Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

evonomics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 186 posts

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#121

Post by vivekd »

handedness wrote: post #118

“The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach t…

I disagree. I think it largely depends on the work you do. If you are doing something you dont enjoy.or don't find meaningful, the work is just a means to an end. But for many people a job is something they derrive meaning from, many craftspeople have notions of pride in their work. I think probably the best example is people who work with the mentally handocapped, studies reveal they tend to be the happiest and most fulfilled, likely because they are getting that sense of fulfillment from their work.

I think the author is wrong about our work culture impaacting peoples need for work. I think people actually want to feel like they are contributing to society, like they are useful. The question to me isnt how do we create less work, its how do we make work more meaningful for people

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#122

Post by rayiner »

neilwilson wrote: post #14

The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth). We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume. But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people tha…

> The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth).

This is an HN conceit that’s not actually true. Take something like health care. It takes a large number of individuals to produce health care services, and technology hasn’t really reduced that amount. The other day, I needed to schedule an appointment for my son, to follow up about his ear infection. I called the nice lady at reception who set everything up. I could’ve used an app, but that’s like saying you don’t need chefs because you could just eat grass. You can, but you don’t want to. Likewise, dealing with a computer to do something like this is an exercise in self abuse. And computers haven’t gotten any better at interacting with a human at the human’s level in decades. (On that front, I think self check out machines are similar. There is a reason Whole Foods mostly has regular cashiers. It’s because computers haven’t automated away the cashiers job, they just make it possible for customers to save a few cents by doing the job themselves.)

Likewise with pretty much everything else. In the legal field, secretaries have universally been downsized to cut costs. The result is just reduces efficiency, where $700/hour lawyers waste their time doing something a secretary should be doing. (Computers have done precious little to actually eliminate any of that work.)

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#123

Post by sonnyblarney »

pm90 wrote: post #100
sonnyblarney wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That majority of work only accounts for a small portion of value on the margin." No, the surpluses yielded by consumers and profits by companies of those people 'doing the work' is vast. If they stopped doing it it would be a nightmare. We don't need resto servers to get English degrees, and then what, exactly? We need someone to do the resto serving. If they 'start their own business', like 'a restaurant' ... well…

> we should think about how to make it work better for everyone This is one of the strongest arguments that I can see in favor of more lenient immigration, specifically to larger countries like US and Canada. The number of low-skilled laborers content with the current level of pay will keep decreasing, rendering businesses unsustainable. However, for whatever reasons, other countries are better at producing low skill…

In eras of low unemployment, yes, America can take in highly skilled migrants.

But in almost all eras (low and high employment) the import of unskilled workers into the US is probably bad. There are already tons of workers on the black market causing pricing weirdness and downward pressure on wages.

I think it's a primary driver of inequality. Recent interview on FT with direct of the Fed indicated for the first time in a long time, US companies are starting to actually 'train people', i.e. they will do this if necessary.

Some jobs Americans will do with the right wages and conditions. For those jobs Americans truly will not do - put them in other, cheaper countries, and let the surpluses go to those areas and villages, helping those people. It's much more fair that way, and more 'good' is created overall.

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#124

Post by thatfrenchguy »

spaced-out wrote: post #91
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable This speaks personally to me as why tech workers (and multi-generation urbanites) are seen as widely disconnected: being persuaded a small number of people "create value" while forgetting about the people building your stuff, growing your food, extracting your oil (and killing the planet in…

>forgetting about the people building your stuff, growing your food, extracting your oil (and killing the planet in the process), moving your stuff around, nursing people, building your house, installing your AC, shipping your amazon packages, What do you mean "forgetting"? I pay those people for their services out of the money I earn. They're not doing all those things out of the goodness of their hearts, they worki…

By forgetting I meant forgetting their contribution to society (and the value they create).

There is a lot to say about pay to show that wages are not a real market as well :-)

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#125

Post by pascalxus »

0815test wrote: post #55
pascalxus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already a vast oversupply of high skilled non engineer white collar labor. Adding more would just exacerbate the situation

"Vast oversupply"? Wage levels/compensating differentials say otherwise. Plenty of highly-skilled (even STEM) workers are non-engineers, and they get high wages.

I suspect there's price anchoring going on there. They don't actually need to pay such high wages. The unemployment rate amongst MBA people is over 30%.

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#126

Post by TomMckenny »

dahfizz wrote: post #108
TomMckenny wrote: post #98

In principle from a capital stand point, it is always better to have one unemployed person and one over worked person who is terrified of becoming unemployed than two employed people. So reducing workload to increase employment rates is completely unacceptable to those who own society. Wage presure from near full employment is also undesireable to them but must be considered the lesser of two evils and is fairly fudg…

That's a pretty big claim you're making with nothing to back it up. Do you think it's the "terror" that makes that situation prefferable from a "capital stand point"? In times of historically low unemployment, I hardly think the general populace is holding such terror. And even so, why would splitting the work reduce this terror?

>That's a pretty big claim you're making with nothing to back it up.

It includes the following assumptions:

Low unemployment causes upward wage pressure.

Organizations are aware of this.

Organizations cooperate politically to achieve their goals.

>In times of historically low unemployment, I hardly think the general populace is holding such terror.

Exactly. Lower unemployment increases confidence. (and reduced hours would lower unemployment)

Higher up in this thread is a suggestion that: 1) almost all productivity comes from a few workers and 2) it is impossible to reduce their work load and 3) employers retain low productivity workers for long hours to encourage them. All of these assumptions are highly dubious but the theory is popular because it appeals to comforting, entrenched ideas. Which is why no one notices that is a big claim with nothing backing it up.

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#127

Post by jandrewrogers »

Retric wrote: post #85
jandrewrogers wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To rephrase: Surpluses and shortages of skilled labor are very unevenly distributed. Differences in ease of automation will magnify this. If there is a demand for 100 neurosurgeons and then cut everyone's hours by 20%, you effectively created a shortage of 25 neurosurgeons. Decreasing hours doesn't increase supply and supply of highly skilled labor is not fungible i.e. you can't trivially retrain a PhD in electrical…

We already forcibly cut doctors hours by giving them inefficient education and excessive paperwork. A doctor working 3 days a week in an efficient system could spend more time with patients in a lifetime than the average US doctor does. The US labor market only really has shortages by design.

I agree that some labor shortages are the product of artificial restriction. But I strongly disagree that all labor shortages in the US have this property. Some labor shortages are unambiguously intrinsic and very difficult to eliminate. Sometimes there simply aren't enough people with deep expertise necessarily acquired over several years to meet demand.

Take my specialty for example. I mostly work on operational multi-modal spatial and sensor analytics at extremely large scales and high velocities (as is typical for these data models). Right now, half the Fortune 500 are trying to hire people that know how to design these systems and throwing silly money at anyone that seems like they can. There is no open source software that can do it and half the required computer science is not in literature, it is an extremely deep technical specialty that takes years of experience to learn. There are, maybe, a half-dozen people in the world right now that know how to design these systems end-to-end from first principles and likely a demand for several hundred. There is no way to manufacture that supply on a time horizon that matters to anyone that wants to hire them.

Even one level lower, high-end systems engineering talent demand is at least an order of magnitude higher than the actual supply. This requires very deep experience to be competent that you can't learn in bootcamp or six months of on-the-job training. Yet despite being paid extremely well even by software engineering standards, as an industry we don't come remotely close to producing enough of them. In fairness, it takes serious devotion to craft and no small amount of talent to become high-end systems engineer -- but few people with the raw talent have that ambition or interest, even though it pays extremely well. You can't force people to do what they have no interest in doing.

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#128

Post by kadendogthing »

neilwilson wrote: post #14

The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth). We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume. But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people tha…

How in the absolute fuck is this the top comment? There's so many platitudes stuffed side by side it just needs to be flagged.

That is to say: citation needed. For all of it.

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#129

Post by pm90 »

0815test wrote: post #106
pm90 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we should think about how to make it work better for everyone This is one of the strongest arguments that I can see in favor of more lenient immigration, specifically to larger countries like US and Canada. The number of low-skilled laborers content with the current level of pay will keep decreasing, rendering businesses unsustainable. However, for whatever reasons, other countries are better at producing low skill…

Isn't that argument even stronger for allowing the higher-skilled to immigrate? They give you a lot more bang for the same or lower effort spent on assimilation.

From the perspective of American society, yes.

From the perspective of Native born Americans, no. Because these skilled workers would be competing for similar jobs.

However, it’s possible that the Skilled Immigrants + Native Born Americans create a synergy that works even better, so IDK. It seems hard to do thought experiments with this stuff.

Re: Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)

#130

Post by thatoneuser »

cleandreams wrote: post #76

I live in SF and I have been in and out of the tech industry, so I know the city from both perspectives. (I now work at one of the big tech companies.) So many people outside of the industry work more than one job. They need to. Wages are too low. That is the problem, wages. Focus on that, economists, so ordinary people can get by on one job's wages.

Don't live in a place that you can't afford. If enough people moved away from SF to the Midwest then they'd live comfortably and local companies would have no choice but to increase wages to keep the rest around.
Post reply on HN