Garbageman used to be a very highly sought-after job a few years ago in my city.
160.000 out of a population of a million registered for a lottery to be considered for one of the 200 spots back in 2006.
It helped that they had an employment contract that basically guaranteed them employment for life and several perks.
Nowadays the city government privatized most of the garbage collection, so it's not such a great deal anymore (the employees they hired before on advantageous conditions are still employed and working though).
In 2015 the average family income was $53657.
53657/52 = $1031/week
But in 2015 the average person worked on average only 34.4 hours per week (http://fortune.com/2015/11/11/chart-work-week-oecd/) so just shy of $30/hour.
If modern Americans were content living at the same level of consumption as their 1930's counterparts they would only have to work 12.5 hours per week to earn that same $375 in purchasing power. Outdoing Keynes' prediction 15 years ahead of schedule.
> If modern Americans were content living at the same level of consumption as their 1930's counterparts...
There are more expenses involved in just getting by now. Mortgages (and I suspect rents) are well above historical price to income ratios. Dual incomes are a necessity for most families. That often means two cars are a necessity. And childcare costs...
I don't have the time to look it up now, but I believe Elizabeth Warren has a well known talk floating around the internet that deals with the issue of debt and how close many American families are to financial disaster. In that talk there's a great breakdown of the shifting nature of expenses.
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.
My family situation aside, it looks as though the average cost of a house in the 30's was $7145 in historical money [src]. I'd imagine 1930 itself was probably lower than that average over the period, but I'm not sure.
There's a general problem with using averages anyway. As I see it an average wage/cost does not actually equal a normal cost which I believe is more important. That is the most common occurrence of something is often distorted by the averaging out process. So I don't put a lot of stock in using them.
Overall I'm pretty sure a few things happened:
1. Product costs went down due to cost reductions (found via economies of scale within manufacturing) and things like sugar manufacturing.
2. Money saved from General goods went into fuelling house price surges. i.e. People don't have bidding wars over food they just buy them at market price, but houses are different, they immediately are driven up with no regulation and lower supplies.
Is a 1930's house really equivalent in value to a 2016 house though? I would expect that the price increase is at least partially due to us know having nicer/bigger houses (bay area excepted).
Yes I agree. The quality of almost everything has dramatically improved, but I believe even if it was the same quality the bidding wars would push prices up to the same level. In my city I've seen 30 year old houses go up in value by 100% to 200% over a 5 year period. And honestly I've seen them and the quality didn't change. The price surge was fuelled by banks allowing people to borrow beyond their means or extending terms and the bidding wars people engaged in. Meanwhile incomes did not jump by nearly that much.
Anyways, my whole point is that this idea of a 15 hour work week by 2030 is just not going to happen and it's not because people are consuming more (which they are). It's because prices continually adjust to an maximum level which pushes people to sacrifice more.
I remember when they did this in Marseille a few years back and it didn't take a week but just a few days before huge trash piles in the streets, set on fire by bored kids, got cleaned up by the army.
I wish there was a way to get rid of these bullshit jobs. Also, I wish there was a way to make entertainment business such as singing, acting, and sports much much less profitable.
The problem with entertainement isn't that it's too profitable, it's that the top earner are taking a huge part of the pie while the majority is fighting for crumbs. It's easy to see the few soccer stars making millions by the dozen, but there are way more people playing soccer professionally that are barely getting by.
Why do you care what someone else is willing to pay for? What is the problem exactly when someone hires a consultant and pays him from his own pocket? You are free to spend your money as you wish.
> I wish there was a way to get rid of these bullshit jobs.
Bankers? Or garbage removers?
I suspect the first will be around for a while and there are plenty of people working on autonomous garbage removal trucks. The crew on those trucks has gone from 4 to 3 to 2 and now in plenty of cases it is only 1, the driver and a robotic arm to empty the containers into the back of the truck.
That last person is a bigger step than the previous ones but with all the automated driving research going on I don't think it will be long before that last person too will be laid off.
> Some law firms even make a practice of buying up patents for products they have no intention of producing, purely to enable them to sue people for copyright infringement.
My grandfather recalled once how his Latin teacher told him the most important job in society is that of the garbage collector - how can it function properly if everywhere is piled high with waste?
My father told the story once of a secretary who told him "my pay is a disgrace. Even garbage men get paid more than me!" To which my father replied "why don't you quit and get a garbage man job?" And the secretary says "are you kidding? That's a filthy, dirty job!"
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 four levels removed as a cost to be cut to the cheapest provider, damn the consequences.
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, so they feel proud, as they save the life just as much as the doctor or the nurse.
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?
Doctors are harder to train, as such they are a rarer resource, and more expensive. We can freely pay cleaners less, and purchase more doctors. Isn't that how it works?
Yes, but hiring more doctors is counterproductive if their work is regularly being undone because of bad sanitation. In such a case, a dollar invested in cleaners buys a greater fraction of lives than same dollar invested in doctors.
> a dollar invested in cleaners buys a greater fraction of lives than same dollar invested in doctors
the dollar equation is relative, i.e. "in such a case". The balance point still ends up with doctors being payed more, and cleaners significantly less.
Plus, who guarantees that dollar cleaning improvement? Maybe all you'll be doing is setting a precedent for higher pay - you need more to correlate with better cleaning. Maybe regular (independent) inspections & testing?
Do you have any reason to believe it's suboptimal? It doesn't seem particularly implausible that the current allocation is close to optimal, and presumably hospital administrators and the like look at the numbers and allocate resources where they think they will most effectively lead to saved lives, no?
At the moment, stopping to help a homeless person isn't worth anything. We should live in a society where helping someone in need makes you a millionaire. Where people are out hunting down the homeless, fighting to help them.
A society where helping a kid to become happy makes you rich. Making a classroom of kids happy and teach them something at the same time earns you tens of millions a year.
Talk about rose tinted glasses! You would need to invent some new product that did those things for kids and convince parents to buy it, otherwise no one will ever pay you millions to make kids happy and teach them something.
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.
They are valuable, except for the fact that machines can now do the disinfecting aspect of the job (the most important part) better and faster than they can.
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.
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).
> 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).
Examples? People might not like what Facebook/Snapchat/Uber/Amazon/etc. are doing (and in some cases I would agree with the criticism - I certainly think startups whose business model involves getting people to break the law need to be held to account), but they're undeniably providing a lot of honest value to their users.
I wasn't thinking about Facebook, Snapchat, Amazon or even Uber - those are examples of companies that do provide a lot of honest value (not to mention I wouldn't call either of them a startup now). I meant all your random SaaS businesses that try to "change the world" by doing something utterly irrelevant that's only meant to give them enough growth to have a shot at getting acquihired by an established corporation.
You're going to have to give some concrete examples. All the "typical" SV startups I can think of were very much about creating value for the user. (If anything the lacuna in the business model tends to be around getting the user to pay for that value).
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.
> 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.
> 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).
This is just wrong. Soccer players, movie stars, and the organizations that front them make money based upon ticket sales. If you don't want them to make as much money you don't buy the ticket. Buying the ticket is making a choice to give them that money.
The problem is that it is easy for people to dissociate from the choices that they make with their purchasing. Not everyone is this deluded. Some people boycott things they disagree with. What you are arguing is that mechanisms like boycott, i.e., voting with your dollars don't always work in the sense of producing outcomes that an observer might consider better for everyone. The same case could be made about democracy for exactly the same reasons. That is a different argument than the one outlined here, that markets do not represent the direct choice of their participants. They certainly do, even when the participants refuse to acknowledge that they are making those choices.
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.
That's probably 90% true, but there are phenomena that defy this.
Imagine you live in a society where the population is mainly composed of two segments. Members of the first segment enjoy consuming service A. Members of the second segment would benefit tremendously from service B, but all the money is held by the first segment. Which service are you going to spend your time offering to the public?
This is at least part of the reason that, as a software engineer, I am much better off selling my time to an advertising company than (say) running a programming/compsci dojo for middle school kids in a low-income urban community.
You'll say, of course, that advertising is so lucrative because businesses around the world (and therefore the society made up of them) value the extra income that advertising provides. You'll say that society as a whole does, in fact, want more, better advertisements. But I suspect that there is a segment of the population just as large that would rather everyone in the advertising industry do something else. Only that segment can't pay.
> selling my time to an advertising company than (say) running a programming/compsci dojo for middle school kids
There are lucrative teaching jobs, and lucrative consumer products bought by low-income communities. But in this case, teaching dojos don't scale the same way ads do.
Also, high-income communities can often incubate products that eventually become available to low-income communities, after they get over initial cost burdens.
Advertising is a good example though: If everyone uses ads, there is no individual (company) advantage to using ads, but you still have to use them to compete.
At the risk of hurting my case, advertising is probably not quite as good an example as you're making it out to be.
In particular, competition between two brands of the same product need not be a zero sum game. If every beer company runs ads in which beautiful women fawn over a guy drinking beer, the outcome might be that every company sees higher profits than in a world without any ads at all.
> You'll say, of course, that advertising is so lucrative because businesses around the world (and therefore the society made up of them) value the extra income that advertising provides. You'll say that society as a whole does, in fact, want more, better advertisements. But I suspect that there is a segment of the population just as large that would rather everyone in the advertising industry do something else. Only that segment can't pay.
Allow yourself the recursion. They could pay if we valued their work more. Every job is on the market.
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.
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).
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.
> IMO this is wrong: Most any banker can become a garbageman. They are way overpaid, that's why there is a lottery for the jobs. Is the reverse true?
The article actually states exactly this as part of it's "bullshit jobs" discussion.
> Relying on strike time to tragedy is complete BS. As we saw in 2007/8 when banker messed up the consequences are indeed harsh.
You're mixing up a strike with a very complex series of events that can arguably be described somewhere on a scale between "messed up" and "maliciously and fraudulently manipulated markets for their own profiteering at the expense of everyone else". However, determining exactly where on that scale they sit is a much bigger discussion than HN allows in a comment. Eitherway, the article again compares a garbage collection strike with a banking strike, which is a fairer comparison, and suggests that the biggest losers from that strike were the bankers.
As someone who does not live in a high-density urban environment, I would rather keep my bank than my garbage man.
My waste is about half compostable and the other half, through a slight change in purchasing decisions, could easily consist solely of easily-burnable paper and cardboard.
Meanwhile, if I had noone to finance the purchase of my house or manage my retirement savings then I would be considerably worse off.
65 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadSome garbagemen do make $100000, more than some bankers (and some software engineers), as they rightly should, as described in this article.
160.000 out of a population of a million registered for a lottery to be considered for one of the 200 spots back in 2006.
It helped that they had an employment contract that basically guaranteed them employment for life and several perks.
Nowadays the city government privatized most of the garbage collection, so it's not such a great deal anymore (the employees they hired before on advantageous conditions are still employed and working though).
http://www.espectador.com/sociedad/83328/se-realiza-el-sorte...
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-history/). so about $7.50/hour
In 2015 the average family income was $53657. 53657/52 = $1031/week But in 2015 the average person worked on average only 34.4 hours per week (http://fortune.com/2015/11/11/chart-work-week-oecd/) so just shy of $30/hour.
If modern Americans were content living at the same level of consumption as their 1930's counterparts they would only have to work 12.5 hours per week to earn that same $375 in purchasing power. Outdoing Keynes' prediction 15 years ahead of schedule.
(53657/1.6) / 52 = $644. That makes the hourly rate $18.72.
So around 20 hours to make 1930's purchasing power.
Keynes prediction still ahead.
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/18/5-facts-abou...
There are more expenses involved in just getting by now. Mortgages (and I suspect rents) are well above historical price to income ratios. Dual incomes are a necessity for most families. That often means two cars are a necessity. And childcare costs...
I don't have the time to look it up now, but I believe Elizabeth Warren has a well known talk floating around the internet that deals with the issue of debt and how close many American families are to financial disaster. In that talk there's a great breakdown of the shifting nature of expenses.
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.
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. :)
[src - not sure about the credibility, but it's good enough for me and this discussion] https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/bentleytran/living-cost-of...
There's a general problem with using averages anyway. As I see it an average wage/cost does not actually equal a normal cost which I believe is more important. That is the most common occurrence of something is often distorted by the averaging out process. So I don't put a lot of stock in using them.
Overall I'm pretty sure a few things happened:
1. Product costs went down due to cost reductions (found via economies of scale within manufacturing) and things like sugar manufacturing.
2. Money saved from General goods went into fuelling house price surges. i.e. People don't have bidding wars over food they just buy them at market price, but houses are different, they immediately are driven up with no regulation and lower supplies.
Anyways, my whole point is that this idea of a 15 hour work week by 2030 is just not going to happen and it's not because people are consuming more (which they are). It's because prices continually adjust to an maximum level which pushes people to sacrifice more.
Bankers? Or garbage removers?
I suspect the first will be around for a while and there are plenty of people working on autonomous garbage removal trucks. The crew on those trucks has gone from 4 to 3 to 2 and now in plenty of cases it is only 1, the driver and a robotic arm to empty the containers into the back of the truck.
That last person is a bigger step than the previous ones but with all the automated driving research going on I don't think it will be long before that last person too will be laid off.
sigh copyright != patent
Reminds me of http://joek.com/jokes/joke_102.shtml
And yet, they are treated as the lowest employees there, well, most are not even employees, outsourced three or four levels removed as a cost to be cut to the cheapest provider, damn the consequences.
Society has some warped views sometimes.
But I agree, cleaners should be more respected.
the dollar equation is relative, i.e. "in such a case". The balance point still ends up with doctors being payed more, and cleaners significantly less.
Plus, who guarantees that dollar cleaning improvement? Maybe all you'll be doing is setting a precedent for higher pay - you need more to correlate with better cleaning. Maybe regular (independent) inspections & testing?
Having a trashy ward - is much more likely a failure of the management / admin team in training & superversion than it is on the cleaner specifically.
Not saying you should treat cleaners poorly, but it does explain the wage level.
At the moment, stopping to help a homeless person isn't worth anything. We should live in a society where helping someone in need makes you a millionaire. Where people are out hunting down the homeless, fighting to help them.
A society where helping a kid to become happy makes you rich. Making a classroom of kids happy and teach them something at the same time earns you tens of millions a year.
The money loving capitalist couldn't imagine being rewarded for helping someone. It makes me sad.
See: http://tru-d.com/
And to the point someone else made in this thread, they are easily replaced; not requiring a significant amount of training or onboarding resources.
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.
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).
Examples? People might not like what Facebook/Snapchat/Uber/Amazon/etc. are doing (and in some cases I would agree with the criticism - I certainly think startups whose business model involves getting people to break the law need to be held to account), but they're undeniably providing a lot of honest value to their users.
That reality escapes most people.
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.
This is just wrong. Soccer players, movie stars, and the organizations that front them make money based upon ticket sales. If you don't want them to make as much money you don't buy the ticket. Buying the ticket is making a choice to give them that money.
The problem is that it is easy for people to dissociate from the choices that they make with their purchasing. Not everyone is this deluded. Some people boycott things they disagree with. What you are arguing is that mechanisms like boycott, i.e., voting with your dollars don't always work in the sense of producing outcomes that an observer might consider better for everyone. The same case could be made about democracy for exactly the same reasons. That is a different argument than the one outlined here, that markets do not represent the direct choice of their participants. They certainly do, even when the participants refuse to acknowledge that they are making those choices.
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.
The reason there is a scarcity is precisely the fact that multiplying availability is not easy, i.e. training is long and/or hard and/or expensive.
If you find yourself in a lucrative, scarce job, just make sure it's hard enough that it will always be that way...
Imagine you live in a society where the population is mainly composed of two segments. Members of the first segment enjoy consuming service A. Members of the second segment would benefit tremendously from service B, but all the money is held by the first segment. Which service are you going to spend your time offering to the public?
This is at least part of the reason that, as a software engineer, I am much better off selling my time to an advertising company than (say) running a programming/compsci dojo for middle school kids in a low-income urban community.
You'll say, of course, that advertising is so lucrative because businesses around the world (and therefore the society made up of them) value the extra income that advertising provides. You'll say that society as a whole does, in fact, want more, better advertisements. But I suspect that there is a segment of the population just as large that would rather everyone in the advertising industry do something else. Only that segment can't pay.
There are lucrative teaching jobs, and lucrative consumer products bought by low-income communities. But in this case, teaching dojos don't scale the same way ads do.
Also, high-income communities can often incubate products that eventually become available to low-income communities, after they get over initial cost burdens.
Advertising is a good example though: If everyone uses ads, there is no individual (company) advantage to using ads, but you still have to use them to compete.
In particular, competition between two brands of the same product need not be a zero sum game. If every beer company runs ads in which beautiful women fawn over a guy drinking beer, the outcome might be that every company sees higher profits than in a world without any ads at all.
Allow yourself the recursion. They could pay if we valued their work more. Every job is on the market.
In the latter case, regulation should take care of these people.
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).
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.
Relying on strike time to tragedy is complete BS. As we saw in 2007/8 when banker messed up the consequences are indeed harsh.
None of this works without gov putting its thumb on the scales. Where do you think the lack of innovation came from?
The article actually states exactly this as part of it's "bullshit jobs" discussion.
> Relying on strike time to tragedy is complete BS. As we saw in 2007/8 when banker messed up the consequences are indeed harsh.
You're mixing up a strike with a very complex series of events that can arguably be described somewhere on a scale between "messed up" and "maliciously and fraudulently manipulated markets for their own profiteering at the expense of everyone else". However, determining exactly where on that scale they sit is a much bigger discussion than HN allows in a comment. Eitherway, the article again compares a garbage collection strike with a banking strike, which is a fairer comparison, and suggests that the biggest losers from that strike were the bankers.
My waste is about half compostable and the other half, through a slight change in purchasing decisions, could easily consist solely of easily-burnable paper and cardboard.
Meanwhile, if I had noone to finance the purchase of my house or manage my retirement savings then I would be considerably worse off.