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

Why Garbagemen Should Earn More Than Bankers

evonomics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 66 posts

Re: Why Garbagemen Should Earn More Than Bankers

#31

Post by lez »

gvurrdon wrote: post #29
askyourmother wrote: post #17

One of the most important jobs in a hospital, is the cleaner. To help prevent the spread of infections like MRSI, to help keep outbreaks of vomiting virus under control, and help reduce the number of admitted and post procedure patients dying as a direct result of infection acquired in the hospital itself. And yet, they are treated as the lowest employees there, well, most are not even employees, outsourced three or…

I suspect that the reason they are so low paid is because it is a job that can be done with the minimum of training, and so it is easy to find replacements.

except when there is a general shortage of workforce

Re: Why Garbagemen Should Earn More Than Bankers

#32

Post by TeMPOraL »

Tomte wrote: post #25
askyourmother wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say they weren't important. But, what a waste, when the doctor saves the life via an operation, the nurse administers care, and the patient dies from an infection acquired due to a dirty ward, when it could be so easily avoided, by respecting the important role of the cleaner, starting with actually making them employees, paying them well, proper training, materials and care, and finally, giving them respect…

What a waste, when a patient dies in a shining, clean ward because no doctor was there. ;-) But I agree, cleaners should be more respected.

And now that we've stated both boundary conditions, we can have a productive discussion - is the pay allocation in a hospital arranged optimally in terms of lifes saved and if not, then how can we shift the arrangement (i.e. who should be paid more, and who less) to maximize the effectiveness of that hospital in saving lives?

Re: Why Garbagemen Should Earn More Than Bankers

#33

Post by kartickv »

If some people are getting paid highly without making a positive contribution to society, they are either: - Taking advantage of gullible customers or, - Exploiting loopholes in the system, as with HFT.

In the latter case, regulation should take care of these people.

Re: Why Garbagemen Should Earn More Than Bankers

#34

Post by lmm »

hvm wrote: post #24
maehwasu wrote: post #23

The writer thinks of money as something people give to you, and so he's never going to make much of it. He's totally right that no one would mourn a strike of lobbyists or high-frequency traders. But those guys aren't waiting to be handed money--they're actively finding ways to get it, for better or worse.

Exactly the problem the author is writing about: because of the way the system works - people are striving to make money, not value.

Those two things should be aligned - that's how capitalism works. There are cases where we create the wrong incentives - e.g. the whole HFT industry exists because the sub-penny rule forbids market-makers from competing on price - but let's fix those. Fundamentally the best way to make money should be - and in my view largely is - by creating value for your clients.

Re: Why Garbagemen Should Earn More Than Bankers

#35

Post by TeMPOraL »

golemotron wrote: post #30

The thing about markets is that they cut through all of the fuzzy thinking about what jobs "should" pay more than others, and tell us what we actually pay - what we collectively find valuable. That reality escapes most people.

> The thing about markets is that (...) tell us (...) what we collectively find valuable.

No, they don't - that's the very point of this article. What society finds valuable and what is economically valuable are two different, separate concepts (and we should really have two different words for them - the term "value" is way overloaded).

First of all, the market is not an information display - it's an actor. It doesn't report on how much something is "worth", nor does it "settle" on true prices - it provides a lot of intertia and maintains whatever status it ends up with. Rarely can a society coordinate strongly enough to have its collective will affect the market on purpose (if it could, soccer players and movie stars wouldn't be making that much money).

Secondly, the market - that emergent system of aggregated individual economic decisions and incentives - suffers from the typical problems of greedy optimizations. It gets stuck in stupid local minimums. It gets stuck in idiotic feedback loops. Look at e.g. advertising industry - a negative feedback loop where each actor works to cancel out the effort put by other actors. It's a stupid loop that can suck up infinite amount of resources - not money, but tangible resources. Time, manpower, fuel, energy. Think of how much of e.g. printing industry exists only to support advertising by manufacturing trash - leaflets, magazines, billboards, etc.

Nature - or the Creator, if you're a believer - gave us brains so that we can notice and correct local minimas and stupid feedback loops of incentive gradients. Market economy isn't a god.

Re: Why Garbagemen Should Earn More Than Bankers

#36

Post by TeMPOraL »

lmm wrote: post #34
hvm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the problem the author is writing about: because of the way the system works - people are striving to make money, not value.

Those two things should be aligned - that's how capitalism works. There are cases where we create the wrong incentives - e.g. the whole HFT industry exists because the sub-penny rule forbids market-makers from competing on price - but let's fix those. Fundamentally the best way to make money should be - and in my view largely is - by creating value for your clients.

> Fundamentally the best way to make money should be - and in my view largely is - by creating value for your clients.

Should be - yes. And to a great extent it was - that's why capitalism is undeniably responsible for propelling (most of) us into the age of prosperity we now enjoy. But I disagree creating (social, not just economic) value for clients is the best way to make money now. Profit and value motives are increasingly misaligned. It is to be expected - we've picked up all low-hanging fruits years ago. Now the money is being made on gaming the system, on exploiting the fact that profit is only a proxy for value.

Companies nowadays know that they can get away with almost anything because the market has very short memory. They also know they can sell any kind of bullshit with enough advertising, and that marketing expenses have much better ROI than actually delivering a working product. In contemporary marketplace, providing honest value to customers is not a competitive strategy - hence less and less of it happens (it's painfully visible in our industry - it's why most Internet startups are bullshit).

Re: Why Garbagemen Should Earn More Than Bankers

#37

Post by lmm »

Where is the money coming from, hmm? The author describes finance as a "tax on the population", but how could such taxation possibly work? The HFT firms are taxing ordinary people's retirement accounts by... undercutting the human market-makers, providing a much better service while employing fewer traders? Um, yeah.

No doubt there are inefficient companies - those with an excess of management (say) or some other kind of employees in "bullshit jobs" that aren't adding value. That's ok; those companies will be competed out of the marketplace. We're already seeing plenty of SV companies experimenting with different management models, for example.

In some cases "bullshit jobs" are forced upon companies. If we have so many more lawyers than Japan, maybe we need to simplify or otherwise improve our legal system. Or maybe not - maybe the Japanese have a worse quality of life as a result - certainly I've heard complaints about e.g. the treatment of people who suffer serious injuries, or even the ability of small businesses to break into markets that are dominated by racketeers.

But in many cases, if a job really is "bullshit", who is paying for it, and why? It's not like banking isn't competitive - you only have to look at the recent quarterly results to see how much effort the industry has put into cutting costs (much of which comes in the form of employing fewer people).

Re: Why Garbagemen Should Earn More Than Bankers

#38

Post by facepalm »

Garbagemen are paid from taxer money, bankers aren't. If you don't like bankers, don't give them your money. Problem solved. I get more angry at people with cushy bullshit government jobs than at bankers.

The example of the Irish pubs seems to show that actually bankers do something of value. Otherwise anybody could have replaced them, instead it was Irish Pub owners because they had knowledge of their customers financial situation.

Re: Why Garbagemen Should Earn More Than Bankers

#39

Post by RobertoG »

golemotron wrote: post #30

The thing about markets is that they cut through all of the fuzzy thinking about what jobs "should" pay more than others, and tell us what we actually pay - what we collectively find valuable. That reality escapes most people.

"what we collectively find valuable"

The mystic approach to markets.

What determine the wage of a job is scarcity or abundance of people available to do that job. Multiply by one hundred the number of doctors or programmers and you will see "how valuable" their job is.

You can apply that to the economy in general. Keep a few millions without job and you will see how you don't need to pay so much to the lucky that have a job.

Re: Why Garbagemen Should Earn More Than Bankers

#40

Post by trymas »

yuzi wrote: post #26
armenarmen wrote: post #4

> Nearly a century ago, economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that we would work fifteen-hour weeks by the year 2030 In 1930, when Keynes predicted the 15 hour work week, the average American earned $1,368/year which is roughly $19,500/year in todays dollars. 19500/52 = $375/week. In 1930, in manufacturing, the average person worked 50.6 hours per week. ( https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-hi…

In 1930 my grandfather bought his house for $20K. So one years salary. But in 1930 people spent 80 percent of their monthly income on food. So house costs have gone up dramatically and food costs have gone down dramatically (as a proportion of income). So even if consumption were to have remained the same, the costs of things would still adjust forcing people to work closer to 40+ hours a week.

$20K of todays money or 1930s?

because:

> In 1930 the average American earned $1,368/year which is roughly $19,500/year in todays dollars.

True about the expense shift. Today food is probably as cheap as it have ever been, and rent/real-estate is as expensive as it have ever been. :)

Post reply on HN