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How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

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Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#201

Post by esotericn »

imtringued wrote: post #200
esotericn wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a distinction between "healthcare crisis laws" (such as the initial lockdown for a few weeks in the UK), and making it illegal to visit friends and family indefinitely. I'm just repeating myself now though.

You know, the problem is that nobody goes and thinks "Oh we have messed up, now we need stronger lockdown measures, if only we had done a weaker lockdown sooner we could have avoided this" instead everyone thinks "The government is subverting democracy. We must fight back." x months later "The government is getting worse. We must fight back even harder"

We are eleven months in.

I voluntarily restricted myself for a long while. Far, far longer than I should have, to the point that I may have given myself brain damage.

Now I am visiting my family because I'm not willing to do it indefinitely. The UK government is waffling on about restrictions until 2022 despite the fact we'll have vaccinated most of the vulnerable in a month or two.

Everyone has their breaking point, and I've reached mine.

Two weeks to flatten the curve, yo.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#202

Post by TeMPOraL »

imtringued wrote: post #199
TeMPOraL wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how this goes. Capitalism is great because it promises individual freedom and giving everyone what they wants, while also holding 70% of Americans at economical gunpoint, justifying that with "well if everyone truly got what they want, nobody would produce and civilization would collapse". Perhaps the capitalists should drop the talk about freedom and voluntary trade. Or we need a new word for "freedom" th…

>Capitalism is great because it promises individual freedom and giving everyone what they wants, while also holding 70% of Americans at economical gunpoint If government policies are set in a way that encourages this outcome then that's what you get. It doesn't have to be that way.

You don't need government policies that encourage this outcome - this outcome is the default. Money begets money, wealth accumulates where there is more wealth. You need active government policies to prevent/reverse that, but those are hard to maintain because wealth also buys power.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#203

Post by imtringued »

kevin__ wrote: post #81
ehsankia wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much of conservative policy just seems very shortsighted to me. Cutting the pandemic team, cutting the cybersecurity team; homelessness, prisons and so on costing orders of magnitude more than it would cost to eliminate or reduce them. It's just that people can't stomach less well off people getting a hand, or prisoners being treated nicely. But now we're left with the largest pandemic in a century, one of the lar…

I think a large part of the problem with conservative policy positions (at least in the US) is that they're mostly unchanged from 30-40 years ago. Despite mountains of evidence on things like work requirements for government benefits, multiplier effects of stimulus spending vs tax cuts, benefits of expanding healthcare coverage, and many more, the conservative positions remain the same. I would guess this is likely b…

Same with the central bank. Supply side stimulus forever, even though the supply side has been saturated with funding.

It's like dousing a farm field with fertilizers and herbicides to improve yields even though you couldn't sell half of last year's harvest. You end up selling your produce for less than last year even though the value of your company has gone up according to the stock market.

It doesn't take a genius to understand that things are doing better when supply and demand are balanced. You need a combination of multiple strategies.

Actually it's even worse. Too much fertilizer and herbicides will cause unintended consequences.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#204

Post by imtringued »

ehsankia wrote: post #46
nabla9 wrote: post #26

This is just once piece of growing evidence that poverty damages health, cognition, and productivity. * Being poor reduces raw cognitive capability including memory and decision making. * Being poor increases stress, leads to bad decisions and short term thinking. * Even relative poverty can have this effect. It may be because social status is so important factor in human well-being. It used to be a joke that you can…

So much of conservative policy just seems very shortsighted to me. Cutting the pandemic team, cutting the cybersecurity team; homelessness, prisons and so on costing orders of magnitude more than it would cost to eliminate or reduce them. It's just that people can't stomach less well off people getting a hand, or prisoners being treated nicely. But now we're left with the largest pandemic in a century, one of the lar…

It's not just conservative policy, although I admit that it has been a prominent source of backwards thinking. The problem is ... everyone. There is no party vs party war. There is a system of underlying issues that transcends party lines. It's just that some people are hit harder than others which forces a bigger response from them. There is too much emotional thinking instead of just looking at the problem and figuring out what solution is the most agreeable for everyone.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#205

Post by imtringued »

username90 wrote: post #192
wutbrodo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are the workers that are getting paid in advance 6.2% more productive or are the workers not getting paid in advance 6.2% less productive because of that? This question isn't meaningful. "Less" and "more" are relative terms. There's no way to choose which one is occurring in the absolute.

It does matter a lot, changing things usually creates a short term improvement but over time that improvement goes away. This is a very common problem when evaluating teaching methods etc, basically any change at all will make teachers and kids excited and improve learning, but once those changes becomes standard the improvements go away and sometimes even reverse.

The problem with the article is indeed that this is just a one time change. It's effectively a mini loan from the employer and you can only get it once.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#206

Post by username90 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #202
imtringued wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Capitalism is great because it promises individual freedom and giving everyone what they wants, while also holding 70% of Americans at economical gunpoint If government policies are set in a way that encourages this outcome then that's what you get. It doesn't have to be that way.

You don't need government policies that encourage this outcome - this outcome is the default. Money begets money, wealth accumulates where there is more wealth. You need active government policies to prevent/reverse that, but those are hard to maintain because wealth also buys power.

Wealth doesn't buy power directly. In a democracy most power comes from voters, so the only way to buy political power via wealth is to affect the voting process by spreading misinformation or manipulating the people. For example in USA the voters are made to believe that they can only vote for people who has spent their lived taking bribes from corporations. That of course isn't true, but as long as people believe it then it money is power.

In nations where people don't believe such blatant lies money doesn't turn into power nearly as easily. And look, poor people in those countries are actually much better cared for and live better lives than in USA! The bottom 90% are 90% of voters and therefore have all the power to make whatever policies they want. And once the 90% makes a lot of policies it is really hard to stop them from continuing doing that, you have to work really really hard to keep them away from power and to continue keeping them away.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#207

Post by imtringued »

ignoranceprior wrote: post #11

how I imagine (straw) hyper-capitalists think: "why is poverty bad? not because we have empathy for poor people, nah, just because poor people are not being optimally productive worker bees"

Why is that wrong? Even the greediest human on the planet with zero empathy for others would be forced to care about others.

The real problem is that a lot of people think the exact opposite.

"If I can drag others down, I can protect or increase my wealth."

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#208

Post by djrobstep »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #188
djrobstep wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as inheritance is a transfer initiated by the owner of the property Incorrect, dead people cannot own things. Inheritance is a government program that redistributes property to rich children based on what their parents wrote on a piece of paper. > expropriated from its owners and redistributed to your favored recipients You are very confused. People do not own what they are taxed. When a person is taxed and the mon…

> Incorrect, dead people cannot own things. That is precisely why they initiate the transfer while they are alive by making a will. > People do not own what they are taxed. When a person is taxed and the money given to eg a social security recipient, that's not violating ownership, that's enforcing ownership. That money is literally the property of the SS recipient. The law is very clear on this. Then it sounds like…

> That is precisely why they initiate the transfer while they are alive by making a will.

A will is not a transfer. The law is very clear on this. The government gets the property, then redistributes it to the rich kids via a nanny state program called "inheritance law".

> What’s your justification for changing the law on property?

To increase fairness and justice. What's your justification for not?

> this amounts to people enforcing their view of property on everyone else

Every possible political system does this, except the "grab what you can" world where there is no property at all. So why is yours "voluntary" and mine isn't.

> people own what they own and obtain through voluntary exchange

Property isn't voluntary. It is coercively enforced by the state.

> we prohibit taking people’s stuff

It's literally not their stuff. Tax law is very clear on this.

Me: This stuff rightfully belongs to A, because of egalitarianism. You: This stuff rightfully belongs to B, because it belongs to B.

You're doing a basic circular argument.

This is the thing with libertarianism - it's just pure status quo bias. "This person rightfully owns it because they own it". Nothing to do with freedom, because property is coercive, nothing to do with anti state because property is run by the state - just allegiance to existing property owners.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#209

Post by esotericn »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #197
nickthemagicman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have more chance of dying from car accidents than Covid if you're under 55 years old. By locking down hard on age groups who aren't vulnerable to the virus you're enabling the clown world that OP is referring to. Sure lock down the elderly that's fine but making national health policy based on one demographic is full on straight clown world stuff.

Car accident rate doesn't grow exponentially, with doubling time measured in days. With an infectious disease like this, what you want is to curb its ability to spread. That means disrupting the entire social network, because while the virus is most dangerous to the elderly, it spreads best through the young. Also lung damage, the fact that small chance of disability or death multiplied by whole country getting infec…

Your second paragraph is of course true.

But right now, we're eleven months in and it's illegal for me to have a single friend over for a cup of tea.

Not advised against; not something we should limit; illegal, punishable by law.

I'm at the point at which I've been told by medical health practitioners to ignore this nonsense and see people for my own wellbeing.

We have a vaccination program running in the UK and it's going fairly well. The thing that is keeping me clinging to sanity is the fact that once the vulnerable groups have been vaccinated, I'm just getting on with life.

Without that; well the news is saying 'social distancing until 2022' and the Government are telling us that maybe in a month it'll be legal to sit on a park bench with a coffee.

This is not me being hyperbolic. It is currently illegal for me to leave my house and sit on a park bench.

If I followed that stuff to the letter, I'd have already gone postal or just thrown myself in front of a train.

This is a policy that, if it works at all, works for specific types of people; nuclear families, introverts, etc.

Those might even be a majority.

But it's not viable at a population level because a significant percentage of people are either in situations whereby they need to mix households in order to function, or have brain chemistry which means that avoiding social mixing for prolonged periods (months or more) causes them to become depressed, anxious, or in extreme cases psychotic.

We're doing all of this stuff in an attempt to reduce coronavirus cases prior to vaccination, because we care about public health, not purely for the sake of it. That would be "clown world".

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#210

Post by imtringued »

andrepd wrote: post #42
DC1350 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because nobody with money gave a shit about the global poor until they realized they could be used for cheap labour. The ability to collect the surplus value of their work encouraged investment in poor regions

> Because nobody with money gave a shit about the global poor until they realized they could be used for cheap labour. They did. It's called slavery. It's only when that finally became mostly unacceptable (remember there are still millions of enslaved persons worldwide), that they had to turn to paying them wages of a dollar a day (slavery with extra steps).

Slavery is not very capitalist. In fact, it's closer to corporate welfare than capitalism (aka socialism except for corporations). Involuntary labor hurts everyone. It's highly inefficient.
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