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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

#41

Post by anon373839 »

int_19h wrote: post #36
anon373839 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I give you this, you give me that, and we're both better off than if we hadn't done it. A fair deal is when both are better off by the same amount, which is not a typical situation with wage labor in capitalism. And a deal that isn't fair is an exploitative one. Capitalism doesn't really have an "intent". It's just an economic system with unbounded private ownership of capital, hence the name. However, there are ce…

> A fair deal is when both are better off by the same amount

I wouldn't agree with that. Suppose I'm a graphic designer and Adobe Creative Cloud is essential to my work. At $60/month, Adobe is capturing far less than 50% of the total economic value the software provides me. I don't think this arrangement is unfair to Adobe. They offered that price, and I accepted it.

I think fairness is really hard to define, but is largely procedural. A deal is fair if we both understand what the deal actually is, if we're not preventing the other from pursuing other options, and a bunch of other stuff. But I don't believe a 50-50 split in the surplus is required.

> large businesses - and their ultimate form, monopolies - are the natural outcome of capitalism

Yes, laissez faire capitalism comes to that. Scale can be disincentivized, and I think society would be stronger and more prosperous if it were.

> why are you going in that direction in the first place?

What's the better alternative? I think capitalism is the least-worse economic system that anyone has proposed.

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#42

Post by metalspoon »

bawolff wrote: post #6

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

In my country, it looks like companies encourage poor people to go self-employed because it'd be easier to take advantage of them.

Rich people also don't self-employ. They just hijack companies through cronyism and such.

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#43

Post by gizmo »

rjzzleep wrote: post #26
devonsolomon wrote: post #20

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 busi…

> “We interviewed a 100 bananas and found that the ripe ones were yellow” I had to google to see if this was from somewhere else, but seems like no. Thank you for this wonderful comment. EDIT: one of the most toxic part of VC culture is that growth is measured by headcount growth.

Most startups can’t hang on to their explosive revenue/user growth without also growing headcount. There are plenty of bad VCs out there but there are also plenty of founders who postpone recruitment because it’s a drag.

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#44

Post by gizmo »

Gud wrote: post #15
akira2501 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You can be dragged into lawsuits that never end. You have to mediate employee drama. You are responsible for paychecks which is stressful when the business is deteriorating.

Owning a $100 million business is not at all like having $100 million in the stock market.

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#45

Post by barfbagginus »

I'm struggling to understand the difference between self employed workers/contractors, an non-employer owners - specifically, which am I?

Some facts:

- I own a CAD design service

- I don't employ others (but this might be changing, see details below)

- I don't work on contract

- I only have one customer, for four years now

- My revenue is around 30k/yr

Considerations:

I'm almost an employee for my customer. However I deliver work at a price I choose, and let the demand curve determine the resulting volume. This let's me survive on 4 to 8 hours of labor a week. This accommodation is necessary due to disability challenges I face, and would be hard to secure as an employee.

I'm like a long term contractor for the customer. I charge more than their employees and get work only when there is overflow work. But I'm not on a contract or 1099 - the customer just sends me work and I invoice for it. Any contract between us is verbal, having to do with expectations on quality, lead time, and confidentiality.

I could say I'm self employed, but the service has around 10K LOC of Python and C# CAD plugins I wrote to make us much faster and higher quality than ordinary workers here. I'm working on turning those tools into a product - so I own some IP and innovative processes that might make me an owner.

I could say I'm a non-employer owner, but then I should be happier and more thriving! Jokes aside, I'm also working to build an efficient training curriculum for my tools, and am currently onboarding an intern - a promising CS grad student with a knack for both CAD design and algorithm design. I hope to sell work to new clients and upgrade the intern into an employee once they drive revenue, and into a worker-owner if they start helping me develop our tools. Ultimately I want the company to be a worker owned commune. So I could be transitioning into an employer?

So which am I? Should I consider myself a non-employer owner making an effort to become an employer? Or am I just a self employed bum, which is what I feel like? Feel free to ask questions!

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#46

Post by Wool2662 »

akira2501 wrote: post #24
Gud wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> And what liabilities do they have? All of them associated with operating their business. The most pertinent to this discussion would obviously be workers compensation in cases of work related injury or illness.

That's what insurance is for. And if it gets really bad, there is the corporate veil for that. Just declare bankruptcy and start over. Not like you are losing the money you extracted from the company.

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#47

Post by em-bee »

devonsolomon wrote: post #27
hermitcrab wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Im not sure new entrepreneurs quite appreciate the gravity of having family livelihoods dependent on your decisions. The toll is also much worse in developing nations where the demand in the job market is low. Business failure then could mean people being long-term or permanently out of work. Entrepreneurship is a massive driver of employment in developed markets (especially VC backed). Ironically, entrepreneurs in d…

do you have any reference to that? because i don't have that impression at all.

what risks do you have when employing, other than spending more money? if you stop earning money you can let people go. i did that without problems.

in a weak job market, entrepreneurship is often the only option. developing countries have some of the highest numbers of self-employed people. since there is no job security either, the risk of failure is not really relevant, because often the alternative is unemployment. and they are very aware of their families depending on them. that's why they are doing it.

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#48

Post by em-bee »

barfbagginus wrote: post #45

I'm struggling to understand the difference between self employed workers/contractors, an non-employer owners - specifically, which am I? Some facts: - I own a CAD design service - I don't employ others (but this might be changing, see details below) - I don't work on contract - I only have one customer, for four years now - My revenue is around 30k/yr Considerations: I'm almost an employee for my customer. However I…

in an EU country you would most likely be forced to be an employee because it looks like you have a dependent relationship with your customer/employer. your disability makes that even more so. (protections for disabled employees are very strong in the EU)

1099 obviously does not apply, but even if it is just verbal, you are on a contract.

but you are also building something to make you more independent, which is good.

as for your last question, it really depends on how you like to work.

i try to hire people because i like to work with others in a team. but my ability to hire depends on my success at getting contracts. i try to hire people who will benefit from working with me even though there is a higher risk that i can't keep them when i don't get new projects. ironically this works well in both a strong and a weak job market. in a strong job market i do not need to worry about letting go people because they will easily find another job. in a weak market the people i hire often don't have another option anyways. and if they do want to leave because they find something more stable then i am happy for them. what i don't do is get people to quit their existing job in order to work for me.

you should make an effort to achieve your goals. whether that means becoming an employer depends on how well that aligns with your goals.

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#49

Post by barfbagginus »

devonsolomon wrote: post #20

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 busi…

It seems like employing others without failing is the condition they find is linked to higher happiness and wealth, rather than just trying to employ.

I'm okay with that insight. Employing others is riskier, but gives happiness and wealth advantages to the tiny 2% that succeed.

A question I have: of the 2%, what fraction comes from money and privilege, what fraction comes from the middle class, and what fraction comes from the lower class? I think class matters here. I think we'd also find class has to do with employer success rate as well.

Another Q: if and when we have a Queer Autonomous Communist Revolution, what happens to that bourgeois 2%? Gulag driven re-education, right? C'mon, Queer Autonomous Gulags! (/S, but not fully)

Re: Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

#50

Post by barfbagginus »

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…

I'm having a hard time understanding the difference between self employed and NEO. They both do the work of an employee, with added administrative work, like you point out. But NEOs are about as happy and wealthy as employees, while SEs are less so. I couldn't find clear definitions for the two categories.

I will note that SEs include contractors. They may have less admin work than other owners or SEs, but also less freedom and opportunity to innovate, and perhaps more cause to feel unhappy.

Aside from that, I don't have much insight into non-contractor SEs, how they differ from NEOs, and why they're supposed to be less happy.

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