Does any government in the world have a sensible plan for what happens when (probably) 1 in 10 of the workforce become unemployable when self-driving cars/trucks take over their jobs?
I'm sure the mighty invisible hand will save us all in its bosom. What we need is faith.. err confidence in the market. All praises be to the one true god money.
I haven't heard of one, the conspiracy-theorist in me is reminded of all the ammunition that various federal agencies have been purchasing over the last decade and the militarization of local law enforcement.
I'm not sure if that's an indication of any actual plan (certainly not a sensible one) or simply a hedge against the fact that nobody has one, or nothing at all.
In any case, ignoring even just the truckers is a bad idea (let alone ups, fedex, usps, etc), they know the highways and the trucks and if they form a new Luddite group then any self-driving trucking company is going to be in for some surprise expenses when their trucks start disappearing and/or breaking down randomly in the middle of nowhere.
Those agencies tend to pre-purchase ammo years in advance, and the "militarization" of police is mostly from agencies receiving surplus equipment from the DoD for pennies on the dollar. Lord knows civilian cops don't have the same level of discipline - if I pulled one-tenth of that sort of abuse while I was an enlisted MP, I'd be rotting in a cell in Fort Leavenworth instead of writing this post.
All that being said, I wouldn't be surprised if certain elites have noticed that public sentiment is resembling France in the 1790s. This whole surveillance apparatus is here to intercept the next Robespierre, national security be damned.
I haven't heard a single proposal yet. I could imagine a government passing a succession of laws which first required all autonomous trucks to have a supervising human on board (with a relaxation of existing maximum hour rules), operating under a new Trucking Supervisor License (which any current CDL holder is automatically granted); then slowly ratcheting up restrictions on actual CDLs (reduced hours, reduced permissible routes, reduced maximum weight) to make them less attractive; then ultimately ceasing issuance of new CDLs for heavy trucks once the final generation of drivers-cum-supervisors has retired.
The second part of your proposal doesn't make any sense in the scheme of transitioning humans out of that sector of the workforce. Increasing restrictions on CDL issuance doesn't make it any easier to transition drivers out, it kicks them out. I find it comparable to increasing the minimum wage of fast food workers as the food prep process is increasingly automated. It simply makes it more and more favorable to choose the automated option.
It stops more coming in; existing holders keep driving (base case) or move to those supervisory roles. Ending the supervisory license and mandate is the end game, done once most of that last generation of CDL holders has hung up their hats.
This is really about long distance, semi truck freight only. Local delivery (as someone mentioned above) is likely to need humans for a very long time.
Apart from people putting out feelers about a Universal Basic Income, the next best thing I've heard is an informal proposal by Bill Gates about taxing automation [1] so we can better control the speed in which this stuff will upend everything, and buy more time for a more controlled transition.
I say that as a developer who is one of the classes that will benefit more from automation (until we are also replaced).
That sounds like a recipe for crippling the competitiveness of the US relative to other countries. It's not like China is going to slow down on the inevitable march towards automation.
The absolute best scenario is for a country to automate as much as possible as quickly as possible to capture the productivity gains available on the global scale and then figure out how to tax gains (from automation or otherwise) domestically after the fact to support those in its population that have been displaced.
If you think instability from unemployment is bad, it's certainly worse if you also have the problem of not having the resources to even try and address it.
"Competitiveness" means nothing when only a fraction of the population prosper from those gains. On paper, America is significantly richer than it was in the 80's, yet incomes for the majority have been flat, social mobility has decreased, worker leverage has nearly disappeared, and quality of life for those outside of the coastal regions has gone down.
There's no reason to push for exponential growth any further until we can correct income and wealth inequality a bit.
It's better that a fraction of the population prosper that the can act philanthropically or that rest of the country can tax. The alternative is a fraction of the population of another country prosper over which we have no power to tax and whose philanthropy likely won't benefit Americans.
The former gives you options, the latter affords you none.
Is this not FUD? Why do you assume that Chinese billionaires are any less philanthropic than US ones? America has the richest people on Earth currently, how successfully are you taxing them to take care of your needy?
This is reminiscent of the prisoner's dilemma in a way. All the rich of all the countries in the world will make the same claims: "look, we don't want to fall behind big scary China or Russia do we? So cut me some slack on taxes and regulation, let's all pitch in to bail me out when I fail (just a few billion here and there--I'm too big to fail, remember?), and we'll see about redistribution once we've won the war. I promise to remember you all."
A country that follows this path ends up like Korea, selling its soul to Samsung.
I'm not assuming they are less philanthropic. I'm assuming that their philanthropy will be skewed towards benefiting Chinese people the same way the philanthropy of American billionaires and millionaires is skewed towards benefiting American citizens. You're reading malice into a statement where there is simply economic self-interest since I live in America.
I don't care if there is economic unrest in China nearly as much as economic unrest in America. Do I wish economic unrest in China? No, of course not. But if I had to choose between economic unrest overseas or in my own backyard, overseas it is.
I only use China as the example here because they are the only ones actually executing an economic game plan that is competitive with taking economic gains from America and Americans.
Relying on philanthropy is a terrible way to provide for the public good. Instead of a democratically elected body, accountable to the electorate, you leave it to a handful of rich people (who answer to nobody) to choose who benefits.
You don't think so? China probably has even more to lose with automation. Automation means that fewer people will need to send their manufacturing over to them. Automation means that their factories will employ fewer people, which will have a much bigger impact given the sheer amounts of people they have.
> Exactly how you’d do it, measure it, you know, it’s interesting for people to start talking about now.
This is an interesting allusion to the fundamental problem with this proposal - it doesn't bother to define what a robot is, the value of a robot's labor, or how to tell when the robot has replaced someone's job. If you start thinking about the implications for even a moment it's clear this is absurd.
If company A makes product X using 100 workers, and company B enters the market using machine C to make X at a lower cost that drives A out of business, how do we decide what to tax B? Does B pay the payroll taxes of 100 workers? What if B's lower cost expands the market for X and now they're selling ten times as much? What if the product A makes is hand-knit sweaters, and B is using knitting machine technology that's been around for a century? Are those the same products? Is the knitting machine a robot?
There's a very real concern here - the concern is that technology allows the proceeds of increased productivity to all be funneled to a privileged few, leaving the rest of the workforce out in the cold. Luckily we already have a way to address that - it's called the income tax.
Yep. It's really as simple as a progressive income and capital tax. Not only is it difficult to define the surplus gains from automation, the societal problem is not automation, but the inordinate accumulation of wealth and power.
Of course passing more progressive tax laws are impossible because you're asking the most rich and powerful to curtail their own wealth. Gate's proposal has any traction whatsoever because it won't touch old money.
Asymmetric growth between those with and without capital (automation/AI) will only worsen. Add in a few more upcoming innovations such as human genetic and cybernetic modification, and a highly segregated (if not fully biologically divergent) world society seems unavoidable. The poor will no longer be lower castes by social fiat, they will truly become physically and mentally inferior. Revolution, which was possible in a time when the oppressed had equal capabilities and access to relatively competitive weaponry, will become impossible.
"Capital" is the key word here. Old man Marx was right when he said that capitalism is inherently self-contradictory... it's just that it took a while for that to fully manifest, and it is not in a way he expected.
Consider what capitalism is, again, from a Marxist perspective. It is an economic mode of production that has two main classes: the capitalist class, which is characterized by the ownership of the means of production (aka capital); and the worker class, which is characterized by the lack of said ownership. The capitalist class, by virtue of owning the means of production, also owns any surplus value created using them.
However, because your average capitalist has too much capital to be able to utilize it to its full extent, in order to maximize the surplus value generated from that capital, they need the workers. So, they effectively rent out the means of production to the workers (note: this includes the entire managerial chain involved, up to CEOs, and even owners themselves to the extent that they operate in a managerial capacity), who generate the actual surplus value, but then pay most of it back to the owner of the capital as rent. On the other hand, the workers, without access to means of production, cannot generate surplus value for themselves. So they have to go and rent those means from the capitalists who own them.
The resulting arrangement manifests as employment and wages, and that's how we nominally describe it. But fundamentally it's all about rent and rent-seeking. The reason why this arrangement works in practice is because, within this established framework (i.e. unless you dispute legality of ownership of capital), both classes need each other to get any value out of it.
Consequently, the reason why it's breaking apart with advent of widespread automation is because it breaks the dependency of the capitalist class on the workers. Automation is essentially capital that generates surplus value all by itself. This means that the entire production/consumption cycle that drives the economy becomes contained to the capitalist class. Simply put, if you have a robot that can do X for free, and the other guy has a robot that can do Y for free, and both of you need X+Y, then you only need to trade between each other. You don't need to trade with (e.g. hire or contract) anyone who does not have any robot that does anything useful. Effectively, everyone who doesn't own any means of production - i.e. the majority of the population in modern societies - become economically redundant in all respects, and cut off from the economy as a result.
This is the point at which the question of who owns the capital - i.e. the automation - becomes paramount. The existing owners can try to avoid pressing that point by willingly taking a part of the surplus value that automation generates for them, and sharing it with all those that don't have any capital of their own, as a direct wealth transfer. This is UBI and other similar schemes. It's probably where we're heading in the medium term, but I doubt it would be a stable arrangement for too long - there's just too many inherent questions about fairness here, and such a scheme would also have basically zero social mobility between the have-automation class and the have-nots, that would further accelerate resentment.
Longer term, we're probably looking at some form of shared ownership of the means of production. Which, combined with the post-scarcity that automation should result in, would, in fact, be communism in the strictest definition of that term. If we do get there, it would be the ultimate irony in that it would be capitalism as a socioeconomic system, rather than socialism, building the road there, for all the efforts of the latter and the indifference of the former...
The worrying thing is how intelligent people spend their time devising financial instruments. It's beyond automation: too much financial sector trickery is capital that generates CAPITAL all by itself: this makes automation look inefficient. In that case, anyone that doesn't already have the most capital is also redundant and cut off, even if they're all set up with automation.
I'm not too worried about that kind, because, while it is wasteful, it is also self-defeating in the long term - it's the kind of capital that is only capital through collective make-believe of our society. Take that away, and it turns into a bunch of useless and meaningless papers overnight. Not so with automation - it represents real capital, the kind that produces surplus value because it can supply the things for which any living being has a demand of.
Missed this at the time, apologies: the trouble is, capital IS only capital through the collective make-believe of our society. That's fundamental to the concept of abstracted money. Automation makes for a hell of a good barter system—you can basically give people golems in exchange for whatever you like, it can be extraordinarily valuable. But we're not talking about barter systems, we're talking about speculative capital, which is even more make-believe than fiat capital.
Well said. My worry is that reaching post-scarcity and shared ownership of capital is only a relevant goal so long as the Capitalists and the Redundant have biology and sociology in common. It may be that the classes diverge enough in a short enough time frame that the Capitalists no longer feel a kindred humanity to the Redundants, and would no longer see a reason to include them in the communist plan. I mean we already see this empathetic disconnect between the ultra rich and dirt poor in today's society.
Capitalists who achieve post-scarcity may look around and see "high" humans, beneficiaries of advanced biotech, and masses of apparent troglodytes, with whom they have less in common than we do with dogs.
The economist hired by Valve had something to say about this plan. He proposes a Universal Basic Dividend that purportedly more effectively taxes automation. [1] His goal is get rid of the incentive to dodge robot taxes by not taxing automation directly, but through giving everyone a portion of new IPOs. Then the capital gains attained by automation can be shared.
This is an elegant solution, and I like the fact that it literally gives everyone ownership in the means of production, but the author missed another easy solution: have a highly progressive income and capital tax. The former-Employer-now-turned-Robot-owner will pay tax at a higher bracket as he now earns what the now-redundant-employee used to make. Similarly, every time there is a consolidation in income (many workers earning wages to few robot owners making bank), total tax revenue will increase.
Not to mention entire small town economies, particularly in the West, are entirely economically dependent on truckers to stop by, rest, fuel up, visit prostitutes etc.
Those people are gonna have a much harder time. Any owners of property will see the values of their assets plummet just as their jobs disappear.
I see the rare few towns along, say, the Dalton Highway on the way to Deadhorse, Alaska as being the first to go. Ignoring the weather for just a moment, that 400 miles of packed gravel would have to be an appealing target for autonomous vehicle engineers. Mostly straight, mostly flat (albeit with one non-trivial mountain pass), little traffic other than other trucks. And poof, there goes Coldfoot and Yukon River when humans don't stop anymore (except for a smattering of tourists).
Or maybe the tank range is enough that trucks don't stop between Fairbanks and Deadhorse the way it is now, and I'm talking out my ass. All I know is that the traffic I saw last time I was up there consisted of a lot of trucks, a minivan, one camper at the Arctic Circle that said they were going to Deadhorse, and the remainder of tourist traffic consisting of a bunch of dumbasses like me on motorcycles.
I'd guess that a road like Dalton where weather-related and road condition-related hazards can suddenly appear, would make an exceedingly poor fit for self-driving non-guideway vehicles.
Far better would be vehicles -- self-driving or otherwise -- on some sort of fixed guideway; given that most of the current usage of the road is for traffic solely between the two points-of-interest on either end. Special vehicles could still be used to access the pipeline running alongside at arbitrary points.
A railway, potentially with extra equipment to assist with maintaining traction and negotiating grades, would accomplish this nicely, but is avoided due to its large up-front cost. While self-driving vehicles don't come with such large non-distributed up-front cost, they would be unreliable on such a road without permanent in-vehicle supervision, at which point they're not really making any of the intervening towns that provide driver services superfluous.
In my experience, the US federal government tends to see this as an issue for those who are being unemployed to figure out for themselves. Not to be cynical, but I wouldn't be surprised if their solution boiled down to granting lots of money to private companies to try to tempt them into providing retraining.
Clinton did. She had a jobs retraining program that would have addressed people in industries that were in decline or going away. Ironically, the very people who would benefit from this program mostly vote for Trump and he is not going to do anything for them.
Automation is coming for these people's jobs and there is nothing that can be done about that. Retraining is the only hope for these people but they have to stop acting entitled and start voting for people who will help them get retrained.
I think rural America needs more than retraining programs, though you're correct that Donald Trump has made no mention of what he's actually going to do for coal workers.
They need new and dynamic industries that treat the employees with respect and agency. Something entire communities can benefit from.
It's not even remotely realistic, it's a populist fantasy.
Nevertheless, that is the plan, to somehow force the world to turn the clock back on globalism to a time when American coal, steel and auto workers were relevant, and to beat back the tide of modernity until the world makes sense again.
I'm not aware of good data either way so it seems something that would be sensible to try at least for some time to collect data on it. You need something to get the workers able to do other jobs because protecting all the current jobs is unreasonable.
Yes, the make-work programs by FDR. The Civilian Conservation Corps worked very well. In the US, considering the infrastructure maintenance / replacement needs, starting up something similar strikes me as with a lot of potential.
You've got to be kidding, right? Have you seen the reports about roads, buildings, and facilities? They've been financially and physically neglected since the early 1980s. The US needs physical labor more than ever - AND - US needs a drastic re-allocation of Capital from Investors to Poor People Who Spend if we ever want to fix this broken dang structure. The US needs to over-pay for much needed fixes and the rising tide will lift all boats, except the big goddamn yachts of the .01% but whatever they can afford it.
To a point, but the bigger problem for military people entering the workforce is getting civilian certifications for things they have been doing for years. I really wish, in addition to drastically improving the VA, the country would put together a formal "after service" program to help people deal with becoming a civilian. One part that would be helpful is to work with state vocational and certification to translate the military experience into immediate certifications without starting over.
The G.I. Bill is very good for military professions that don't have a common civilian analog and the person is going to start again anyway.
The best answer I've had wouldn't work without a big change in politics: we could use a ton of home health aides and other support for aging Boomers, not to mention classroom assistants (one of the best ways to boost academic performance) or daycare workers.
Spending on directly helping people seems like a very humane way to deal with shifts in employment but I don't see us choosing to invest that kind of money, not to mention the problem with attitudes complicating shifting a heavily-male worker surplus into traditionally female fields.
Exactly the problem – it'd be a good way to deal with a rising worker surplus, just as e.g. the New Deal created a lot of not-strictly-necessary public works, but I don't know how we get here in the current political climate and its bitter crab-pot mentality.
Since the end of the great recession the US has been creating about 200k new jobs per month. BLS says there are about 2 million truckers in the US. That's 10 months of job growth. That's a lot but it's not as big of a deal as some people seem to think. Especially since automation will take over slowly over the course of quite some time.
You imply that there is no other work available for these people, and I think you are partially correct. But I would train them in small business skills so that they can recognize small business opportunities and find work for themselves. This coupled with the loosening of regulations that unnecessarily prohibits small business. That is a general statement, the details I do not know.
Retraining for what? Another comment mentioned FDR and infrastructure projects, but this isn't the 1930's. Even if there were a massive infrastructure project, that's good for at most 5-10 years of employment, and then what?
Retraining we can do. However, we can't create massive new job sectors to hire those retrained workers, unless it's make-work government jobs (in which case we'd be better off paying those people a basic income and not removing value from government services by making them more complex and bureaucratic than they need to be).
why can't they be trained to do jobs that might be considered white collar? how about training them to the job of a CEO, or heavens forbid, invest in them to become entrepreneurs?
The same thing that, at the turn of the century when one in ten people were employed in agriculture. (today it's closer to 1/100) they go find other work.
Same goes for a farrier or a blacksmith or milkman, or ice delivery, or newpaper boy shouting "extra, extra - read all about it" from the street corner. In some cases, the job is simply gone. In others, the work still exists, but is nowhere as common.
I agree to a point but I think it is a different scenario today as you have unprecedented concentration of wealth in the top 1 % as well as the means of production. I have a hard time seeing how 5% of the nations workforce suddenly transitions to jobs that did not exist before.
You also have an increase in the cost of living where most households require two incomes compounding the issue.
With agriculture new jobs were created as people moved to cities and new communities were created. those cities already exist. Short of a sudden civilization focused effort to colonize mars, I just don't see it.
I honestly don't think we pay enough attention to the rising cost of living. Cost of living should go down year over year due to productivity gains, but we see at least three line items becoming more expensive over time: (1) housing, (2) healthcare, and (3) higher education.
Amusingly, these exact three things were free in the USSR. I benefited from that a lot. Though most other consumer goods were less affordable and lower quality in the USSR than in the US, and the economy was in worse shape overall. I wonder if there's a way to combine the two systems without people screaming blue murder.
Well, it won't be sudden. But the job loss might not be sudden either. Personal computers destroyed the secretary job over about 30 years. And that used to be the most common job in America.
Even Level 4 automated cars debut tomorrow, we'll need truck drivers for a long time. You need someone there to watch the goods, arrange deliveries, unload, etc. It'll probably allow truckers to drive 24 hours a day instead of 14, which will cost jobs, but it won't be a complete loss.
Same goes for Ubers. You'll need full level 5 unless you want lost Ubers clogging our streets all the time. That probably means you'll need a person in the car for years to come.
Thank you. I keep seeing this Agriculture jobs reference. But, no one mentions that (most of) those people left by their own will. Not because they were pushed out. My own family used to have a farm. All the boys left to go work in mills when they became of age.
I looked for a couple minutes and didn't find it conveniently already done, but it would be interesting to see a breakdown of the US work force from 1850, showing the percentage working in agriculture (including slavery pre Civil War) and the percentage of agriculture workers that were immigrants.
If there is a high proportion of immigrants working in agriculture it blows the whole theory into the sky, as that would be people answering demand for labor at pretty high personal cost, the opposite of incumbents getting pushed out.
This has the current info and some historic info (but not a convenient table!) for California, spread out all over the writing, the percentage of immigrants depends on the crop, for crops that require manual picking the vast majority of the workers are immigrants (everyone except the person in charge most of the time), 5% (800000/16000000) of the workers in California are temporary farm workers.
http://migration.ucdavis.edu/cf/more.php?id=174
I have seen a lot of movement back to agriculture. Friends of mine, many college educated, are working for farms or starting their own farms. Land is available and they seem to be doing pretty well.
Except people left agriculture because they wanted to. They also didn't need much in specialized training (and the factories were more willing to provide that).
Seriously, tell us what jobs these truckers are going to go find.
Ag labour was replaced by the same fundamental change which made the factory work which replaced it viable: more energy per worker.
A farmer with a 15 - 30 HP Ford or John Deere tractor could do the work of a team of men or horses. Rather than 40-horse combine-harvester rigs (with swingletrees to transmit force evenly through the harness), you had a draw-harvester and PTO off the tractor.
Factory productivity tracks virtually linearly with kW or HP per worker, in the form of power tools and equipment.
Humans were the control elements of such systems.
Now we're swapping out the control elements -- computers for people.
If humans don't have either muscle or brainpower to contribute, what's left?
> don't have either muscle or brainpower to contribute, what's left?
I want to see a future where most people are hyper specialists, doing one niche thing for almost the entire world.
also, I want to see more people be capital owners where they make decisions for their own business rather than work for someone else. robots may replace humans, but can they replace being a business owner?
Let's say, for the sake of argument, self-driving cars and truck, fully deployed, are 10 years away.
In that time we might see a move to many more drivers on the road, not less: A lot of growth in food delivery, e-commerce and in particular shuttles offering a fast,affordable, shared transport mode, as an attractive replacement for private cars in many places.
Maybe, with all of that, instead of 1/10 we'll have 2/10 of the workforce as drivers. Consider the effect their salaries have on the families, and indirect support extended families has, we could see a really strong political base against self-driving cars.
And from that point, all kinds of things could happen, to better manage or prevent that change.
Its interesting as we are seeing a similar scenario play out in the energy sector with the shift away from coal. So far the government response has essentially been to ignore it or to use it as a scape goat for relaxing environmental protections.
As far as having a real plan dedicated to finding people decent paying and more importantly fulfilling jobs, i believe the answer is for the most part no. Finland beginning a limited basic income trial is the closest I have seen.
It is a kick the can scenario that has the possibility of massively reducing the quality of life of tens of millions of people.
No, not really. If anything, it's likely those people might have a lot higher risk of suicide. (deaths of despair)
"Because at 54 years old, nobody wants me. I can’t retrain for anything else. For older people, you kind of get trapped. For every one that does well, there’s 30 that it destroys."
That feeling that nobody wants you is a killer. It may be true, it may not, but that lack of hope just prevents anything good from happening. "I can't retrain for anything" - you're defeated right from the start, and it's obvious people don't even want to take the leap to try.
It's hardest on people that had it good, and then lost it. Much worse than those that never had it, in that you feel like you're losing something. (endowment effect)
Here's an interesting article the WaPo did about whites and a lack of hope. While there is a race component to it, I think it'd equally apply to other races where people have had a good/stable life, but lost it.
From the article it seems that whites in the same situation as blacks have the same mortality rates - "If you compare whites with a high school degree or less with blacks with a high school degree or less, their mortality rates have converged."
It suggests that the group having higher status previously does not change things all that much.
I don't think it's about the groups having higher status or not, say whites vs blacks, but in the article they say they believe the cause is:
"These deaths of despair have been accompanied by reduced labor force participation, reduced marriage rates, increases in reports of poor health and poor mental health. So we are beginning to thread a story in that it's possible that [the trend is] consistent with the labor market collapsing for people with less than a college degree. In turn, those people are being less able to form stable marriages, and in turn that has effects on the kind of economic and social supports that people need in order to thrive."
Like you said, the rates are converging when they have a high school degree or less. These are the kinds of people that get hit the hardest when the labor market is collapsing.
It's not that "whites had it before and now they don't", it's "I used to believe I was entitled to a job if I wanted to work hard, and that would pay enough to live, but now that doesn't seem to be true." People just don't know what to do now and are feeling hopeless.
Is there a reason to think they are feeling more hopeless then those who were in that situation longer? That was my point - when you compare groups in same situation, they are similarly hopeless regardless of previous good life or not. It is hard and hopeless for both groups.
Other comparisons in article always compared different socioeconomic groups - whites without degree with all blacks - that is not the same because it counts in middle class blacks.
Maybe "good life" was too strong. Really I meant to say at least positively employed. Losing a job you've had for a while (even if it's just a year) is a pretty big shock. You feel worse losing the job than probably when you were previously unemployed (although you're arguably better off, because at least you were working over that time).
I agree it's hard and hopeless for both groups, and I think it's only going to get worse. Comparing hopelessness I don't think really provides much insight though, but what that hopelessness might cause people to do. (increased drug use, suicide, etc.) What my point was is that that hopelessness isn't going to help them retrain and it might actively keep people from seeking it. I think we're missing out on a whole mental health component.
Perhaps they are not drinking the koolaid you need to drink in order to believe that self-driving vehicles are likely to work well enough to be widely deployed in the next 20 years?
Well, I wasn't sure either, but have you seen Waymo's current state-reported stats for mean miles driven between human takeover incidents? If not, look them up, they are very impressive.
If you still disagree, please elaborate on _why_ you think this
Trucks travel a lot of highway miles. That is a significantly easier problem than general driving. Even if you don't believe that general driving will be solved in 20 years, you can easily imagine trucks doing their highway driving alone and only having the last couple of miles taken care of by humans.
Currently in the US the workforce population rate is at an all time low in almost 40 years. Basically the same number of people working as in the early 1970s. Yikes.
My point is we're already in this situation, automation be damned, and until the tsunami of anti-intellectualism backs off, then smart people aren't going to have a chance to actually figure some of this out.
Human nature is not ready for this world. We are dogmatic puritanical beasts obsessed with the idea that a person's value must be inextricably tied to one's economic output. We're more likely to see a worldwide make-work program where 1/2 of the people are paid to dig holes and the other 1/2 paid to fill them in, than we are to see something like universal basic income.
When will that happen? Self-driving cars/trucks aren't anywhere near being deployed on real roads. Also, as soon as there's an accident and the self-driving car kills a child, they will be postponed for at least 5 years until safety assurances are strengthened.
Brother did this. The bad part about the job, as noted in the article, is the way the pay works. If the truck is not moving the driver is not getting paid. Stuck in traffic? Not paid, Takes a day to load your truck, no paid. Take a day to unload truck, not paid. Truckers sit for hours doing nothing and not getting paid. Sometimes trucks have to wait a day or two just to be assigned a load. Not paid.
I'm trying to think of reasons why it would be this way and what I can come up with is that if you were to pay by the hour instead of by the mile it would be an incentive to the drivers to take longer to complete routes. A classic principal-agent problem in other words. Is there any non-obvious reason besides that that anyone knows of?
One guess is that most truck drivers were freelance (and many still are), owning their truck and getting paid per mile. Perhaps the rest of the industry standardized around that model regardless of the relationship the truck driver has with the parent company.
We know a route from X to Y is $miles . Detours happen, but Google is getting to the point of calculating realtime incidents. But time could be fairly compensated, as could the miles on a vehicle.
If you took a way longer route, it's on you. But if you're traffic jammed, it's not your fault, and should fairly be compensated.
Then Reagan de-regulated and lots of companies from right to work states moved in and killed the market. The union shops like Yellow Freight mostly operate in blue states and are profitable.
Trucking deregulation occurred between 1978-1980 during the Carter administration.
Plus, the way it was regulated makes modern regulatory capture look consumer friendly.
If you wanted to start a trucking company, you had to submit a business plan with a list of committed customers and already set in stone pricing. The Feds would literally hand your plan to everyone with a route in the region, give them a few months to review it and then your potential competitors got to vote on whether you should be allowed to operate that route.
Predictably, it was basically just outsourced sales for the exiting companies.
It's not the employee's fault if a restaurant is "dead" for an evening. But the employees are required to be there, and thusly, are paid.
Same here. If the truck driver was free to go home, or whatever, sure dont pay them. But traffic jams are in transit between places they are told to go. It doesn't have to be the "fault" of the employer. But the employee is captive, and working, and absolutely should be paid with regards to time.
From the employee perspective that makes sense. You articulate why they should be paid. But is that enough?
I think you have to reason about the other side of the equation, where someone has to pay you.
It rains. I have to walk to work I the rain. I should get compensated. But is my employer on the hook, to give me the happiness I would've had if it hadn't been raining?
It would be better for the employer if the employee paid for the oil checks on the trucks, or worked for the minimum wage. So why isn't that the case? "Because it's better for the employer" is simultaneously the explanation for everything and nothing. In reality, these situations arise from a lot of complex interactions between employer, employee and regulatory body, which is what I was trying to get at.
The consequence to the employer for missed maintenance on a truck is damage to the asset or loss of use when the truck is pulled off the road by DOT inspectors.
The consequence to an employee getting stuffed is that the driver has less time to sleep or jerk around in the back of the truck.
On the other hand, trucking companies for the most part are lacking drivers. Turnover is rampant. Drivers will hop to another company for a better per-mile rate, or better scheduling, or newer equipment. Good, safe, dependable drivers are in demand.
And they don't want idle trucks any more than the driver does because if the truck is idle they aren't making money either.
Shadows of the constant "shortage of engineers" threads on HN. There are parallels if you look--the same dichotomy: Companies saying they lack employees, high turnover, job hopping, yet employees say they are dis-satisfied, have little power over their working conditions, their office situation, the terms of their employment, etc. because there's always someone willing to take their spot.
We have managers and dispatchers to take care of that.
The real reason is that it pushes off risk. Why would a trucking company pay a guy to sit in traffic? WTF is the guy going to do anyway... he's sleeping in the truck behind a gas station somewhere in Armpit, PA.
The issue isn't that they're not getting paid for non-driving time, it's that the driving time pay isn't enough to cover the non-driving time. Which is to say the economics of the job overall isn't working..
I've met a number of people working in various piece work [1] industries and I make it a point to ask them about their view of payments and how their work effort correlates with payment.
What I've found is that with near certainty, these individuals suffer from a kind of economic myopia. They view every aspect of their work as something though should be charged for and they complain about every little bit they aren't paid for separately. They are almost never open to the idea that it doesn't matter how much they get paid for each action; what matters is their total income. They view anything they don't charge for as money that rightfully belongs to them.
Note that this is not about education level either. Easily, the single most vocal group about piece work payments are the medical doctors I've talked to. I've met multiple doctors who think they should be able to bill for each question asked during a visit that concerns a different medical topic, and some go so far as to demand the patient leave and book a subsequent 15 minute appointment before they will discuss it.
Edit: I'm not saying anything about how much truckers, or any other profession, should be paid. Instead, piece work professions would be better served (and would avoid potentially disastrous financial outcomes) by evaluating their business in terms of overall profitability. For example, drivers might negotiate a higher price per mile, but if one of the aspects the parent mentioned changes significantly (load/unload time, traffic conditions in a geograph), they should turn down the work or start transitioning to a new occupation.
Easily, the single most vocal group about piece work payments are the medical doctors I've talked to.
To be fair, there are unusual incentives in place here -- depending on the specific circumstances, each individual task or procedure a doctor performs may end up being coded differently for insurance reimbursement purposes. The focus of doctors on piece work is incentivized by the way insurance works.
As someone with truckers in the family, and who discusses it frequently with them, their biggest problems with the 14 hour rules are twofold.
(1) It's immutable, and squeezes them between their dispatchers (who schedule them for 11 hour drives) and remaining legal. If you're running a day load (far better quality of life), then if you hit traffic you're spending the night on the road in your truck, parked wherever you happened to hit the time limit. There's no individual flexibility in terms of "I'll drive less tomorrow to make up for it."
(2) Removal of individual agency. Imagine if someone showed up at your desk and told you that you couldn't write any more code because you'd already been coding X hours. Doesn't matter you were on a roll. Doesn't matter that the past 4 hours were lightweight commenting and code formatting. Doesn't matter you were in the middle of writing a solution that finally occurred to you. Just is. Oh, and here's a $500 DOT ticket for trying to jot down some code notes to yourself to salvage your work.
I hear and agree that some people feel entitled to bill counter to market. But IMHO the combination of a per-mile-rate, dispatcher-driven scheduling, and absolute regulation is pretty sadistic to truckers.
There's a lot more friendly ways the legislation could have been written: work hour cap per week, different classes of CDL / experience levels mean different caps, etc.
> Imagine if someone showed up at your desk and told you that you couldn't write any more code because you'd already been coding X hours.
If there were a decent moment-to-moment shot of somebody dying because I was coding tired (rather than a future chance with a barrier of code reviews), it would be totally reasonable to put a really sharp barrier on reducing that risk.
Here's the problem I have with that line of logic: a huge number of trucking accidents are caused by non-trucking road traffic they have to share the road with.
Which is completely unregulated with anything like the same strictness.
I can only speak to the day trip side, not long-haul multi-day freight. But based on annectdotes, I would say there's (on average) at least one incident per month per driver where the truck has to be driven off the road to avoid a collision with physics-ignorant non-trucking traffic.
A friend of a friend was involved in an older lady's death after she pulled out right in front of him (as in, "even the brakes can't slow a truck down that fast" close). Of course he survived in the larger vehicle, but now he has that on his conscience.
I don't dispute that freight trucks are dangerous vehicles. But generally speaking, their drivers are far more experienced than you or I - they should be, they do it every day.
That's all fair, and I don't blame truckers for the accidents caused by others. That doesn't change that they have a job involving long stretches of boredom punctuated by very rare, high-stakes, split-second reaction moments, so they shouldn't be allowed to operate past a certain point of fatigue.
I peeked at some statistics, and it looks like there were around 4,000 fatalities involving large trucks. Out of (I'm assuming this includes commercial vehicles) 35,000 total vehicle fatalities.
11% is not nothing, but it's also not the 89% chunk.
Long stretches of boredom punctuated by split-second reaction moments also describes my driving... and I can do that in anything 5 tons or under without any sort of regulation (except a passed driver's license test some number of years ago).
I agree the affront to liberty and personal agency is bad.
The regulation exists because of the unacceptable collision rate that truckers were having on public roads. Citizens compel the government to act when their relatives die due to a few irresponsible truckers who fall asleep behind the wheel.
The truckers in your family are probably responsible and know their limits. Brand new truckers ---or those who don't have the leverage to push back to an employer who expects them to drive dangerously long hours--- might not be responsible.
And you, and the regulators are very wrong. Since I have eLog in my cab (mandatory for all trucks by the end of the year), I can't cheat in any way. Meaning I'm forced to drive to meet my delivery obligations when I'm falling asleep. I also forced to sit 10 hours during my break, quite often in less than pleasant conditions. I don't need 10 hours for sleep. I need 6. I waste other 4 browsing hacker sites. Then I work 14 hours very much without any meaningful breaks(to browse above mentioned sites). Until recently, before we had elogs, I could juggle a paper log. Now I can't. Now I have the big brother computer, which is totally hackable, thank you government. The monstrosity you so afraid of just became much worse. Now about anyone with little skills can take control over my truck. Trucks are part of IoT nowadays. Just think about it. 40 ton monstrosity connected to Internet
The lack of perspective of this comment is amazing. My brother is a DOT guy who regulates this stuff.
Their freedom is restricted because given the choice of pissing off the boss and putting people at risk, drivers and companies often choose the later.
My brother almost got hit by a semi at a weigh station when it took too long too stop -- because only one brake was functioning. He stopped a Chinatown bus venting exhaust into the cabin, also brakes were on fire. Another time they caught a guy who drove straight through from San Diego to Syracuse on amphetemine.
The regulations are there to protect the driving public. Violators are actively policed, and companies who break the rules get shut down.
See my comment above for some of my general problems with trucking vs non-trucking regulation.
To your specific points, the company and drivers' interests usually aren't in lockstep.
Unfortunately, the company usually has the power. Correct me if I'm wrong on some of the details here.
But when a driver's in another city and picks up a trailer that's been overloaded, or one with bad tires or faulty brakes, if they choose to pull it then they're the one that gets nailed with the DOT ticket. Correct?
I know some trucking companies have reimbursement policies, but that seems like a really perverse incentive structure. Why not find out who the driver is contracted to for the load & fine the hell out of them? It's their trailer after all!
My problem isn't that there's regulation. It's that some pieces (like the above, and the absolute cutoff times for logbooks) seems like it was designed by someone who wasn't overly burdened with imagination, empathy, or an inkling of game theory.
(And on the driver-vs-company fines, I'm basing my guess on most of them accruing against the driver by the fact that trucking companies generally seem to be pushing drivers to make the shady choices)
I'm not sure of the mechanics of the process, but the regulators know that the drivers are in the middle and they definitely target bad carriers when they can. There's a lot of gaps between what is state regulated and what is federally regulated, and shitty carriers know how to skirt enforcement by basing in low-regulation states and using the best trucks for the longer routes that are federally regulated.
The driver shares responsibility. If a trailer is overloaded and has bald tires and brakes, he shouldn't pick it up. The driver has a strong incentive to tow the line as his CDL is his livelihood, and serious violations can affect that. (In addition to his life.)
The problem is that the carrier may or may not care and most drivers have little leverage. My uncle was a teamster driver. If he showed up to pick up a load and it was overloaded or unsafe, he'd go to the dock master, tell him to get the overload off the trailer and refuse to pick up. If you work for JimBob Trucking from Alabama, you may be on your own.
As for the inflexibility -- you need to be inflexible sometimes. You don't need game theory to state that trucks must have brakes, or that drivers must sleep. The fact is that a human's performance of occupational tasks diminishes as you stay awake. If someone is up for 17 hours, they will perform as if they are drunk.
It's funny, truck drivers seem an ideal fit for unionization, but tend to skew politically anti-union (in the South and Midwest at least).
Agreed that drivers have responsibility for a load they pick up, but my understanding is that with the new eLog systems there's less opportunity for "flex time". So if you arrive at a yard and need to get a container swapped to a new trailer or have them pull a different trailer then you're still on the clock. Which gets dicey when the yard knows this and says "Sure, we'll get you a new trailer. It'll just take a couple hours. We're really busy right now..."
The ideal would be the unionized situation you outlined, where there's a strong, independent driver's advocate to mediate disputes.
And agreed that there's a hard cliff where no one should be allowed to drive. But if it's 11 hours in the seat max, then what if you sat in traffic at a port for 5 of those? Is that driver as tired as someone doing 11 hours of interstate miles?
Paper logs afforded both drivers and regulators a judge-like discretion that I think lubricated the wheels with reasonableness while still dissuading repeated patterns of risky behavior.
eLog (assuming they fix all the loopholes in the terribly implemented first gen systems) doesn't provide that flexibility.
Which, in general, is a problem I think we're going to have to deal with more and more. You can't take partially enforced laws that worked, implement technical measures to absolutely enforce them, and expect everything to be the same as it was before. (E.g. if police departments started sueing for Google Maps tracking data and handing out tickets whenever a speed limit was exceeded)
14-16 hours of wakefulness is where you start hitting levels of impairment that are equivalent to 0.04BAC, which is the DUI threshold for CDL drivers. Doesn't matter if you are driving, reading, etc.
"There's a lot more friendly ways the legislation could ave been written: Work hour cap per week, different classes of CDL/ experience means different caps, etc."
Only these do not solve the issue. The issue is that working longer shifts puts people's lives in danger. You could legislate in some worker protections for the driver, making it more likely these things do not happen. But they wouldn't make the laws any less necessary.
When I was in high school, several of my classmates had jobs as tomato pickers. The interesting thing was that some of them got paid per tomato while others got paid by the hour. The ones that were paid per tomato definitely seemed to work a lot harder. So much so that they didn't want to waste time on bathroom breaks and just peed between the tomato plants instead.
This essentially taught me two things: 1) performance pay really works and 2) always wash your vegetables.
It seems like you should get paid (perhaps a slightly reduced hourly rate) if you're waiting for the truck to be loaded. That's completely outside of your control and yet I assume you must be in control of the truck the entire time?
I do think the mileage incentive makes sense because it forces you to be clever about your route. But not getting paid while a truck is loaded seems like total bullshit and basically another example of companies building their business off the backs of workers.
If I'm not mistaken, the truckers are generally 1099 contractors (owner-operators), so it's not that they are just clocked out when they aren't moving, but they are paid by the mile to the destination. Of course, that results in the same effect as described above, but it hopefully adds some context.
Some are owner/operators, many are not. I don't know the breakdown, but many people who drive trucks for a living do not have the financial resources or credit score to be able to buy their own truck (generally a purchase between $150,000 - $200,000 or more, with that much again in annual operating costs).
> Isn't all that exactly why taxicab meters have a hail fee and then measure both time and distance?
The meters only charge for time when the cab isn't moving, or is moving slowly... This enabled a passenger to run in to a convenience store, and it would be worthwhile for the driver to wait for the passenger to buy their beer (or whatever). Sometimes my passengers would ask me to stop the meter so it wouldn't run up on them ("sure"), others expected it and were fine with the arrangement.
It looks like the gorilla rideshare company slashed their per-minute rate in Phoenix since I last checked - used to be $0.25/min, now is $0.09/min. This makes it not worthwhile for the "ride share" driver to wait for their passenger to run into a store... In theory, since the "rides" show up instantaneously it's more efficient to get a new ride rather than make stops.
Since the "ridesharing" apps charge for both time & distance, the posted price-per-mile makes it seem like you're getting a better deal than you are. 3-4 minutes/mile adds $0.27-$0.36 to the cost for every mile of travel, at $0.09/min.
If rides could show up instantly, it would be more efficient to just get a new 'ride' for every leg of your trip. But Phoenix is spread out, and you can't always count on a car being nearby.
It typically took me 7 minutes to get to a pickup address, which included a minute to plug the address into my navigation software (the taxi company I used to drive for now has a phone app that automagically directs the driver to the pickup address, just like the upstarts' system). The mother of a friend of mine has taken to using "Lifts" when she needs to go someplace where she'd rather not have to park. I explained that the driver she was getting might not actually be just around the corner.
The big problem here is that if you're at the terminal waiting on a load, you're "on-duty, not driving." This is a specific status as it relates to federal motor carrier regulations that govern the hours a driver can operate. Once you've hit 14 hours of "on duty" time for the day you can't drive any longer.
Some major carriers will ask drivers to fudge this, although the rules are actually pretty strict about this. Notably, Wal-Mart has come under a lot of criticism in the past for asking drivers to mark time waiting for a truck to be loaded/unloaded as "off duty" instead of "on duty, not driving."
There are parts of the job that are 100% essential to have done, yet it is OK to not pay a driver for doing it - like putting fuel in the truck. I don't understand it.
There are too many companies that ask drivers to fudge the books. My dad has worked for a handful of them and finally found a nice place where he doesn't have to worry about that kind of request. I think it is more common than people think.
You're joking right? Here and in other software circles MBAs and other business people are constantly looked down upon as being a waste of time and money.
I really doubt he was trying to make a point about engineers....
It's important that there be jobs for people without much education. When I was in my twenties I volunteered as a reading instructor. One of the students was a trucker in his late 30s who had never learned to read. He had just memorized certain routes and took the same ones. He wanted to read so he could get better jobs.
Not a dumb guy, but he'd slipped off the rails at a very early age, and dropped out of school as soon as he could. He did already know the alphabet and numbers. He was embarrassed to even talk about this with his peers.
Abstract ideas of "job retraining" may sound great but I think they are generally unrealistic. Folks who figured they were "done with school" at 18 or even 22 and then find themselves unemployed in their 40s have a hard time changing direction in my somewhat limited experience.
(But those students at community college who are aged between late 30 and 50? Really driven. It's embarrassing to compare typical college students to them.)
Wages should be higher. Considering inflation, minimum wage workers in the 60's made more than they do today. The issue is labor surplus caused by both globalization and illegal immigration.
Edit: To those downvoting me, could you explain why? Because minimum wage has decreased[1], wages have been stagnant[2], and globalization has undeniably affected the midwest negatively[3]. I suppose the impact of illegal immigration is up for debate, but when you have 10 million illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage in a country of 300 million, of course there will be wage suppression.
No, wages should not be higher. The cost of living should be lower. Productivity increases year over year. It should be much cheaper to have a decent life today than in the 60s. Plenty of people in other countries live a lot better than many Americans on a lot less money per day. We need to ask ourselves why.
It's not potato pahtahto. Many US jobs are in competition with third world wages. If you raise wages 1000 dollars and increase cost of living 1000 it isn't a wash, since some companies might choose to outsource.
Americans shouldn't be competing with workers in third world countries. That behavior leads to a race to the bottom to see what country is willing to offer the cheapest labor, lowering the standard of living for everyone except the business owners.
I'm sorry, but this is the kind of low-effort response that I come here to avoid. There's no substance, nothing thought-provoking, just conjecture designed to illicit an emotional response.
It doesn't necessarily have to lower the standard of living for everyone. Goods and services can get cheaper alongside purchasing power leading to the standard of living being approximately the same. It's not a problem for labor to be cheaper if the cost of living also becomes cheaper. It only lowers the standard of living if the ratio of income to cost of living drops.
Those at the bottom today have a standard of living that is in many ways better than the standard of living of a billionaire a century ago. Why? Productivity gains.
There have absolutely been productivity gains, but those gains haven't been going to the workers. Return on labor has dropped, with the corporations seeing the gains. In the 70's in America, a laborer in a single worker family could afford a house, car, and retirement. Can a laborer in a third world country do the same?
The gains on increases in productivity have gone to workers, just not the workers being replaced. The gains are going to the workers implementing the automation that has increased productivity. The gains are also going to the consumers in the form of cheaper goods and services. Why would those not responsible for the productivity gains be entitled to those gains?
Well and according to metrics, it's also raising the standard of living for the world's poorest, who have been leaving poverty at record rates. It's a shame the evidence doesn't support your narrative. It's such a popular stance that one would hope it was more than a construct of untruth.
You can measure a country's success not by how much its top-earners pull down but by how much those at the bottom make.
> It should be much cheaper to have a decent life today than in the 60s.
It would be if not for the problem of housing and transportation being vastly more expensive than they were in the 1960s. You could get a cheap suburban home back then for less than a year's salary. Try that now and you're living 300 miles from the nearest city.
> It would be if not for the problem of housing and transportation being vastly more expensive than they were in the 1960s. You could get a cheap suburban home back then for less than a year's salary. Try that now and you're living 300 miles from the nearest city.
You've now correctly identified the problem. Housing costs in the US are out of control and have been for a long time because we have policies that promote housing as an investment asset that should always grow in value. Many baby boomers have their entire net worth tied up in housing and have supported policies for decades that increase the value of that asset to support their retirement. Housing has become a vehicle for an inter-generational transfer of wealth from the young to the old.
"Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconveniency to the society? The answer seems at first sight abundantly plain. Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged."
it's worth noting that housing has also gotten much bigger since the 1960s. A source worth looking at is the American Housing Survey, which is put out by the US Census Bureau.
What I find most telling is that average housing in 1970 is comparable to sub-poverty-line housing right now, in terms of total square footage and number of rooms -- and average housing in 1970 had considerably fewer amenities (fewer full bathrooms, less likely to have a full kitchen, much less likely to have AC or in-unit washer/dryer, etc.)
I won't attempt to tease out all of the issues that led to this, from changes in demand to zoning regulations to developer preferences. Just pointing out that "housing inflation" is a major driving factor in the cost of housing. As others have pointed out, there isn't a lot of affordable housing inventory, particularly not in big cities.
If those houses were less then houses available now, it would also be worth looking at how they compared to high income housing of the era. My guess is these changes have been societal and it's proper to assume that cost should decrease or stay the same while function improves.
you can see from the link malandrew provided about American spending habits (in a sibling comment to mine) that Americans are spending considerably more on housing, on average.
I don't believe the surveys cover "high-income" housing, but they do show median / middle-income housing growing by the mid 2010s to roughly triple the 1970s square footage. Inflation-adjusted, that means lower cost per square foot.
But it's certainly worth thinking about whether the shift to much bigger housing has been an entirely positive one, or whether it has drawbacks.
It may be said that of this hard lot no one has any reason to complain, because it befalls those only who are outstripped by others, from inferiority of energy or of prudence. This, even were it true, would be a very small alleviation of the evil. If some Nero or Domitian were to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to death, it would not be any diminution of the injustice that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape. The misery and the crime would be that any were put to death at all. So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements.
I'm from one of the countries where we live a lot worse than Americans for a lot more per day (New Zealand). What first world country is 'better' in that regard than America?
There's a huge difference between "wages should be higher" and "it should be illegal to pay low wages". Like, this is the difference between "people should have housing" and "being homeless should be illegal". Outlawing a thing does not fix the economic forces that generate it.
The minimum wage is an effort to increase the welfare of those whose skills are in excess supply.
Economics is complicated and far from reliable. The idea that removing the minimum wage would result in full employment is ridiculous. It would make businesses richer and subject millions of people to worse poverty. There is open debate that the minimum wage even reduces employment [1].
If you don't address other costs, rising minimum wages can end up putting employers out of business. Now you have a decline in the supply of minimum wage jobs.
I'm not being precise. I do not have the expertise to debate this.
When I talk about the minimum wage, what really matters is what that income can buy you. Rather than discussing nominal wage and associated costs let's just combine them and talk about real wages.
Clearly there is a point where a higher minimum wage (real) is infeasible and detrimental.
In my opinion there is a wide range of minimum wages (real) that raise the welfare of those whose skill is in excess supply.
>The minimum wage is an effort to increase the welfare of those whose skills are in excess supply.
It's an inefficient one. We can do a better job at improving their welfare at a lower overall cost.`
>The idea that removing the minimum wage would result in full employment is ridiculous.
I'm not arguing that at all.
>It would make businesses richer and subject millions of people to worse poverty.
So combine abolishing the minimum wage with a complimentary policy that makes businesses poorer and alleviate the poverty of millions. A minimum wage is not the only way to make employers pay to alleviate the poverty of the working poor.
"It's an inefficient one. We can do a better job at improving their welfare at a lower overall cost."
So show us anywhere in the Western world that does that; improves the welfare of the poor without a minimum wage.
But show us with evidence from other countries that are currently employing the system, don't defer to untested and unproven "it could be so if..." claims, please.
It's essentially the same here in Norway and so far the system is working reasonably well. It does mean that my job as a software developer doesn't pay as well as it might in the US but on the other hand I have a lot more security; I can't be fired without cause, notice periods are six months after working for the company for ten years, etc., redundancy compensation is generally reasonable, and so on.
Compared to the US, I think there might be a shortage of truly affluent individuals. Are there angel investors in Norway, that can give a new startup a chance?
As the population of Norway is less than 1/60th part of the US then there is bound to be a massive difference of course but they do exist and Norway does in fact have quite a few fairly well off people. There is even a Wikipedia page listing the top six. Norway is ranked 25th in the world in number of billionaires with 14 so in terms of billionaires per capita it beats the US by a fair margin. Of course, their total wealth is much less.
Anyway, yes there are angel investors and companies that exist only to match them to those needing the money. Again, probably not on the scale you will find in Silicon Valley.
Deadweight losses. A bored teenager that'd rather have $3 than an hour of his time sits at home. A retired person would rather tell stories to a bored teenager for an hour than have $3. The law says that it's illegal to make this trade, even though both parties are better off afterwards.
There's other issues from messing with prices - shortages/surpluses, excesses or deficiencies of quality, search costs, and misallocation of resources. It really all boils down to the same thing, though. Prices provide feedback between what buyers want and what sellers provide. Mess with prices, and society starts lying to itself about what it wants or how hard getting it is. Do Not Mess With Prices.
>When you propose an alternate solution I'd like to see it in practice before throwing millions of people to the wolves.
We have an alternate solution, we just reserve it for people who somehow "deserve" to be treated humanely through virtue of being disabled or elderly. Everyone deserves to be treated humanely. Expand the current welfare system to everyone, eliminate the incentive distortions from means and needs-testing people, and pay for it through tax increases.
Okay, you are a proponent of basic income. There are pilot programs happening. We'll see how that works out.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Are the inefficiencies you mentioned significant? I suggest you read the empirical studies section of the Wikipedia article.
I think you can have an opinion but I don't think you can treat it as fact.
Note: your example of the teenager seems ridiculous as people get paid under the table all the time.
Edit: prices are always messed with. Inefficiencies are created and removed every day. A minimum wage is just a large union saying we want our share of the value we create. If you want to argue that they are messing with the efficiency of the economy or are shooting themselves in the foot then you should have damn good evidence.
"Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated." - Thomas Sowell
The biggest problem with minimum wage is that it amounts to a half-assed universal basic income implementation, but one that is funded by a regressive tax (i.e. the poor you are, the more you pay).
The reason is straightforward - a higher minimum wage disproportionally affects goods and services produced by employees that get paid said wage, or close to it. These tend to be the cheaper products on the market, and so the poorer you are, the more such products are in your consumption budget. Obviously everyone has a substantial amount, so the tax is still spread around - but poor still end up paying proportionally more of it.
For another perspective at the same problem, consider what happens when the wage gets raised. Now your paycheck is higher - but so is the cost of your food, most likely, because the people producing it were also paid little, and are now paid slightly more. So the actual increase in purchasing power is less than the nominal dollar amount - and the difference is proportional to how many cheap (= produced by low-paid labor) products you consume. Whereas someone on the high middle class end of the spectrum will see some minor increases in restaurant bills and such, but it's a blip on the radar compared to their income (and their mortgage, education costs, car loan etc).
The obvious conclusion is that we should stop being half-assed about it, recognize that our existing arrangement, between min. wage and unemployment insurance, is already a kind of UBI, acknowledge that it means that we as a society are already okay with the moral argument behind UBI, and work on implementing it ASAP.
The minimum wage is there to prevent abuse of workers.
It's pretty obvious why when you look at the near slavery conditions that abused workers doing things like picking tomatos in Florida are subjected to. Shitty businessmen get away with nasty shit when workers lack protection.
The difference between today and 75 years ago is that we now import second class humans again who lack access to basic rights and import goods manufactured by peasants abroad.
I can't really explain here why I'm in this situation for a few reasons (particularly anonymity - if my employer finds out I've said any of this I'll be fired and his "friends" will come for a visit), but here's what I can say:
my employer is a thief. Tax fraud, wage theft, copyright violation. Staff are expendable, and routinely fired for not working certain shifts (illegal, because the staff are hired for differing shifts and are not required to work extra). Contract fraud, multiple different types of harassment and abuse of staff, as well as threats against personal safety.
Basically, anything he can get away with to pocket a few dollars, he will do. I'm sure you can imagine that minimum wage is, to him, a target; if it didn't exist, he would pay us much less.
What keeps him in business is powerful friends in government (in a country with "low levels of corruption") who seem to help complaints get lost rather than actioned, and the local gangs who will have a chat with anybody who gets out of line.
> my employer is a thief. Tax fraud, wage theft, copyright violation. Staff are expendable, ... What keeps him in business is powerful friends in government (in a country with "low levels of corruption")
That sound horrible.
Is there anything that can be done to bring such people to justice without exposing dvtv75?
My girlfriend, who worked for US Customs, has a story about the sugar industry here in South Florida. Sugar harvesting is done in the winter and the companies, for quality reasons, prefer to have the cane hand harvested. The companies would bring in island workers (legally) to work the three month harvest. The work was hard and by US standards, low paying. But per island standards, those three months brought in enough money for the harvester to not only not work for the remaining nine months, but raise a family.
But enough outcry about the companies "exploiting" the islanders was enough for the companies to say "uncle," and automate the harvest with machines. I'm sure that had an effect on the economies of the islands.
> The minimum wage is there to prevent abuse of workers.
It does part of that, but creates a precarious position for most of the workers. If the minimum wage is higher than the market-clearing wage (as might be evidenced by 100s of applicants for every opening at a fast food restaurant), then the employer knows there is little repercussion for firing (or force-quitting) an employee.
"Plenty more where they came from" and the employee knows that they just passed the 100:1 gauntlet to get this job, so they're a bit more inclined to put up with BS.
I see this continuing assumption that businesses of any sort always maintain minimum profits distributed so efficiently that any increase in worker pay always translates to increased product cost, perhaps because of an assumption that the owner class either is not taking an 'arbitrage' style profit, or cannot possibly seek to be competitive through taking less owner profit.
The rest of the argument I'm quite sympathetic to. It just always puzzles me, this assumption that labor share will always destroy itself by turning into exactly increased costs, as if owner profit was either nothing, or completely non-negotiable.
It's worse than inefficient. It's actively counter-productive, as it increases welfare at the expense of reducing the number of opportunities to benefit from that welfare.
Economists disagree about this issue. Lots of the people who are affected by the minimum wage support it.
Remember, it's okay to not know something.
Edit: thanks for the source. I don't think an analysis of the minimum wages affect on restaurant exits answers the question "Is the minimum wage good for those whose skills are in excess supply?". It may be bad for the number of restaurants but is it bad for restaurant workers?
If the number of restaurants declines, so does the number of restaurant jobs. Those that still have a restaurant job are better off until they find themselves in the market again, at which time they will be competing with more people for fewer jobs. Effectively, you've just transferred income from some restaurant workers to other restaurant workers and eliminated the income for some restaurant owners who went out of business. Those restaurants that do survive also end up reducing the number of staff or shifts available to maintain their profit margin.
No. You've transfered from customers/restaurant owners/unemployed to the workers. The unemployed get unemployment, which is a transfer from the workers.
There are smarter people than us who are debating this. Maybe you shouldn't hold this opinion so strongly.
> There are smarter people than us who are debating this. Maybe you shouldn't hold this opinion so strongly.
An ad hominem is not an argument. If we're going with logical fallacies to make our case, I'm going to appeal to authority: I understand this pretty well as I used to work directly on macro-economic reports at the largest broker dealer in Latin America upon which many international institutional investors based their investment decisions. Unfortunately, the citizens of the country whose economy I covered (Brazil) didn't understand these economics issues (among many), which among the reasons why its economy has contracted over 3% for the past 2+ years.
You're assuming that it's a strict wealth transfer where the size of the pie stays the same. It does not. The pie gets smaller when you reduce economic activity, which raising the minimum wage accomplishes as it eliminates jobs and puts businesses out of business. You can lie to yourself by using welfare to prop things up, but that doesn't work so well when the amount of taxes you collect to fund your welfare state drops as the economy shrinks. Eventually that gravy train runs out of steam.
I didn't assume that. I was just correcting your statement about what transfers were occurring.
I do not consider myself an expert on this topic. It's good that you do. However, your evidence is weak. You have made a leap from restaurant exits to minimum wage is bad for the workers.
That there is disagreement among people better informed than I suggests I shouldn't hold my opinion strongly without good reason.
The source isn't particularly meaningful. Restaurants need to be cheap or great. No middle ground survives. The 3.5 star restaurants, who are generally dead men wakling anyway just hasten the their exit.
It's better to look at similar localities where there are constrasting costs. There are still stores in Philadelphia and Trenton even though sales tax is 0% in Delaware. Likewise, counties or adjoining states with higher wages than neighbors are still able to compete.
I worked for a retail chain in college and saw the regional numbers. The marginal differences in wages between stores in different jurisdictions was insignificant. Our stores had about 100 employees -- a $1 delta was a few thousand bucks... peanuts that barely registered in the bottom line.
The problem with that paper is that other research that looks at employment figures across industries doesn't show a decrease in employment when the minimum wage is raised. Which I assume is why you cited that paper.
So while that paper's data and conclusion may be sound, neither that paper nor other research supports the notion that low-skilled labor demand is, overall, strongly responsive to changes in the minimum wage.
That said, there are a ton of problems in that paper. Their estimates on changes in restaurant entry in the same timeframe as exit were statistically insignificant, so they gratuitously look at a completely different timeframe and data set which happens to support their conclusion.
Economies are just too complex and multifaceted to be able to say that a minimum wage bump will clearly decrease employment. It's worth noting that the political pressure to increase wages doesn't happen in a vacuum. For example, presumably the political pressure exerted is a function of wealth inequality and thus of the capacity for the local economy to redistribute income downward.
This incredible complexity is why you get such counterintuitive results, such as that American corporate investments were highest when taxes were highest, decreasing as corporate taxes decreased, so that today both investment and taxes are at their lowest.
What other industries? Are these other industries businesses where minimum wage laborers are a significant part of the labor? An increase in minimum wage isn't going to hurt businesses in an industry where you have few if any minimum wage laborers.
If you have specific contradictory evidence, cite it instead of a vague handwavy response.
By across industries I meant studies that look at the impact of minimum wage changes in geographic regions, which would include not only the restaurant industry but all industries. For example, some studies have looked at metropolitan areas that span multiple jurisdictions (i.e. straddling a state line) where one jurisdiction increased the minimum wage but the other didn't, so that you have something approximating a control group.
If you look at all the literature, the results are mixed and equivocal, at least for modest changes in the minimum wage. See the empirical studies section on Wikipedia
or a discussion of minimum wage studies in an economics textbook, such as
The Economic Way of Thinking, Paul L. Heyne, et al.
Fundamental economic laws tells us that an increase in the minimum wage should result in a decrease in labor demand. But the numerous empirical studies are so equivocal and so obviously confounded that it's utterly naive to assume (as we normally assume, and indeed normally should assume) to see a simple labor demand response. Exogenous and second-order effects seem to be huge. So whenever you see a study that purports to claim (or is held out to evidence) either that an increase in the minimum wage decreases overall labor demand _or_ that it decreases income inequality, we should be highly skeptical.
Of course, the paper you cited doesn't make any claims about aggregate labor demand, nor even labor demand in the restaurant industry. It only looks at exists and entries using some novel data sources. The only truly interesting thing about that paper, IMO, is it's novel use of Yelp. That paper raises a ton of questions--good questions--about data sources and methodologies. I wouldn't venture to rely on it's conclusions for any economics argument.
"Our analysis proceeds in three stages. First, we provide evidence that lower quality
businesses [as measured by Yelp rating] are, on average, closer to the margin of exit and fail at higher rates than higher quality
restaurants irrespective of the minimum wage level. A one-star increase in rating is associated
with more than a 50% decrease in the likelihood of going out of business. This qualitative
relationship holds both with and without restaurant effects.
"We then exploit the multiple city-level minimum wage changes in recent years across the
Bay Area to implement a difference-in-differences design to investigate the effects of the
minimum wage. We find suggestive evidence that a higher minimum wage leads to overall
increases in restaurant exit rates – depending on the specification, we find that a $1 increase in
the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of exit,
although the estimate is only statistically significant in certain specifications.
"Next, we present robust evidence that the impact of the minimum wage varies with the
rating of the business. Our point estimates suggest that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads
to an approximate 14 percent increase in the likelihood of exit for the median 3.5-star restaurant
but the impact falls to zero for five-star restaurants. These effects are robust to a number of
different specifications, including controlling for time-varying county characteristics that may
influence both minimum wage policies and restaurant demand, city-specific time trends to
account for preexisting trends, as well as county-year fixed effects to control for spatial
heterogeneity in exit trends."
The minimum wage is an effort to increase the welfare of those whose skills are in excess supply.
No, that is entirely unrelated to why it was created.
It was created because The Deep South was unwilling to pay a black man "a white man's wages" and blacks were routinely paid about half what whites made for the exact same job. The policy was initially a failure. Businesses in the South fired blacks en masse rather than pay a black man the same as a white. This did not change until WW2 caused very serious labor shortages.
Minimum wage was an antiracism policy aimed at forcing the Deep South to get more in line with the rest of the nation and stop having Jim Crow bullshit linger on in the form of literally paying blacks half as much as whites. It was intended to put a stop to that practice.
Whatever they do with it now for REASONS, the original federal minimum wage law was passed for the above reason.
> Minimum wage was an antiracism policy aimed at forcing the Deep South
Could you offer some support for this claim? There is a recent book called "Illiberal Reformers" that seems to suggest exactly the opposite: that minimum wage policies were put in place with the intent of putting minorities out of work (rather than raising their standard of living).
"""
The low-standard or undercutting-of-wages part of the theory, got its start with the violent activism of white Americans against Chinese immigrant workers. The title of a pamphlet published by the American Federation of Labor trenchantly captured the heart of the claim: Meat versus Rice: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive? If wages were determined by living standards rather than by productivity, then the meat-eating Anglo-Saxon could not compete with the Chinese worker accustomed to eating rice.
Professor Woodrow Wilson, in his popular History of the American People, preferred the same theory of low-standard races undercutting American wages, adding a fillip of racism to cement the notion that race explained the low standards. White laborers, unable to "live upon a handful of rice for a pittance," could not compete with the Chinese, "who with their yellow skin and strange debasing habits of life seemed to them hardly fellow men at all but evil spirits, rather."
"""
I read a really excellent and well researched book on the history of the deep south some years ago. It began with trying to define "The Deep South" and listed out the many conflicting definitions. Some definitions include Florida, others do not. Some include Texas, others do not. Some include states on the northern edge of the area, some do not.
It laid this out very credibly. It had a very respectable list of sources. The author talked about getting original copies from someone who was old of some of the papers and what not that he referenced.
Sadly, I cannot remember the name of the book. If I can find it, I will let you know.
Also, I have read a different theory than the one you cite for why Asians ended up working on, for example, the rail lines that were laid across the U.S. It involved the fact that they drank tea, thus they boiled their water. This protected them from getting diseases that often laid up white workers in harsh settings where the water was not always safe to drink without boiling.
The racist explanations you list sound to me like explanations created by people living through the fallout who were expressing their anger rather than genuinely analyzing the situation.
Those lesser races included Irish and most Catholics as well, blacks were literally a whipping boy used both as cheap labor and way to keep lesser white races in line. End of the day people are assholes.
Many of these things can be read in different ways. The modern interpretation is to read everything through a racial lens, but I don't think that captures the essence of the issue. The initial minimum wage laws really targeted sweatshops and child labor. It was viewed then that these employers had way too much power over labor and were depressing wages overall.
Where to draw the line between anti-Chinese antagonism and pushing out predatory business is subjective. But I think if you look at the circumstances surrounding the issue and the laws, you'll find more of the latter.
How Deep South are we talking? The first and second nations in the world to introduce minimum wage laws (New Zealand and Australia, both are pretty South) weren't ever slave states, about 40 years before the US caught on. It was introduced for welfare reasons - to ensure people had a living wage. A few other places had minimum wage before the US as well.
> this is the difference between "people should have housing" and "being homeless should be illegal"
Whoa, that's a bit of a strawman innit? If someone proposed punishment for workers getting paid less than X, it'd be an appropriate analogy. But people are instead proposing punishment for employers who pay workers less than X.
To be relevant, your analogy ought to be something like "evicting people should be illegal".
You could argue that mandatory minimum wages are a poor way of raising incomes. It's basically putting the burden solely on employers. Some people argue that this means businesses become less competitive, which leads them to hire less. Perhaps abandoning the minimum wage, but replacing it with a basic income, e.g. through a negative income tax, might yield better results. I don't know enough about it to have strong opinions on this, but just wanted to point out that minimum wages are just one solution/tool.
You're forgetting automation. Unskilled labor is valued less now; i don't think you can pin everything on labor surplus (especially illegal immigration) when the labor market itself is restricting.
I haven't forgotten. Automation isn't the reason manufacturing was shipped to Asia in the 70's, though. It's not why manufacturing was shipped to Mexico in the 90's. The cheap labor is the reason.
"A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation."
If you're not paying your labour what it costs them to survive, you're not operating a business. You're running a charity in which the hired help spills their life-force for the owner.
Automation is a good thing, even when it reduces jobs.
If a human is doing some work that a robot could do, the human is essentially being used as a substitute for that robot, and economics will inevitably result in them being treated as such.
If the sole point of having a human do that job is so that they can collect a paycheck, this is a thinly veiled form of a broken window fallacy - in this case, the hypothetical robot is "broken" to allow the human to step in and "fix" the problem. This is inherently an inefficient arrangement - it reduces overall productivity, which in turn reduces the total surplus value generated by the economy, that could have been used for things like welfare.
In essence, restricting automation for the sake of job preservation is welfare - except it's a very inefficient form of it, because you're wasting human labor in the process, and then there's the social cost of unhappiness for all those people forced to work shitty and meaningless jobs.
The only reason why this approach is even seriously considered is because we, as a society, can't divorce ourselves from the concept that you must work to earn a living. So when faced with technological progress that plainly invalidates this notion, we construct elaborate schemes that allow us to preserve the veneer of "propriety" as we understand it, while substantially redefining it - and we do so at the cost of considerable overhead.
It's insane. I don't expect it to change anytime soon, however.
Because of the very problem that we're discussing - that automation drives humans out of jobs. Whether in 20 years or in 200, we'll inevitably get to the point where there's simply less work that has to be done (to keep the lights on, so to speak), than there are humans. At that point, saying that you must work to earn a living amounts to saying that some proportion of the population deserves to die - since there isn't enough jobs for all the people. Or, alternatively, it amounts to saying that people must perform meaningless work to live, for the sake of... I don't know what exactly?
> the means of production naturally belong to all humans collectively
I don't think anything "naturally" belongs to anyone. The whole notion of property and its ownership does not exist in nature - it's a social construct. So it's up to us to figure out the arrangement that works best, depending on our definition of "best". That is also inherently subjective - some people would claim that it's best for property rights to be absolute and inviolable, as a guarantee of stability, for example.
I think that long-term, some form of collective ownership is the only way to stabilize. But I don't know what form it would take. I doubt it would be anything similar to self-proclaimed socialist states of our age, which have clearly failed in that regard (indeed, many lefties argue that they don't actually have society-wide collective property ownership, but instead it's the collective ownership by the ruling bureaucratic elites - "the Party" etc - excluding your average citizen).
> being born entitles you to be kept alive by the rest of your species
We're clearly heading in this direction. In fact, I would even say that first world societies have already adopted this maxim in fullest, it's just not worded quite so bluntly. If you go around and ask people this exact question, many would probably say "no". But if you go around and ask the same people about specific policies like free healthcare, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, ER not allowed to turn people away etc, that all add up to the same thing, you'll find a lot of people in favor.
> resources should be allocated based on need
This follows from the previous point, with the caveat that the "need" here is not some arbitrary subjective desire, but what's deemed to be a real need by social consensus. What this consensus is, exactly, will likely evolve over time - today we mostly talk about food, shelter and healthcare, but we're already starting to discuss e.g. access to Internet as a basic right. The logical conclusion to that is something like what Bujold described in "Barrayar":
“Poor?” said Cordelia, bewildered. “No electricity? How can it be on the com network?”
“It’s not, of course,” answered Vorkosigan.
“Then how can anybody get their schooling?”
“They don’t.”
Cordelia stared. “I don’t understand. How do they get their jobs?”
“A few escape to the Service. The rest prey on each other, mostly.” Vorkosigan regarded her face uneasily. “Have you no poverty on Beta Colony?”
“Poverty? Well, some people have more money than others, of course, but . . . no comconsoles?”
Vorkosigan was diverted from his interrogation. “Is not owning a comconsole the lowest standard of living you can imagine?” he said in wonder.
“It’s the first article in the constitution. ‘Access to information shall not be abridged.’ ”
Thanks for answering despite the blunt wording. I think it makes for a more honest discussion, but it riles some people up to the point of derailing debate.
Curious: do you see these questions as anything more than questions about "what is consensus at this time?" Does it even make sense to seek an answer on a different level than an opinion poll?
In other words, can morality be more than popular opinion?
Absolutely. I don't mean to imply that one's individual morality is in any way subject to popular opinion. I'm talking mainly about popular opinion in this context, because that sets boundaries of what can be done politically (and remain stable long term). But, of course, there's still the moral imperative to influence that opinion in the direction that you consider more right and proper.
How did he pass the multiple choice driver's test? You must be able to read at least some language in NC to pass it(I think it also in Spanish and something else). I took it recently so something might have changed since you were teaching.
Go to a graduate engineering program, find the worst speaking foreigner. He has passed the toffle exam and probably outscored the Americans in the English GRE.
Then ask yourself: how?
(In case anyone's offended, I'm a foreigner with ESL)
In 91 when I took my commercial license test (Passenger), the machine I used was video (well more PowerPoint / HyperCard) and had pictures of the situation and big colored buttons with the letters. It didn't take a lot of language skills.
I just took a regular license test, and it had headphones providing narration accompanying on-screen animation. Someone who can't read could certainly pass it with no trouble at all. It is probably designed that way.
I knew a guy that was an orphan shipped around endlessly until college. An old friend of mine (since passed) found him pushing carts or something and got him into community college.
I lived with him when he transferred into uni. He couldn't read very well until junior year but he forced himself to learn to read and write. He was never completely illiterate but maybe a 4th grade reading level when I met him.
It's been 5 years since then and you would never know. He graduated college and got a solid job, and his reading and writing skills are basically normal.
I agree that there must be jobs, but with one important and subtle distinction. There should always be jobs for anyone willing to work. The difference is it leaves out the subtle dehumanization implied in your response (and I know it was unintended), and leaves out our limited, market-driven and popsci ideals about human intelligence out of it.
We have all met some damn smart people who never went to college, or learned how to read or write profeciently. My father was brilliant at arithmetic from learning to count money in restaurants and gambling. He was a middle school dropout. The trucker didn't all of a sudden go from stupid to intelligent once someone showed him how to read -- all he needed to do is for someone to teach him!
There is a wonderful TED talk about how our STEM-driven craze is a tragedy in terms of how it defines human intelligence by a renounced English teacher and professor, highly recommend it.
The short of it is we should never discriminate on arbitrary things like IQ, reading levels, etc, because we have no idea what even constitutes "intelligence", much less how to duplicate it from adolescent to adolescent.
I agree with the sentiment wholeheartedly, but the problem is that some types of intelligence become less useful than others as society changes. STEM-type intelligence becomes more in demand while a very smart person who lacks skills like these (whether they are not attuned to it or didn't have the opportunity to learn) will still struggle because the competition pool is so large that there are tons of people in the same situation and a limited number of ways they can become economically useful. The end result is likely to be a large scale dehumanization even for smart folks unless there is some intervention.
Edit: to clarify, the market driven popsci definition is paramount because the market determines your dehumanization
I hear what you are saying. I am challenging the assertion that intelligence has 'types'. The 'type' of intelligence (or in my terms, the more dominant expression of your intelligence) is largely geared by your early upbringings and what you were exposed to. I believe fundamentally we all have the same brain and same capabilities. Strictly speaking, the brain is an organ, but operates more like a muscle, and as such can be trained and improved just like any other organ or muscle in our body. Every single human being has the potential to be an Einstein, so to speak, in my opinion* we have just done a horrible job at a. figuring out what exactly is the right combination of training, motivating factors, and environmental influence to push more towards that direction, b. what it actually means to be an 'Einstein'
In any case, since most people have not had the fortune of having the good experiences that most of us here have, I think it is merely a common service to our fellow man and woman to treat them equally no matter what and provide equal opportunities for employment -- and that includes whatever the en-vogue measure of intelligence is out there today.
* to be fair to me: I formed my opinion over years long soul searching and embellishment in countless self-help and pop-sci books on self-improvement, finally forming opinions around sound science and not junk science. But I am also a human after all, and admit my understanding of the current literature can be flawed.
The chemical composition of your brain may be nearly indistinguishable from mine, but the output of mine may be radically different than yours.
There are all sorts of "intelligence" that I just don't have. I don't get social cues. They just don't register for me. There is a "social intelligence" that I don't have. But I have seen people who clearly do.
Likewise, there are things that I find to be quite natural for me, and other people look at me like I'm crazy and they don't comprehend how I can do those things.
Whether you call it "intelligence" or some other word, I think the result is the same.
> Aptitudes are natural talents, special abilities for doing, or learning to do, certain kinds of things easily and quickly. They have little to do with knowledge or culture, or education, or even interests. They have to do with heredity. Musical talent and artistic talent are examples of such aptitudes.
> Some people can paint beautifully but cannot carry a tune. Others are good at talking to people but slow at paperwork. Still others can easily repair a car but find writing difficult.
Is that a better term than "intelligence" for what you had in mind?
My job exists only because a certain type of job has a lot more than average of people that can't write much. Mostly because of dyslexia or similar problems. My job is to completely remove the need for them to waste time on the writing part and let them do their job instead.
>Every single human being has the potential to be an Einstein, so to speak, in my opinion
Your opinion is completely unsupported by evidence. Do you truly believe someone with Downs Syndrome or a severe traumatic brain injury has the capacity to be a theoretical physicist?
The belief that everyone is capable of great things might be comforting, but it's ultimately very cruel. Many people will try their very hardest and get the best available support, but still struggle with the most basic tasks of life and work. Pretending otherwise just absolves us of responsibility. It's a get-out-of-jail-free card when we see people suffering.
We need a society that provides a good life for everyone, regardless of their ability to contribute. It's great if truckers can retrain to be software developers or psychotherapists, but we shouldn't be planning our society based on that assumption. Some people are very unlikely to develop advanced professional skills, but that's fine. They're still human beings and they're still entitled to a dignified and fulfilling life.
> Strictly speaking, the brain is an organ, but operates more like a muscle, and as such can be trained and improved just like any other organ or muscle in our body.
Ironically, this directly contradicts your point of view, since your maximum physical potential is strongly determined by your genes. Only very few people have the potential to be a Usain Bolt or a Michael Phelps.
> Every single human being has the potential to be an Einstein, so to speak, in my opinion [...]
If it's a job that doesn't actually need to be done (i.e. it's only done to keep the person willing to do it occupied), is it still a job, or is it just a hobby?
You might say it depends on whether it pays or not... but if there's a paycheck in exchange for essentially useless work, it's just welfare in disguise.
> but if there's a paycheck in exchange for essentially useless work, it's just welfare in disguise
How many devs out there writing framework (or insert your idea of re-inventing the tech wheel again here) of the week at a job only because VCs are willing to burn up their capital for that lottery ticket?
"Useless" is highly subjective when you don't have enough information to render accurate judgment. But this is not the case that we're talking about.
Consider this simplified case. I hire you to sweep the floors in my apartment, and I pay you by the hour. I have a vacuum cleaner, but I don't offer it to you, because then you'd have done the job much sooner, and would be paid less - and I want to pay you more.
Do you see the absurdity in this arrangement? I hope it's fairly obvious. The moral choice in this case is, of course, to let you use the vacuum cleaner, but pay you the same amount as for manual sweeping (minus any amortization costs for the cleaner). I don't lose anything this way, since I've parted with the same amount of money. You have gained, because you've got the same money for less back-breaking work - and now you can either enjoy some extra rest, or perhaps go clean someone else's house and earn more money.
The difference in amount of work you performed in the first case vs the second case is the "useless work" here - and there's nothing subjective about it.
The difference in amount of money paid for a manual sweep and for vacuuming, if you were paid at the same rate for both, is the welfare, because I didn't have to pay you more than the market price of the hour of your work.
Note, I do not consider the term "welfare" to be in any way negative. I just wish we recognized it for what it is, and consciously designed our economic policies around it, instead of pretending that it's something else - in this case, by forcing people to do useless work for it just to satisfy our sense of "propriety" (that they shouldn't "get it for free").
Incidentally, what kind of vacuum do you have? I've gone through a few permutations, and nothing that sucks seems to really compare to a good sweeping. Roomba to Rainbow, it just doesn't pull up the dust the same way. To be fair, the broom leaves a lot of stuff behind, it seems like mopping phase is when stuff gets really clean.
Actually, no. I've tried a couple bagless vacs, they're great on carpet. On a hard floor edges and wierd ridges and valleys seem to always get missed. Sweeping always seems faster when I have to screw around with special cases. Although I'm shooting for clean. Not pseudo clean.
The vacuums have to blow out air too, and this stirs the dust you didn't vacuum yet. As soon as you are done this starts settling again. If you sweep the floor instead, with moist or antistatic cloth, you get most of it and it does not just resettle.
Back on topic I think many people that goes to higher education does not valuate the work of people that clean or do other manual laybour. I have done quite a few different jobs like cleaning, transport and servicing machines and it differs a lot between workplaces how much you feel appreciated. A school for example would not be able to stay open if noone was sweeping the floors every day...
> I have a vacuum cleaner, but I don't offer it to you, because then you'd have done the job much sooner
In a way, this applies to most software work. While each company is just trying to survive, the world is rewriting hundreds of thousands of ERP, CRM, databases, OSes, libraries...
During the Great Depression we had the CCC. They did a lot of good work that still benefits us today, building overpasses, flood control, trails and erosion protection in parks, fire lookout towers, roads, planted forests, and a ton of other useful stuff. Most of it wouldn't have gotten done otherwise, but we're better off for having it done.
Having said that, I'd start by simply funding as many small, <18 month road projects as I could. That'd suck up a lot of labor, tighten the labor market quickly and easily.
That's great and all, but that seems like a temporary solution that works because we've underinvested in infrastructure, not something that can absorb large numbers of people indefinitely.
There are endless jobs that should get done. No one would argue to do pointless jobs - maybe just jobs that are still useful but maybe not quite as useful to make it attractive to private industry?
There are endless jobs that should get done. No one would argue to do pointless jobs - maybe just jobs that are still useful but maybe not quite as useful to make it attractive to private industry?
It's a sliding scale. There is a lot of work out there that has some value, but that value is lower than the value the people are willing to do the job for. Let's say there is a job that is 'worth' $5/hour but it costs $12/hour to hire someone to do it. A reasonable argument could be made that the additional value generated for the government/society to get one person off of actual welfare and into the job market could be worth $7/hour.
There's also work where the overall utility generated might be much higher than the cost of the labor, but the utility generated specifically for the business or local government considering the project is lower than the cost of the labor.
Planting trees might only be worth $5/hour for the local lumber company, but the existence value of a new forest to the population generally might be many times that.
I suspect that the amount of potential work that fits into this category is enormous.
This is an orthogonal issue, though - we're just not good at capturing the true benefits (and the true costs, including externalities) for many things.
Broadly speaking, though, I agree. This is one other case where we can do better - instead of constructing a "broken window" in the private sector and have the person repair it to keep them busy, directly utilize their labor for a socially productive task that may not be market-efficient.
But I'm not sure that there's enough of that kind of useful work (i.e. the kind that actually makes a difference) to keep everyone busy. It also feels like it's mostly easy to automate.
If we're retraining people to do it, we absolutely should, because we'd be spending significant resources for something that might prove a very short-sighted investment. It might be better to just invest that money into automation to do that same work instead.
I imagine that most jobs that have a 'value' of ~$5/hour don't require much training. Also we could implement this policy tomorrow if we wanted to while automation is still many years out (at best) for a lot of tasks, so the two policies could be run in parallel.
I seriously doubt there'd be much work around that has such low value, and that cannot be automated. And if it can be automated, what is the additional value to society to have human perform it instead?
If it's a job that doesn't actually need to be done (i.e. it's only done to keep the person willing to do it occupied), is it still a job, or is it just a hobby?
You might say it depends on whether it pays or not... but if there's a paycheck in exchange for essentially useless work, it's just welfare in disguise.
I think the difference between job and hobby more lies with enjoyment and something that one would consider doing regardless of paycheck. Housework doesn't often reap a paycheck, but few actually enjoy it. That qualifies as work. Arts and crafts is usually a hobby, but some folks make it into a job with a paycheck. Few adults would look at being a cashier or janitor as a hobby. A small subset can be truly both - programming, for example.
I think the much bigger distinction between job and hobby isn't so much that the job is useless (as most jobs aren't quite so), but the demands it places on your life and family. You can stop your hobby to go to your kid's play, but can't always take off work to do the same. Some jobs give much less control over your lifestyle - like trucking - yet refuses to give back enough benefits to compensate. Fast food, retail, and others have other methods of not giving back. I think these are the jobs that are basically welfare in disguise.
> Few adults would look at being a cashier or janitor as a hobby. A small subset can be truly both - programming, for example.
I don't think the distinction is inherent in the job but in the freedom and income that are generally associated with it.
I know a number of people who would be perfectly happy as cashiers if the cashier job had the same flexibility as my programming job. And to harp on UBI again: UBI by giving extra leverage to the employee might actually turn some jobs that are currently low status inflexible drone jobs into something that people will willingly do because they will have more control.
There are plenty of people who have a love hate relationship with their job because of the inflexibility imposed on them by the employer rather than anything that is fundamentally wrong with the core activity.
I don't mean that all employers are evil, they too are constrained by the current reality.
I differ a bit, but the idea that we are shoving only one type of skill set over another is what he touches on. He argues a lot for creativity how it's over looked in modern schooling.
It's important that there be jobs for people without much education.
Average education levels for women when Abe Lincoln was president was 2nd-4th grade level. People routinely quit school after 8t grade. Often, only people who wanted a serious professional career went on to high school.
It is within my lifetime that we moved from more than half of all people living outside of cities to more than half living within cities. Not terribly long ago, most jobs were farm related in some fashion.
I don't know what the solution is, but I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job as they are, without first getting more education. As society evolves, there tends to be upward pressure on how much education is needed to get even an entry level job. This is not merely assholery by the people running the bureaucracy or whatever. Things seem to genuinely get more complicated and take more skill.
I think one big piece of the puzzle is that we need to bring back genuinely affordable housing. It has largely gone the way of the dinosaur. I think this puts enormous pressure on people, regardless of what kind of job they have. It cuts off a lot of avenues.
But I seem to be howling into a void. Everyone seems to be discussing UBI and largely ignoring the fact that even if you cut everyone a check for some kind of basic income, if we don't solve some of our housing issues, you will still see growing numbers of people either homeless or crammed together like sardines in a space not intended to hold that many people.
I agree with you. I am also an advocate for (quality) boarding-house style accommodation in cities. I disagree that affordable housing is gone in rural areas; there is nothing wrong with renting a double-wide trailer, of which there is usually a good supply.
> I think one big piece of the puzzle is that we need to bring back genuinely affordable housing.
It's impossible to solve affordable housing by constructing more buildings and regulating prices. The only solution is to decrease demand, and large scale UBI helps do that because it frees people up to move to cheaper cities without having to worry so much about finding a job there.
There's a ton of affordable housing in the United States, the problem is the lack of jobs in those locations.
The solution then is to work on advanced public transport and secondarily road network.
This allows the metropolitan area to expand enhancing the availability of land to build affordable housing.
(Don't get into a suburb trap though. Mixed use is best to reduce unnecessary traffic.)
Sprawling cities are really bad, you end up paving over and building atop your best farmland.
Dense development is cheaper in both the short term & long term, if we remove zoning barriers to it we can have affordable, unsubsidized and non-rent controlled apartments in Seattle. Instead we mandate worthless parking be built, despite that it is extremely costly and goes unused quite often, while capping and limiting how large & tall buildings are, kneecapping sustainable, affordable housing.
There is a huge difference between affordable housing, and building "Affordable" housing. Rent regulation causes prices for unregulated units to increase dramatically (cross-subsidizing regulated units). Is it better to have 100 units at $1000 a month each, or 33 units at $600 and 67 at $1200?
Why do we still have archaic zoning that forces worthless parking to be built (sub-$0.50sqft parking vs $3-4sqft housing)? Fixing this alone would cut $150 to $300 a month off rent in many complexes, as it is another massive cross-subsidy that goes markedly unused in newer buildings.
Lets not even touch on how zoning in nearly every city blocks high density development in smart areas (eg. adjacent to mass transit) and causes medium to low density, super expensive slum to be built. Who really wants a $600k 2 bed/1 bath home when a similar condo would be less than half the price on the same land?
TL;DR: Zoning is killing our cities and causing horrid price increases. Kill zoning, keep fire code, watch housing prices stabilize.
In Berlin basically all units are regulated (can't increase rent beyond inflation once you sign a contract, all contracts are indefinite by default and usually only breakable by the tenant, and only newly built units or such that have been renovated at a cost of more than a third of their entire value can be rented to new tenants at more than 10% above average current renting price for a comparable unit in the same neighborhood/comparable location).
The result is that while purchase prices (which are unregulated) have continued to increase in line with the rate of increase in other desirable world cities, rent prices are increasing at a much lower rate - and they started relatively (compared to purchase price) low to begin with.
Of course it's not a perfect system and i wish they'd cut down on the burocracy to enable building more units faster, but it did show an effect.
> Who really wants a $600k 2 bed/1 bath home when a similar condo would be less than half the price on the same land?
I do.
So I bought a place with a similar "you 'overpaid this much' ratio". Why? So we could live in (/on the edge of) Cambridge and have a small yard for my kids and dog to play in, have BBQs, grow plants and flowers, have a driveway/garage, a basement for projects and tinkering, etc.
It quite literally means that I will have to work 5-8 years longer before retirement to afford the excess we paid over a condo in a similar neighborhood. To me, that tradeoff (which is enormous - 12-20% of my prime adult years) is worth it.
Anyone walking around San Francisco knows that there is no lack of underutilized land that could be used to increase housing supply and take pressure off housing prices. Reducing demand helps but it's certainly not the only solution.
On the education front why IYO are we actually stuck in a loop of credentialing instead of actual learning? Everyone is forced to take x amount of math, art, english etc. This really should be done at grade school not everyone needs Calculus I or a Contemporary modeling of Shakespearean characters.
The problem is, that unlike vocational school, students cannot really be trusted they know what they want or need. Additionally some level of general knowledge is needed as a fallback.
The solution is to fast forward through the easy parts, do not block it. The trouble then becomes managing mixed age classes.
This may be a cop out but I would say I agree with both of you. Students may not know for sure, but nor does the education bureaucracy. For my part I'd far rather student choice!
I wouldn't, any more than I'd let my 6 & 8 year olds choose their food entirely. I'm fiercely independent and libertarian, but I believe that a basic level of education is sufficiently important to a free society that it's worth curtailing that freedom to mandate certain things (or mandate by default with an opt-out process, which is pretty close to the condition today).
Interesting those ages and I agree. That is why I said in my op comment these things should be ironed out in grade school ie 6-11 not even really in middle school and certainly not in high school where we decide what children need to function in society. I assume, and admittedly I'm 20, that with your young children you have much control over what they eat. But as the years go by you will have less and less. I really think students by middle school should be allowed to have far more self directed learning then the shite shoved down their throats.
Problem with a school system choosing the curriculum, is that they can filter the truth or focus on what to teach. Forget REAL history. Why did the American Civil War really start? How about Henry Ford getting an Iron Cross from Hitler in the 30's? Why did he receive it? I didn't learn this stuff in the 70's and 80's either, but stumbled upon it as I read outside of the official curriculum.
Kids nowadays have even a more PC curriculum. Lord help them. My 15 year old niece who we are raising comes home with some pretty crazy stuff that is required.
Because the Universities have an interest in the whole process. My kids got a University education, but overall it isn't worth it. Neither of them use their degree. Not saying don't go to college, but you really need to think it out. A Bachelors in Lesbian/Gay Studies, or any useless degree like this for example, doesn't have many career opportunities after graduation. Young folks leave school with so much student loan debt that something is going to have to give.
I started college, but quit. I've been lucky/smart in my career. I started out in the Army and moved to Federal LEO that didn't require a degree. During the 90's I took a buyout and shifted into IT.(Still don't have a degree) Went back into the Army in 2007 and left in 2009, broken. (BTW I have Post 9/11 GI Bill, and still don't go.) Was tired of IT and ironically thought I would drive a truck. As the NYT article stated, what a thankless job. People treat you as second class citizens and the pay was horrible. Back to IT where I make a very good living and live in a suburb working in that suburb. 20 minute commute most days. Yes housing is expensive, but I have a rural property that is my refuge. Yes if I lived there, I would be hard pressed to find work. The only grocery store is a Piggly Wiggly that can't be more than 10k square feet. There farthest parking space is as close as the disabled ones at WalMart, so you need to be content with limited restaurants and stores and you pretty much have to have a car. I see people walking here and there, but that isn't something many can do.
As side note, my rural county has only two permit requirements. Electrical and Septic. I can build a house out of Popsicle sticks and no one would say boo about it.
Some observations on human nature, based on first hand experience. This is anecdotal evidence, but I have family members, friends and neighbors that have worked in factories. During conversations with them about changes taking place in their workplaces I hear about how they don't like them. Most of these changes are technological in nature. Most, not all, of these folks are too lazy to learn a new machine or process. All they want to do is come home and watch TV and many cases drink and do it all over again the next day. Go to work run a machine and make quota, go home.
These folks are smart enough to learn, but just don't want to. My Grandpa was like this. He was content to go work and straighten drills all day, go home read the paper, watch the news and go to bed. He wasn't a drinker.
I would ask him if he got bored straightening drills all day and he would just shrug. I couldn't get my mind around doing something that boring all all day. This was the 1970's BTW.
>I don't know what the solution is, but I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job as they are
I'm less concerned with what people's feelings are than I am about results. The problem here is the minimum wage. We send people to sub-par schools in shitty areas, denying them the ability to get the skills to be productive. Then we require employers to discriminate against them if their productivity is insufficient to justify the minimum wage. Without the minimum wage that abysmally educated person would be more likely to get some amount of productive work and learn skills which would make them qualified for other jobs with higher pay.
> Without the minimum wage that abysmally educated person would be more likely to get some amount of productive work and learn skills which would make them qualified for other jobs with higher pay.
Wow that is a very controversial opinion. With a higher minimum wage, that person would have disposable time they could use for whatever they want, including study.
I think you're making the assumption that the person you're talking about would get the job without being out-competed by someone else? Higher paying jobs have more competition.
This does not seem to be a universal truth. Time and again I see news stories of grocery store type jobs (or McDonalds) getting hundreds of applicants.
That's because the minimum wage is higher than the market value for many of those people's productivity. Without a minimum wage anyone willing to do work would more quickly be able to find paying work. And anyone who is productive will quickly move up the pay scale.
Having to work too many hours due to a low minimum wage is a common reason low earners don't have the energy to try to study and move up the ladder. So I agree, removing the minimum wage doesn't sound like a good answer at all.
It's all well and good to want to study but for some their are many roadblocks. Not all bootstraps are made at the same length and some are just a little too short to reach.
Working is studying to move up the ladder. There's a reason a senior developer makes more than a junior developer. Even if you work a completely no-skill job doing something like sweeping floors... if you show up on time, work hard, etc. you will get references for better jobs with more opportunity to grow. Or perhaps if you do a good job sweeping floors, maybe you'll get the opportunity to get promoted to working the stock room, and then managing the stock room, etc.
What good is a $15/hr minimum wage for a person only capable of producing $10/hr in value? It's off to the unemployment line with them. Without a minimum wage more employers would be willing to hire completely unskilled workers and provide them with on-the-job training. The higher the minimum wage, the more like they are to demand you already have the skills and experience necessary to be highly productive on day one.
Minimum wage is a difficult issue. Perhaps you're right. Or perhaps eliminating the minimum wage would force those trying to survive on it, however temporarily, to take multiple jobs and reducing the number of people who can be employed.
Perhaps reducing or eliminating the minimum wage would make employers more productive and more profitable; they could then put that money back onto circulation, making life better for the entire economy. Or it could reinforce the concentration of wealth and put companies into the awkward position of not having anyone to sell their products to.
>Or perhaps eliminating the minimum wage would force those trying to survive on it, however temporarily, to take multiple jobs and reducing the number of people who can be employed.
That's a very shallow view of the market, pretending like moving one thing doesn't move everything else. If the price of labor goes down, the price of goods and services will shortly follow suit. That's why shit produced in China has been so cheap, labor is cheap.
>Perhaps reducing or eliminating the minimum wage would make employers more productive and more profitable;
It would increase the economic efficiency of the entire system. The employers are already productive and profitable, they just ship your job to China where labor is cheaper. Not only are you unemployed, but every moment you lack a job your market value is decreasing. Nobody wants to hire someone who has been unemployed for a long time. You're also not building useful skills, or a reputation/references for being a good worker.
And you will gladly pay taxes to subsidize their housing and other living expenses, right? Maybe we could designate some sort of universal income for such people, so they could pursue opportunity with a safety net of sorts.
Housing is not entirely the problem, it's the commute to work. People will still have places to be, even with basic income. That, and the depersonalization of cookie-cutter homes.
Getting into or out of a city is this recurring nightmare, of feeling trapped in a car or cramming into a train compartment with 250 other people.
We know how to fund, develop and create residential neighborhoods, but the interconnect with commercial and industrial zones, as lives change across decades becomes the challenge. People resist being packed together in stifling ways, and rightfully so. Some people hate the claustrophobia of cities, and some people chafe at simply having neighbors. Very few people would advocate for randomly assigned neighbors, if random includes ex-convicts for violent crimes, which becomes a reality in large cities.
If it were as simple as just building many reasonable houses, and bringing any people into them, to meet the needs of anyone who wants a place to live, this would have been solved a hundred years ago.
I think you may have misread. The parent comment mentioned housing as an issue because people with even normal incomes are struggling to afford housing. That has nothing to do with the commute, although I totally agree that commuting for work is its own very serious proble.
Build denser neighborhoods, eliminate the need for long commutes in general. Commuting is not adding value to our economy, it is just a large money pit that we throw gas, maintenance, and tax dollars into.
The concept of low-rise residential & commercial is very recent, and was a reaction to the cold war (eg: lets spread out, nukes can't kill us all then!). You end up with sprawling burbs covering your best farmland, and a crapton of infrastructure to maintain at great expense. If it weren't for federal infrastructure subsidies covering the up front capital for infrastructure, most suburbs would not exist.
You can build dense, multi-story complexes with good insulation and seperation, were it not for running into your neighbors at the mailbox, you'd hardly see them at all. Most buildings built from 2002 on in Seattle are of this caliber, and having put up walls before, stapling some insulation between isn't that hard or expensive, and is worth every dollar if you plan to live there.
> Everyone seems to be discussing UBI and largely ignoring the fact that even if you cut everyone a check for some kind of basic income, if we don't solve some of our housing issues, you will still see growing numbers of people either homeless or crammed together like sardines in a space not intended to hold that many people.
And you seem to miss the fact that with UBI you have no incentive to live and stay in an expensive area.
For the deposit amount on an average house where I live I would cover 80% of the cash price of a bigger house country side. But you know, I'd have no work.
The problem is not housing, the problem is cramming all the work in cities. My last 3 jobs could've been done remotely, I asked and was always denied even while offering to take a pay cut.
I and many like me despise living in cities, we do not live there by choice. I've slightly moved out of a big one (London) but still live/work in the outer rim where housing is a dream far away, even on a way above average salary.
Give me UBI and I quit my job to settle country side tomorrow, so would my wife. So would a few of my colleagues.
Give me UBI and I quit my job to settle country side tomorrow, so would my wife. So would a few of my colleagues.
If you're a halfway skilled programmer you can scrape together the equivalent of what you'd get on any sort of realistic UBI doing small freelance jobs while living in the country side.
Bingo. All of these 'but you can work remotely' suggestions are non starters to anyone who isn't already relatively wealthy, because they carry immense risk.
If there was a serious safety net that guaranteed a decent quality of life, a significant portion of people would be taking on those options and leave the city centers.
True, it's one thing to convince your employer to let you work remotely. It's a totally different thing to convince a new employer to hire you remotely.
I'm leaving the midwest because there are too few opportunities for the work I do. I'll be fighting it out in NY soon.
> And you seem to miss the fact that with UBI you have no incentive to live and stay in an expensive area.
Like many people here on HN, I can work from anywhere with electricity, Internet and decent cell phone coverage. But I still strongly prefer a bigger city, and I even prefer to be close to the city center, not out in suburbia. The reasons are many:
- close to the city center I can chose between some of the best schools in the country for my kids. Outside the city center, I would have to chose a mediocre school. In the cuntryside, I would have to have to go with whatever is there
- I like going out with my wife. In the city we can chose between all kinds of cuisines, cafes and bars. In a village, we would be lucky to find a pub with fries. In suburbia that would be a strip mall.
- Shopping in easy in the city center. Whether you like it or not, you need to do groceries on a daily basis and to buy clothes etc every now and then, and this is far easier when you live in the city.
- I like to walk for things (walk my kids to school, walk to do groceries, or just walk for the sake of it). Curiously, I find that this is easier in the city center with sidewalks and parks than in the countryside, where I would walk in the side of a highway or road.
- In the city center I can do sports (tennis, soccer). Yes, I might find that option in the countryside or in suburbia, but in the city I can chose between 10 different teams, venues etc.
- I like people. There are many more people in the cities, especially younger people.
- I like to travel. I can take the metro to the airport in the city and visit hundreds of places within a a few hours of flight. Driving 2 hours to the nearest local airport to transfer to a bigger airport would kill that.
I live far from my family and friends. They would visit much less if I didn't live near an international airport.
What I am trying to say is that I think nowadays people live in the city for many other reasons than work.
I think Mikushi's point would be that UBI gives both of you greater freedom to choose. It would probably reduce inner city housing costs a little as some of the people who currently are there only because they have no other way of getting an income decide to take their labour elsewhere where they can get more value for their contribution..
Those corporations provide the goods and services that makes life liveable for 7.3 billion people on this planet. I'm curious what other alternatives to capitalism and firms (to use Ronald Coase's term) would have been able to achieve and sustain a quality of life equal to or better than what these 7.3 billion currently enjoy. Capitalism is the basis of the quality of life for 7.3 billion humans on Earth. Telling yourself otherwise is just lying to yourself.
And telling yourself that on such a small sample (200years) Captialism is a success is lying to yourself. We're already facing the hard consequences of capitalism and consumerisms, and with no real change in sight all the QOL improvement in the world will not matter when this planet is mostly destroyed.
> What I am trying to say is that I think nowadays people live in the city for many other reasons than work.
I think we both agree there.
From my own limited sample I see the opposite trend as well, people who would rather live country side.
What I was getting at is that even if people like me are a small sample (20%? more, less, who knows. If anyone has got numbers I'm interested), if you free us to go live country side suddenly there's more space and housing available for people like you.
The numbers suggest that the supposed urbanization trend is the product of a narrow demographic--relatively wealthy childless younger people. (Of course, there are exceptions.)
They didn't explicitly say it but since earlier in the comment they mentioned looking for remote work, I imagine they'd still search for it after they move. The key here is they wouldn't have to wait for the job first.
And you seem to miss the fact that with UBI you have no incentive to live and stay in an expensive area.
I am homeless. I also have portable income. I have already used that fact to move someplace cheaper. That failed to get me back into housing. I plan to move again in the near future to move someplace even cheaper.
So, no, I am not missing anything. You are just LA LA LA not listening to the fact that if you cannot find housing cheap enough that your pathetic low income will cover rent, fuck you. So, I stand by my statement that UBI won't really do shit all if we don't solve the affordable housing issue.
> I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job as they are, without first getting more education.
Speak for yourself, cowboy. It's ironic, considering how affectionate HN claims to be towards "disruption" and the many of us who have learned by doing, that this comment exists here. We should not make arbitrary judgements as to what someone else deserves, especially in regards to feeding his or her family, by applying our own sensibilities so broadly.
No one, including everyone on HN, self taught or otherwise, "deserves" a job. Jobs are earned. You need to demonstrate that you can provide value to someone else directly (freelance) or to someone else's value producing firm (employment). The exchange of value (goods and services for goods, services or a tool that can be exchanged for either, money) is the foundation for why jobs exist in the first place. Without the exchange of value, the only job that exists is providing for yourself.
Opportunities for less skilled workers have been dwindling, though. Not because the job isn't being done, but because the work has been shipped overseas so the rich could increase their profits. It's not all due to automation.
If a society does not provide an individual the potential to live a comfortable life, the individual has no incentive to help that society.
Your choice of vocabulary creates a false choice and a logic trap.
Please consider some re-framing.
Everyone deserves to be part of society. Everyone ought to have the chance to contribute to the extent they can. No one deserves to be thrown away and forgotten.
Example:
My wife's uncle can't hold a job and requires assistance for basic life tasks like figuring out how to live on his own. He wakes up everyday at five, takes the bus to the hospital and works as a (volunteer) greeter.
He is not capable of a lot of tasks you'd associate with the idea of a job, but the work he does benefits society (makes the world better) it also benefits him to be able to give back.
Have you ever walked into a place and had no idea what to do next? Have you ever benefited from someone calm and welcoming who provided a quick hello and simple directions? Have you ever felt lost and just needed a human to help the littlest bit? There's room for a lot more humanity in the world I see around me. I don't know if there's strictly a financial need, but it would sure make the world a better place.
But back to my uncle by marriage:
His work and his maintenance of basic needs are decoupled. I would argue that he deserves both.
I don't know what you deserve or what you've earned or the relationship between the two.
Let's just remember not to throw people away as we plan the future we'll all live inside.
A job implies that someone somewhere is paying for that job to exist. In a free society, you can't make it compulsory for someone to pay another individual to do work that isn't valuable to the person doing the paying.
Life and the universe don't owe us anything. This concepts of "deserve" comes from some monotheistic religions and it's been called Just World Fallacy.
> I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job
Thankfully, a large number of people in the world support the idea of feeding the hungry in a way or another.
I am currently homeless. I have, in fact, eaten at soup kitchens. I do everything in my fucking power to stay away from the free meal sites. They are so uniformly shitty and expose me to crazy people who are dirty and germy and a threat to my health and welfare to stand next to. Any dive eatery is vastly better for my health and welfare than the soup kitchens.
I desperately want to figure out how to establish an adequate earned income. I am not pro Basic Income. You can keep your charity. It is almost never anywhere near even the very average, middle of the road quality of the cheapest fast food places.
When free food is as good as what you relatively rich people are eating, then you can talk to me about how wonderful this impetus is. Until then, I would like a fucking adequate earned income, thanks. And I would like to see that standard applied more generally.
People who imagine they are generous, good people are very, very often just justifying incredibly bad treatment of other people that they don't really believe deserve a real life, like they have. If they believed that, instead of giving charity, they would create jobs and build affordable housing. But, no, we can't do that. And fuck you all to hell to the poor schmucks ending up homeless because of the incredibly shortage of affordable housing. Y'all all must just be losers. It couldn't possibly be that society as a whole is all kinds of fucked up and you just happened to draw one of the excessive number of short straws.
> People who imagine they are generous, good people are very, very often just justifying incredibly bad treatment of other people
To be honest, I find that people who genuinely believe that about themselves are oblivious to how utterly hypocritical and inconsistent they are as human beings.
Some of the worst people in history have acted out of perceived righteousness.
> But those students at community college who are aged between late 30 and 50? Really driven. It's embarrassing to compare typical college students to them.
I'm in that age bracket (30-50), and trying to transition from tech-support/helpdesk into something like coding/linux-admin/devops/etc, anything that would pay enough to allow raising a family in/near a major US city.
I find it daxx hard to even get a phone call back because of my age.
I spend a lot of time learning this and that and have s small portfolio that can be viewed. But still no joy.
So I keep on pressing myself to learn new skills, putting in 10-30 hrs a week, ON top of my 9-5 job. I did not I work this hard with this much focus in college. Honestly much regrets.
Craft a new post with a non-disposable account and title your post "Ask HN: What's the best way for a ~40 year old to retrain and get a job in tech" or "Who's hiring ~40 year old developers?".
I've seen the HN community respond really well to developers looking for work (Who's Hiring threads come to mind) and seen us really respond well to the plight of older people in our workforce. I have no doubt that if you posted something like this, you'd find people who would be interested in reading your resume.
So, I recently hit the 50+ age bracket, and got laid off by VMware back in November. I got a BSCS in 1989, and my first job after graduation was for the Defense Communications Agency in the basement of the Pentagon. I've worked for AOL (years before Gene Kim got there), and I've consulted for Apple, Raytheon, AT&T, and a wide variety of other companies. I was literally doing DevOps many years before that term was coined.
Since the layoff, I've been able to scrape together a few phone interviews, but I find that it is damn hard to get a second interview -- anywhere.
It's not just hard to get into this line of work at this age, it's also hard to get another job in this line of work when you have already been working in this industry for over 25 years.
The last time I was interviewing, one recruiter said to me that they were looking for someone who was just exactly like me -- but just five to ten years younger -- and asked me if I knew of anyone who was looking. I don't see how you can have as much experience as I did at this time, if you didn't start playing with computers back in 1982.
This seems curious to me, here in the midwest, it's pretty common for non software companies with shit legacy apps to desperately hire anyone with experience. These companies find it impossible to keep developers, no one wants to work at them. I'm at one now, making the highest salary of my career thus far. I'm not quiet 50.
A random Midwest non-software company with a line of business legacy app that they want to keep limping along is unlikely to even know how to answer "do you do remote?"
They have a business problem they need solved, and that almost surely means "come in, walk around, talk to people, and figure it out".
There are limits to what I am willing to do. For example, I don't do Windows.
There are also limits to what I am capable of doing. I like to think I'm pretty good at the Ops side of the house, and I'm more than happy to work with Devs as part of a larger team, but I am not a Programmer or Developer. I can hack on code to a degree, but I simply do not have the capacity to develop code from scratch.
My wife and I have lived in Austin since 2006, and we are not willing to relocate in order for me to get a job. Since she is an international business lawyer who has always made at least twice what I have ever made (even comparing her worst year to my best), it just doesn't make financial sense for us to move.
So, I'm limited to jobs I can get here in Austin, or to work remotely. Austin being the town it is, there are lots of startups here, but they want devs and not ops. Or they want devs who can do everything.
There's also a number of big enterprise companies here, but of course they want Windows. The University isn't an option because I found out the hard way that they are the biggest flying Mongolian clusterfuck in town.
> but I find that it is damn hard to get a second interview -- anywhere.
So your original comment was a bit disingenuous, you have a lot of conditions to where you'll work, but you then you also tried to use the "age discrimination in tech" narrative to garner sympathy (so I suppose). If there is age discrimination in tech (which I don't see myself, I see the opposite), then commentary like your original post don't help.
That last bit sounds like textbook age discrimination; if you have that on any sort of record, or even if you don't, I would consider challenging it - not just for yourself, but for all the other 50+ job seekers out there.
Full disclosure: I (as does almost everyone else here) have a stake in this as I will likely someday be a 50+ employee or job seeker.
P.s. I'm going to stop writing this, but the more I think about what you wrote the more infuriated I get. What the * is wrong with that recruiter? At the least they should be fired for expressing that thought, but they should also suffer in some way for having that thought. They have no business considering your age at all, especially with 50 being decade(s) below retirement age.
"So I keep on pressing myself to learn new skills, putting in 10-30 hrs a week, ON top of my 9-5 job. I did not I work this hard with this much focus in college. Honestly much regrets."
Maybe you could put this effort into building something for yourself? Because, the cruel reality is, the older you get the less likely it you'll get the break you are currently aiming at.
I worked in construction for most of my life but once I past 40 it became obvious that nobody wants to hire someone older and better qualified than they are.
I'm still young enough that ageism is a concern yet, but I do read situations like yours with interest. I wonder what my shelf-life is as a dev, and wonder if I shouldn't try and more aggressively transition into something else.
My gut instinct is you'd have more luck in more rural areas - jobs do exist in them, I'm technically employed in the agricultural industry.
"I spend a lot of time learning this and that and have a small portfolio that can be viewed. But still no joy." -- You should try posting with a non-disposable account then, I agree showing your work is a hard thing but this community is filled with people who try to be helpful to others.
Also if you are interested in all this stuff try this -- [https://www.visualstudio.com/dev-essentials/] you get free 3 months trials for Pluralsight and Linux Academy, you can download and watch some video courses during commute and that might reduce your study time at home a bit.
Disclaimer -- not affiliated with Microsoft or Linux Academy or Pluralsight, just trying to be of some help :)
What type of job are you looking for? What I mean is, web dev accounts for like 95% of the age discrimination you'll see. There are companies out there that still make stuff and need programs written to configure that stuff. Look in the transportation and agriculture industry. There are still programming jobs out there that don't have much, if anything, to do with the web. And those place don't typically age discriminate.
I appreciate many aspects of your post, but let us remember that jobs are good because they produce value.
For instance, people who want to give free haircuts to homeless people that are charged/fined are people who create value that dont have jobs, being stopped from creating value by people who do. DOH preventing people from living in Tiny Houses they've built IMO falls under same category. Health insurance execs, red tape admin workers, etc.
I contend that what is important are things like human welfare and dignity, space exploration, and animals rights, to name a few.
When truckers are obsoleted I dont want to see them digging holes and filling them again. Let creative destruction work its magic, push them to succees in a competitive market, and in the meantime help with their human needs so they dont starve or go without housing or healthcare. Jobs are the wrong thing to focus on, it leads to perverse incentives.
You touched on a couple of points that resonated with me.
My grandfather was a steel worker and one of his work friends was illiterate. He had gotten a job in a steel mill back in the 1960s and somehow had fallen through the cracks in the educational system. (To be fair, this man probably sought out those cracks and crawled into them but that's another matter) He was similarly not a dumb guy, he was able to learn how to perform complex jobs safely in a dangerous industrial environment.
He never admitted it at work, it would have been volunteering for vicious bullying but my grandfather was able to deduce it from his behavior and actions.
After they retired, this man finally decided to learn to read and enrolled in a program.
I can't imagine what it would be like to get into my 60s before learning how to read.
Also, I went back to college at 30 years old and not only was I a more focused and driven student than I was when I first went at 18, I was consistently more focused and driven than most of my younger classmates. I pounded out 4 degrees in 6 1/2 years.
It's important that there be jobs for people without much education
This is a critical point that most people just glaze over. Actually, I would refine your statement to be "Its important that there are jobs for people on the left side of the bell curve". That's really what the issue is when you get down to it. Half of the population is above average in intelligence and general ability. And half the population is below average. To have any sort of sustainable society there needs to be opportunity for those below average to be able to live decent lives. Offshoring jobs is the single biggest problem in this regard. Many, many middle class jobs with decent/good pay are continuously offshored, especially if they are office jobs because most office jobs can generally be performed from anywhere. I've seen many cases where there are 1-2 highly paid US employees that manage oversees teams in India, Singapore, etc. The problem with that (other than the obvious) is how does one gain the experience to be in those higher paid jobs if you are a US citizen? All the entry level jobs are oversees being managed by someone who was around before the offshoring.
If I were advising a close friend or family member on the left side of the curve (but not on the extreme left edge), I'd think along with them to ask what jobs will never be offshored in their lifetime.
Food service, personal services, and trades are my answer. No one in India is going to cut your hair, unclog your sink, rewire your kitchen, paint your walls, re-roof your house, or serve your dinner.
Indeed. Trucks cause several orders of magnitude more road wear than cars, because road wear scales like weight per wheel to the fourth power (this might not always be the perfect model http://www.nvfnorden.org/lisalib/getfile.aspx?itemid=261 but even so the general idea holds), and trucks weigh a whole lot. If trucks had to pay their fair share of road maintenance, shipping by truck would probably be noticeably more expensive.
Trucks do disproportionately more damage do the roads than they pay in taxes for fuel, though. You're subsidizing trucking every time you fuel up your passenger vehicle.
This subsidy is going to take an interesting turn with vehicle electrification. Right now the lower the MPG, the more taxes you pay. Moving to a tax per miles driven is going to punish those that have the most efficient vehicles in a more upfront manner than it is today (Hidden in gasoline prices).
Are you sure? Truck burns 6 miles/ gallon. New EPA regulations in 21 century actually increased fuel consumptions since about 20% of engine's power goes to cleaning the air. Modern car use 30+Miles/gallon.
Road wear isn't linear with weight. Estimates I've seen put a heavy 18-wheeler at the equivalent of more than 9,000 cars traveling over the same stretch of road. Way, way more than 5x the damage (6mpg vs 30mpg).
Since the advent of containers, a huge amount of freight is shipped by rail, especially from coastal ports to inland hubs.
Trucks are used for shipments to more local warehouses or retail/factory locations that don't have rail access. And no, it's not feasible to build a rail spur to every warehouse or Wal-mart.
Interestingly, previously, you did see spur lines to many facilities which today are served by truck.
Low-speed (15 - 30 mph) tracked autonomous vehicles for local ("last 10 - 20 mile") delivery might very much make sense.
It's a lot easier to focus on things like traffic control and hazard detection (including people on tracks) when your wheels literally hold you to the road.
Short lines & spurs have nearly all been spun off into small, local railroad companies as BNSF, UP & CNX don't want to deal with the expensive, time consuming short lines.
The major rail companies would much rather move mile long trains hundreds of miles on well maintained track, and let the short lines fend for themselves, barely scraping by, running trains at a few miles an hour (as they can't afford proper track maintenance.
Long haul is the only type of trucking I can see being replaced by autonomous vehicles in the next 10 years. Milk runs require, at least for the time being, driving through many surface streets, unloading product off the truck, and potentially upselling the customer using the relationship you build with them over time.
I think if battery and drone technology increases sufficiently, we could see automated or semi-automated drone deliveries for the "last mile" for many things like that.
Drones that can deliver small packages will likely disrupt quite a bit of the delivery scene. Why hire five delivery drivers for an area when you can have one who drives the drone launch truck, they drive to the middle of the zone, deploy the drones, monitor them (or offshore their piloting to remote pilots), wait for them to finish their run, rinse and repeat.
Long haul is the only type of trucking I can see being replaced by autonomous vehicles in the next 10 years. Milk runs require, at least for the time being, driving through many surface streets, unloading product off the truck, and potentially upselling the customer using the relationship you build with them over time.
I guess is my chance to tell my story.
I have been doing this job for a few years now. Driving all over the country, living in the truck, see the family one or two days a month, etc, etc. In summary not the best job but it allowed me to help my children.
Now, how have I spent all those long and boring lonely hours ? Learning to code, yeah!.
Always looking for something to do inside that truck, somehow started reading about computer programming, and, well, now I can't let go.
I used to work in accounting(long time ago), so had an idea of what it was, but that was it. Now I know a little bit about Angular2, Ionic, Django, Docker, github, and things like that, and even bought a PC and installed Ubuntu after reading the book How Linux works.
But what I really want express is this: It's amazing how much free learning material is offered by the open source community, and will never be able to thanks them enough.
And yes, my hope is to someday get a good programming job!
Thanks for sharing and I hope the value is great in your lifetime - as in, providing help your children but also give you a chance to discover something about yourself. I feel bad for a lot of the drivers who don't see their downtime as a way to try something or practice something. For me, it'd be rehearsing stories or talking out thoughts on a recorder to upload while I'm back driving, maybe play a little guitar to see it could speed up how quick people help me out. I think many hard jobs don't allow enough room for a person to engage in some self-improvement regularly, and that's unfortunate.
Cool, as a story writer sometimes it really helps me just make a voice memo! I've actually mocked out a full 3 Act feature script on a casual walk. Granted, I had the characters and idea already, but it was just a nice use of time and surprisingly beneficial. Keep it up!
Well. I guess, I should jump into the discussion. I'm a truck driver with 18 years of experience. Between driving jobs I have had 3 breaks when I was doing programming/software development. I had never liked programming jobs, i always enjoyed driving. Programming is something I can do based on my unfinished education.
I'm an immigrant. I follow the industry news. Both industries, I guess.
First. You wont believe how diverse the truck driving jobs are and how diverse truck drivers as a group.
There is a fair populations of drivers with bachelor/masters degrees and pretty high IQs
I had chosen the job because it is always there. No need for looking for one. After initial 2-3 years of entry level jobs (big/ corporate type companies driving dry vans with 90-100% turnover) good drivers migrate to niche
Jobs. Owner/operators with secured contracts. Or specialized freight. Oversized/high security/more dangerous/requiring specific skills (chemical tankers, medical equipment, military contracts etc)
Company drivers in such fields are getting fair pay, very much equal to low/entry level unambiguous programming jobs in $70000-$100000 range. I get paid both by miles(normally under 10%less than actual miles) and time I spend at customers. But, unlike in programming field, I can dictate my conditions. Which is normally would be work hard 8-10 months/year and play with hobbies rest of the time.
But yes, it feels like we are getting squeezed harder and harder.
The problem is very much same like everywhere in the country. Big/corporate type companies with low pay are getting bigger and bigger share of the market. Going into owner/operator business(equal to being contractor/consultant) means get plummeted with regulations and costs of health insurance.
And, starting in December 2017, every truck must be equipped with eLog. Which is watching your every step and hackable by any kid with imagination. Hackability is written in the law. It requires eLog providing interface to truck's engine computer and having cellular contact with the outside world. Just look up eLog and trucking in google and cry and be nervous every time you see 18 wheeler.
As a person with a Masters Degree & 10 years office experience who has found even White Collar work to cap out in the big city at $60,000, financially speaking, there is actually more potential in specialized driving than doing what I do now. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
I'm surprised truck driving used to be a "road to the middle class" in USA. It's one of the shittiest jobs and requires almost zero higher brain function. I'm pretty sure you can train a brain damaged person to reasonably drive a truck across the country. This job should never have been able to lift anybody into middle class.
Glad to see that truckers are feeling the pinch. If they are even a bit smart, they should leave and do something else. Even repairing trucks along the Highway may be a better job.
Somewhat tangential, but I hate this notion people seem to harbour, that any kind of job should be able to provide dignified living. No. If your work is shitty and super replaceable and doesn't need much brain power you will live in poverty.
In the past, a wage job like trucking wasn't a road to the middle class. It was the middle class. I grew up in what was supposedly a middle class neighborhood -- little tract houses, families with one wage earner, and one stay-at-home parent. A lot of the adults worked in the car plants, steel mill, machine shops, or other jobs that didn't require college education. Among those with college degrees, many didn't earn substantially more than the wage workers, e.g., school teachers, nurses, etc.
Apparently, you know very little about the job and how much brain function (mind you, I didn't say education) it requires. And how difficult it is.(just search London taxi drivers study in your favorite search engine) And, at its base lavel how underpaid it is.
Last time I checked, 9/10 of Arkansas working population was involved in trucking or logistic industry. As a side note. Automizing this job will bring total and enormous poverty to US
In the US we're all 'Throwaway People'. Its just a matter of time before all our jobs here are automated (programming, lawyering, even art and design). And yet everybody here seems to think that they will get different treatment than detroit workers, or truckers, or who-ever is losing their job to automation. The rich have responded perfectly consistent to automation opportunities, and yet somehow programmers seem to think it will be different for them. Instead we spend all our time discussing the various merits of each of these jobs, and how its probably a good thing that they've been automated. Its like everyone thinks we're magically going to get Star Trek instead of Blade Runner.
Whether we'll get Star Trek or Blade Runner depends entirely on us. Automation enables both of these possibilities, but it also requires political action to adjust the economic system accordingly.
Whether said political action takes the form of ballots and bills, or torches and pitchforks, remains to be seen - it could go either way.
I drove a semi truck for a summer. Enjoyed it more than the summer I spent writing iOS and Android apps for a startup (Beartooth Radio). I was pretty unusual however in that on both sides of my route (300 miles) I had nice houses to stay in as well as a social and family life.
Most truck drivers don't get this luxury and the infrastructure setup for trucks is absolutely awful from a social/health perspective.
> What’s retirement? Sounds boring. I’m single, I have no money saved up, I’ve lived paycheck to paycheck. My fault. I didn’t think about retirement growing up. This is the first time I’ve ever made decent money in my life.
> I bought me a brand-new car, a 2017 Chevrolet, two days after I hit this town.
I don't know what the answer is, but there must be a better way of educating people about their finances.
You mean a better way than car commercials? There's no money to be made by teaching people financial responsibility... Lots of money in convincing them to buy cars, though.
One could argue with one, people would buy more of the other. Now that most rent, a car will be the biggest single financial decision most people make in their lives. Kinda weird, but preparing people for it would help it happen more. I know people who feel they are too poor to even aspire to a car these days. Its not true, but it is the best of their knowledge. Surely there is wide reaching opprotunity to be had here.
Im not sure i would extrapolate the feelings of workers in an entire industry from a two day visit to a truck stop.
If you interviewed my coworkers at the hated retailer-of-them-all you could cherry pick totally bad experiences. Or on the other hand you could find example after example how a walmart worker can buy their own house [1] and how every walmart has at least one employee making 6 figures, often 250k or more.
Some of the comments here... SMH. I think that a lot of you should cut back on the self-aggrandizing and realize that whether you are a software engineer or a trucker, very few people in the world do great and meaningful things.
If you are not happy with what you do, work to find another job. I would love to be a truck driver if it paid enough to get by around where I live. I'm sure a lot of people would.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadI'm not sure if that's an indication of any actual plan (certainly not a sensible one) or simply a hedge against the fact that nobody has one, or nothing at all.
In any case, ignoring even just the truckers is a bad idea (let alone ups, fedex, usps, etc), they know the highways and the trucks and if they form a new Luddite group then any self-driving trucking company is going to be in for some surprise expenses when their trucks start disappearing and/or breaking down randomly in the middle of nowhere.
All that being said, I wouldn't be surprised if certain elites have noticed that public sentiment is resembling France in the 1790s. This whole surveillance apparatus is here to intercept the next Robespierre, national security be damned.
This is really about long distance, semi truck freight only. Local delivery (as someone mentioned above) is likely to need humans for a very long time.
I say that as a developer who is one of the classes that will benefit more from automation (until we are also replaced).
[1]: https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-j...
The absolute best scenario is for a country to automate as much as possible as quickly as possible to capture the productivity gains available on the global scale and then figure out how to tax gains (from automation or otherwise) domestically after the fact to support those in its population that have been displaced.
If you think instability from unemployment is bad, it's certainly worse if you also have the problem of not having the resources to even try and address it.
There's no reason to push for exponential growth any further until we can correct income and wealth inequality a bit.
The former gives you options, the latter affords you none.
This is reminiscent of the prisoner's dilemma in a way. All the rich of all the countries in the world will make the same claims: "look, we don't want to fall behind big scary China or Russia do we? So cut me some slack on taxes and regulation, let's all pitch in to bail me out when I fail (just a few billion here and there--I'm too big to fail, remember?), and we'll see about redistribution once we've won the war. I promise to remember you all."
A country that follows this path ends up like Korea, selling its soul to Samsung.
I don't care if there is economic unrest in China nearly as much as economic unrest in America. Do I wish economic unrest in China? No, of course not. But if I had to choose between economic unrest overseas or in my own backyard, overseas it is.
I only use China as the example here because they are the only ones actually executing an economic game plan that is competitive with taking economic gains from America and Americans.
That is obscenely optimistic and almost Randian.
This is an interesting allusion to the fundamental problem with this proposal - it doesn't bother to define what a robot is, the value of a robot's labor, or how to tell when the robot has replaced someone's job. If you start thinking about the implications for even a moment it's clear this is absurd.
If company A makes product X using 100 workers, and company B enters the market using machine C to make X at a lower cost that drives A out of business, how do we decide what to tax B? Does B pay the payroll taxes of 100 workers? What if B's lower cost expands the market for X and now they're selling ten times as much? What if the product A makes is hand-knit sweaters, and B is using knitting machine technology that's been around for a century? Are those the same products? Is the knitting machine a robot?
There's a very real concern here - the concern is that technology allows the proceeds of increased productivity to all be funneled to a privileged few, leaving the rest of the workforce out in the cold. Luckily we already have a way to address that - it's called the income tax.
Of course passing more progressive tax laws are impossible because you're asking the most rich and powerful to curtail their own wealth. Gate's proposal has any traction whatsoever because it won't touch old money.
Asymmetric growth between those with and without capital (automation/AI) will only worsen. Add in a few more upcoming innovations such as human genetic and cybernetic modification, and a highly segregated (if not fully biologically divergent) world society seems unavoidable. The poor will no longer be lower castes by social fiat, they will truly become physically and mentally inferior. Revolution, which was possible in a time when the oppressed had equal capabilities and access to relatively competitive weaponry, will become impossible.
Consider what capitalism is, again, from a Marxist perspective. It is an economic mode of production that has two main classes: the capitalist class, which is characterized by the ownership of the means of production (aka capital); and the worker class, which is characterized by the lack of said ownership. The capitalist class, by virtue of owning the means of production, also owns any surplus value created using them.
However, because your average capitalist has too much capital to be able to utilize it to its full extent, in order to maximize the surplus value generated from that capital, they need the workers. So, they effectively rent out the means of production to the workers (note: this includes the entire managerial chain involved, up to CEOs, and even owners themselves to the extent that they operate in a managerial capacity), who generate the actual surplus value, but then pay most of it back to the owner of the capital as rent. On the other hand, the workers, without access to means of production, cannot generate surplus value for themselves. So they have to go and rent those means from the capitalists who own them.
The resulting arrangement manifests as employment and wages, and that's how we nominally describe it. But fundamentally it's all about rent and rent-seeking. The reason why this arrangement works in practice is because, within this established framework (i.e. unless you dispute legality of ownership of capital), both classes need each other to get any value out of it.
Consequently, the reason why it's breaking apart with advent of widespread automation is because it breaks the dependency of the capitalist class on the workers. Automation is essentially capital that generates surplus value all by itself. This means that the entire production/consumption cycle that drives the economy becomes contained to the capitalist class. Simply put, if you have a robot that can do X for free, and the other guy has a robot that can do Y for free, and both of you need X+Y, then you only need to trade between each other. You don't need to trade with (e.g. hire or contract) anyone who does not have any robot that does anything useful. Effectively, everyone who doesn't own any means of production - i.e. the majority of the population in modern societies - become economically redundant in all respects, and cut off from the economy as a result.
This is the point at which the question of who owns the capital - i.e. the automation - becomes paramount. The existing owners can try to avoid pressing that point by willingly taking a part of the surplus value that automation generates for them, and sharing it with all those that don't have any capital of their own, as a direct wealth transfer. This is UBI and other similar schemes. It's probably where we're heading in the medium term, but I doubt it would be a stable arrangement for too long - there's just too many inherent questions about fairness here, and such a scheme would also have basically zero social mobility between the have-automation class and the have-nots, that would further accelerate resentment.
Longer term, we're probably looking at some form of shared ownership of the means of production. Which, combined with the post-scarcity that automation should result in, would, in fact, be communism in the strictest definition of that term. If we do get there, it would be the ultimate irony in that it would be capitalism as a socioeconomic system, rather than socialism, building the road there, for all the efforts of the latter and the indifference of the former...
Capitalists who achieve post-scarcity may look around and see "high" humans, beneficiaries of advanced biotech, and masses of apparent troglodytes, with whom they have less in common than we do with dogs.
[1]: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bill-gates-tax-...
Those people are gonna have a much harder time. Any owners of property will see the values of their assets plummet just as their jobs disappear.
Or maybe the tank range is enough that trucks don't stop between Fairbanks and Deadhorse the way it is now, and I'm talking out my ass. All I know is that the traffic I saw last time I was up there consisted of a lot of trucks, a minivan, one camper at the Arctic Circle that said they were going to Deadhorse, and the remainder of tourist traffic consisting of a bunch of dumbasses like me on motorcycles.
Far better would be vehicles -- self-driving or otherwise -- on some sort of fixed guideway; given that most of the current usage of the road is for traffic solely between the two points-of-interest on either end. Special vehicles could still be used to access the pipeline running alongside at arbitrary points.
A railway, potentially with extra equipment to assist with maintaining traction and negotiating grades, would accomplish this nicely, but is avoided due to its large up-front cost. While self-driving vehicles don't come with such large non-distributed up-front cost, they would be unreliable on such a road without permanent in-vehicle supervision, at which point they're not really making any of the intervening towns that provide driver services superfluous.
Automation is coming for these people's jobs and there is nothing that can be done about that. Retraining is the only hope for these people but they have to stop acting entitled and start voting for people who will help them get retrained.
They need new and dynamic industries that treat the employees with respect and agency. Something entire communities can benefit from.
He apparently plans to revive the coal industry by repealing environmental regulations and to put them back to work mining coal[0,1].
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/coal-jobs-trump-...
[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-27/trump...
Nevertheless, that is the plan, to somehow force the world to turn the clock back on globalism to a time when American coal, steel and auto workers were relevant, and to beat back the tide of modernity until the world makes sense again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps
The G.I. Bill is very good for military professions that don't have a common civilian analog and the person is going to start again anyway.
Spending on directly helping people seems like a very humane way to deal with shifts in employment but I don't see us choosing to invest that kind of money, not to mention the problem with attitudes complicating shifting a heavily-male worker surplus into traditionally female fields.
Retraining we can do. However, we can't create massive new job sectors to hire those retrained workers, unless it's make-work government jobs (in which case we'd be better off paying those people a basic income and not removing value from government services by making them more complex and bureaucratic than they need to be).
Same goes for a farrier or a blacksmith or milkman, or ice delivery, or newpaper boy shouting "extra, extra - read all about it" from the street corner. In some cases, the job is simply gone. In others, the work still exists, but is nowhere as common.
You also have an increase in the cost of living where most households require two incomes compounding the issue.
With agriculture new jobs were created as people moved to cities and new communities were created. those cities already exist. Short of a sudden civilization focused effort to colonize mars, I just don't see it.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-co...
https://howmuch.net/articles/american-spending-past-75-years
I'm saying we should eliminate governmental policies that restrict consumer choice and market competition or contribute to cost disease.
Even Level 4 automated cars debut tomorrow, we'll need truck drivers for a long time. You need someone there to watch the goods, arrange deliveries, unload, etc. It'll probably allow truckers to drive 24 hours a day instead of 14, which will cost jobs, but it won't be a complete loss.
Same goes for Ubers. You'll need full level 5 unless you want lost Ubers clogging our streets all the time. That probably means you'll need a person in the car for years to come.
If there is a high proportion of immigrants working in agriculture it blows the whole theory into the sky, as that would be people answering demand for labor at pretty high personal cost, the opposite of incumbents getting pushed out.
Seriously, tell us what jobs these truckers are going to go find.
A farmer with a 15 - 30 HP Ford or John Deere tractor could do the work of a team of men or horses. Rather than 40-horse combine-harvester rigs (with swingletrees to transmit force evenly through the harness), you had a draw-harvester and PTO off the tractor.
Factory productivity tracks virtually linearly with kW or HP per worker, in the form of power tools and equipment.
Humans were the control elements of such systems.
Now we're swapping out the control elements -- computers for people.
If humans don't have either muscle or brainpower to contribute, what's left?
I want to see a future where most people are hyper specialists, doing one niche thing for almost the entire world.
also, I want to see more people be capital owners where they make decisions for their own business rather than work for someone else. robots may replace humans, but can they replace being a business owner?
How many people are there?
Which of these sets is larger?
By how much?
Let's say, for the sake of argument, self-driving cars and truck, fully deployed, are 10 years away.
In that time we might see a move to many more drivers on the road, not less: A lot of growth in food delivery, e-commerce and in particular shuttles offering a fast,affordable, shared transport mode, as an attractive replacement for private cars in many places.
Maybe, with all of that, instead of 1/10 we'll have 2/10 of the workforce as drivers. Consider the effect their salaries have on the families, and indirect support extended families has, we could see a really strong political base against self-driving cars.
And from that point, all kinds of things could happen, to better manage or prevent that change.
it doesn't matter how strong the political base is, when there's profit motive, the humans will lose to machines.
As far as having a real plan dedicated to finding people decent paying and more importantly fulfilling jobs, i believe the answer is for the most part no. Finland beginning a limited basic income trial is the closest I have seen.
It is a kick the can scenario that has the possibility of massively reducing the quality of life of tens of millions of people.
"Because at 54 years old, nobody wants me. I can’t retrain for anything else. For older people, you kind of get trapped. For every one that does well, there’s 30 that it destroys."
That feeling that nobody wants you is a killer. It may be true, it may not, but that lack of hope just prevents anything good from happening. "I can't retrain for anything" - you're defeated right from the start, and it's obvious people don't even want to take the leap to try.
It's hardest on people that had it good, and then lost it. Much worse than those that never had it, in that you feel like you're losing something. (endowment effect)
Here's an interesting article the WaPo did about whites and a lack of hope. While there is a race component to it, I think it'd equally apply to other races where people have had a good/stable life, but lost it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/15/the-w... http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/52108333...
It suggests that the group having higher status previously does not change things all that much.
"These deaths of despair have been accompanied by reduced labor force participation, reduced marriage rates, increases in reports of poor health and poor mental health. So we are beginning to thread a story in that it's possible that [the trend is] consistent with the labor market collapsing for people with less than a college degree. In turn, those people are being less able to form stable marriages, and in turn that has effects on the kind of economic and social supports that people need in order to thrive."
Like you said, the rates are converging when they have a high school degree or less. These are the kinds of people that get hit the hardest when the labor market is collapsing.
It's not that "whites had it before and now they don't", it's "I used to believe I was entitled to a job if I wanted to work hard, and that would pay enough to live, but now that doesn't seem to be true." People just don't know what to do now and are feeling hopeless.
Other comparisons in article always compared different socioeconomic groups - whites without degree with all blacks - that is not the same because it counts in middle class blacks.
I agree it's hard and hopeless for both groups, and I think it's only going to get worse. Comparing hopelessness I don't think really provides much insight though, but what that hopelessness might cause people to do. (increased drug use, suicide, etc.) What my point was is that that hopelessness isn't going to help them retrain and it might actively keep people from seeking it. I think we're missing out on a whole mental health component.
If you still disagree, please elaborate on _why_ you think this
My point is we're already in this situation, automation be damned, and until the tsunami of anti-intellectualism backs off, then smart people aren't going to have a chance to actually figure some of this out.
Human nature is not ready for this world. We are dogmatic puritanical beasts obsessed with the idea that a person's value must be inextricably tied to one's economic output. We're more likely to see a worldwide make-work program where 1/2 of the people are paid to dig holes and the other 1/2 paid to fill them in, than we are to see something like universal basic income.
But why ? why not dump the risk of delays at the weak party in this transaction ?
We know a route from X to Y is $miles . Detours happen, but Google is getting to the point of calculating realtime incidents. But time could be fairly compensated, as could the miles on a vehicle.
If you took a way longer route, it's on you. But if you're traffic jammed, it's not your fault, and should fairly be compensated.
You know, that's what Unions are for.
Then Reagan de-regulated and lots of companies from right to work states moved in and killed the market. The union shops like Yellow Freight mostly operate in blue states and are profitable.
Plus, the way it was regulated makes modern regulatory capture look consumer friendly. If you wanted to start a trucking company, you had to submit a business plan with a list of committed customers and already set in stone pricing. The Feds would literally hand your plan to everyone with a route in the region, give them a few months to review it and then your potential competitors got to vote on whether you should be allowed to operate that route. Predictably, it was basically just outsourced sales for the exiting companies.
Same here. If the truck driver was free to go home, or whatever, sure dont pay them. But traffic jams are in transit between places they are told to go. It doesn't have to be the "fault" of the employer. But the employee is captive, and working, and absolutely should be paid with regards to time.
I think you have to reason about the other side of the equation, where someone has to pay you.
It rains. I have to walk to work I the rain. I should get compensated. But is my employer on the hook, to give me the happiness I would've had if it hadn't been raining?
The consequence to an employee getting stuffed is that the driver has less time to sleep or jerk around in the back of the truck.
Guess what the company doesn't give a shit about?
Economics doesn't care about the morale of the workers in this context as it contributes nothing to the bottom line.
Would you prefer if management cared more about that, instead of the bottom line?
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure if they could make that happen, they would!
Otherwise there are teamsters, which are very heavily unionized.
And they don't want idle trucks any more than the driver does because if the truck is idle they aren't making money either.
You could also phrase it this way. Maybe drivers wouldn't jump if they got treated better,
The real reason is that it pushes off risk. Why would a trucking company pay a guy to sit in traffic? WTF is the guy going to do anyway... he's sleeping in the truck behind a gas station somewhere in Armpit, PA.
What I've found is that with near certainty, these individuals suffer from a kind of economic myopia. They view every aspect of their work as something though should be charged for and they complain about every little bit they aren't paid for separately. They are almost never open to the idea that it doesn't matter how much they get paid for each action; what matters is their total income. They view anything they don't charge for as money that rightfully belongs to them.
Note that this is not about education level either. Easily, the single most vocal group about piece work payments are the medical doctors I've talked to. I've met multiple doctors who think they should be able to bill for each question asked during a visit that concerns a different medical topic, and some go so far as to demand the patient leave and book a subsequent 15 minute appointment before they will discuss it.
Edit: I'm not saying anything about how much truckers, or any other profession, should be paid. Instead, piece work professions would be better served (and would avoid potentially disastrous financial outcomes) by evaluating their business in terms of overall profitability. For example, drivers might negotiate a higher price per mile, but if one of the aspects the parent mentioned changes significantly (load/unload time, traffic conditions in a geograph), they should turn down the work or start transitioning to a new occupation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work
To be fair, there are unusual incentives in place here -- depending on the specific circumstances, each individual task or procedure a doctor performs may end up being coded differently for insurance reimbursement purposes. The focus of doctors on piece work is incentivized by the way insurance works.
(1) It's immutable, and squeezes them between their dispatchers (who schedule them for 11 hour drives) and remaining legal. If you're running a day load (far better quality of life), then if you hit traffic you're spending the night on the road in your truck, parked wherever you happened to hit the time limit. There's no individual flexibility in terms of "I'll drive less tomorrow to make up for it."
(2) Removal of individual agency. Imagine if someone showed up at your desk and told you that you couldn't write any more code because you'd already been coding X hours. Doesn't matter you were on a roll. Doesn't matter that the past 4 hours were lightweight commenting and code formatting. Doesn't matter you were in the middle of writing a solution that finally occurred to you. Just is. Oh, and here's a $500 DOT ticket for trying to jot down some code notes to yourself to salvage your work.
I hear and agree that some people feel entitled to bill counter to market. But IMHO the combination of a per-mile-rate, dispatcher-driven scheduling, and absolute regulation is pretty sadistic to truckers.
There's a lot more friendly ways the legislation could have been written: work hour cap per week, different classes of CDL / experience levels mean different caps, etc.
If there were a decent moment-to-moment shot of somebody dying because I was coding tired (rather than a future chance with a barrier of code reviews), it would be totally reasonable to put a really sharp barrier on reducing that risk.
Which is completely unregulated with anything like the same strictness.
I can only speak to the day trip side, not long-haul multi-day freight. But based on annectdotes, I would say there's (on average) at least one incident per month per driver where the truck has to be driven off the road to avoid a collision with physics-ignorant non-trucking traffic.
A friend of a friend was involved in an older lady's death after she pulled out right in front of him (as in, "even the brakes can't slow a truck down that fast" close). Of course he survived in the larger vehicle, but now he has that on his conscience.
I don't dispute that freight trucks are dangerous vehicles. But generally speaking, their drivers are far more experienced than you or I - they should be, they do it every day.
11% is not nothing, but it's also not the 89% chunk.
Long stretches of boredom punctuated by split-second reaction moments also describes my driving... and I can do that in anything 5 tons or under without any sort of regulation (except a passed driver's license test some number of years ago).
The regulation exists because of the unacceptable collision rate that truckers were having on public roads. Citizens compel the government to act when their relatives die due to a few irresponsible truckers who fall asleep behind the wheel.
The truckers in your family are probably responsible and know their limits. Brand new truckers ---or those who don't have the leverage to push back to an employer who expects them to drive dangerously long hours--- might not be responsible.
Their freedom is restricted because given the choice of pissing off the boss and putting people at risk, drivers and companies often choose the later.
My brother almost got hit by a semi at a weigh station when it took too long too stop -- because only one brake was functioning. He stopped a Chinatown bus venting exhaust into the cabin, also brakes were on fire. Another time they caught a guy who drove straight through from San Diego to Syracuse on amphetemine.
The regulations are there to protect the driving public. Violators are actively policed, and companies who break the rules get shut down.
To your specific points, the company and drivers' interests usually aren't in lockstep.
Unfortunately, the company usually has the power. Correct me if I'm wrong on some of the details here.
But when a driver's in another city and picks up a trailer that's been overloaded, or one with bad tires or faulty brakes, if they choose to pull it then they're the one that gets nailed with the DOT ticket. Correct?
I know some trucking companies have reimbursement policies, but that seems like a really perverse incentive structure. Why not find out who the driver is contracted to for the load & fine the hell out of them? It's their trailer after all!
My problem isn't that there's regulation. It's that some pieces (like the above, and the absolute cutoff times for logbooks) seems like it was designed by someone who wasn't overly burdened with imagination, empathy, or an inkling of game theory.
(And on the driver-vs-company fines, I'm basing my guess on most of them accruing against the driver by the fact that trucking companies generally seem to be pushing drivers to make the shady choices)
The driver shares responsibility. If a trailer is overloaded and has bald tires and brakes, he shouldn't pick it up. The driver has a strong incentive to tow the line as his CDL is his livelihood, and serious violations can affect that. (In addition to his life.)
The problem is that the carrier may or may not care and most drivers have little leverage. My uncle was a teamster driver. If he showed up to pick up a load and it was overloaded or unsafe, he'd go to the dock master, tell him to get the overload off the trailer and refuse to pick up. If you work for JimBob Trucking from Alabama, you may be on your own.
As for the inflexibility -- you need to be inflexible sometimes. You don't need game theory to state that trucks must have brakes, or that drivers must sleep. The fact is that a human's performance of occupational tasks diminishes as you stay awake. If someone is up for 17 hours, they will perform as if they are drunk.
Agreed that drivers have responsibility for a load they pick up, but my understanding is that with the new eLog systems there's less opportunity for "flex time". So if you arrive at a yard and need to get a container swapped to a new trailer or have them pull a different trailer then you're still on the clock. Which gets dicey when the yard knows this and says "Sure, we'll get you a new trailer. It'll just take a couple hours. We're really busy right now..."
The ideal would be the unionized situation you outlined, where there's a strong, independent driver's advocate to mediate disputes.
And agreed that there's a hard cliff where no one should be allowed to drive. But if it's 11 hours in the seat max, then what if you sat in traffic at a port for 5 of those? Is that driver as tired as someone doing 11 hours of interstate miles?
Paper logs afforded both drivers and regulators a judge-like discretion that I think lubricated the wheels with reasonableness while still dissuading repeated patterns of risky behavior.
eLog (assuming they fix all the loopholes in the terribly implemented first gen systems) doesn't provide that flexibility.
Which, in general, is a problem I think we're going to have to deal with more and more. You can't take partially enforced laws that worked, implement technical measures to absolutely enforce them, and expect everything to be the same as it was before. (E.g. if police departments started sueing for Google Maps tracking data and handing out tickets whenever a speed limit was exceeded)
Here's a link: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-on-sleep-deprivation-20... There's a lot of public military research as well, but without the pretty charts.
Only these do not solve the issue. The issue is that working longer shifts puts people's lives in danger. You could legislate in some worker protections for the driver, making it more likely these things do not happen. But they wouldn't make the laws any less necessary.
This essentially taught me two things: 1) performance pay really works and 2) always wash your vegetables.
I do think the mileage incentive makes sense because it forces you to be clever about your route. But not getting paid while a truck is loaded seems like total bullshit and basically another example of companies building their business off the backs of workers.
The meters only charge for time when the cab isn't moving, or is moving slowly... This enabled a passenger to run in to a convenience store, and it would be worthwhile for the driver to wait for the passenger to buy their beer (or whatever). Sometimes my passengers would ask me to stop the meter so it wouldn't run up on them ("sure"), others expected it and were fine with the arrangement.
It looks like the gorilla rideshare company slashed their per-minute rate in Phoenix since I last checked - used to be $0.25/min, now is $0.09/min. This makes it not worthwhile for the "ride share" driver to wait for their passenger to run into a store... In theory, since the "rides" show up instantaneously it's more efficient to get a new ride rather than make stops.
Since the "ridesharing" apps charge for both time & distance, the posted price-per-mile makes it seem like you're getting a better deal than you are. 3-4 minutes/mile adds $0.27-$0.36 to the cost for every mile of travel, at $0.09/min.
It typically took me 7 minutes to get to a pickup address, which included a minute to plug the address into my navigation software (the taxi company I used to drive for now has a phone app that automagically directs the driver to the pickup address, just like the upstarts' system). The mother of a friend of mine has taken to using "Lifts" when she needs to go someplace where she'd rather not have to park. I explained that the driver she was getting might not actually be just around the corner.
Some major carriers will ask drivers to fudge this, although the rules are actually pretty strict about this. Notably, Wal-Mart has come under a lot of criticism in the past for asking drivers to mark time waiting for a truck to be loaded/unloaded as "off duty" instead of "on duty, not driving."
There are too many companies that ask drivers to fudge the books. My dad has worked for a handful of them and finally found a nice place where he doesn't have to worry about that kind of request. I think it is more common than people think.
I really doubt he was trying to make a point about engineers....
Not a dumb guy, but he'd slipped off the rails at a very early age, and dropped out of school as soon as he could. He did already know the alphabet and numbers. He was embarrassed to even talk about this with his peers.
Abstract ideas of "job retraining" may sound great but I think they are generally unrealistic. Folks who figured they were "done with school" at 18 or even 22 and then find themselves unemployed in their 40s have a hard time changing direction in my somewhat limited experience.
(But those students at community college who are aged between late 30 and 50? Really driven. It's embarrassing to compare typical college students to them.)
And yet we seek for ever higher minimum wages, decreasing the number of low-skill jobs and push for even more automation.
Edit: To those downvoting me, could you explain why? Because minimum wage has decreased[1], wages have been stagnant[2], and globalization has undeniably affected the midwest negatively[3]. I suppose the impact of illegal immigration is up for debate, but when you have 10 million illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage in a country of 300 million, of course there will be wage suppression.
[1]http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-wages-table-4... [2] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2016/09/1... [3]http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2012/04/09/the-global-midwest...
You are both saying that a job should provide more buying power.
Those at the bottom today have a standard of living that is in many ways better than the standard of living of a billionaire a century ago. Why? Productivity gains.
(Which turns out to be much more widely applicable than generally realised.)
and the workers in those countries and the people who those goods and services...
You can measure a country's success not by how much its top-earners pull down but by how much those at the bottom make.
> It should be much cheaper to have a decent life today than in the 60s.
It would be if not for the problem of housing and transportation being vastly more expensive than they were in the 1960s. You could get a cheap suburban home back then for less than a year's salary. Try that now and you're living 300 miles from the nearest city.
Wealth isn't measured in how much you make. It's measured in choices.
You can measure a country's success by how many choices those at the bottom have.
https://mises.org/blog/wealth-isnt-just-measured-money-%E2%8...
> It would be if not for the problem of housing and transportation being vastly more expensive than they were in the 1960s. You could get a cheap suburban home back then for less than a year's salary. Try that now and you're living 300 miles from the nearest city.
You've now correctly identified the problem. Housing costs in the US are out of control and have been for a long time because we have policies that promote housing as an investment asset that should always grow in value. Many baby boomers have their entire net worth tied up in housing and have supported policies for decades that increase the value of that asset to support their retirement. Housing has become a vehicle for an inter-generational transfer of wealth from the young to the old.
https://howmuch.net/articles/american-spending-past-75-years
-- Karl Marx
https://goo.gl/LJh3Kh
What I find most telling is that average housing in 1970 is comparable to sub-poverty-line housing right now, in terms of total square footage and number of rooms -- and average housing in 1970 had considerably fewer amenities (fewer full bathrooms, less likely to have a full kitchen, much less likely to have AC or in-unit washer/dryer, etc.)
I won't attempt to tease out all of the issues that led to this, from changes in demand to zoning regulations to developer preferences. Just pointing out that "housing inflation" is a major driving factor in the cost of housing. As others have pointed out, there isn't a lot of affordable housing inventory, particularly not in big cities.
I don't believe the surveys cover "high-income" housing, but they do show median / middle-income housing growing by the mid 2010s to roughly triple the 1970s square footage. Inflation-adjusted, that means lower cost per square foot.
But it's certainly worth thinking about whether the shift to much bigger housing has been an entirely positive one, or whether it has drawbacks.
It may be said that of this hard lot no one has any reason to complain, because it befalls those only who are outstripped by others, from inferiority of energy or of prudence. This, even were it true, would be a very small alleviation of the evil. If some Nero or Domitian were to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to death, it would not be any diminution of the injustice that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape. The misery and the crime would be that any were put to death at all. So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements.
Chapters on Socialism, p. 713.
Economics is complicated and far from reliable. The idea that removing the minimum wage would result in full employment is ridiculous. It would make businesses richer and subject millions of people to worse poverty. There is open debate that the minimum wage even reduces employment [1].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2951110
When I talk about the minimum wage, what really matters is what that income can buy you. Rather than discussing nominal wage and associated costs let's just combine them and talk about real wages.
Clearly there is a point where a higher minimum wage (real) is infeasible and detrimental.
In my opinion there is a wide range of minimum wages (real) that raise the welfare of those whose skill is in excess supply.
It's an inefficient one. We can do a better job at improving their welfare at a lower overall cost.`
>The idea that removing the minimum wage would result in full employment is ridiculous.
I'm not arguing that at all.
>It would make businesses richer and subject millions of people to worse poverty.
So combine abolishing the minimum wage with a complimentary policy that makes businesses poorer and alleviate the poverty of millions. A minimum wage is not the only way to make employers pay to alleviate the poverty of the working poor.
So show us anywhere in the Western world that does that; improves the welfare of the poor without a minimum wage.
But show us with evidence from other countries that are currently employing the system, don't defer to untested and unproven "it could be so if..." claims, please.
There is legislation that binds non-union members at non-union workplaces to union agreements.
Anyway, yes there are angel investors and companies that exist only to match them to those needing the money. Again, probably not on the scale you will find in Silicon Valley.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
When you propose an alternate solution I'd like to see it in practice before throwing millions of people to the wolves.
Deadweight losses. A bored teenager that'd rather have $3 than an hour of his time sits at home. A retired person would rather tell stories to a bored teenager for an hour than have $3. The law says that it's illegal to make this trade, even though both parties are better off afterwards.
There's other issues from messing with prices - shortages/surpluses, excesses or deficiencies of quality, search costs, and misallocation of resources. It really all boils down to the same thing, though. Prices provide feedback between what buyers want and what sellers provide. Mess with prices, and society starts lying to itself about what it wants or how hard getting it is. Do Not Mess With Prices.
>When you propose an alternate solution I'd like to see it in practice before throwing millions of people to the wolves.
We have an alternate solution, we just reserve it for people who somehow "deserve" to be treated humanely through virtue of being disabled or elderly. Everyone deserves to be treated humanely. Expand the current welfare system to everyone, eliminate the incentive distortions from means and needs-testing people, and pay for it through tax increases.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Are the inefficiencies you mentioned significant? I suggest you read the empirical studies section of the Wikipedia article.
I think you can have an opinion but I don't think you can treat it as fact.
Note: your example of the teenager seems ridiculous as people get paid under the table all the time.
Edit: prices are always messed with. Inefficiencies are created and removed every day. A minimum wage is just a large union saying we want our share of the value we create. If you want to argue that they are messing with the efficiency of the economy or are shooting themselves in the foot then you should have damn good evidence.
"Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated." - Thomas Sowell
The reason is straightforward - a higher minimum wage disproportionally affects goods and services produced by employees that get paid said wage, or close to it. These tend to be the cheaper products on the market, and so the poorer you are, the more such products are in your consumption budget. Obviously everyone has a substantial amount, so the tax is still spread around - but poor still end up paying proportionally more of it.
For another perspective at the same problem, consider what happens when the wage gets raised. Now your paycheck is higher - but so is the cost of your food, most likely, because the people producing it were also paid little, and are now paid slightly more. So the actual increase in purchasing power is less than the nominal dollar amount - and the difference is proportional to how many cheap (= produced by low-paid labor) products you consume. Whereas someone on the high middle class end of the spectrum will see some minor increases in restaurant bills and such, but it's a blip on the radar compared to their income (and their mortgage, education costs, car loan etc).
The obvious conclusion is that we should stop being half-assed about it, recognize that our existing arrangement, between min. wage and unemployment insurance, is already a kind of UBI, acknowledge that it means that we as a society are already okay with the moral argument behind UBI, and work on implementing it ASAP.
It's pretty obvious why when you look at the near slavery conditions that abused workers doing things like picking tomatos in Florida are subjected to. Shitty businessmen get away with nasty shit when workers lack protection.
The difference between today and 75 years ago is that we now import second class humans again who lack access to basic rights and import goods manufactured by peasants abroad.
I can't really explain here why I'm in this situation for a few reasons (particularly anonymity - if my employer finds out I've said any of this I'll be fired and his "friends" will come for a visit), but here's what I can say:
my employer is a thief. Tax fraud, wage theft, copyright violation. Staff are expendable, and routinely fired for not working certain shifts (illegal, because the staff are hired for differing shifts and are not required to work extra). Contract fraud, multiple different types of harassment and abuse of staff, as well as threats against personal safety.
Basically, anything he can get away with to pocket a few dollars, he will do. I'm sure you can imagine that minimum wage is, to him, a target; if it didn't exist, he would pay us much less.
What keeps him in business is powerful friends in government (in a country with "low levels of corruption") who seem to help complaints get lost rather than actioned, and the local gangs who will have a chat with anybody who gets out of line.
That sound horrible.
Is there anything that can be done to bring such people to justice without exposing dvtv75?
But enough outcry about the companies "exploiting" the islanders was enough for the companies to say "uncle," and automate the harvest with machines. I'm sure that had an effect on the economies of the islands.
http://leftinalabama.com/cinram-foreign-workers-essentially-...
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/01/31/100-nepalese-workers...
But it's worse than most other forms of welfare. We can do better. Much better.
It does part of that, but creates a precarious position for most of the workers. If the minimum wage is higher than the market-clearing wage (as might be evidenced by 100s of applicants for every opening at a fast food restaurant), then the employer knows there is little repercussion for firing (or force-quitting) an employee.
"Plenty more where they came from" and the employee knows that they just passed the 100:1 gauntlet to get this job, so they're a bit more inclined to put up with BS.
The rest of the argument I'm quite sympathetic to. It just always puzzles me, this assumption that labor share will always destroy itself by turning into exactly increased costs, as if owner profit was either nothing, or completely non-negotiable.
e.g. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2951110
Economists disagree about this issue. Lots of the people who are affected by the minimum wage support it.
Remember, it's okay to not know something.
Edit: thanks for the source. I don't think an analysis of the minimum wages affect on restaurant exits answers the question "Is the minimum wage good for those whose skills are in excess supply?". It may be bad for the number of restaurants but is it bad for restaurant workers?
There are smarter people than us who are debating this. Maybe you shouldn't hold this opinion so strongly.
Edit: Downvotes for what?
An ad hominem is not an argument. If we're going with logical fallacies to make our case, I'm going to appeal to authority: I understand this pretty well as I used to work directly on macro-economic reports at the largest broker dealer in Latin America upon which many international institutional investors based their investment decisions. Unfortunately, the citizens of the country whose economy I covered (Brazil) didn't understand these economics issues (among many), which among the reasons why its economy has contracted over 3% for the past 2+ years.
You're assuming that it's a strict wealth transfer where the size of the pie stays the same. It does not. The pie gets smaller when you reduce economic activity, which raising the minimum wage accomplishes as it eliminates jobs and puts businesses out of business. You can lie to yourself by using welfare to prop things up, but that doesn't work so well when the amount of taxes you collect to fund your welfare state drops as the economy shrinks. Eventually that gravy train runs out of steam.
I do not consider myself an expert on this topic. It's good that you do. However, your evidence is weak. You have made a leap from restaurant exits to minimum wage is bad for the workers.
That there is disagreement among people better informed than I suggests I shouldn't hold my opinion strongly without good reason.
It's better to look at similar localities where there are constrasting costs. There are still stores in Philadelphia and Trenton even though sales tax is 0% in Delaware. Likewise, counties or adjoining states with higher wages than neighbors are still able to compete.
I worked for a retail chain in college and saw the regional numbers. The marginal differences in wages between stores in different jurisdictions was insignificant. Our stores had about 100 employees -- a $1 delta was a few thousand bucks... peanuts that barely registered in the bottom line.
So while that paper's data and conclusion may be sound, neither that paper nor other research supports the notion that low-skilled labor demand is, overall, strongly responsive to changes in the minimum wage.
That said, there are a ton of problems in that paper. Their estimates on changes in restaurant entry in the same timeframe as exit were statistically insignificant, so they gratuitously look at a completely different timeframe and data set which happens to support their conclusion.
Economies are just too complex and multifaceted to be able to say that a minimum wage bump will clearly decrease employment. It's worth noting that the political pressure to increase wages doesn't happen in a vacuum. For example, presumably the political pressure exerted is a function of wealth inequality and thus of the capacity for the local economy to redistribute income downward.
This incredible complexity is why you get such counterintuitive results, such as that American corporate investments were highest when taxes were highest, decreasing as corporate taxes decreased, so that today both investment and taxes are at their lowest.
If you have specific contradictory evidence, cite it instead of a vague handwavy response.
If you look at all the literature, the results are mixed and equivocal, at least for modest changes in the minimum wage. See the empirical studies section on Wikipedia
or a discussion of minimum wage studies in an economics textbook, such as Fundamental economic laws tells us that an increase in the minimum wage should result in a decrease in labor demand. But the numerous empirical studies are so equivocal and so obviously confounded that it's utterly naive to assume (as we normally assume, and indeed normally should assume) to see a simple labor demand response. Exogenous and second-order effects seem to be huge. So whenever you see a study that purports to claim (or is held out to evidence) either that an increase in the minimum wage decreases overall labor demand _or_ that it decreases income inequality, we should be highly skeptical.Of course, the paper you cited doesn't make any claims about aggregate labor demand, nor even labor demand in the restaurant industry. It only looks at exists and entries using some novel data sources. The only truly interesting thing about that paper, IMO, is it's novel use of Yelp. That paper raises a ton of questions--good questions--about data sources and methodologies. I wouldn't venture to rely on it's conclusions for any economics argument.
"We then exploit the multiple city-level minimum wage changes in recent years across the Bay Area to implement a difference-in-differences design to investigate the effects of the minimum wage. We find suggestive evidence that a higher minimum wage leads to overall increases in restaurant exit rates – depending on the specification, we find that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of exit, although the estimate is only statistically significant in certain specifications.
"Next, we present robust evidence that the impact of the minimum wage varies with the rating of the business. Our point estimates suggest that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to an approximate 14 percent increase in the likelihood of exit for the median 3.5-star restaurant but the impact falls to zero for five-star restaurants. These effects are robust to a number of different specifications, including controlling for time-varying county characteristics that may influence both minimum wage policies and restaurant demand, city-specific time trends to account for preexisting trends, as well as county-year fixed effects to control for spatial heterogeneity in exit trends."
No, that is entirely unrelated to why it was created.
It was created because The Deep South was unwilling to pay a black man "a white man's wages" and blacks were routinely paid about half what whites made for the exact same job. The policy was initially a failure. Businesses in the South fired blacks en masse rather than pay a black man the same as a white. This did not change until WW2 caused very serious labor shortages.
Minimum wage was an antiracism policy aimed at forcing the Deep South to get more in line with the rest of the nation and stop having Jim Crow bullshit linger on in the form of literally paying blacks half as much as whites. It was intended to put a stop to that practice.
Whatever they do with it now for REASONS, the original federal minimum wage law was passed for the above reason.
Could you offer some support for this claim? There is a recent book called "Illiberal Reformers" that seems to suggest exactly the opposite: that minimum wage policies were put in place with the intent of putting minorities out of work (rather than raising their standard of living).
See some of the quotations here:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/12/thomas_leonard.html
""" The low-standard or undercutting-of-wages part of the theory, got its start with the violent activism of white Americans against Chinese immigrant workers. The title of a pamphlet published by the American Federation of Labor trenchantly captured the heart of the claim: Meat versus Rice: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive? If wages were determined by living standards rather than by productivity, then the meat-eating Anglo-Saxon could not compete with the Chinese worker accustomed to eating rice.
Professor Woodrow Wilson, in his popular History of the American People, preferred the same theory of low-standard races undercutting American wages, adding a fillip of racism to cement the notion that race explained the low standards. White laborers, unable to "live upon a handful of rice for a pittance," could not compete with the Chinese, "who with their yellow skin and strange debasing habits of life seemed to them hardly fellow men at all but evil spirits, rather." """
It laid this out very credibly. It had a very respectable list of sources. The author talked about getting original copies from someone who was old of some of the papers and what not that he referenced.
Sadly, I cannot remember the name of the book. If I can find it, I will let you know.
Also, I have read a different theory than the one you cite for why Asians ended up working on, for example, the rail lines that were laid across the U.S. It involved the fact that they drank tea, thus they boiled their water. This protected them from getting diseases that often laid up white workers in harsh settings where the water was not always safe to drink without boiling.
The racist explanations you list sound to me like explanations created by people living through the fallout who were expressing their anger rather than genuinely analyzing the situation.
Many of these things can be read in different ways. The modern interpretation is to read everything through a racial lens, but I don't think that captures the essence of the issue. The initial minimum wage laws really targeted sweatshops and child labor. It was viewed then that these employers had way too much power over labor and were depressing wages overall.
Where to draw the line between anti-Chinese antagonism and pushing out predatory business is subjective. But I think if you look at the circumstances surrounding the issue and the laws, you'll find more of the latter.
They, in fact, exist outside the United States, period.
Interesting retro-rationalisation, but patently false.
Whoa, that's a bit of a strawman innit? If someone proposed punishment for workers getting paid less than X, it'd be an appropriate analogy. But people are instead proposing punishment for employers who pay workers less than X.
To be relevant, your analogy ought to be something like "evicting people should be illegal".
I'm not saying that one is better than the other -- I don't have an opinion on that. I am saying that the market effect is the same.
-- Karl Marx
https://redd.it/1z5vfb
If you're not paying your labour what it costs them to survive, you're not operating a business. You're running a charity in which the hired help spills their life-force for the owner.
If a human is doing some work that a robot could do, the human is essentially being used as a substitute for that robot, and economics will inevitably result in them being treated as such.
If the sole point of having a human do that job is so that they can collect a paycheck, this is a thinly veiled form of a broken window fallacy - in this case, the hypothetical robot is "broken" to allow the human to step in and "fix" the problem. This is inherently an inefficient arrangement - it reduces overall productivity, which in turn reduces the total surplus value generated by the economy, that could have been used for things like welfare.
In essence, restricting automation for the sake of job preservation is welfare - except it's a very inefficient form of it, because you're wasting human labor in the process, and then there's the social cost of unhappiness for all those people forced to work shitty and meaningless jobs.
The only reason why this approach is even seriously considered is because we, as a society, can't divorce ourselves from the concept that you must work to earn a living. So when faced with technological progress that plainly invalidates this notion, we construct elaborate schemes that allow us to preserve the veneer of "propriety" as we understand it, while substantially redefining it - and we do so at the cost of considerable overhead.
It's insane. I don't expect it to change anytime soon, however.
- the means of production naturally belong to all humans collectively
- resources should be allocated based on need
- being born entitles you to be kept alive by the rest of your species
I don't think anything "naturally" belongs to anyone. The whole notion of property and its ownership does not exist in nature - it's a social construct. So it's up to us to figure out the arrangement that works best, depending on our definition of "best". That is also inherently subjective - some people would claim that it's best for property rights to be absolute and inviolable, as a guarantee of stability, for example.
I think that long-term, some form of collective ownership is the only way to stabilize. But I don't know what form it would take. I doubt it would be anything similar to self-proclaimed socialist states of our age, which have clearly failed in that regard (indeed, many lefties argue that they don't actually have society-wide collective property ownership, but instead it's the collective ownership by the ruling bureaucratic elites - "the Party" etc - excluding your average citizen).
> being born entitles you to be kept alive by the rest of your species
We're clearly heading in this direction. In fact, I would even say that first world societies have already adopted this maxim in fullest, it's just not worded quite so bluntly. If you go around and ask people this exact question, many would probably say "no". But if you go around and ask the same people about specific policies like free healthcare, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, ER not allowed to turn people away etc, that all add up to the same thing, you'll find a lot of people in favor.
> resources should be allocated based on need
This follows from the previous point, with the caveat that the "need" here is not some arbitrary subjective desire, but what's deemed to be a real need by social consensus. What this consensus is, exactly, will likely evolve over time - today we mostly talk about food, shelter and healthcare, but we're already starting to discuss e.g. access to Internet as a basic right. The logical conclusion to that is something like what Bujold described in "Barrayar":
“Poor?” said Cordelia, bewildered. “No electricity? How can it be on the com network?”
“It’s not, of course,” answered Vorkosigan.
“Then how can anybody get their schooling?”
“They don’t.”
Cordelia stared. “I don’t understand. How do they get their jobs?”
“A few escape to the Service. The rest prey on each other, mostly.” Vorkosigan regarded her face uneasily. “Have you no poverty on Beta Colony?”
“Poverty? Well, some people have more money than others, of course, but . . . no comconsoles?”
Vorkosigan was diverted from his interrogation. “Is not owning a comconsole the lowest standard of living you can imagine?” he said in wonder.
“It’s the first article in the constitution. ‘Access to information shall not be abridged.’ ”
Curious: do you see these questions as anything more than questions about "what is consensus at this time?" Does it even make sense to seek an answer on a different level than an opinion poll?
In other words, can morality be more than popular opinion?
Then ask yourself: how?
(In case anyone's offended, I'm a foreigner with ESL)
Test of English as a Foreign Language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_of_English_as_a_Foreign_L...
I lived with him when he transferred into uni. He couldn't read very well until junior year but he forced himself to learn to read and write. He was never completely illiterate but maybe a 4th grade reading level when I met him.
It's been 5 years since then and you would never know. He graduated college and got a solid job, and his reading and writing skills are basically normal.
Damn proud of that guy
We have all met some damn smart people who never went to college, or learned how to read or write profeciently. My father was brilliant at arithmetic from learning to count money in restaurants and gambling. He was a middle school dropout. The trucker didn't all of a sudden go from stupid to intelligent once someone showed him how to read -- all he needed to do is for someone to teach him!
There is a wonderful TED talk about how our STEM-driven craze is a tragedy in terms of how it defines human intelligence by a renounced English teacher and professor, highly recommend it.
The short of it is we should never discriminate on arbitrary things like IQ, reading levels, etc, because we have no idea what even constitutes "intelligence", much less how to duplicate it from adolescent to adolescent.
Edit: to clarify, the market driven popsci definition is paramount because the market determines your dehumanization
In any case, since most people have not had the fortune of having the good experiences that most of us here have, I think it is merely a common service to our fellow man and woman to treat them equally no matter what and provide equal opportunities for employment -- and that includes whatever the en-vogue measure of intelligence is out there today.
* to be fair to me: I formed my opinion over years long soul searching and embellishment in countless self-help and pop-sci books on self-improvement, finally forming opinions around sound science and not junk science. But I am also a human after all, and admit my understanding of the current literature can be flawed.
There are all sorts of "intelligence" that I just don't have. I don't get social cues. They just don't register for me. There is a "social intelligence" that I don't have. But I have seen people who clearly do.
Likewise, there are things that I find to be quite natural for me, and other people look at me like I'm crazy and they don't comprehend how I can do those things.
Whether you call it "intelligence" or some other word, I think the result is the same.
The Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation (http://jocrf.org/aptitudes) uses the term "aptitudes":
> Aptitudes are natural talents, special abilities for doing, or learning to do, certain kinds of things easily and quickly. They have little to do with knowledge or culture, or education, or even interests. They have to do with heredity. Musical talent and artistic talent are examples of such aptitudes.
> Some people can paint beautifully but cannot carry a tune. Others are good at talking to people but slow at paperwork. Still others can easily repair a car but find writing difficult.
Is that a better term than "intelligence" for what you had in mind?
Your opinion is completely unsupported by evidence. Do you truly believe someone with Downs Syndrome or a severe traumatic brain injury has the capacity to be a theoretical physicist?
The belief that everyone is capable of great things might be comforting, but it's ultimately very cruel. Many people will try their very hardest and get the best available support, but still struggle with the most basic tasks of life and work. Pretending otherwise just absolves us of responsibility. It's a get-out-of-jail-free card when we see people suffering.
We need a society that provides a good life for everyone, regardless of their ability to contribute. It's great if truckers can retrain to be software developers or psychotherapists, but we shouldn't be planning our society based on that assumption. Some people are very unlikely to develop advanced professional skills, but that's fine. They're still human beings and they're still entitled to a dignified and fulfilling life.
Ironically, this directly contradicts your point of view, since your maximum physical potential is strongly determined by your genes. Only very few people have the potential to be a Usain Bolt or a Michael Phelps.
> Every single human being has the potential to be an Einstein, so to speak, in my opinion [...]
Well, it seems that your opinion is wrong, then.
You might say it depends on whether it pays or not... but if there's a paycheck in exchange for essentially useless work, it's just welfare in disguise.
How many devs out there writing framework (or insert your idea of re-inventing the tech wheel again here) of the week at a job only because VCs are willing to burn up their capital for that lottery ticket?
"Useless" is highly subjective.
Consider this simplified case. I hire you to sweep the floors in my apartment, and I pay you by the hour. I have a vacuum cleaner, but I don't offer it to you, because then you'd have done the job much sooner, and would be paid less - and I want to pay you more.
Do you see the absurdity in this arrangement? I hope it's fairly obvious. The moral choice in this case is, of course, to let you use the vacuum cleaner, but pay you the same amount as for manual sweeping (minus any amortization costs for the cleaner). I don't lose anything this way, since I've parted with the same amount of money. You have gained, because you've got the same money for less back-breaking work - and now you can either enjoy some extra rest, or perhaps go clean someone else's house and earn more money.
The difference in amount of work you performed in the first case vs the second case is the "useless work" here - and there's nothing subjective about it.
The difference in amount of money paid for a manual sweep and for vacuuming, if you were paid at the same rate for both, is the welfare, because I didn't have to pay you more than the market price of the hour of your work.
Note, I do not consider the term "welfare" to be in any way negative. I just wish we recognized it for what it is, and consciously designed our economic policies around it, instead of pretending that it's something else - in this case, by forcing people to do useless work for it just to satisfy our sense of "propriety" (that they shouldn't "get it for free").
But, uh, seriously, what kind of vacuum is it?
I will do some research on dyson though.
(As long as you don't have small carpets, it's so powerful it'll actually lift them up)
I've got a C3, which I mainly bought to keep the pet hair and allergens under control. My only regret is that I don't vacuum nearly often enough.
Back on topic I think many people that goes to higher education does not valuate the work of people that clean or do other manual laybour. I have done quite a few different jobs like cleaning, transport and servicing machines and it differs a lot between workplaces how much you feel appreciated. A school for example would not be able to stay open if noone was sweeping the floors every day...
In a way, this applies to most software work. While each company is just trying to survive, the world is rewriting hundreds of thousands of ERP, CRM, databases, OSes, libraries...
Having said that, I'd start by simply funding as many small, <18 month road projects as I could. That'd suck up a lot of labor, tighten the labor market quickly and easily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps
Maybe that's so trivial that it doesn't even matter?
Planting trees might only be worth $5/hour for the local lumber company, but the existence value of a new forest to the population generally might be many times that.
I suspect that the amount of potential work that fits into this category is enormous.
Broadly speaking, though, I agree. This is one other case where we can do better - instead of constructing a "broken window" in the private sector and have the person repair it to keep them busy, directly utilize their labor for a socially productive task that may not be market-efficient.
But I'm not sure that there's enough of that kind of useful work (i.e. the kind that actually makes a difference) to keep everyone busy. It also feels like it's mostly easy to automate.
Perhaps we should not worry about that until all the useful work has in fact been done.
I think the difference between job and hobby more lies with enjoyment and something that one would consider doing regardless of paycheck. Housework doesn't often reap a paycheck, but few actually enjoy it. That qualifies as work. Arts and crafts is usually a hobby, but some folks make it into a job with a paycheck. Few adults would look at being a cashier or janitor as a hobby. A small subset can be truly both - programming, for example.
I think the much bigger distinction between job and hobby isn't so much that the job is useless (as most jobs aren't quite so), but the demands it places on your life and family. You can stop your hobby to go to your kid's play, but can't always take off work to do the same. Some jobs give much less control over your lifestyle - like trucking - yet refuses to give back enough benefits to compensate. Fast food, retail, and others have other methods of not giving back. I think these are the jobs that are basically welfare in disguise.
I don't think the distinction is inherent in the job but in the freedom and income that are generally associated with it.
I know a number of people who would be perfectly happy as cashiers if the cashier job had the same flexibility as my programming job. And to harp on UBI again: UBI by giving extra leverage to the employee might actually turn some jobs that are currently low status inflexible drone jobs into something that people will willingly do because they will have more control.
There are plenty of people who have a love hate relationship with their job because of the inflexibility imposed on them by the employer rather than anything that is fundamentally wrong with the core activity.
I don't mean that all employers are evil, they too are constrained by the current reality.
I differ a bit, but the idea that we are shoving only one type of skill set over another is what he touches on. He argues a lot for creativity how it's over looked in modern schooling.
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_cre...
Willing to work != provide value someone is willing to pay for
Average education levels for women when Abe Lincoln was president was 2nd-4th grade level. People routinely quit school after 8t grade. Often, only people who wanted a serious professional career went on to high school.
It is within my lifetime that we moved from more than half of all people living outside of cities to more than half living within cities. Not terribly long ago, most jobs were farm related in some fashion.
I don't know what the solution is, but I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job as they are, without first getting more education. As society evolves, there tends to be upward pressure on how much education is needed to get even an entry level job. This is not merely assholery by the people running the bureaucracy or whatever. Things seem to genuinely get more complicated and take more skill.
I think one big piece of the puzzle is that we need to bring back genuinely affordable housing. It has largely gone the way of the dinosaur. I think this puts enormous pressure on people, regardless of what kind of job they have. It cuts off a lot of avenues.
But I seem to be howling into a void. Everyone seems to be discussing UBI and largely ignoring the fact that even if you cut everyone a check for some kind of basic income, if we don't solve some of our housing issues, you will still see growing numbers of people either homeless or crammed together like sardines in a space not intended to hold that many people.
It's impossible to solve affordable housing by constructing more buildings and regulating prices. The only solution is to decrease demand, and large scale UBI helps do that because it frees people up to move to cheaper cities without having to worry so much about finding a job there.
There's a ton of affordable housing in the United States, the problem is the lack of jobs in those locations.
(Don't get into a suburb trap though. Mixed use is best to reduce unnecessary traffic.)
Dense development is cheaper in both the short term & long term, if we remove zoning barriers to it we can have affordable, unsubsidized and non-rent controlled apartments in Seattle. Instead we mandate worthless parking be built, despite that it is extremely costly and goes unused quite often, while capping and limiting how large & tall buildings are, kneecapping sustainable, affordable housing.
Why do we still have archaic zoning that forces worthless parking to be built (sub-$0.50sqft parking vs $3-4sqft housing)? Fixing this alone would cut $150 to $300 a month off rent in many complexes, as it is another massive cross-subsidy that goes markedly unused in newer buildings.
Lets not even touch on how zoning in nearly every city blocks high density development in smart areas (eg. adjacent to mass transit) and causes medium to low density, super expensive slum to be built. Who really wants a $600k 2 bed/1 bath home when a similar condo would be less than half the price on the same land?
TL;DR: Zoning is killing our cities and causing horrid price increases. Kill zoning, keep fire code, watch housing prices stabilize.
The result is that while purchase prices (which are unregulated) have continued to increase in line with the rate of increase in other desirable world cities, rent prices are increasing at a much lower rate - and they started relatively (compared to purchase price) low to begin with.
Of course it's not a perfect system and i wish they'd cut down on the burocracy to enable building more units faster, but it did show an effect.
I do.
So I bought a place with a similar "you 'overpaid this much' ratio". Why? So we could live in (/on the edge of) Cambridge and have a small yard for my kids and dog to play in, have BBQs, grow plants and flowers, have a driveway/garage, a basement for projects and tinkering, etc.
It quite literally means that I will have to work 5-8 years longer before retirement to afford the excess we paid over a condo in a similar neighborhood. To me, that tradeoff (which is enormous - 12-20% of my prime adult years) is worth it.
The solution is to fast forward through the easy parts, do not block it. The trouble then becomes managing mixed age classes.
Neither can anyone else be trusted to know what the students want or need.
At least it looks like that these days.
Kids nowadays have even a more PC curriculum. Lord help them. My 15 year old niece who we are raising comes home with some pretty crazy stuff that is required.
I started college, but quit. I've been lucky/smart in my career. I started out in the Army and moved to Federal LEO that didn't require a degree. During the 90's I took a buyout and shifted into IT.(Still don't have a degree) Went back into the Army in 2007 and left in 2009, broken. (BTW I have Post 9/11 GI Bill, and still don't go.) Was tired of IT and ironically thought I would drive a truck. As the NYT article stated, what a thankless job. People treat you as second class citizens and the pay was horrible. Back to IT where I make a very good living and live in a suburb working in that suburb. 20 minute commute most days. Yes housing is expensive, but I have a rural property that is my refuge. Yes if I lived there, I would be hard pressed to find work. The only grocery store is a Piggly Wiggly that can't be more than 10k square feet. There farthest parking space is as close as the disabled ones at WalMart, so you need to be content with limited restaurants and stores and you pretty much have to have a car. I see people walking here and there, but that isn't something many can do.
As side note, my rural county has only two permit requirements. Electrical and Septic. I can build a house out of Popsicle sticks and no one would say boo about it.
Some observations on human nature, based on first hand experience. This is anecdotal evidence, but I have family members, friends and neighbors that have worked in factories. During conversations with them about changes taking place in their workplaces I hear about how they don't like them. Most of these changes are technological in nature. Most, not all, of these folks are too lazy to learn a new machine or process. All they want to do is come home and watch TV and many cases drink and do it all over again the next day. Go to work run a machine and make quota, go home.
These folks are smart enough to learn, but just don't want to. My Grandpa was like this. He was content to go work and straighten drills all day, go home read the paper, watch the news and go to bed. He wasn't a drinker.
I would ask him if he got bored straightening drills all day and he would just shrug. I couldn't get my mind around doing something that boring all all day. This was the 1970's BTW.
Just my 2 cents.
I'm less concerned with what people's feelings are than I am about results. The problem here is the minimum wage. We send people to sub-par schools in shitty areas, denying them the ability to get the skills to be productive. Then we require employers to discriminate against them if their productivity is insufficient to justify the minimum wage. Without the minimum wage that abysmally educated person would be more likely to get some amount of productive work and learn skills which would make them qualified for other jobs with higher pay.
Wow that is a very controversial opinion. With a higher minimum wage, that person would have disposable time they could use for whatever they want, including study.
It's all well and good to want to study but for some their are many roadblocks. Not all bootstraps are made at the same length and some are just a little too short to reach.
Perhaps reducing or eliminating the minimum wage would make employers more productive and more profitable; they could then put that money back onto circulation, making life better for the entire economy. Or it could reinforce the concentration of wealth and put companies into the awkward position of not having anyone to sell their products to.
That's a very shallow view of the market, pretending like moving one thing doesn't move everything else. If the price of labor goes down, the price of goods and services will shortly follow suit. That's why shit produced in China has been so cheap, labor is cheap.
>Perhaps reducing or eliminating the minimum wage would make employers more productive and more profitable;
It would increase the economic efficiency of the entire system. The employers are already productive and profitable, they just ship your job to China where labor is cheaper. Not only are you unemployed, but every moment you lack a job your market value is decreasing. Nobody wants to hire someone who has been unemployed for a long time. You're also not building useful skills, or a reputation/references for being a good worker.
Getting into or out of a city is this recurring nightmare, of feeling trapped in a car or cramming into a train compartment with 250 other people.
We know how to fund, develop and create residential neighborhoods, but the interconnect with commercial and industrial zones, as lives change across decades becomes the challenge. People resist being packed together in stifling ways, and rightfully so. Some people hate the claustrophobia of cities, and some people chafe at simply having neighbors. Very few people would advocate for randomly assigned neighbors, if random includes ex-convicts for violent crimes, which becomes a reality in large cities.
If it were as simple as just building many reasonable houses, and bringing any people into them, to meet the needs of anyone who wants a place to live, this would have been solved a hundred years ago.
The concept of low-rise residential & commercial is very recent, and was a reaction to the cold war (eg: lets spread out, nukes can't kill us all then!). You end up with sprawling burbs covering your best farmland, and a crapton of infrastructure to maintain at great expense. If it weren't for federal infrastructure subsidies covering the up front capital for infrastructure, most suburbs would not exist.
You can build dense, multi-story complexes with good insulation and seperation, were it not for running into your neighbors at the mailbox, you'd hardly see them at all. Most buildings built from 2002 on in Seattle are of this caliber, and having put up walls before, stapling some insulation between isn't that hard or expensive, and is worth every dollar if you plan to live there.
And you seem to miss the fact that with UBI you have no incentive to live and stay in an expensive area.
For the deposit amount on an average house where I live I would cover 80% of the cash price of a bigger house country side. But you know, I'd have no work.
The problem is not housing, the problem is cramming all the work in cities. My last 3 jobs could've been done remotely, I asked and was always denied even while offering to take a pay cut.
I and many like me despise living in cities, we do not live there by choice. I've slightly moved out of a big one (London) but still live/work in the outer rim where housing is a dream far away, even on a way above average salary.
Give me UBI and I quit my job to settle country side tomorrow, so would my wife. So would a few of my colleagues.
If you're a halfway skilled programmer you can scrape together the equivalent of what you'd get on any sort of realistic UBI doing small freelance jobs while living in the country side.
If there was a serious safety net that guaranteed a decent quality of life, a significant portion of people would be taking on those options and leave the city centers.
Like many people here on HN, I can work from anywhere with electricity, Internet and decent cell phone coverage. But I still strongly prefer a bigger city, and I even prefer to be close to the city center, not out in suburbia. The reasons are many:
- close to the city center I can chose between some of the best schools in the country for my kids. Outside the city center, I would have to chose a mediocre school. In the cuntryside, I would have to have to go with whatever is there
- I like going out with my wife. In the city we can chose between all kinds of cuisines, cafes and bars. In a village, we would be lucky to find a pub with fries. In suburbia that would be a strip mall.
- Shopping in easy in the city center. Whether you like it or not, you need to do groceries on a daily basis and to buy clothes etc every now and then, and this is far easier when you live in the city.
- I like to walk for things (walk my kids to school, walk to do groceries, or just walk for the sake of it). Curiously, I find that this is easier in the city center with sidewalks and parks than in the countryside, where I would walk in the side of a highway or road.
- In the city center I can do sports (tennis, soccer). Yes, I might find that option in the countryside or in suburbia, but in the city I can chose between 10 different teams, venues etc.
- I like people. There are many more people in the cities, especially younger people.
- I like to travel. I can take the metro to the airport in the city and visit hundreds of places within a a few hours of flight. Driving 2 hours to the nearest local airport to transfer to a bigger airport would kill that. I live far from my family and friends. They would visit much less if I didn't live near an international airport.
What I am trying to say is that I think nowadays people live in the city for many other reasons than work.
If we are talking about a UBI, we might as well start treating people like people again instead of job-executing machines!
But who cares, we'll go trash Mars with Elon.
That's probably too radical!
I think we both agree there.
From my own limited sample I see the opposite trend as well, people who would rather live country side.
What I was getting at is that even if people like me are a small sample (20%? more, less, who knows. If anyone has got numbers I'm interested), if you free us to go live country side suddenly there's more space and housing available for people like you.
See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/01/the-s... for one example.
That's one of the problems with UBI. It has a negative impact on productivity which is bad for society.
I am homeless. I also have portable income. I have already used that fact to move someplace cheaper. That failed to get me back into housing. I plan to move again in the near future to move someplace even cheaper.
So, no, I am not missing anything. You are just LA LA LA not listening to the fact that if you cannot find housing cheap enough that your pathetic low income will cover rent, fuck you. So, I stand by my statement that UBI won't really do shit all if we don't solve the affordable housing issue.
Speak for yourself, cowboy. It's ironic, considering how affectionate HN claims to be towards "disruption" and the many of us who have learned by doing, that this comment exists here. We should not make arbitrary judgements as to what someone else deserves, especially in regards to feeding his or her family, by applying our own sensibilities so broadly.
If a society does not provide an individual the potential to live a comfortable life, the individual has no incentive to help that society.
Please consider some re-framing. Everyone deserves to be part of society. Everyone ought to have the chance to contribute to the extent they can. No one deserves to be thrown away and forgotten.
Example: My wife's uncle can't hold a job and requires assistance for basic life tasks like figuring out how to live on his own. He wakes up everyday at five, takes the bus to the hospital and works as a (volunteer) greeter. He is not capable of a lot of tasks you'd associate with the idea of a job, but the work he does benefits society (makes the world better) it also benefits him to be able to give back.
Have you ever walked into a place and had no idea what to do next? Have you ever benefited from someone calm and welcoming who provided a quick hello and simple directions? Have you ever felt lost and just needed a human to help the littlest bit? There's room for a lot more humanity in the world I see around me. I don't know if there's strictly a financial need, but it would sure make the world a better place.
But back to my uncle by marriage: His work and his maintenance of basic needs are decoupled. I would argue that he deserves both. I don't know what you deserve or what you've earned or the relationship between the two. Let's just remember not to throw people away as we plan the future we'll all live inside.
A job implies that someone somewhere is paying for that job to exist. In a free society, you can't make it compulsory for someone to pay another individual to do work that isn't valuable to the person doing the paying.
> I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job
Thankfully, a large number of people in the world support the idea of feeding the hungry in a way or another.
I desperately want to figure out how to establish an adequate earned income. I am not pro Basic Income. You can keep your charity. It is almost never anywhere near even the very average, middle of the road quality of the cheapest fast food places.
When free food is as good as what you relatively rich people are eating, then you can talk to me about how wonderful this impetus is. Until then, I would like a fucking adequate earned income, thanks. And I would like to see that standard applied more generally.
People who imagine they are generous, good people are very, very often just justifying incredibly bad treatment of other people that they don't really believe deserve a real life, like they have. If they believed that, instead of giving charity, they would create jobs and build affordable housing. But, no, we can't do that. And fuck you all to hell to the poor schmucks ending up homeless because of the incredibly shortage of affordable housing. Y'all all must just be losers. It couldn't possibly be that society as a whole is all kinds of fucked up and you just happened to draw one of the excessive number of short straws.
To be honest, I find that people who genuinely believe that about themselves are oblivious to how utterly hypocritical and inconsistent they are as human beings.
Some of the worst people in history have acted out of perceived righteousness.
I'm in that age bracket (30-50), and trying to transition from tech-support/helpdesk into something like coding/linux-admin/devops/etc, anything that would pay enough to allow raising a family in/near a major US city.
I find it daxx hard to even get a phone call back because of my age.
I spend a lot of time learning this and that and have s small portfolio that can be viewed. But still no joy.
So I keep on pressing myself to learn new skills, putting in 10-30 hrs a week, ON top of my 9-5 job. I did not I work this hard with this much focus in college. Honestly much regrets.
Posting this with a disposable account.
I am working in a tech company and my colleagues/friends frequent HN. I am just not in one of those high paying positions.
But I will retain this account to check for responses.
Do you have any suggestions in general? Sorry I cannot post much more details on my part though.
Since the layoff, I've been able to scrape together a few phone interviews, but I find that it is damn hard to get a second interview -- anywhere.
It's not just hard to get into this line of work at this age, it's also hard to get another job in this line of work when you have already been working in this industry for over 25 years.
The last time I was interviewing, one recruiter said to me that they were looking for someone who was just exactly like me -- but just five to ten years younger -- and asked me if I knew of anyone who was looking. I don't see how you can have as much experience as I did at this time, if you didn't start playing with computers back in 1982.
I wonder, is it the recruiter doing the age screening on their own or is it coming from above?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14372192
They have a business problem they need solved, and that almost surely means "come in, walk around, talk to people, and figure it out".
There are also limits to what I am capable of doing. I like to think I'm pretty good at the Ops side of the house, and I'm more than happy to work with Devs as part of a larger team, but I am not a Programmer or Developer. I can hack on code to a degree, but I simply do not have the capacity to develop code from scratch.
My wife and I have lived in Austin since 2006, and we are not willing to relocate in order for me to get a job. Since she is an international business lawyer who has always made at least twice what I have ever made (even comparing her worst year to my best), it just doesn't make financial sense for us to move.
So, I'm limited to jobs I can get here in Austin, or to work remotely. Austin being the town it is, there are lots of startups here, but they want devs and not ops. Or they want devs who can do everything.
There's also a number of big enterprise companies here, but of course they want Windows. The University isn't an option because I found out the hard way that they are the biggest flying Mongolian clusterfuck in town.
Sigh....
So your original comment was a bit disingenuous, you have a lot of conditions to where you'll work, but you then you also tried to use the "age discrimination in tech" narrative to garner sympathy (so I suppose). If there is age discrimination in tech (which I don't see myself, I see the opposite), then commentary like your original post don't help.
Full disclosure: I (as does almost everyone else here) have a stake in this as I will likely someday be a 50+ employee or job seeker.
P.s. I'm going to stop writing this, but the more I think about what you wrote the more infuriated I get. What the * is wrong with that recruiter? At the least they should be fired for expressing that thought, but they should also suffer in some way for having that thought. They have no business considering your age at all, especially with 50 being decade(s) below retirement age.
Maybe you could put this effort into building something for yourself? Because, the cruel reality is, the older you get the less likely it you'll get the break you are currently aiming at.
I worked in construction for most of my life but once I past 40 it became obvious that nobody wants to hire someone older and better qualified than they are.
Hope it works out for you.
My gut instinct is you'd have more luck in more rural areas - jobs do exist in them, I'm technically employed in the agricultural industry.
Also if you are interested in all this stuff try this -- [https://www.visualstudio.com/dev-essentials/] you get free 3 months trials for Pluralsight and Linux Academy, you can download and watch some video courses during commute and that might reduce your study time at home a bit.
Disclaimer -- not affiliated with Microsoft or Linux Academy or Pluralsight, just trying to be of some help :)
There is a small business for that. Nothing much, a food stall or whatever it was in 60s or 70s. Low-tech.
For instance, people who want to give free haircuts to homeless people that are charged/fined are people who create value that dont have jobs, being stopped from creating value by people who do. DOH preventing people from living in Tiny Houses they've built IMO falls under same category. Health insurance execs, red tape admin workers, etc.
I contend that what is important are things like human welfare and dignity, space exploration, and animals rights, to name a few.
When truckers are obsoleted I dont want to see them digging holes and filling them again. Let creative destruction work its magic, push them to succees in a competitive market, and in the meantime help with their human needs so they dont starve or go without housing or healthcare. Jobs are the wrong thing to focus on, it leads to perverse incentives.
My grandfather was a steel worker and one of his work friends was illiterate. He had gotten a job in a steel mill back in the 1960s and somehow had fallen through the cracks in the educational system. (To be fair, this man probably sought out those cracks and crawled into them but that's another matter) He was similarly not a dumb guy, he was able to learn how to perform complex jobs safely in a dangerous industrial environment.
He never admitted it at work, it would have been volunteering for vicious bullying but my grandfather was able to deduce it from his behavior and actions.
After they retired, this man finally decided to learn to read and enrolled in a program.
I can't imagine what it would be like to get into my 60s before learning how to read.
Also, I went back to college at 30 years old and not only was I a more focused and driven student than I was when I first went at 18, I was consistently more focused and driven than most of my younger classmates. I pounded out 4 degrees in 6 1/2 years.
This is a critical point that most people just glaze over. Actually, I would refine your statement to be "Its important that there are jobs for people on the left side of the bell curve". That's really what the issue is when you get down to it. Half of the population is above average in intelligence and general ability. And half the population is below average. To have any sort of sustainable society there needs to be opportunity for those below average to be able to live decent lives. Offshoring jobs is the single biggest problem in this regard. Many, many middle class jobs with decent/good pay are continuously offshored, especially if they are office jobs because most office jobs can generally be performed from anywhere. I've seen many cases where there are 1-2 highly paid US employees that manage oversees teams in India, Singapore, etc. The problem with that (other than the obvious) is how does one gain the experience to be in those higher paid jobs if you are a US citizen? All the entry level jobs are oversees being managed by someone who was around before the offshoring.
Food service, personal services, and trades are my answer. No one in India is going to cut your hair, unclog your sink, rewire your kitchen, paint your walls, re-roof your house, or serve your dinner.
What are working conditions of truckers relative to railroad workers?
While $5B is still a lot of money, it's smaller than the $8B that funds mass transit.
The difference isn't enough to compensate for the increased wear but there is a difference.
Trucks are used for shipments to more local warehouses or retail/factory locations that don't have rail access. And no, it's not feasible to build a rail spur to every warehouse or Wal-mart.
Low-speed (15 - 30 mph) tracked autonomous vehicles for local ("last 10 - 20 mile") delivery might very much make sense.
It's a lot easier to focus on things like traffic control and hazard detection (including people on tracks) when your wheels literally hold you to the road.
The major rail companies would much rather move mile long trains hundreds of miles on well maintained track, and let the short lines fend for themselves, barely scraping by, running trains at a few miles an hour (as they can't afford proper track maintenance.
Drones that can deliver small packages will likely disrupt quite a bit of the delivery scene. Why hire five delivery drivers for an area when you can have one who drives the drone launch truck, they drive to the middle of the zone, deploy the drones, monitor them (or offshore their piloting to remote pilots), wait for them to finish their run, rinse and repeat.
And agree about opensource, I learned more from opensource than my formal CS education.
I'm an immigrant. I follow the industry news. Both industries, I guess.
First. You wont believe how diverse the truck driving jobs are and how diverse truck drivers as a group. There is a fair populations of drivers with bachelor/masters degrees and pretty high IQs
I had chosen the job because it is always there. No need for looking for one. After initial 2-3 years of entry level jobs (big/ corporate type companies driving dry vans with 90-100% turnover) good drivers migrate to niche Jobs. Owner/operators with secured contracts. Or specialized freight. Oversized/high security/more dangerous/requiring specific skills (chemical tankers, medical equipment, military contracts etc)
Company drivers in such fields are getting fair pay, very much equal to low/entry level unambiguous programming jobs in $70000-$100000 range. I get paid both by miles(normally under 10%less than actual miles) and time I spend at customers. But, unlike in programming field, I can dictate my conditions. Which is normally would be work hard 8-10 months/year and play with hobbies rest of the time.
But yes, it feels like we are getting squeezed harder and harder.
The problem is very much same like everywhere in the country. Big/corporate type companies with low pay are getting bigger and bigger share of the market. Going into owner/operator business(equal to being contractor/consultant) means get plummeted with regulations and costs of health insurance. And, starting in December 2017, every truck must be equipped with eLog. Which is watching your every step and hackable by any kid with imagination. Hackability is written in the law. It requires eLog providing interface to truck's engine computer and having cellular contact with the outside world. Just look up eLog and trucking in google and cry and be nervous every time you see 18 wheeler.
Glad to see that truckers are feeling the pinch. If they are even a bit smart, they should leave and do something else. Even repairing trucks along the Highway may be a better job.
Somewhat tangential, but I hate this notion people seem to harbour, that any kind of job should be able to provide dignified living. No. If your work is shitty and super replaceable and doesn't need much brain power you will live in poverty.
Whether said political action takes the form of ballots and bills, or torches and pitchforks, remains to be seen - it could go either way.
Most truck drivers don't get this luxury and the infrastructure setup for trucks is absolutely awful from a social/health perspective.
> I bought me a brand-new car, a 2017 Chevrolet, two days after I hit this town.
I don't know what the answer is, but there must be a better way of educating people about their finances.
Keeping people ignorant of savings, debt, credit etc. seems to benefit a certain section of the financial services though.
If you interviewed my coworkers at the hated retailer-of-them-all you could cherry pick totally bad experiences. Or on the other hand you could find example after example how a walmart worker can buy their own house [1] and how every walmart has at least one employee making 6 figures, often 250k or more.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/69m275/walmart_emp...