If we only take the title without a context and that and this HN thread we can go far from the employer and employee relationships. There are political and cultural systems where lazyness exist even at a high pay.
The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
331–340 of 511 posts
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>entirely on the country and region. Very true... My home when I bought it was about 2x my annual income, my home today is worth on the market about 2x my current annual income. The average factory worker (or teacher) in my area could easily afford to buy my home in a standard 2 person income situation. Now if you go into the new construction area's of this city, the houses there start at 2x the price of my home. I…
> This is largely drive by the new construction of these high end homes fueled by low interest rates. I doubt it. How many such modest houses in your modest neighborhood are available now? How much has the housing supply in your town grown, and how much has the population grown? Are all these buyers actually making a direct choice between these two kinds of houses, or is only one of those choices actually available t…
>How many such modest houses in your modest neighborhood are available now?
In my zipcode +/- 10% of my home value... 30 or so....
>How much has the housing supply in your town grown, and how much has the population grown?
No idea on supply... We average about 1% population growth per year. Slight decrease during the pandemic, slight increase in the last couple of years.
In the same zip code there are 18 New Construction properties for sale, all 2 - 3x my home price. Which would not include the homes being built for buyers under contract.
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and to the extent it's true it's a pretty brief period of time historically. That is true, but understandably, people are not thrilled about the prospect of their conditions being worse than those their predecessors experienced. Especially not if, at the same time, they experience an uninterrupted period of economic growth and ever growing profit margins for the corporations they work for.
It's not worse than their predecessors. That belief is a combination of looking at the past with rose colored glasses and extrapolating the issues of a handful of cities to the entire country.
By objective standards, it isn't worse. Unfortunately, people don't care about objective standards, once they're not hungry cold and in pain they mostly derive their happiness from how well off they are compared to other people they encounter. By that metric more are worse off now.
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think piketty would disagree. Productivity per worker has gone up but the share of profits going to workers has gone down. This is not some kind of inflation driven by scarcity.
The ultra wealthy hired the best to win a game of financial manipulation that the rest of us didn’t even know was being played. The median salary would be six figure if the share of productivity gains was distributed like it was in 1970.
GDP per capita is $80K in the US.
I suspect this includes people of all ages, so if we distribute this only to working age, that’s probably close to $100K (six figures)
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly that's a valid criticism BUT I would point out the wealth distribution in our economy. If it was more equable would this luxurious lifestyle for all still be possible ?
Let’s take a look at income (not wealth) The US has a GDP per capita of $80K, so if it were distributed equally, everyone would “get” $80K. Since in reality the distribution is very skewed a lot of people would earn more. Of course, that’s if we artificially constrain this to the US. The world-wide GDP per capita is only $12K. So if we’d be really equitable with the whole world, we’d all have to make do with a lot le…
> The US has a GDP per capita of $80K, so if it were distributed equally, everyone would “get” $80K
Pedantically, you actually want GNI, not GDP, here. (But they are close enough in practice for the US–and identical on a worldwide basis since there is no foreign income—that it doesn’t materially change anything else in your comment.)
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have heard the argument that a negative effect of the post WW2 "feminist" movement (by that I mean women in the work force) has had the long term effect of causing prices to simply adjust to the dual income household, to the point that now it is a necessity. It is a privileged family today that can afford to live comfortably on only one salary.
I think piketty would disagree. Productivity per worker has gone up but the share of profits going to workers has gone down. This is not some kind of inflation driven by scarcity.
Except that with machines doing more of the on the job labor at the same time that women are entering the work force en-mass, there was more competition for fewer jobs which depressed wages.
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gimme a good argument why good conditions should diminish, or deteriorate, despite the fact that workforce productivity, as well as corporate margins, have been growing steadily ever since.
It was only ever good conditions for some . If wealth redistributes faster than wealth grows, those some will experience loss while society at large experiences net gain.
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Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ultra wealthy hired the best to win a game of financial manipulation that the rest of us didn’t even know was being played. The median salary would be six figure if the share of productivity gains was distributed like it was in 1970.
Is the average salary six figures?
GDP per capita in the US is $80K [wikipedia]
I assume it includes everyone regardless of age, so the average salary when only considering people working if probably $100K or above
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#339It's pretty simple really. If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets. And people don't like being indentured servants. History should have mad…
I think it's important to note that the good old days of a working man being able to support a family of five was only true for a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries. In most of the world, and for most of human history, it hasn't been the case that any single person working 40 hours a week could provide a luxurious lifestyle for a large family. While some lament the loss of this golden age their g…
There were a lot of people working very hard in the 50s and 60s, not having luxurious lifestyles. My grandparents had 6 kids on a farm because they all had to work to make ends meet, and lived in a modest farm house. They grew their own food, and didn't have what some would describe as 'luxury'. My other grandparents had a 1000 square foot home with 5 boys in it. Both parents worked and a vacation consisted of driving 4 hours to a nearby big city once a year, not going to Machu Picchu or the Amalfi Coast.
Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As a tech lead, the big problem I see now is that people are not hungry anymore. The best engineers I've ever worked with were consistently asking for more and leveling up the team at the same time. Now, the post-covid hires, especially the junior engineers, just do the bare minimum to scrape by, and they seem totally unbothered by it. Because they see management not pulling their weight for the pay they get. Why s…
What do you consider a fair pay for junior engineers in order for them to contribute at the capacity they're expected to? Our fresh college grads are paid a total compensation higher than $200K. Is that not enough to expect working, at minimum , 8 hours a day?
I think the distinction being drawn here is that there is a disconnect between hiring managers and workers.
A hiring manager has an expectation that 200k will incentivize someone to work for 8 hours a day consistently and constantly where work is the point, not the tasks themselves. They expect the worker to figure out what additional tasks are to be done for that price and work at the upper limit of the time expectations (8 hour a day).
Whereas the average worker is coming to the workplace to complete a set of tasks defined by the manager, not to figure out more tasks to do in their free time. They expect the manager to know what tasks needs to be done and understand that their results need to be tracked.
As jobs become more and more compartmentalized it becomes less of an advantage for an employee to be hungry for more work, when their chance for promotion diminishes the better they are at their job, as in my anecdotal experience, management is loathe to lose that efficient cog in the system in that specific point. Which then reinforces the employees becoming jaded and resorting to the least amount of work possible.
I believe it’s because in todays corporate world more often than not, most employees have no skin in the game. That is, they are not privy to the more long term planning for their companies and are not usually compensated based on performance (outside of sales anyway).