41–50 of 288 posts
>Some countries have developed policies that encourage older people to leave the labor force, so they do not “crowd out” younger workers Classic lump of labor fallacy.
Classic lump of labor fallacy. That fallacy is far from proven, see e.g. http://econpapers.repec.org/article/tafrsocec/v_3a65_3ay_3a2...
I am not positive this computes. People with more education might earn more now but that doesn't mean that their wages or the amount of jobs in their domains won't go down when more people have a degree.
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What do you mean by "privileged classes", not sure i understood your idea ?
All it takes is a computer, hard work and dedication. The 'poor' manage to find the time to surf the net, why not spend the time learning how to build the net? It's a simplistic idea, but it is definitely possible. I lived out of my car for months until I was able to turn it around by using my computer for something besides surfing MySpace.
Rich or poor, there are numerous people sitting in front of extreme learning resources, and they'll never do anything with it unless there's this enormous infrastructure designed to remedy issues of motivation and planning. And that's where I think the difference is between rich and poor; yes, there are networking differences, yes, there are differences in local crime rate and other environmental stressors and so on, but the biggest factor is motivation.
I've seen a peer ditch school to go to the library to use public terminals, back at the time when computers still weren't that popular, and there was no Google or Wikipedia. But even then I could see that some people have a different heart -- starting from an early age, they had a yearning to learn that surpassed the praises of parents or the soothing structure of school.
The issue isn't access. The access is already intense for rich and poor alike. Most people don't possess the psychological traits to pursue their own intellectual growth. Almost everyone I've met, rich or poor, stop learning when society stops pressuring them. They may have high or low IQ, be rich or poor, but they are not interested in self-directed learning, at least not without strong external reasons like parents or social shame.
Almost everyone is not an intellectual.
But... older people earn 2-3 times more than a younger one (at, least in Portugal). So for each old people there could be 2-3 younger working.
So if you lay off 100 old people you can get ~2500 younger people working. Of course, I doubt that the productivity will be lower per person, but here you are paid by how old are you (not, experience) * what you know
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It is great that you are able to do this, but not that your situation is not the one described in the article. The article discusses men who only qualify for low/no skill jobs paying $10-15/hr. That is markedly different from a tech startup cofounder who could get a software engineering job paying $100k+ with benefits.
yeah, a big problem with the whole "Don't need BigCo's job cuz I'm running a SV startup!" narrative is that it's really only accessible for people who already belonged to pretty privileged classes (exceptions exist, obviously.) A portion of the population does not get opportunities to develop these skills and were once allowed low-skilled jobs that paid "decently" but have now found themselves squeezed due to inflati…
Exactly!
Why do they exclude men in the military from their numbers?
Of course there's nothing in the article to suggest many of these people are happy.
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> companies hoarding cash instead of spending it I've heard this sentiment many times but I've wondered if there's an economic fallacy there. Would the economy be better off if lots of companies stopped hoarding cash and hired lots of new employees? Or would there be side-effects like inflation, or some effect of pulling out cash from whatever it was invested in, etc.? Serious question.
Very little down side. People with more income spend more which grows the economy. In a two person economy, your expenditure is my income and my expenditure is your income. If one of us hoards then both of us lose eventually. Also moderate inflation is a good thing. It disincentivises hoarding of cash.
Another way to look at that is that it incentivises short-term investment in anything that brings returns above inflation, instead of allowing for capital to be saved up for more important projects.