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

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

#141

Post by dTal »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #13
Konnstann wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is how to incentivize companies to pay workers the same amount for less work. A lot of people, for example, the service industry, can't just work shorter shifts for the same pay. If your job is delivering a product then you can, and a lot of people do, work hard enough to deliver and then goof off for the remaining time. Take a Starbucks employee: They get paid per hour worked, so if they want to work les…

Raise the minimum wage while reducing the work week to 4 days for full time employment (this brings the minimum wage closer to where it should be after not being raised for decades, while also giving labor a share of the productivity gains they should’ve been receiving since the 70s). You squeeze Capital with labor law and regulation. Any reduction in employment due to rising wages can be fixed with social support sy…

This is the right answer. The only reason we don't work 80 hour weeks for 2 bucks an hour is because the law forbids it.

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

#142

Post by llamaz »

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…

This is just Ayn Randian reactionary propaganda, a society based on these hateful ideas is not one I would want to live in.

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

#143

Post by atemerev »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #36
ameliaquining wrote: post #25

Are economists obsessed with job creation? Government economists tend to focus on it because that's literally their job, but my sense of academic economists has always been that they're pretty good at not eliding distinctions like between employment and economic value.

100% employment is possible. Just look at any U.S. military base. Without poverty, capitalists lose some of the leverage over the working class which makes the current levels of exploitation difficult to maintain without massive price hikes. I think the U.K. had an experience with mass employment that convinced capitalists to raise the prices of their goods just to maintain the exploitation which poverty allowed.

Sure, we once had an entire country with 300 million population, living like on a military base: barracks as residences, the same assortment available in department stores, symbolic salaries, some involuntary labor, and no freedom of movement. It was the USSR.

Not everyone liked this lifestyle. At least the personnel on military bases know when their contract ends, so they could return to life of freedom and opportunity.

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

#144

Post by ionised »

someguydave wrote: post #75
Avshalom wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the appearance of disconnect thatfrenchguy is talking about is the idea that designing the mold is the actual output of society despite the fact that designing the mold no matter how few people can do it is completely useless without a massive web of interconnected labor that, yes anyone can do but, must done in order for society to actually output anything. It's not a swipe at engineers, it's a swipe at engineers wh…

That fails to respond to the point that there exists skilled necessary work that armies of unskilled workers can not replace.

If you're talking about software development, it's not hard to learn.

You can teach someone unskilled to be a developer in around 6-12 months. Within a year or two they will be working unsupervised to a professional level.

You don't need university for it. You don't need a degree. Anyone can learn it. It's not magic, it just takes time.

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

#145

Post by ionised »

dahfizz wrote: post #104
Avshalom wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there exists unskilled necessary work that armies of skilled workers can not replace. But even beyond that there's armies of skilled necessary work that skilled workers can not replace either but seem to forget exist. Apple doesn't exist without massive sophisticated logistical support but no one ever points out that the naval architects at Maersk or the welders at their shipyards are one piece of the process tha…

> And there exists unskilled necessary work that armies of skilled workers can not replace. I think this is false. Unskilled work is easy to teach and learn, by definition. All you need is an "army" and the unskilled work can be easily fulfilled.

I'm thinking you haven't done much 'unskilled labour'.

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

#146

Post by _khau »

pojzon wrote: post #137
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…

Unfortunately with how the world works it requires some level of slave-like population to operate. Noone really likes to talk about that because that hits our morality itch, but thats how it is. Without slavery-like labour, our society would collapse.

You mean capitalism would collapse.

Society would continue on in another form.

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

#147

Post by unionpivo »

jp555 wrote: post #116
Avshalom wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their contribution was necessary, I mean it's utterly facile but: you weren't gonna get a degree from a university if the university doesn't exist. There's a billion or so people in addition to them and a few billion more that got us to this point. It's not that there is no such thing as individual achievement it's that there is no "small minority" skilled or unskilled that the modern economy can be reduced to.

Sure as a whole, on average. But there absolutely is a small minority of extreme producers in most domains.

If you take out truck drivers and train operators, most modern cities die in a few weeks.

If every star programmer/engineer died, a lot of things would stop working, but people would at least live long enough to maybe deal with it.

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

#148

Post by nmaKw1 »

roenxi wrote: post #89
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…

> while forgetting about the people ... You might be reading the comment slightly sideways. My read was that the people you list are from small businesses creating value, and most of the tech workers are creating very little value with a few peakers who do amazing things. > Without the drivers, Uber does not exist. Personal bugbear, there is as yet no evidence that Uber is creating more value than it destroys. It has…

> they are actually doing is whatever someone tells them.

This it not how it works in real life. Normally the situation is that a rich narcissist has an "idea" on the level of a 5-year old, say, "let's go to the moon".

The narcissist then thinks he is a genius, hires people, calls a lot of meetings to extract actual ideas from his employees.

The narcissist then proceeds to go to conferences and investors, passing the actual ideas off as his own.

He still has no clue how to build things (in the case of the moon the Saturn V).

But the general populace remembers Kennedy and not von Braun (who in turn may have taken credit from others).

This is how it is in the software industry, "decisions" are mostly post facto credit stealing.

It may be different in other areas.

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

#150

Post by MagnumOpus »

snidane wrote: post #119
pitaj wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wages are too low. Compared to costs We know mainly why costs are too high in the Bay Area, and it's mostly housing. Which is a solvable problem, if only the market was able to expand housing supply.

> if only the market was able to expand housing supply. If only.. there was more land. Building houses is not the bottleneck. Land is. You'd have to create a 'second floor' of land to mitigate the problem.

> You'd have to create a 'second floor' of land to mitigate the problem

Or -- stay with me on this -- allow a 'second floor' on top of the current single-floor buildings.

Seriously, NIMBY zoning that doesn't allow for higher-density 5-6-floor townhouse-style development is the issue.

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