and everything that has ever called itself communism wasn't true communism. You'll face the same issue with capitalism.

The confounding factor I see here is what do we call China? They've experienced an incredible increase in wealth under their communist system but is what they have really communism? It certainly has lots of attributes of both theoretical capitalism and western capitalism as practiced mixed in with communist concepts. Whatever it is, China, for better and worse, is a very different country than it had been because in part due their hybrid economic system.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#35

Post by tor11 »

DC1350 wrote: post #28
andrepd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? That sounds like overreaching conclusions. You might as well say "monarchy is responsible for the scientific and industrial revolutions", or "Christianity has created the Renaissance", just because those pairs of complex changes in society and history happened concurrently in time.

Because nobody with money gave a shit about the global poor until they realized they could be used for cheap labour. The ability to collect the surplus value of their work encouraged investment in poor regions

cheap labour is better than no labour

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#36

Post by u678u »

throwanem wrote: post #15
fatsdomino001 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.

I've heard this claim before, but I've never seen it substantiated. Would you like to do so?

Generally the last few decades as capitalism has swept the globe poverty has dropped dramatically in the poorest countries. https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/globalization-reduced-po...

Western Europe vs Eastern Europe, N Korea vs S Korea, Colombia vs Venezuela, USA vs Russia - its pretty standard that the workers in the Capitalist countries have a better quality of life than those in the Communist ones.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#37

Post by adamnemecek »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #20
_qulr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also a surprising number of people in the US believe that poverty is a moral failure of some sort. Yep, there's a marriage in the US between business and religion that seems contradictory until you realize that these people believe the "invisible hand" of the market is God.

> that these people Who? I’ve never met anyone who believes that.

Half of the country.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#38

Post by adamnemecek »

DC1350 wrote: post #22
adamnemecek wrote: post #9

The US doesn’t care about productivity but more about maintaining some sort of class system. It took me a while to realize this. Also a surprising number of people in the US believe that poverty is a moral failure of some sort. I never actually understood this.

> I never actually understood this. If you grow up middle class or better then it’s pretty much impossible to make good decisions and end up poor. The incorrect “moral failure” mindset comes from projecting this belief onto people who grew up in poverty and never had a chance.

Idk if this is true. Ok what if you don’t. Also things like medical bankruptcy are way too common.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#39

Post by wyre »

fatsdomino001 wrote: post #13
ignoranceprior wrote: post #11

how I imagine (straw) hyper-capitalists think: "why is poverty bad? not because we have empathy for poor people, nah, just because poor people are not being optimally productive worker bees"

Keep in mind capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.

Advancements in technology lifts people out of poverty. There is no proof these advancements in tech would not have realized without capitalism.

If anything China and the USSR turning their agrarian societies into world powers in the course of a few decades says otherwise. Whether or not the authoritarianism needed to accomplish this is worthwhile is another discussion. That said it is theoretically possible to achieve a more equal society without authoritarianism.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#40

Post by lostcolony »

pgsimp wrote: post #27
esotericn wrote: post #10

This is going to sound egotistical, but it's not intended that way, just the experience of your average prole. The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in. When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely kil…

Presumably companies that don't pay you well are already struggling, so their problems (that you were put to work on) were also more of a struggle. Of course companies who are doing well can also afford to pay more and give all sorts of perks to their employees. I suspect often that is the actual causation, not vice versa. People like to point at successful companies and say "see, if you would treat your employees li…

Of course not.

But you mention causation. You have to treat your employees well if you want to be successful. It is necessary, but not sufficient.

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