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

151–160 of 186 posts

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

#151

Post by agent008t »

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…

> Their pay, just like my pay, is set by the market. If you don't think that's fair, your issue is with capitalism. I'm actually open to the idea of moving away from capitalism, but very few people, especially in the US, are, and I have no expectation that will change in my lifetime.

No, the pay of people that you pay is set by you, not by capitalism. If you think some people that provide you services deserve more pay, what is stopping you from paying them extra?

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

#152

Post by Retric »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #127
Retric wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mu…

6 months may not be enough to train up someone without a technical background, but when a skill shortage extends beyond the time horizon of training a pool of 100’s of thousands of people up it’s very much self inflicted as the company simply does not want to pay market rate + training.

PS: People with related skills can always pick up these deep specialty skills with extreme speeds. I have seen someone paid contractor rates to learn a extreme specialty. Including that training, he actually finished the project in less time than the original team had wasted.

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

#153

Post by petra »

harimau777 wrote: post #105
petra wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, today's context is capitalism, so it motivates many. But there are other ways to motivate people. If we're talking about a different , more utopian world, shouldn't we consider those ?

What alternative do you suggest? The alternatives that I can think of: Enjoying the work and similar motivations: This tends to only apply to certain jobs. In addition, just because I'm intrinsically motivated to work on programming, for example, that doesn't mean that I'm motivated to program the things that society wants me to. A sense of duty: I think this motivation tends to have limitations and is likely hard to…

In the old Jewish tradition, religious studies gave people high status, but also, because of the culture, were considered very valuable.

This meant that those who we're good religious students(a life long pursuit, and not financially rewarding) married the most desired women.

And that's just on culture.

So maybe there are ways to cretae a motivating culture .

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

#155

Post by Konnstann »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #48
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…

You give people more money for less work by making it policy. UBI, in other words. Captalism isn't going to do this one on its own.

Yes, I even mentioned that in my comment, the problem is actually implementing the system. It's all well and good to say "UBI" but getting it past the lobbyists and through Congress is another thing. I'm trying to understand how we get there, not the end goal, since that's obvious.

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

#156

Post by Frondo »

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.

Much, if not most, of "unskilled" work also has a lot of hidden complexity that means your productivity starts off slow and improves over time.

There's a reason capitalists have gotten us to think of some work as "unskilled," and that's so they can pay those people far less than they should be, and no one raises a stink about it.

The farm worker is an obvious example of "unskilled" labor, but if you watch a video of what these people do minute by minute, hour after hour, for the entire harvest, they are absolutely being underpaid by criminal amounts.

Yet, because we've been convinced it's "unskilled" labor, hardly anyone cares.

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

#157

Post by kjsbfkjbf »

Avshalom wrote: post #82
someguydave wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

It would also be nice to frame "necessary" and "unnecessary".

I would think developments like saving the environment, healthcare research, improving public transportation, energy consumption, etc. are all "necessary" work. Building Uber or Twitter or Facebook? I'd lean more towards "unnecessary".

HackerNews is so close to arriving at the conclusion that most jobs (including their own prized "skilled" engineering) are worthless outside of capital accumulation. :)

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

#158

Post by kjsbfkjbf »

unionpivo wrote: post #147
jp555 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Especially considering many start programmers and engineers seemingly exist to increase revenue of complete luxury services like Netflix.

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

#159

Post by mruts »

dTal wrote: post #141
toomuchtodo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is just false. Approximately only 2% of American workers are paid minimum wage. Everyone else makes more.

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

#160

Post by kjsbfkjbf »

_khau wrote: post #146
pojzon wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes! I wish people would take a better look at history and recognize that _throughout_ history we've had the ruling class make claims about the structure and survival of society and invariably those claims require the status quo of oppressed people.

Shorter work days and society will collapse. No slavery and society will collapse. Providing worker's rights and society will collapse. We find a way to survive because... the majority of people _are_ workers.

The only thing that collapses when we get rid of a slave population is the capitalist's free lunch.

Post reply on HN