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Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

news.gallup.com

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Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#11

Post by akira2501 »

jamilton wrote: post #7

Seems kinda "no duh" to me. An non-employer owner is essentially employing themselves, right, having to do the work of an employee, just with the added work and benefits of being the owner. An employer-owner does not have to do the work of an employee, and is likely able to employee people to deal with the added work of ownership, leaving only the benefits. The median for non-employer owner being 24k while the median…

> leaving only the benefits.

Well.. those and the liabilities and risk.

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#12

Post by thyrsus »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #4
softjobs wrote: post #3

Initially I read that as "Exploiting others"...

Well yes, in the strict sense, that's what it says: you are better off extracting labor from others via the wage relation. You could swear the headline was written by a doctrinaire Marxist.

Is that not presumed by capitalists as well? It appears to me the difference between the two lies in the expectations (Marxist: bad outcome; capitalist: good outcome) and the degree to which moral judgements adhere (ironically, the putative "scientific" Marxists seem more moralist than the capitalists).

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#15

Post by Gud »

akira2501 wrote: post #11
jamilton wrote: post #7

Seems kinda "no duh" to me. An non-employer owner is essentially employing themselves, right, having to do the work of an employee, just with the added work and benefits of being the owner. An employer-owner does not have to do the work of an employee, and is likely able to employee people to deal with the added work of ownership, leaving only the benefits. The median for non-employer owner being 24k while the median…

> leaving only the benefits. Well.. those and the liabilities and risk.

Such as? It seems to me that whatever risk the owning class has can be easily controlled by diversifying.

And what liabilities do they have?

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#16

Post by floating-io »

warcher wrote: post #8
bawolff wrote: post #6

> Self-employed adults tend to have the lowest scores That kind of surprised me.

Wondering how that gets measured— the gig economy could skew this by a lot. In general it’s a tough road no matter the paycheck though.

There's a lot of things here that make me wonder what is being measured -- and what isn't being measured.

Examples:

Age is a factor. How many "self employed" people are young up-and-comers who do not yet have the resume to actually make good money as contractors? What percentage of the "self employed" workforce is that? That's just one example.

Type of business is another. A one-person house cleaning business is likely to make a lot less money than a one-person niche SaaS company.

After thinking about it a bit, this stinks of "we have a conclusion, here's how we manipulated the data to support it."

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#17

Post by anon373839 »

thyrsus wrote: post #12
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, in the strict sense, that's what it says: you are better off extracting labor from others via the wage relation. You could swear the headline was written by a doctrinaire Marxist.

Is that not presumed by capitalists as well? It appears to me the difference between the two lies in the expectations (Marxist: bad outcome; capitalist: good outcome) and the degree to which moral judgements adhere (ironically, the putative "scientific" Marxists seem more moralist than the capitalists).

Certainly not with the baggage that words like "exploiting" and "extracting" carry. Capitalism is rooted in the idea of comparative advantage and gains from trade: I give you this, you give me that, and we're both better off than if we hadn't done it.

Of course, that's the lofty, textbook ideal. Plenty of capital owners actually do want to extract and exploit. To me, that's not the intent of capitalism, but rather a propensity that needs to be curtailed with strong legal/regulatory incentives.

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#18

Post by hermitcrab »

lr4444lr wrote: post #5

There's gotta be a lot of survivorship bias here: many people whose businesses failed and had to go back to wage labor, or who simply lack the motivation to even try to pursue their own occupational freedom would be expected to feel more disgruntled.

Yes. Having a business with employees fail must be so much more painful than having a business with no employees fail.

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#19

Post by hermitcrab »

repomies69 wrote: post #14

Yeah, as an employer I made much more money. It was also very stressful, as managing people can be quite a hassle. I much prefer being self-employed without employees.

Yep. I've been running a 1-man software business for 19 years. I could have taken on employees and made more money, but made a conscious decision not to. I don't regret it.

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#20

Post by devonsolomon »

Tempting to deduce that employing people will make you happier and wealthier: it wont. It will just kill your business faster and reduce the chance you show up in a Gallup poll as a business owner at all.

People who have employees and haven’t yet gone out of business are likely to have a good product and business model. Having a good business model is likely to make you wealthier than not having yet found a good business model.

“We interviewed a 100 bananas and found that the ripe ones were yellow”

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