How the gig economy is making life harder for North American workers • Hacker News Board

Re: How the gig economy is making life harder for North American workers

#141

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 7:34 PM UTC

wh313 wrote: post #45

dredmorbius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the supple-side version of caveat emptor? How do you mean? "Employer beware" would be cave dico . Provider beware, provisor cave . Though it's not clear what dynamic you're pointing to.

Actually employer beware would be "cave conductor". Dico means "I say". Provisor comes from the verb vidi, and means "one who sees ahead," but I suppose you can use "patronus" instead to mean provider. So provider beware should be "cave patrone".

Granted my Latin's weak. I was more interested in meaning than the linguistics lesson.

Re: How the gig economy is making life harder for North American workers

#142

Post by cornholio » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

njarboe wrote: post #136

cornholio wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we are literally able to imagine the implications of an economic scenario where the market clearing wage for toilet cleaning is $200.000, with current purchasing parity (that is, every janitor could buy the equivalent of a nice suburban home, every year, or accumulate the equivalent of 100 acres / 40 hectares of land in capital, every year). That world would have more to do with a Star Trek episode than…

In the US in 1960 one can find wage surveys[1] where one finds saleries of: Electric, gas, sanitary services: $6147/yr Wholesale and retail trade: $4478/yr The first would be where janitors would go and retail is another poorly paid job today. The average house cost in 1960 [2] was $11,900. So with a house price of around two times yearly income, we get to about $100k wage for a janitor or retail clerk in 1960. US po…

Using average housing prices is a poor proxy since both the average size and quality of homes have increased, while the US real estate market has had a very particular evolution, unrepresentative for the overall inflation. It was a bad choice on my part, I was trying to give an intuitive current wealth reference, not track housing trends over decades.

An inflation adjusted wage of $5000 in 1960 represents $42.500 in 2018, which is in line with the often repeated tidbit that real wages of blue collar workers have stagnated for decades.

Therefore, what you are describing is a world with similar real wages to those of today, and with real estate cheaper by a factor 2-3x, inflation and quality adjusted. That is indeed easy to imagine.

What I am describing is a world where real wages are 4-5 times larger. Yes, those wealth increases could be trapped by a ballooning real estate market, where a single bedroom semi is worth $2 million at current purchasing parity, making it very similar to your world. Or something else could happen entirely, that is almost impossible to predict.

Re: How the gig economy is making life harder for North American workers

#143

Post by anovikov » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 10:27 PM UTC

dev_north_east wrote: post #119

anovikov wrote: post #64

I never had a full time job, and i think of it as of a very, very odd thing. I know there are areas where it is necessary (say upper levels of management, public servants, and doctors in areas of healthcare where it's all about collective efforts, not private practice). But for the most people, being full time is nothing but a form of psychological exploitation. People were generationally taught to value the (false)…

> the (false) sense of stability it provides What's false about it?

Because most of the time, need to fire a worker who held for a time period longer than a typical contract duration of a contractor, comes when the company itself goes bust. When nothing can help you regardless of your employment status.

Re: How the gig economy is making life harder for North American workers

#144

Post by haihaibye » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 11:04 PM UTC

cornholio wrote: post #124

throwaway2048 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that all taxes are ultimately paid for by consumers is dangerous, stupid and misleading. If companies/people could charge you more for whatever you are buying, they would. Taxation is largely paid for by reduced profitability, not increased prices. Land taxes are one of the only ways to tax non-productive, rentier style wealth that has lots of fixed assets, and merely sits on them extacting money with very l…

Agricultural producers have razor thin margins almost anywhere in the world and face strong international competition. The rent seeking landowner gouging consumers through food prices is an ideological fantasy. Quite the opposite, there is a strong tendency to overproduction and subsidies. A large land tax in such an ECON101 postcard-perfect market will immediately increase the costs of inputs to the point where prod…

A land tax would reduce the price of land, and farmers would borrow less in the future to buy it.

In effect it would probably be a one off hit to real estate prices. I think the distortions of a land tax are better than others and support it.

I own real estate but it's only 5x my wage, the current system sucks - taxing human effort and creativity is about the worst thing you can tax.

Re: How the gig economy is making life harder for North American workers

#145

Post by tankerslay » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 3:55 AM UTC

candiodari wrote: post #140

lovich wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars and TVs go down in price for the same feature set as technological improvements and nor efficient business models are created. Healthcare has gotten more expensive every year for the same features(ex, a physical, or treatment for the flu). That is where healthcare is leeching money out of the economy. They haven't provided any improvements in service or products, they've just learned how to wring more money out…

First, cars haven't gone down much in price. Advanced in quality, sure. Gone down in price ? Hardly, at least in my experience. About 8-14 months net pay. TVs have gone up massively, mostly because flatscreens make ridiculous TVs possible. A CRT screen just can't be big. 50" is ridiculously large for a CRT, and anything under 40" is just unusable, so there just wasn't much difference between the cheapest and the most…

>TVs have gone up massively, mostly because flatscreens make ridiculous TVs possible.

Your assertions about price movements sound rather curious as they appear nearly the opposite of what is obtained by people whose job it is to measure these things. https://fee.org/media/17509/prices2-1.png

https://fee.org/articles/why-large-screen-tvs-are-affordable...

Re: How the gig economy is making life harder for North American workers

#146

Post by candiodari » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 5:23 AM UTC

tankerslay wrote: post #145

candiodari wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, cars haven't gone down much in price. Advanced in quality, sure. Gone down in price ? Hardly, at least in my experience. About 8-14 months net pay. TVs have gone up massively, mostly because flatscreens make ridiculous TVs possible. A CRT screen just can't be big. 50" is ridiculously large for a CRT, and anything under 40" is just unusable, so there just wasn't much difference between the cheapest and the most…

>TVs have gone up massively, mostly because flatscreens make ridiculous TVs possible. Your assertions about price movements sound rather curious as they appear nearly the opposite of what is obtained by people whose job it is to measure these things. https://fee.org/media/17509/prices2-1.png https://fee.org/articles/why-large-screen-tvs-are-affordable...

Looking at that article, they are comparing same-for-same tv sizes, and essentially saying that the 40" TVs are really cheap now.

I'm saying the biggest TVs (the ones that everybody seems to buy, like 100" and up) are far more expensive than the biggest TVs used to be 20 years back.

Also that article argues for competitive private healthcare. We've tried that. We know where that leads. Trust me, you don't want that.

It also comes with such insightful statements as this one: "Consider each product or service shown. College is heavily subsidized, regulated, and exclusionary, and the costs are soaring."

Yes this whole student loan thing we keep hearing about ... nothing to do with anything, right ?

Re: How the gig economy is making life harder for North American workers

#147

Post by cornholio » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 6:35 AM UTC

haihaibye wrote: post #144

cornholio wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agricultural producers have razor thin margins almost anywhere in the world and face strong international competition. The rent seeking landowner gouging consumers through food prices is an ideological fantasy. Quite the opposite, there is a strong tendency to overproduction and subsidies. A large land tax in such an ECON101 postcard-perfect market will immediately increase the costs of inputs to the point where prod…

A land tax would reduce the price of land, and farmers would borrow less in the future to buy it. In effect it would probably be a one off hit to real estate prices. I think the distortions of a land tax are better than others and support it. I own real estate but it's only 5x my wage, the current system sucks - taxing human effort and creativity is about the worst thing you can tax.

Clearly, a tax on arable land would devalue it. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't also be reflected in food prices - and that is the absolute worst thing you can tax.

As for income taxes, they don't really tax creativity and human effort, except if you think of the world as a perfect meritocratic utopia where everyone has infinite positive liberties. But in that case, you wouldn't really need to tax anybody.

The revenue of an individual is generally strongly dependent on the social infrastructure they use to generate it. The same person, transplanted into another area of the world with less functional social institutions will generate orders of magnitude less money. For example, an American or British medic moving to the peaceful and English speaking country of Ghana: same creativity and effort, 5-10x less revenue, purchasing parity adjusted. It's only natural then for him to pay for his access to the rich society, thus enabling the public investments that allow such a rich society to exist in the fist place.

Re: How the gig economy is making life harder for North American workers

#148

Post by dahauns » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 10:22 AM UTC

candiodari wrote: post #138

dahauns wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone coming from a country whose government sucessfully provides several means to prevent these kinds of scenarios, the idea of seeing this as a fundamentally good thing frankly strikes me as absurd.

As someone who's now lived in 5 countries let me just say : your post is absurd. All of those countries have governments that "successfully provide several means to prevent ..." and ... in none of them was it a problem to find people sleeping on the street. I never once actually tried to find them, incidentally. Just take some trains in any large city. Which is that country that supposedly prevents these situations ?…

Sheesh, do I really have to spell this out? No, I never talked about "preventing each and every single case of homelessness." Yeah, there's people on the street here in Vienna as well. There's enough harsh situations, of course.

But rest assured (and this not some "feel good feeling", but first hand knowledge of social workers in the field), there's not a single case of "a family that wouldn't have been homeless if the earner just had the opportunity of a second "gig economy" job".

And the systems in place here do work rather well (as long as you stay realistic - and I do know quite some harsh cases). People that really manage to fall through all the cracks have almost all the status of being unemployable/unfit for work (and I don't mean "sorry, but you're too old"-unemployable, but usually because of severe mental health issues and/or substance abuse).

I have to admit though: Looking at what our current government does at the moment, chances are I'll chime in with you in a few years...

Re: How the gig economy is making life harder for North American workers

#149

Post by anovikov » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 1:27 PM UTC

dev_north_east wrote: post #119

anovikov wrote: post #64

I never had a full time job, and i think of it as of a very, very odd thing. I know there are areas where it is necessary (say upper levels of management, public servants, and doctors in areas of healthcare where it's all about collective efforts, not private practice). But for the most people, being full time is nothing but a form of psychological exploitation. People were generationally taught to value the (false)…

> the (false) sense of stability it provides What's false about it?

Essentially, this is because the companies themselves are living for much shorter than they used to. And their 'useful lives' (when working there can provide for any career advancement, improving one's skills, personal growth) is even shorter.

Re: How the gig economy is making life harder for North American workers

#150

Post by njarboe » Fri, Jun 15, 2018, 4:01 AM UTC

cornholio wrote: post #147

haihaibye wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A land tax would reduce the price of land, and farmers would borrow less in the future to buy it. In effect it would probably be a one off hit to real estate prices. I think the distortions of a land tax are better than others and support it. I own real estate but it's only 5x my wage, the current system sucks - taxing human effort and creativity is about the worst thing you can tax.

Clearly, a tax on arable land would devalue it. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't also be reflected in food prices - and that is the absolute worst thing you can tax. As for income taxes, they don't really tax creativity and human effort, except if you think of the world as a perfect meritocratic utopia where everyone has infinite positive liberties. But in that case, you wouldn't really need to tax anybody. The reve…

The people are the rich society. The people are the social infrastructure, created by them and their ancestors. Not seeing much positive investment by government these days for that 50% overhead.