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Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

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Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#501

Post by tomp »

fzeroracer wrote: post #460
knubie wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A profit oriented system doesn’t make outcomes irrelevant. A grocery store could maximize their profit margins by selling rotten fruit at the same price as fresh fruit, but of course no one would buy it. Maximizing your profit margin is one strategy for increasing profits, but growing market share by producing higher quality outcomes is another (arguably more common) strategy. This is the case because markets have co…

A profit oriented system doesn’t make outcomes irrelevant. A grocery store could maximize their profit margins by selling rotten fruit at the same price as fresh fruit, but of course no one would buy it. This argument falls on deaf ears to be honest, considering Amazon deals with a very similar situation due to rampant fakes and yet it's more profitable for them to simply do nothing. The problem is that for-profit in…

This example actually show the fundamental value of separating infrastructure from service.

Amazon's infrastructure (1 day delivery) is good and valuable, but their service (products, etc) are severely lacking. It would be beneficial, in the free market sense, for the government to break up Amazon, split out that infrastructure part make it rentable, and have the rest of Amazon compete with other providers to provide a service on top of this infrastructure.

Same goes for all natural monopolies (e.g. gas pipelines, optic fibre internet, rail, ...).

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#502

Post by turbinerneiter »

quotemstr wrote: post #337
turbinerneiter wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true. People do unpaid work all the time. Ask your mom. Humans have compassion. They want to cooperate and collaborate. Also, right now, we have a system that takes from the productive (workers) and gives it to the unproductive (shareholders) - so please chose wisely which argument you want to make.

> People do unpaid work all the time. Ask your mom. Humans have compassion. They want to cooperate and collaborate. Free work is for people close to me or for special cases like FOSS projects I want to win. It's not for strangers. When the Soviets collectivized farms, output crashed. Let's not so quickly forget the lessons of the 20th century. > have a system that takes from the productive (workers) and gives it to t…

The problem with your argument is that you only know capitalism and communism and act like it's the end all of all economic ideas anyone could ever have.

What societal benefit does profit have? Is there a difference between profit put into research and profit put into dividends? What do you think benefits humanity more? High stock prices? High wages?

You talk about the lessons of the 20th century. You mean the golden times, when a single earner in a car factory could feed a family? When minimum wage had more buying power than today? When more people were unionized? Or do you mean the lessons we learned in the 21st century? When an unleashed financial industry crashed the economy?

In today's economy the shareholder of a successful company can earn more in dividends than the workers who produce the wealth in wages. This is the issue. ROI on capital is higher than on work. Model the system, feed in this number and you will see it's unstable.

Disastrous consequences? Take a look at the US healthcare system - congrats for not having any socialism - you pay double than anyone else and have lower life expectancy. Awesome system.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#503

Post by kelnos »

u801e wrote: post #342
rayiner wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole idea of “bullshit jobs” is ignorant. You’ve got armies of managers and bean counters trying to squeeze nickels out of processes, and yet we are supposed to believe that we’re keeping all of these people employed for no reason? It’s the same sort of juvenile thinking that causes someone to look at a vast legacy codebase and decide “oh we could easily rewrite that.” The reality is that automation is progressi…

> In fast food, for example, self-order touch screens are vastly inferior to a trained order taker. In my experience, once you get used to the interface, it's actually faster to just use the touchscreen to place the order. > There’s not a single job I can think of that qualifies as a “bullshit job.” Any job that involves taking a handwritten form which then is processed or oral instructions could be eliminated by pro…

> In my experience, once you get used to the interface, it's actually faster to just use the touchscreen to place the order.

Right, but in general, people don't. Sure, there are some people who will go to the same fast food place every day, and after a week will be able to input their order blindfolded, but that's not the norm.

The people who get used to the interface and end up incredibly efficient are the paid cashiers who input hundreds of orders for 8 hours each day.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#504

Post by dang »

missingpint wrote: post #9
boyadjian wrote: post #4

I do not agree with that, having a job is always a good thing for mental health. It is always better than staying at home doing nothing.

Having work one finds valuable is. Having a shitty mind numbing job is hell. Adam Smith wrote about it (paraphrasing) extreme division of labor will create servile, ignorant humans. IMO billionaires suffer from it too. Offloading so much real doing and learning while existing in the context of abstract decision maker. You think Bezos can do much more than validate or demean people around him? Bet he can barely rotate…

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#505

Post by turbinerneiter »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #475
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Profit is not a sin. What work do shareholders actually do within the confines of the company? If you gave a poor unemployed person the investment capital that shareholders have, then from the company's perspective, how do you distinguish them from other shareholders? That was the parent poster's point. > Tech treats its workers better than practically any other industry, and there's never been an industry with few…

They put their hard earned and taxed money into a company to produce something. To build a nail factory you need workers, but you also need the plant; who pays for the plant? Not the workers. Without one of the components, there is no nail plant, you have either unemployed people or an empty building.

This is btw the smartest comment here. The key to economic stability and social progress is the balance of the return on capital to the return on work.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#506

Post by vladimirralev »

ikeboy wrote: post #171
vladimirralev wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I got one of those insightful hedge fund newsletters with a deep dive in inflation and unemployment. The dynamics are really complicated but one thing is unequivocal, the moment real wages go up the inflation catches up and those at the bottom suffer the most (due to Cantillon effect, negotiating power and other queuing phenomena). Higher wages as a platform is meaningless. Perhaps the best measure that…

>one thing is unequivocal, the moment real wages go up the inflation catches up Hard disagree. Inflation is affected by wages, but it's not a 1:1 relation and I'm not aware of anyone seriously making that claim. Of course there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages , but not seriously advocated today as far as I know. >Inflation is further segmented by demographics This is actually a really interesting po…

> Hard disagree. Inflation is affected by wages, but it's not a 1:1 relation

I am talking about "real wages" to avoid the gotchas associated with nominal wage and inflation definitions. I think this makes the controversy go away. When you extend the nominal wage growth beyond the productivity gains in real terms, any extra purchasing power from a nominal wage gain will have no real basis and thus instantly triggering inflation as defined for your specific personal definition by demographic and income.

Say if you are really rich, your personal consumer basket that defines your personal purchasing power (and your personal inflation) will be dominated by expensive luxury items and investments while regular food/medical price increases will not impact you at all because they are a small part of the basket. However if your "demographic" (that has similar personal consumer basket) wage increases there is nothing to stop the price increase on such goods. There are small exceptions, but we can ignore them for the most part.

When you break down the demographics into small enough micro-groups you can get rid of the guesswork about what is inflation and how it affects everybody on average. This way you should be able to see how the relationship between wages and inflation is really 1:1. It's indeed not 1:1 when you mix dissimilar baskets and work with averages.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#507

Post by dang »

quotemstr wrote: post #312

> We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living No, what we must absolutely do away with is the specious notion that when you take from the productive and give to the unproductive, the productive will keep producing out of the goodness of their hearts. Every attempt at forming a collectivist utopia fails, and that's because collectivism runs contrary to human nature. All atte…

Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological flamewar. It's predictable and tedious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Edit: I forgot to mention that we detached the parent comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027960.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#508

Post by m0zg »

jasonsamoa wrote: post #493
m0zg wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't "ignorant". They just can't admit Donald Trump did something positive. So they engage in logical contortionism like "tax cuts didn't help the middle class" (they did), "low-earner wages aren't growing" (they are), "he will start WW3" (he won't - he's the least militarist president since Jimmy Carter), "low unemployment doesn't matter" (it does - how else do you expect to create upward pressure on wages?),…

Is there a hacker news type forum for people not in the liberal bubble but interested in computer science and entrepreneurship?

I wish there was, but I don't know of one. Tech is full of young people and therefore mostly liberal. I was liberal myself when I was younger. I still largely am on social issues.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#510

Post by dang »

benignslime wrote: post #391
subject117 wrote: post #330

Work, save up, start a business of your own choosing. So many excuses for those unable to achieve this simple formula that our forefathers fought and died for us to have the right to.

How does someone so painfully propagandized even stumble upon this site? Lmao what a joke

Please don't respond to a bad-for-HN comment with an even-worse-for-HN one. That's going the wrong way down a one way street.

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