Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers • Hacker News Board

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#311

Post by Mikeb85 » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 10:40 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #300

netcan wrote: post #10

" middle-class life to those without a college degree " Anytime you start delving into what has changed for a subset of people, over decades, the most important piece of the puzzle is decided ding who qualifies for the subset. I mean concepts like "middle class" or "without a college degree." A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people?…

> Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people? An interesting touchstone for the article: high-rent cities in the US have started to see restaurant turnover not from 'normal' financial failures but from labor shortages. For midrange restaurants that aren't either selling luxury or exploiting captive demand (e.g. lunch for nearby offices), there's no price point where they can…

Re. failing restaurants, that's a result of bad business planning. If you can't find staff, pay more, pass those costs on to customers. If people can afford to live in high-rent areas, they can afford to pay more for food.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#312

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 10:50 PM UTC

gdubs wrote: post #269

pgwhalen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ten years? Do you really think software development as we know it will be gone in ten years? I think it’s important on hacker news that we have perspective on our place in society and history and that we don’t think of ourselves (speaking for software engineers mostly here) as gods or something, but it seems very extreme to suggest that what we do will be gone or severely reduced in ten years.

The timing is a guess. But I do believe that we’re not far away from a point at which computers are much better at generating a CRUD app, or finding the most efficient algorithm, etc, but are still far from crossing the uncanny valley of making a truly moving piece of music, or work of art. I don’t think programmers will be obsolete; but I think the skill set will shift away from the analytical and mathematical trait…

In regards to art and music, it is more about artificial scarcity and popularity. The few artists at the top make a lot of money. As for the rest - the term "starving artist" describes them.

Also, given that computers can test stuff on billions of people, I would say there is a good chance that you could have popular pieces of music and art that are produced largely by algorithms in the very near future.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#313

Post by Eridrus » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 10:52 PM UTC

gizmo686 wrote: post #276

Eridrus wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For increase supply to have no effect on price, the demand curve has to be highly inelastic, but this just isn't true. People very much do make decisions about where to live based on the cost. At the margin, people may be more likely to move if you build more housing, but this would be because they can get a better deal on housing, not because there is some abstract idea of more housing. Without a reduction in price/…

I am thinking more in terms of lagging responses. For instance, suppose we increased supply 10% today, and prices immidietly fall. Seeing the lower prices, bussiness begin making plans to open in the new city to take advantage of the lower COL workforce. In total, these plans would increase the demand for labor by 20% and take 5 years to be implemented. At some point in those 5 years, people will have moved into the…

I mean, rents won't immediately fall. We're incapable of producing that much housing quickly. We're limited by all sorts of construction infrastructure. It's going to take a decade to crawl out of this hole in the best case.

This also assumes that these hypothetical employers would be paying the same amount as the employers who were there before. Which is unlikely because the existing employers were already there paying increased wages, vs the new employers who waited for falling CoL/salaries to move in.

Also, raising salaries is often not enough to offset CoL expenses, since not all employees have the same CoL expenses, e.g. families, and those with higher CoL expenses will again move away / won't come to these jobs.

Also, in practice, the amount of jobs is not the binding factor in, e.g. the bay area. There are plenty of jobs out there, people are just a lot less willing to move there due to the insane CoL/shitty commute.

You could have some perfect storm where the induced demand perfectly offsets the new housing, but if you assume there is some elasticity at all points in the system, I think the default assumption should be that increased supply will drive down prices for everyone.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#314

Post by danans » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 10:57 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #303

grigjd3 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In higher ed, at least, we have an abundance of people with PhDs that could theoretically teach at a college level - which is why a single tenure-track job will have 300 applicants. Not saying that supply and demand aren't involved here, but a simple application of supply and demand like you suggest isn't an adequate description.

Don't many of them actually teach (for bargain-basement wages)? At least, most of my friends who went to grad school had to teach undergrads at some point. There's probably some artificial barriers to entry for education as well - it's hard to explain how Ph.Ds have no job prospects at the same time that college tuition keeps on rising. And I suspect that has to do with college's role as a signaling device for job pr…

> ...come to think of it, I wonder if colleges know that their primary value is as a signaling mechanism, and intentionally restrict the size of the incoming class to preserve that signal. In other words, they're aware that they don't actually add any educational value, they just ensure that they only admit students who would've succeeded anyway and then point to all their successful graduates.

I think what you're saying is that they don't add any additional educational value beyond what your hypothetical band of PhDs could. They do provide educational value and also the signalling, though perhaps they don't acknowledge the latter so much.

But at least with pre-university education, as far I've seen, the process you describe is what most private preschools, primary and secondary schools engage in: They can essentially select their student population for the children who are most prepared, either by means (== family support system) or by their natural abilities.

Even those private schools that have scholarship programs for underprivileged students only accept students who are exceptional and don't have serious social functioning issues.

These schools then point to the achievement of their students as an indication of their superior educational process (which in some cases might be true, due to just having more money to provide better educational services).

Public schools, by contrast, must accept students of all abilities, and thus look worse on paper, when they are often dealing with a much more diverse, and often more challenging set of student backgrounds.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#315

Post by zozbot123 » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 10:59 PM UTC

grawprog wrote: post #290

natoliniak wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really not a fun way to live. this is exactly why I find UBI appealing. For those who are unable to work, it will provide minimum means not to fall into abject poverty, but it will still carry enough incentive to improve oneself, find meaningful work and be a net contributor.

Minimum wage here is $15/hour. If you make that you are below the poverty line. The poverty line here is $41,866/year. I work 6 days a week most weeks and make a bit above that and it's still a struggle sometimes affording bills and other expenses and I really don't live very extravagantly. So unless you're giving that out...you will be living in abject poverty with a ubi. I really think people who advocate for this…

If you have UBI, you don't need a high minimum wage. By getting rid of high minimum wages and of a host of heavy and intrusive labor regulations that keep marginal workers out of the market, structural unemployment can be expected to fall and earned-incomes at the low end to increase. You might be living in abject poverty if UBI was all you had, but that's not the point. It's a supplement to your existing income.

BTW we already have something very much like this for low-wage workers, known as the EITC - there's nothing unrealistic about this as a policy proposal! UBI is a bit simpler and doesn't require the recipient to be working at all times, so it can make a lot more sense for marginal and "gig" workers, and for people who are just entering the labor market.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#316

Post by Bartweiss » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 11:05 PM UTC

Mikeb85 wrote: post #311

Bartweiss wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people? An interesting touchstone for the article: high-rent cities in the US have started to see restaurant turnover not from 'normal' financial failures but from labor shortages. For midrange restaurants that aren't either selling luxury or exploiting captive demand (e.g. lunch for nearby offices), there's no price point where they can…

Re. failing restaurants, that's a result of bad business planning. If you can't find staff, pay more, pass those costs on to customers. If people can afford to live in high-rent areas, they can afford to pay more for food.

I don't disagree, exactly - I'm strongly opposed to most rent-control measures other than scrapping protectionist zoning rules.

But I do think can versus will is a thorny question. Restaurant and delivery dining are highly elastic in general, and big cities aren't necessarily an exception. People who can stably afford to live in downtown SF, NYC, LA, Boston, etc. are still frequently paying >33% of income in rent, and ~50% isn't shocking for younger people. As a result, you've got a major demographic that's relatively high-income but still tight on cash and consequently price sensitive. (More speculatively, I think there's also a grain of truth to the "avocado toast" thing; young urbanites seem likely to cut back on purchase frequency before they cut back on quality.) So it's not necessarily the case that restaurants can make things work by raising prices; there's no rule saying that a given type of restaurant has to be viable at any price point.

I realize that we can label all of this as free markets doing their thing; maybe mid-tier restaurants with lots of staff are just an inefficient use of valuable urban space. But real estate is infamously messy, and there are some interesting questions about whether city rents would be more functional if not for the conversion of usable space into artificial demand (e.g. mandatory parking with housing) and disused investment space. And even if that's not the case, it's still news if we've built a market where "going out for dinner" is no longer a standard transaction.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#317

Post by Retric » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 11:24 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #301

Retric wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All jobs past and present involve some very specific domain knowledge and a range of more general skills. A car salesman needs to know a lot about the product, more general sales tactics, more general skills like email, and even more general skills like just speaking. But, as you narrow down into the ultra specific niche the percent of time working in that domain decreases. What percentage of the time is the sales gu…

> Put another way, if my last job had been using Java instead of C# I would have done the same thing with ~80% of my time. You would be reading the same requirements of the code was in another language. That works well for languages, yes, but what about data scientists, business intelligence, cyber security, and machine learning experts? Those are all jobs that launched off the dev backbone, but are very different, h…

'Data scientists' is one of those interdisciplinary fields that does not have an ultra deep dive into any one silo. Rather it's a collection of several skills that are all useful for doing other things which is not really specialization. People can dip into and out of that role with minimal transition unlike say becoming a Doctor.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#318

Post by malandrew » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 11:29 PM UTC

hoaw wrote: post #274

danans wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American term "middle-class" means something far less specific than the original British meaning of "well to do, town dwelling, non-aristocratic business owner". In that definition, a "middle-class" person is never an employee (which would make someone "working-class"). The American use of the term reflects (whether or not it is borne out in reality) the achievement of a comfortable and secure lifestyle (relative…

The most concise modern class definition I have seen goes something like this: Working class: work to survive. Middle class: work to do other things. Upper middle class: work for wealth. Upper class: work optional. People rightfully like to talk about the working poor and the disappearing middle class, but I think we are actually already past that. What we are seeing now is that between education, housing and financi…

It's not even just that it's hard to be upper middle class (build wealth), but that people aren't even being taught to build wealth. Learning to build wealth isn't taught in schools. It's passed down from parents to children and it was far more common to find families where the parents taught these skills when there were lots more mom&pop businesses and homesteads where they built their own wealth and taught the skills to their progeny. The rise of the company man and the firm all but eliminated the need to teach about wealth building. People outsourced thinking about wealth building to pension plans. Now that pension plans have failed we have 2-3 generations now that have lost a lot of the teachings of how to build wealth.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#319

Post by nine_k » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 11:37 PM UTC

travisoneill1 wrote: post #251

irrational wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive?" Colleges shouldn't be in the business of training people for jobs - that is what tech schools are for. If you just want to get a job, go to a tech school, don't go to college. College is (or should be) about expanding your mind, your horizons. It should be about exposing you to new ideas and thoughts you hadn't b…

What is it with this attitude that somehow learning new things is only honorable when those things are useless in the job market? Do you really think that anybody is taking up 4 years of their life and 200 thousand of their (probably borrowed) dollars just for the purpose of "expanding their horizons"?

Costly signaling.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#320

Post by throwawaymsft » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

hoaw wrote: post #250

throwawaymsft wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I care if someone has 1000x the artistic talent I do? Is there a shared river of inspiration we're all drinking from? You seem to believe there's a fixed pile of money in the world that every human competes for (e.g., 16th century Mercantilism). Go into the woods and turn a tree into a chair. Where did that value come from? Will it run out?

I think it is hard to make that into a constructive argument. Either you care and the 'allocation' is unfair. Or you don't care, which means that the market doesn't work since you caring is what is supposed to allocate resources fairly, and it is still unfair.

The word 'allocate' presupposes a fixed pie that we're expected to split in a zero-sum game. That works for redistributing the fraction of wealth captured in taxes. But the parent's argument is about the process of accumulating wealth itself being zero-sum somehow.

Thinking "someone earned money which would have gone to me otherwise" is like thinking "someone got in shape and that physical fitness would have gone to me otherwise".