I can’t tell from your comment but I’m not sure this is what you expect. This is not people who have never had a job. This is a (now politically motivated) estimate of the number of employable people. Subtle difference.
Participation rate is not politically motivated, but citing it can be. This was widely cited by the right during the Obama administration and now by the left during the Trump administration.
Is the left citing labor participation rate during the Trump administration? This is strange, because the labor participation rate is recovering since Trump elected.
I will indulge you, though I doubt my points will perhaps provide any clarity to your understanding of the situation. Trump has undertaken many efforts that will force the impoverished and disabled into the McJobs creation that Trump is so proud of during his tenure.
The Trump administration has cut benefits programs that our society's most vulnerable rely upon, like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program)[0][1] or Meals on Wheels[2] and reduced the number of people qualifying for disability benefits.[3]
Trump's plans for 2020 and beyond look to go even farther[4] in targeting the elderly, the disabled and children.
I've chosen Scholar rather than a general Web (or literature) search as the frequency of this accusation online or in the general press is so common as to be a trope, though you can repeat my query in either.
My own read is that unemployment is at best an incomplete metric for reasons expressed in the Brookings article: it fails to consider wages or compensation, and a large number of low-wage, low-skill, low-opportunity jobs really isn't commensurate with a strong labour sector.
There was that article I saw on HN where IIRC a doctor explained that disability diagnosis depends on the kind of work a person can get. If they are a blue collar worker and they can't stand for a whole shift, they get disability. If they can sit in front of a computer for 8 hours and work, they don't get disability, for same medical issue.
People without college degrees get disability and stop seeking employment, making the economy worse off but making the employment statistics look better.
I would love to see tech pivot away from being an industry that is 100% about tracking & advertising more and more every year and towards something, anything that was an actual real new product or service.
We used to take it for granted that tech was the industry of innovation and progress, but there seems to be very little of that any more. Just a few more ads on the page.
I'm hoping/wondering if 2020 will be the year there's some sort of real cultural shift in how this is all viewed. We already know about all the research pointing to social media making people generally less happy, but a huge part of the internet/tech economy is just ads and services that... bluntly, don't really add much to the world. And a ton of capital and human effort is going into that.
I had a moment of excitement when Google announced their practical quantum computing breakthrough, then I instantly realized it meant they will just find a way to track me at a quantum level and anticipate my consumer targeting brand preferences 10000x more quickly or something equally as awful.
Adam Smith wrote about it (paraphrasing) extreme division of labor will create servile, ignorant humans.
IMO billionaires suffer from it too. Offloading so much real doing and learning while existing in the context of abstract decision maker.
You think Bezos can do much more than validate or demean people around him? Bet he can barely rotate a tire.
On the upside for the first time in history, the oligarchs in America don’t also control armed gangs. The risk of toppling one is manageable: taxes.
Organizing abstract social metadata very particularly is way less useful and makes for way less interesting people, than real muscle memory built from doing a variety of types of work.
"In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging, and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it."
According to Wikipedia, Bezos "once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room" and "worked at McDonald's as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift".
I expect he's in the American average range for practical workaday skills.
I don't know whether or not he can specifically "rotate a tire"... but rotating just one tire is pointless anyway, you have to rotate the entire set to even out wear.
HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
A lot of people become unhappy with their jobs and develop mental health issues. Some people never recover from having worked in destructive work environments.
If you have to take a bus for an hour to get to your four-hour shift at a stressful minimum wage job, where your manager is abusive and the workplace is unsafe, your mental health may suffer.
Meaningful work, or contributing to the wellbeing of those around you -- that would be a worthwhile goal. Suffering just so your family isn't hungry is a harder sell.
Inevitably, someone will say they should just learn skills from the internet to improve their lot, and perhaps some will. I think most people on HN (especially me) are so insulated from the reality of working poverty that we just look for technical solutions. I wish there were some.
Due to how many North American cities are designed with urban sprawl and separation of living areas (suburbs) and productive areas (industrial/office zoning laws) it should actually be the norm to have a lengthy commute to work.
Hell, I live in a suburb with quite good public transport and it would take me almost 30 minutes to go to the grocery store by bus.
When I was a teenager and had no car, it took me about an hour to get to my minimum wage job by bus due to transfers. Once I could afford a car (because I lived with mum and dad and could save) that commute got cut to 20 minutes.
You're right, we probably should have said longer, maybe an hour and a half. I definitely know people that commute a long time for low wages. Or did. They're in better places, now.
One of them used to stay really late at night at a Denny's because the buses didn't run when he needed to get to work, so he would spend the night (basically) at a Denny's so he was at work on time.
> to take a bus for an hour to get to your four-hour shift at a stressful minimum wage job, where your manager is abusive and the workplace is unsafe, your mental health may suffer
Your statement sounds like what would be typically written in an attention grabbing first paragraph of a news article in order to draw people in w/o providing any context as far as how common all or even most of those items you listed even exist. It is not realistic in any way at scale common sense says that. You are highlighting almost certainly an outlier not what is typical to make your point.
Let's take a look in particular into 'suffering just so your family isn't hungry'.
- Riding a bus for an hour in itself isn't suffering.
- Four hour shift isn't suffering
- Stressful minimum wage job? Any job can be stressful having a job pay more does not make it less stressful.
- Manager is abusive. Abusive? This sounds like some characterization for impact to make a point. How realistic is it that the vast majority of jobs have people who are 'abusive' managers (as opposed to a percentage of them let's call it 10% arbitrarily).
- Workplace is unsafe? Where? In the US? You think 'all' or 'most' workplaces are unsafe? Or there are perhaps a percentage that are unsafe?
- Your mental health may suffer. Sure ok that one is fine. But maybe you are in the position that you are in the first place because of your mental health.
When I was younger, I worked a job at a car wash. There was only one thing I really did all day long- vacuum cars and wipe them down.
This got repetitive quickly, and the managers got really upset whenever you slacked off in the lulls. Groups of more than three people chatting while we had "downtime" were more or less immediately disbanded. Checking your phone, even to text your family, was a big no-no on company time. There was no such thing as a "smoke break" (I don't smoke, but man a five-minute break occasionally would've been really nice.)
I hated that job. I dealt with a bout of depression because of that job. The turnover there- among people who were talented- was exceptionally high (I lasted about two months before I found a better job) because the job was so menial- and the managers so demeaning- that all joy in working was lost fairly regularly.
It would've been better than staying at home and playing games all day long, but I'm sure that I could've done something more productive, without pay than I did with pay.
> (I lasted about two months before I found a better job) because the job was so menial- and the managers so demeaning- that all joy in working was lost fairly regularly.
That sounds like a good outcome though. If the job weren't so bad you might have stuck with it. You could say that you (and others 'talented') were lucky it sucked so much.
But the job still needed to get done. Just in terms of basic human decency, maybe we shouldn't encourage abuse and exploitation of workers just because "they can just get a better job."
Who is 'encouraging abuse and exploitation'? I am saying that adversity also creates opportunity. Along those lines we all know of people who grew up poor and that was the thing that made them work hard. Also what makes many immigrants want to come here. This doesn't mean 'make things really bad it's motivating'. My point was more if things are comfortable it can keep people around and prevent them from seeking a better life.
>I am saying that adversity also creates opportunity.
But it doesn't. Occasionally it spurs on action, but just as often, it traumatizes.
>This doesn't mean 'make things really bad it's motivating'.
That's just what you said, it's simply the flipside of the following sentence, and it's untrue. If we have limited time and energy on this planet, every moment in the work you describe is wasted.
Totally disagree. It's 1000000 times better than without a job, a job at least helps mental status and boost some esteem. Also it's 1000000000000 times better than living on welfare or food stamps. for himself/herself and for the society.
Are you saying that it's better to be on food-stamps than having a "low-paying" job? You are part of the problem. This mentality is extremely harmful for society as a whole, as well as for individual taxpayers.
Not always. Being in one of these low end jobs tends to beget staying in that low end job longer, making it more difficult to have the time to invest in getting a better job. Numerous studies have shown that giving people a bigger safety net may make them stay unemployed longer, but when they do get a job they end up making much more money and being happier overall.
You are thinking of people who go to college or get some sort of official training. However, the best way to earn more money is to get on the job ladder and start learning skills. Once you have some experience it’s far easier to earn more. Putting people on welfare doesn’t help people learn skills.
I think it's a stretch to say all jobs help mental status and self esteem.
I think the point of the article is that relying on low unemployment as a main proxy of the health of the economy and how the workforce is doing overall, while pushing economic policies that try to mainly optimize that number, misses some pretty big points.
Eventually you approach (modern) slavery though, and the transition is not black to white, but a continuous one. So your argument, without any qualifications, actually implies that (modern) slavery is not a problem. I hope it is obvious to you why that is a highly unreasonable argument.
I don't quite see your point. I agree that both traditional and modern slavery is not voluntary. But if there are no other options, other than taking an extremely low-paying job, then modern slavery is exactly what you get.
None of that contradicts what I originally said. Not having a minimum salary, and removing options for people to get by when they find themselves unemployed, creates a perfect environment for modern slavery. The OP that I replied to above seemed to think this is a good idea - it is obviously not.
Of course having a low-paying job is A LOT better than not having a job at all. You can ignore other ill-intended comments that are throwing straw-men at you.
Subjective opinion: jobs promote financial independence, mainly independence from the government. When the majority is not handcuffs and forced to give their votes to socialists to secure their welfare benefits (which, ironically, furthers their dependence on corrupted government and tightens handcuffs), democracy and sane vote prevail.
I came from poverty, struggled all my way up, and I'm a strong believer that no matter what, you have to WORK and to earn your life. Those people with good life from born and call others "slave" are not helping anyone, in fact you're trying to make more true slaves by that attitude. Always encourage others to work/study/be-independent as much as you can.
During the time without a job and when I am in poverty, I _NEVER_ sought for food stamp or any government help, I consider it is a shame to me per my own standard, and this is the only way I got out of the poverty.
These regulations upon regulations, shitty policies and "governing" from socialists are killing the market and gotta stop. It's dumb to interfere with the market and dictate how much your skills are worth. USSR as a reference? We know what financial top-down planning and dictatorship does to countries.
"The market" is not some all-powerful, benevolent force that will always achieve the best outcome for humanity or society as a whole. Markets are disproportionately controlled by the current holders of wealth (and therefore power), who will naturally tend to seek their own advantage at the expense of others. And so some kinds of regulation are often appropriate to protect the less powerful participants.
free market IS all-powerful. times change, technological progress moves forward, financial powers rise and fall, it's natural, it's evolution, a chaos controlled by the market (and not by the billionaires, it's not Russia). If you interfere, you are making things worse, delaying the inevitable, promoting dependence, killing individuality (or even progress).
The market is not some emergent natural phenomenon. It is a construct to facilitate human interaction. We already heavily circumscribe the “free market” and I don’t understand reactions to market failures that amount to “Well we can’t do anything about that”. Of course we can, it exists for us, not the other way around.
I'm surprised you'd be in favor of welfare for anybody, actually. Why should we protect and support those with a disabled body or feeble mind? Let them freeze, let them starve. Individuals rise and fall. Natural selection is all-powerful. It's dumb to interfere. It's natural, it's evolution.
I'm glad not everyone shares your particular morality.
I completely agree with you that we effectively killed natural selection among humans. Natural selection is dead, and now guess what, we are going after artificial one, with UBI, welfare etc. Ridiculous, right?
We reward stupidity, promote mediocracy, and teach dependency.
America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada. The difference is the US, you basically need a job, or else you're one broken ankle, complex childbirth, or infected hangnail away from complete financial ruin. People being able to take extra time to find the right job is a good thing for the economy. Better than being driven by an abject fear of not having a job.
I don't think it's terribly strange to view lower unemployment numbers as something to strive for. The idea that I might not need a job (when I haven't accumulated the resources to support myself without one) is totally foreign to me, and not attractive at all.
I grew tremendously as a person working jobs I didn't enjoy. I only work on what I want to now, and I couldn't imagine I'd be very satisfied with my life I didn't navigate to this position through hard work.
It is possible, but it is also quite rare, and usually happens for higly paid, white collar jobs. I'm yet to meet, say, trash pickup guy that enjoys his job.
EDIT: to clarify - it's not that I look down on any jobs. Trash pickup is very much needed profession. What I'm saying is: Let's say person wins a lottery and suddenly has all the money they need for the rest of their lives. I can imagine that many software developers will still continue to program, writers or musicians would continue writing novels or songs, but I'm pretty sure noone would voluntarily continue their trash pickup work.
It's also possible that people with jobs you are judgy about won't tell you they actually like the work that you look down upon. This is one of the ways prejudice is self reinforcing.
People tend to frame things selectively in response to the audience in question. People in vulnerable positions are usually aware of it and acting to protect themselves.
There are jobs that you don't enjoy but that will help you achieve a better future. Then there are jobs that do nothing but provide a temporary stop gap from financial ruin.
The idea isn't that you don't need a job, the idea is that you are less dependent on finding a job right away so that you can find a good fit between your skills and your goals and your job. This not only will lead to a better life for you, but more overall economic productivity.
There's no reason people should have to suffer "busy work" while they're looking for some place to be truly productive, just to assuage the grievances of Puritan work ethic folk.
"Any job" doesn't help people find stable work as well as training and a safety net do. SOME jobs provide this, but forcing people into jobs that don't is counterproductive. This is a common misunderstanding people have.
What if the job has terrible safety conditions and a high injury rate. Is it still good? I’m not arguing that it doesn’t provide some value if it staves off financial ruin, but, the world is composed of more than only “good” and “bad”. If it wasn’t things would be so simple that sites like HN would not exist.
> If working a job will prevent financial ruin, then it's a good job. No job has to be permanent.
That seems to be the definition of an acceptable job.
To me a good job is one which you wouldn't mind doing every day for the rest of your life. The occupation needs to actually be desirable in the long run, and a decent paycheck does not fit the bill.
I've been noticing things like this and I wish I could come up with a good name for it. It's about noticing how the scale has slid up quite a bit in just a generation or two. The "American Dream" used to be something a 1200 sq ft house in the burbs with a white picket fence in a clean/safe neighborhood. Just a couple generations ago that was the dream that most Americans worked towards. Now when people talk about the American Dream they talk about Gates, Musk, Kardashians, etc. Of course many people still live in unsafe neighborhoods, but things have gotten so relatively good for so many people that now the scale has slid up and the dream is to become millionaires/billionaires. I think you are presenting a similar thing with your concept of acceptable jobs. During the Great Depression a GREAT job was working for the CCC digging up the bowels of the Earth for $1/day, most of which you sent home to feed your family who was on the brink of death. And there was no "health insurance." If a boulder fell on you and crushed your legs, your family just starved. Another poster parallel to you brought up, "What if your job isn't safe?" Imagine that notion just a few generations ago. Now, just a couple of generations later a job that prevents financial ruin is merely "acceptable." And I agree with you in that depiction. It's amazing how far we've come.
note: this is an "old man yelling at clouds" post. I hope readers can consume it in a way that they find valuable to their current perspectives.
I have experiences with many jobs that were not enjoyable. By "not enjoyable", I don't only mean they were dull office jobs. I had a lot of jobs in my early twenties, often through temp agencies but not always: working in warehouses, working as a manual laborer in large institutional buildings (moving furniture etc), two different jobs working on factory assembly lines, working in old office buildings to pull network cable through ceilings and floors, working on receiving docks, etc. Well over ten or fifteen jobs, as they tended to last for a summer, or a few months or weeks. As someone with computer skills and ultimately a pretty promising career ahead of me, I always had the sense in these temp jobs that they were just that, "temporary". However, most everyone I worked with in these roles were not there as temps, they were the people for whom life had worked out such that these kinds of jobs were close to the best they were going to get. There is no amount of "hard work" that someone in these roles can apply to move to a new station in life, there are too many strikes against them: educational, cognitive/developmental, health-wise, criminal backgrounds, etc. that make it extremely unlikely they would ever have much better of a station in life. And like me, all of these people were entirely aware of this element of who they were; they were the "lifers".
One of the worst jobs I had which I could only handle for about two weeks was working in a factory that manufactured rolls of ink ribbon for line printers and typewriters. My job was to be handed a large metal bar called the "spindle" onto which I would pull out 30 or so rolls, stick all the rolls onto the spindle with spacers in between them, then hand them off to this other woman who had whatever minor skill was required to put this spindle into the machine that would roll the ink ribbon onto them. You do this in a dark and smelly factory for 8 hours a day. This job was for me, a valuable experience, as I can look back on it with all the perspective offered by doing that kind of job. But for all the other folks working in that place including the woman who I handed the spindle off towards, that was it for them. They were all at most high school grad or less, they were people for whom there were no opportunities. The job paid minimum wage. They were "lifers". These people are counted as part of "the employed". But they live paycheck to paycheck with minimal benefits or health care, in a dangerous and unhealthy environment, low life expectancy, poor nutrition, all of it. I don't consider low employment numbers to be very interesting when one notes how miserable life is for so many of the "employed".
Your hypothesis does not hold up to the data. The unemployed in Canada experience the same penalty in life satisfaction as the unemployed in the United States:
> On average, the unemployed experience lower life satisfaction than the employed by about 0.3 standard deviations in Canada and the United States, by 0.32 standard deviations in the United Kingdom and by 0.47 standard deviations in Germany.[1]
Your claims relies on the assumption that unemployment in Canada is more tolerable than unemployment in the US. Yet large-scale surveys do not reflect that for the average jobseeker.
Therefore we can conclude that higher unemployment in Canada vis-a-vis the US is almost certainly driven by a lower supply of jobs, rather than as you posit a lower demand for employment. The same also holds true for the major Western European economies surveyed.
Heath insurance is a benefit offered by some US employers as an alternative form of compensation. Employers get discounted rates because of how many customers they bring to the insurer and they pocket some of those savings while passing the rest on to the employees.
You can get health insurance without having a job. It's expensive, but it's not like it's cheap through employers. Just cheaper.
Health care - at least, treatment for life-threatening emergencies - is a right protected by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act in the US.
Try getting healthcare in the US without health insurance, and try affording health insurance when you don't have good enough work. Yeah... thought so.
You edited your post to add a line about emergency healthcare being a legal obligation of hospitals - we both know that emergency healthcare (i.e. "I am literally dying right this second") is not the total of necessary healthcare for many people. I invite you to try surviving very long as a diabetic when the only treatment option is to go to A&E when you are literally dying.
I understand your point but you’re also attempting to portray that low income folks have no chance at obtaining health insurance. Thankfully Medicare and Medicaid coverage gives health insurance to millions of people. 63 million to be exact were enrolled through some form of Medicaid in October 2019 (Center for Medicare, 2019)[1]. Another 10 million or so people are eligible for Medicare (prior to age 65) due to a disability.
The problem is there's a gap between having low enough income (and being able to jump through enough hoops) to qualify for Medicaid and having a good enough job to be able to afford adequate health insurance to receive healthcare in anything but an emergency.
> Try getting healthcare in the US without health insurance, and try affording health insurance when you don't have good enough work.
I'm not offering an opinion here. I just think the distinction between health care and insurance is important.
The original post I was responding to implies to some that you need a job to receive treatment. It also conversely implies that having a job means you can get treatment. I've actually talked to people outside the US who think that because of how our discussions are often worded.
> You edited your post to add a line about emergency healthcare being a legal obligation of hospitals
I'm sorry. I often think of things to add to my post right after submitting. I was editing it before I saw your response.
> we both know that emergency healthcare (i.e. "I am literally dying right this second") is not the total of necessary healthcare for many people.
I agree, which is why I specified that the right only extends to life-threatening emergencies.
Emergency care means they stabilize you so you won’t die right away and then kick you out. Many of the things that you will die from will never even qualify for it, e.g. treatment for cancer. You need money, insurance, or real charity to get care for that.
If you're not offering an opinion through the kind of hair-splitting that elides the immediate and generally permanently life-wrecking consequences of not having health insurance, then that hair-splitting serves very little purpose. On the other hand, if your opinion is that the status quo is acceptable, it allows you to rhetorically minimize those consequences because, hey, at least they're not dead, even if the best way out of that debt can seem to be suicide[0].
If you believe that, you've bilged a test of basic humanity. If you don't, perhaps re-think what drives your well-actuallies in the future?
I gave a reason for my "splitting hairs" and you conveniently ignored it.
Stop projecting opinions that are not mine onto my post. I believe the health care and insurance industries in the US is broken and does not adequately serve a huge portion of citizens with low incomes. I have never suggested the current system is okay.
If your opinion is reliant on misinformation, you should reevaluate it. Otherwise, you should not be concerned with someone like me "splitting hairs".
In the US, the distinction between having health insurance and being able to receive necessary healthcare is not a huge distinction. Fairly sure you know this.
I would consider a distinction between financial ruin and death to be fairly significant. That doesn't mean I think a system that so frequently results in financial ruin is acceptable.
My intention is not to say "you're just broke, you're not dead". Quite the opposite. My intention is to say that health care access is not limited by whether you have a job - it's whether you have money. Plenty of people have money but no job and even more have jobs but no money.
Emergency healthcare prevents some causes of death - generally, those which can be fixed in an ER and allow the person to continue living a mostly normal life after. Take the example of a diabetic person, or a suicidally depressed person, as counter-examples which cannot be fixed in an A&E environment and will lead to death.
You can't get treatment for life-threatening "conditions". You can only get treatment for life-threatening "emergencies". You got a tumor? Good fucking luck. You got a seizure because of your tumor? Come on in and we'll make sure to send you an absurd bill later.
I know multiple poor people that had their cancers cured without cost to themselves, no "emergency" required. The reality isn't as bleak as you are making it.
The US has the highest cancer survival rate in the world, which would not be possible if poorer populations were not having their cancers proactively treated.
On the one hand, good for them and it would be nice if you elucidated whatever you know about how they pulled this off.
On the other hand, it's basically dismissive of a very real problem here. I read a lot about homelessness. I've seen far too many people indicate they are homeless in part because they have cancer and it's ruining them financially.
America is hardly some utopia where we take wonderful care of all our people, regardless of ability to pay.
General surgeon in the South here. What I've seen is that uninsured individuals will prolong going to the doctor for symptoms because of cost and that sometimes costs them their lives because of the advanced presentation of their disease. On the other hand, once you get diagnosed with cancer in South Carolina, you automatically qualify for Medicaid so that you receive some treatment.
This way, you die with treatment and our system does not seem cruel. Even advanced, expensive chemotherapy is paid for, sometimes exceeding hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Affordable Care Act provides subsidies for health insurance based on income, not assets. If you're diagnosed with cancer and lose your job (because chemo is tough), and have assets, pay the Cobra until next sign up period. Sell all assets and invest to make about $20-$30k a year. Your premiums will be low and you'll have access to quality care. Move near large academic institutions because they do medicaid / bad insurance care. This way you minimally touch assets.
Rich people hate the Affordable Care Act because they don't get subsidies on premiums, which are about $3500 / month for a family now, and they have to pay 4.8% Medicare tax on all income over $250k . So, in essence, someone that makes $1m a year pays $78k/year in health care costs.
Lastly, I take care of a Pizza Hut delivery person who gets his insurance through the Affordable Care Act and only pays $40 / month for it, because of the subsidies.
Medicare is a health insurance program for all citizens of U.S. whereas Medicaid is health coverage for low income group and people with disabilities.
Medicare is federal-supported program and Medicaid is a joint program by the state and the federal government. As such the eligibility and coverage for Medicaid vary from state to state.
That only looks at three cancers. The oncology literature tracks survival rates across all cancer incidence, in which the US consistently comes out on top. Only a few other countries, such as Switzerland, are close.
It is attributable almost entirely to more aggressive (and expensive) diagnostics combined with many new cancer therapies being available in the US years before they trickle down to the rest of the world.
> The US has the highest cancer survival rate in the world
No it doesn't.
But even if it was true (and it isn't) you should also specify which type of cancer.
No country gets every type of cancer better than any other.
For example if we consider stomach cancer, South Korea is on top with 57.90% survival rate, USA is 30 points lower at 29.10%
> which would not be possible if poorer populations were not having their cancers proactively treated
It wouldn't also be possible if rich people couldn't get the same treatments other countries have developed by traveling abroad or having them for cheap in Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela.
But to put it in another way: take breast cancer, where USA leads the charts with 88.87% survival rate.
According to the sources "About 1 in 8 U.S. women (about 12%) will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime."
In Italy, where I come from, we measure breast cancer as patients over 100,000 women, not in %.
"Breast cancer is the leading tumor among women in Italy ... The incidence per age group was estimated to exceed 100 new cases every 100,000 women ≥ 40 years of age"
100 over 100,000 is one in a thousands or 0,1%, which is 120 times better than U.S. 12%.
It means that every 120 women that develop breast cancer in USA there is only one Italian woman in the same condition.
That's what really an universal health care system make possible: to not develop the diseases.
You are cherrypicking, and conflating incidence (demographics) with survival rates (medical outcomes). The survival rate across all cancers in the US is around 70%. In the UK (since I work there and have the number handy), it is around 55%, which is a significant improvement for the UK in recent years.
Cancer incidence rates are primarily the product of genetics and environment, which is why it varies across countries. It has little to do with access to healthcare. Stanford hospital has given state-of-the-art treatment for both liver and stomach cancer for free to poor members of my family.
> Cancer incidence rates are primarily the product of genetics and environment
I'm sorry, but that's not how it works.
For example only 1 in 4 breast cancers are attributed globally to risk factors (i.e genetics or environment)? [1]
Since you're bringing it up, I know a things or two about cancer, my father worked in health care, in pulmonary oncology, my mother worked in health care too, in infective diseases, most of my family is tied to Italian public health care, my aunts and uncles worked for it, our family best friends worked there, one of their children and one of my best friends is now a geneticist and is researching rare disease (some types of cancers among the others).
If it was simply about environment and genetics, looking at the numbers, one would assume that in Africa or India they have a very resilient genetic pool and the best environment in the World and in USA they've got some serious problem [2] [3].
Of course that's not the entire story, in those places people don't develop cancer because they die for many other (curable) diseases before cancer gets them.
So what makes survival rates so high in the US?
Well, this Forbes article [4] explains it quite well: overtreating.
But at what price? (not talking about raw monetary value here)
Cancer insurgence is tightly related to aging [5], I've brought up the example of Italy because it's the second oldest population in the World on average after Japan.
And we know that the best cure for cancer is (still) avoiding it.
We have a system here that tries to prevent cancer: women are called in for regular check ups for a number of diseases (including breast cancer), men are checked regularly for prostatic cancer when they are 40 or older and its for free.
Companies, by law, have to send their employees to regular check ups every five years.
I have high blood pressure, I have to attend mandatory check ups every year, because I am more at risk than the others.
It's all paid by the Company.
Would you prefer to develop breast cancer and have a 90% chance of survival or not develop it at all?
Breast cancer is by far the most common type of cancer for women [6] and it has high levels of survival rates in all the western World [7].
What's particularly controversial about the way US counts average survival rates is that they also count breast cancer in situ, which is not a try cancer, but it's used
to inflate breast cancer statistics [8]
One statistics is particularly interesting, despite the fact that since the 90s sales of cigarettes per adult per day dropped
dramatically and are among the lowest in the west [9] the share of cancer deaths attributed to tobacco is still pretty (alarmingly) high [10].
What's really important in cancer prevention and cure is that globally the chances of going back to an average life expectancy is rising, not
only the survival rate after 5 years. In Italy 25% of cancer patients can expect to go back to a normal life, I haven't found the numbers
relative to USA.
From a profit standpoint, the health industry (providers, not payers) have every incentive to delay care for chronic conditions until they can't get away with not doing it. Once a patient is sick enough, more resources and justification tends to be thrown against the insurers to pressure them to pay up, no matter the cost. One might recall Michael Moore's infamous protests for a dramatic example of this.
Yep. And I don't see it being fixed in the US, because the anti-single-payer crowd erroneously believes that US healthcare exists under a "free market". In truth, the budget per capita for healthcare in the states is actually _higher_ than in Canada. So Americans pay more for a lot less.
It turns out a few turn-your-head-and-coughs in your 30s is a way better deal than waiting for it to become a trip to the ER in your 50s.
Lots of medium sized (and larger) companies self insure and pay an outside company for administration rather than insurance (insurance companies often offer this type of service).
Health insurance is a benefit offered by some employers to some employees. And the data clearly shows that the drop in employment has not resulted in a corresponding rise in health insurance coverage, which just adds further evidence to the argument that our current low unemployment rate really just means that we’ve traded high unemployment for high underemployment.
I take care of a lot of people who work for Fortune 500 companies that have Medicaid. My taxes, therefore, subsidize these companies' profits. Moreover, when I was in private practice, I accepted sub market fees for my services when I took care of them. This is the reason why I am a hospital employee. I get paid regardless of whether the hospital gets paid.
> Employers get discounted rates because of how many customers
That's hilarious.
I mean, you are correct that employers bundle employees together. But without massive government intervention during and after WWII, the industry would have been wildly different, and the way the trend began was highly historically contingent:
It is mainly that economic factors regarding employment insurance bundling are side effects of having employment-based insurance, not the cause.
It is very useful to look at other countries - we have lots of natural experiments in health care markets. If bundling were determinative of market structure, you'd see the same pattern elsewhere.
You care completely mis-citing / mis-reading that study. It specifically is an attempt to measure the non-material effects of unemployment on persona well-being and happiness.
"Emotionally tolerable" is a very different thing from "financially risky". Indeed, people should be willing to tolerate temporary dissatisfaction to achieve a better long term outcome in ways that they are not willing to tolerate complete financial ruin and the potential loss of major assets that will decrease their long term outcomes.
Financial stress explains upwards of 30% of the cross-sectional variance of life satisfaction.[1] If the hypothesis is that the US unemployed are significantly more financially stressed than the Canadian unemployed, then that would almost assuredly be reflected in differing life satisfaction scores.
Again, you are conflating two different things, financial risk and financial stress.
You are also citing a study that looks at the financial stress levels of employed mental health professionals and then trying to use that to reason about the economic choices made by unemployed people.
This is not how you use data responsibly. You can't just use a 30% correlation in an unrelated dataset to justify conflating two different measures without actually doing statistical analysis to show that that there is reason to believe that that correlation not only exists in a different population, but also isn't washed out by an a other factors.
Your comment seems unnecessarily dismissive and misses the point.
The parent argues that Americans disproportionately boast about their unemployment figures compared to Canadians despite US unemployment carrying an exponentially greater risk of causing financial ruin due to medical expenses.
You dismissed his comment outright by citing that self-reported stress levels of unemployed Canadians and Americans are about the same, although this is at best tangentially related.
Your data is not relevant to the hypothesis. The surveys were conducted in different time-frames (Canada: 2009-2014, USA 2005-2010), which I shouldn't need to tell anyone why that dataset is not useful for rigorous comparison, but I will anyway: one surveys people who were just recently hit by a recession and tracks them throughout the economy's recovery; while the other surveys people who recently experienced massive economic growth (exuberance) and tracks them throughout their economy crashing. Both, Canda's and the USA's, economies were intertwined during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and this should be accounted for -- but it isn't.
Furthermore, the data DOES hold up to the GP's assertion: that as the unemployment rate goes up, the gap in life satisfaction between employed and unemployed approaches zero (chart 2). That is, 20% nationwide unemployment, unemployed and employed Canadians have the same life satisfaction (chart 1).
Lastly, this is social sciences. We cannot conclude anything from the data without experimentation. At best, this data is observational reason to pursue deeper inquiry, at worst it's idealogical fodder to drive other people's agends by lying with statistics. Everyone does it. Statistics don't really mean anything on their own, and lay-people give them too much weight!
For those of us familiar with science, and not social science can you explain why we can't conclude anything from data without further experimentation? Or is this a claim about the scientific method as opposed to say how art is criticized.
It's not that you can't conclude anything from data, it's just that the things you can conclude from data are limited to only two "scientifically-sound" conclusions:
>1). There is a relationship in your data
>2). There isn't a relationship in your data
From there, you can then setup further experiments to better understand why there is or isn't a relationship -- and perhaps find the opposite is true!
It's the same reason you don't assume a theory is "true;" you don't conclude "that higher unemployment in Canada vis-a-vis the US is almost certainly driven by a lower supply of jobs, rather than as you posit a lower demand for employment" (GGP), because that's bad science!
What the GGP did is create an inference -- one based on misread data and faulty assumptions about scientific methods -- and expressed it as de facto. Now, in order for his inference to have weight, he must either support it with further evidence (DIY meta-analysis) or carry out some other type of experiment to test said inference.
A very good example of this is how long it took scientists to be comfortable with positively saying that tobacco use caused lung cancer in people. (A fact tobacco companies greatly leveraged in their defense.)
Huge surveys long showed a correlation between smokers and increased incidence of cancer. But it took decades of research to rule out confounding factors. For example, it may have been the case that industrial work was causing the cancer and industrial workers just happened to be more likely to be smokers.
There is one tool that really nails causation fairly quickly which is a double blind controlled experiment. But usually in social science it's very hard to or even immoral to conduct such experiments.
For example, assigning babies at random to be smokers or not for some period would be pretty hard to carry out and certainly be immoral if you thought the smoking may lead to cancer.
Genuinely no. Mostly I think the industry failed to corrupt the scientific process. Their attempts to do so were nakedly transparent. And they absolutely preyed upon the fact that real quality scientists were reluctant to definitively say the link was causal because they were being diligent about the fact that there was a preponderance of evidence that was correlative.
They succeeded in corrupting the political process though. I don't think you should need 100% scientific certainty to begin regulatory action. Maybe 80% or 90% of the way is good enough. The industry succeeded in requiring 150% certainty before a public health response could begin.
Full disclosure: I am affiliated with myself, and represent the views of me, myself, and I. I am very biased.
Me expressing my opinion, but I don't like either. So I try to steer away from expressing "my opinion," and sticking to only things that have a high probability of being true, which in this case, is the GGGP using an imperfect study incorrectly.
Sorry for being so dumb. Your answer just confused me. Is this standard for data something that is unique to social science? Or is this the same standard?
It's standard for all data, but must be enforced more strictly in social sciences where controlling for all variables (let alone knowing what they all are!) is impossible, and your correlations are more likely to be pure chance.
It’s the equivalent of running an experiment and then looking for correlations. The likelihood of it being chance is drastically increased. There’s an important reason why you are supposed to come up with your hypothesis before. Social science has the issue that theres lots of data to review ex post facto and it’s hard to run rigorous experiments. This means you need extra rigor to avoid spurious correlations.
I'm guessing your data is comparing satisfaction of employed (nationality) to unemployed (same nationality).
If so, all it says is that unemployment sucks and fails to really compare across borders. I've seen some stuff that indicates American parents are some of the most stressed out and dissatisfied parents on the planet due to our lack of family-friendly policies, including but not limited to our sucky healthcare policies.
I thought “underemployment” referred to people working less than full-time (or less than they want) and/or working at a job far below their skill level, e.g. a skilled machinist or college graduate working as a cashier.
But yes, the standard unemployment rate that’s talked about does not account for a lower participation rate, people who could be working or looking for a job but aren’t.
Clinton found a way to exclude all those pesky minorities. He renamed them from "minority" to "discouraged" workers and dropped them off the books! Pig ...
As far as I understand — without private insurance in Canada, somebody with few resources in Canada is at risk of financial ruin from any of the health conditions you mentioned. For older Canadians, a pre-existing condition may not be covered, which means a serious condition could rack up significant medical bills.
Edit: I should have specifically said that I'm talking about expensive prescription drugs and required ancillary care that is not paid for by the province. Also, each province is different. Ex: cancertaintyforall.ca
The Canadian healthcare system doesn’t even have the concept of “pre-existing condition”. That term is deeply flawed and was constructed by the healthcare insurance system in the USA.
The term used in Canada is “medical history”.
I’m at an age where I’m watching my friends in Canada deal with family suffering from long term illnesses and ultimately, death.
They all deal with anguish, grief, heartbreak, and in some cases depression.
Perhaps my error was in saying that the specific conditions that the OP listed would result in financial ruin.
My experience is anecdotal from close relatives in Alberta having severe diseases early in life. Their drugs and "required care" was expensive and not entirely covered by their private insurance. Their private insurance had caps (annual and/or lifetime), and after, their medical history made it difficult or impossible to get private insurance with adequate coverage.
The bills were significant, but maybe each province has programs to cover the difference for those that cannot afford the bills?
In general in Canada, any care you receive at a hospital or doctor's office is free to you. However, drugs you purchase at your local pharmacy are at your own expense. The provinces all have plans to cover drugs in certain situations (for children, for the elderly, for diabetics, etc.) but they do not provide complete coverage. Employers typically offer prescription drug insurance to employees.
Some people with chronic conditions that fall through the various provincial drug plans are spending fair chunks of money on prescription drugs that may be necessary for them to have a good life.
Thanks for explaining this more eloquently than I was able to. I did a poor job of highlighting that I was mostly referring to to these out-patient drugs.
For example there is a drug you can take before chemo that reduces the side effects, it costs a lot, wasn't covered by the province and isn't free with private insurance. It can make a terrible experience a little more tolerable.
Having a heartbeat is a "pre-existing condition". It's vexing how often Americans will discuss treatments + checkups as though there's some chance that they _won't_ see their health degrade as they age.
> The Canadian healthcare system doesn’t even have the concept of “pre-existing condition”. That term is deeply flawed and was constructed by the healthcare insurance system in the USA.
Neither does the US since the passage of ACA in 2010:
Private insurance in Canada barely exists, and primarily covers prescription coverage and paramedial (acupuncture, chiropracty, TCM, etc.) Inpatient prescriptions are covered by provincial health. Doctor's visits are covered by provincial health. Dental may or may not be covered. Hospital stays, urgent care, ER visits, routine checkups, mental health are covered by provincial health. Health hotlines (call a nurse) are literally free. There's no such thing as "pre-existing". There's no such thing as medical billing.
I don't think you should downplay the scope of "not publicly insured" services in Canada, especially after the last couple decades of aggressive privatization of once-insured services.
It varies from province to province in its specifics, but the majority of working-age Canadians have private insurance through their employer. This is expected to cover everything from physiotherapy to psychotherapy to prescription medications.
People without such insurance have a limited patchwork of public programs and usually either have to pay themselves or go without.
Case in point: A friend injured his back, and while the surgery and doctor's consultations were covered, everything else including medication and physiotherapy was not. He ended up spending tens of thousands out of pocket to be able to stand again.
The private health insurance market in Canada is closer to a truly free market and isn't regulated like in the USA, and that means the insurers happily and routinely deny coverage for pre-existing or self-inflicted conditions (as the insurance contract may define them).
Another case in point: A friend of mine is HIV+, and was denied group coverage through his employer. He pays thousands of dollars out of pocket for antivirals every year.
When the public insurer doesn't cover you, it's an absolute wild west of unregulated private insurance coverage and usually boils down to pay or suffer and die.
Private insurance for prescriptions, dental, vision, etc. is offered by most big employers in Canada.
"As CBC News points out, private health insurance is “a crucial part of the system,” and Canadians spent about $43.2 billion on private coverage in 2005."
If you cross that barrier switching between unemployed and employed, there is mounds of paperwork. I wish I could cite a study, but I'm pretty sure people procrastinate / preventative health measures are less prevalent because of this red type.
Not exactly. The ACA included an expansion of the Medicaid program, almost entirely funded by the federal government, that provides coverage to anyone making below the amounts other posted quoted. However, the Supreme Court ruled that states could opt out of this "expansion" if they want, and several states did. In those states they still provide pre-ACA Medicaid services - children, pregnant women, and a couple other groups are covered - but don't have general coverage for low-income people.
> America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada
I don't think that's actually true, I think it's a political talking point that we are all hit over the head with repeatedly. A key progressive talking point is that the issue of so-called "prosperity" is not as simple as "everyone has a job". This is where the issue of people having multiple jobs, minimum wage, benefits, unions, etc. all come into play but that all requires more cognitive overhead, something that is in scarce supply with a nation steeped in distraction.
Yet the official unemployment rate is really closer to the job seeker rate and largely meaningless when compared between countries, what really matters economically is the employment rate where Canada has been 1+% ahead for most of 2019.
To be fair, American smugness about this is likely driven by the fact that most Americans lack perspective concerning how other systems work. They just don't get it that a better medical system that doesn't tie medical access to having a job at all brings stress levels down enormously.
For most people, no job means both no medical insurance and also no ability to pay out of pocket. So I'm baffled as to how this is supposed to be a rebuttal.
I travel around the US constantly, and have never heard anything remotely close to comparing unemployment with Canada. Any talk of unemployment is always internally focused, comparing the rate to the past.
Americans overwhelmingly have no idea what the unemployment rate is in Canada, in my opinion. They certainly don't spend much time boasting about the US rate vs the Canadian rate.
It's a staged premise - which was entirely unsupported - to launch into the America Bad talking point. If you don't use a primer to launch into that, it looks particularly biased on a forum. So what you do instead, is you set up something ugly (those boasting Americans!) that can never be backed up, and that provides your on-ramp.
This is a comedy routine here on HN at this point.
Consider that the Americans boasting premise was the whole foundation to the parent comment and the parent made zero effort to back it up (it'd be impossible to support, the US is far too large, insular, and diverse for it to be likely true). The same country that, yes, largely doesn't know where Iran is at on a map, pays deep attention to Canadian economic statistics.
Pre-2000, 65% of adults 18+ were in the workforce; Today that sits at shy of 60%. You'd expect the cycle of liquidity crisis driven by reserveless lending would result in a stable graph over long periods of time, instead over an elongated period of time, it's pointing downard.
The problem with this is you leave a lot of people on the sidelines\wayside, and it takes years of working, of gaining experience, even doing something like janitorial work, to be considered competent.
Walmart has a drug rehab program today they run at many of their stores; they drug test 100 applicants, 99 fail the drug test. They have no other way of finding people to staff basic positions.
The entire concept and point of minimum wage was to ensure people wouldn't fall into this kind of disarray and businesses that complain about minimum wage hikes are parasites that have to literally eat people alive to survive, except today they hire PR Firms to cover it up. This is not the way to run a society. A lot of the reason our government allows this to go on has to do with controversial tech firms like Uber being funded by foreign entiteis with questionable morals such as the Saudi Oil fund, the US Government allowing china to buy 100bn+ in bonds every year, and other such "arrangements". We had 2 presidential candidates last election the Russians government admitted to compromising.
Congress has sold certain segments of people up the river and genuinely doesn't know how to get them out.
If you look at the growth rate in US Census data and private studies of men over 45 never married, no chilren, and look at the trend and how that has been correlated with a declining fertility rate that's starting to rival the USSR's collapse.
We haven't even begun to recover from 2000, and there's one heck of a powder keg forming.
And none of those people who make up that powder keg care about whether or not our health system is superior or inferior to canada's.
> Walmart has a drug rehab program today they run at many of their stores; they drug test 100 applicants, 99 fail the drug test. They have no other way of finding people to staff basic positions.
Sorry for being the "cite please" guy, but where on Earth did you find this? It's not in your link.
I know people who work there out in Chicago. They distribute pamphlets and have it cooked into their health insurance policy. It's mostly a city and urban problem for the company, and done on a community-by-community basis; the stores they do not drug test at are the stores they impliment the program in. All you have to do for yourself is walk into a wal-mart in a bad neighborhood and ask.
Understand this is a company that advertised converting their employee's to all part-time in 2008 to save on health insurance and then lost their proverbial behinds when they had to hire 8x as many hands whom stole 100x as much merchandise. Some stores had 7 figure shrink numbers. They're under indictment under FCPA by the SEC right now.
If you want some REALLY fun numbers, go look at BLS OES Job wage data for number of warehouse supervisors vs number of warehouse workers. More supervisors than workers. Walk into a warehouse sometime and look around, lots of people who can't speak english.
Not hard to find statistics on how these kinds of outfits work.
Historically the unemployment rate has just been one indicator of how the economy is doing. All else being equal[1], economy A with 5% unemployment should be doing better than economy B with 10% unemployment, at least from a job seeker's standpoint.
The danger of being purely quantitatively driven by these historically useful metrics is that there is an absolute focus on keeping the numbers at the right level or moving in the right direction while simultaneously doing things that undercut the value of those metrics. In the previous century, falling unemployment numbers used to indicate that factory workers were returning to work at their old wage and benefits or better that new jobs were being created. However, today it often means that the factory worker who lost their job is now an Uber driver for a fraction of the pay. You used to see stories like 'factory X is bringing back Y thousand good paying jobs as it (re)opens a production line' now the story is 'unemployment is below 4%... shut up and like it'
[1] If all else isn't equal, whether comparing economy A to economy B or a previous version of itself, you are right it isn't a meaningful metric at all.
The infected hangnail case is because it’s illegal for the corner store to sell you $4 in antibiotics without a $200 doctor’s note, fwiw.
This is an issue with the government, not the economy or medical system. They literally make cheap treatment illegal.
PS: For anyone in this situation, search online for FISH MOX or FISH PEN. Amoxicillin and Penicillin respectively. Aquarium stores usually carry them. Saved my life a few times! Sadly, no longer on Amazon.
As a Canadian, who's been unemployed in Canada...just what??? Being unemployed was one of the most stressful times of my life. I had to hustle for odd jobs to pay bills, and the ≈$700 every two weeks for about 4 months I got from ei wasn't even enough to cover rent. I barely made it through and kept my place. The only reason I didn't end up homeless was finding a job within the last few weeks of my ei. There were days I didn't eat though.
>Now what would you do if you had a sudden medical emergency during your time on EI?
I'd be fucked. I have no msp coverage currently and haven't for a couple years. I can't actually go to a doctor right now unless I get hurt at work and wcb covers it.
You guys believe a lot of bullshit fairy tales about things up here honestly.
I wouldn't describe politicians trying to score cheap political points as "America" having a weird complex. I can promise you the average American does not have any thoughts whatsoever regarding Canada. It's not even on our radar.
He is saying that people in Canada are less concerned about Canada's unemployment numbers than people in America are concerned about America's unemployment numbers.
If that were the case then the word superiority does not belong in that sentence. No average American has enough thoughts about Canada to have feelings of superiority about our economic statistics.
>In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44% of all workers—earn barely enough to live on. Their median earnings are $10.22 per hour, and about $18,000 per year.
Right away, they're presenting some large number that's actually double the real number of people below that threshold. If the median is $10.22, that means only half of them make less than that.
They then make a bunch of broad statements about the entire group.
> While there is no universal definition of a low-wage worker, we use the often-employed threshold of two-thirds median wages for full-time/full-year workers, with slight modification. When determining median wages, we consider only wages for males. This raises the threshold, since men earn more than women on average, but using the typical male worker as the benchmark limits the extent to which gender inequality in wages effects our definition. While this is a less common approach to take, we are not the first to do so.
...
> The average of the national threshold across our five years of data, in 2016 real dollars, is $16.03, and the adjusted thresholds range from $12.54 in Beckley, W.Va. to $20.02 in San Jose, Calif.
They should probably include some of this info without sending you through 3 different links to track it out, but whatever.
Moving on:
>However, imagine that everyone without a college degree suddenly earned one. The jobs that pay low wages would not disappear. Hospitals would still need nursing assistants, hotels would need housekeepers, day care centers would need child care workers, and so on.
If everyone had a college degree, and assuming in the hypothetical that they had higher human capital (since the hypothetical doesn't really make sense under signalling theories of education), then productivity would be higher in other jobs, which would increase pay for their example jobs due to the Baumol effect.
>Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades, even as costs for basic inputs to a stable life—such as health care, housing, and education—have skyrocketed.
For the stagnation claim, their own source disproves them:
>After adjusting for inflation, wages are only 10 percent higher in 2017 than they were in 1973, with annual real wage growth just below 0.2 percent.
Those numbers are themselves somewhat misleading, there's nuances with measures of inflation, total compensation vs wages, etc, but even their source is sufficient to disprove the claim that "Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades"
The other half is a weird claim. "health care, housing, and education" are part of the inflation index. If your wages are higher after adjusted for inflation, then you can afford more "health care, housing, and education" than before. Yes, they will cost more, but by definition other parts of the inflation index will have gone down, and your total cost to purchase the same basket of goods is now lower as a perce...
> then productivity would be higher in other jobs, which would increase pay for their example jobs due to the Baumol effect.
Laughing hard here. You just invented “trickle-down pay raises”!
If everybody has a degree, the degree doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Being a bachelor of economics will not make you a better burger deliverer. Plus the effect only hold due to a few sectors like IT paying disproportionately - overall, productivity increases over the last 70 years have not been reflected in purchasing power or work hours. The gains disappear into the upper deck.
We need to stop this bullshit mentality that people need to ‘educate themselves more’ to earn a decent living. The shit jobs will always exist, and they should pay well just for being shit jobs, which is what happens in northern Europe where minimum wages are more than enough to live comfortably as a bartender. There should be absolutely no shame in working for McDonalds (except about the food itself).
You’re taking that sentence as an absolute, not in the context of low-wage jobs. And it it is a liberal fantasy, right next to meritocracy. That wealth stays put exactly where it is, at the top of the chain. All studies on labor show productivity gains far outpacing salaries in the past century. A well-paid knowledge worker today can barely meet the lifestyle of his factory worker grandparents.
This is the result Google currently features for "productivity effect on wages". The chart shows total compensation tracking productivity very closely, although it only goes back a quarter century.
>Being a bachelor of economics will not make you a better burger deliverer.
No one said it did. But if your other option is something that's more productive, then the only way you'll agree to deliver burgers is if you're paid as much as the alternative. This has been known for half a century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
Pay rises in industries without productivity increases to match those in industries with productivity increases because of competition.
Of course, this is in the hypothetical where everyone has a college degree and assuming that the value of a degree is in human capital, which I pointed out explicitly was something I'm assuming.
The other day I got one of those insightful hedge fund newsletters with a deep dive in inflation and unemployment. The dynamics are really complicated but one thing is unequivocal, the moment real wages go up the inflation catches up and those at the bottom suffer the most (due to Cantillon effect, negotiating power and other queuing phenomena). Higher wages as a platform is meaningless.
Perhaps the best measure that matters is the U6 underemployment which cleverly captures the utilisation of education and skill. It looks like this is as good as it gets as of right now in the US.
There are 15+ measures of inflation indeed, varying from 0 to 20%. Inflation is further segmented by demographics, younger people suffer far more inflation than older people (mostly due to housing, education and legacy cheaper medical plan expenses). Poor people also suffer higher inflation than the others.
The rabbit hole is deep and confusing. You can make just about any claim and it will be accurate for some definition of unemployment or inflation. And it's very easy to find contradictions. I'm sure somebody understands all this stuff, but this privilege is probably reserved for the top finance gurus.
>one thing is unequivocal, the moment real wages go up the inflation catches up
Hard disagree. Inflation is affected by wages, but it's not a 1:1 relation and I'm not aware of anyone seriously making that claim. Of course there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages, but not seriously advocated today as far as I know.
>Inflation is further segmented by demographics
This is actually a really interesting point. Elizabeth Warren made exactly this point in her 2004 book The Two Income Trap, with regard to middle class families with kids having higher housing costs due to competition over school districts.
> Hard disagree. Inflation is affected by wages, but it's not a 1:1 relation
I am talking about "real wages" to avoid the gotchas associated with nominal wage and inflation definitions. I think this makes the controversy go away. When you extend the nominal wage growth beyond the productivity gains in real terms, any extra purchasing power from a nominal wage gain will have no real basis and thus instantly triggering inflation as defined for your specific personal definition by demographic and income.
Say if you are really rich, your personal consumer basket that defines your personal purchasing power (and your personal inflation) will be dominated by expensive luxury items and investments while regular food/medical price increases will not impact you at all because they are a small part of the basket. However if your "demographic" (that has similar personal consumer basket) wage increases there is nothing to stop the price increase on such goods. There are small exceptions, but we can ignore them for the most part.
When you break down the demographics into small enough micro-groups you can get rid of the guesswork about what is inflation and how it affects everybody on average. This way you should be able to see how the relationship between wages and inflation is really 1:1. It's indeed not 1:1 when you mix dissimilar baskets and work with averages.
Now you're changing your claim. You're not talking about real wage increases, you're talking about an increase that's bigger than the productivity increase.
Even that doesn't necessarily increase inflation 1:1. Your models are off.
You can't talk about a single demographic because multiple demos buy the same products. The demand curves have multiple customers.
Real wage increase is the same as nominal wage, bigger than productivity increase. Real wages already have productivity and inflation factored in, so any extra nominal increase would be beyond productivity.
> Even that doesn't necessarily increase inflation 1:1. Your models are off.
Assuming you use the example rich demographic I gave, what would be an example scenario that systemically breaks the 1:1 ratio?
> You can't talk about a single demographic because multiple demos buy the same products.
I know what you mean here but you can bypass the dependencies between demos by letting the system play itself out and taking the numbers when you have access to them. You can pick any demographic or a person and you can get their personal basket, calculate inflation, calculate their purchasing power and how it changes every single tick just from their credit card statements. It doesn't matter what other people buy when you can see the actual purchases for each individual. What other demos buy is already taken into account in the numbers you see in the credit card statements so to speak.
>Real wages already have productivity and inflation factored in
What source are you using that adjusts for productivity when reporting real wages? Real is defined as inflation adjusted only.
>Assuming you use the example rich demographic I gave, what would be an example scenario that systemically breaks the 1:1 ratio?
>Say if you are really rich, your personal consumer basket that defines your personal purchasing power (and your personal inflation) will be dominated by expensive luxury items and investments while regular food/medical price increases will not impact you at all because they are a small part of the basket. However if your "demographic" (that has similar personal consumer basket) wage increases there is nothing to stop the price increase on such goods.
You're assuming perfectly inelastic supply, among other things. If there's elasticity, then additional money will result in some additional supply of luxury goods and greater quantity demanded.
Also, investments != purchases. Investments are a decision to defer consumption to the future.
which means we imported severe rural poverty of subsistence living! We decided it was smart to compete with that so that our execs could have a few more dollars of bonuses. We even imported authoritarian behavior from the Chinese government!
It's the one-party no-listening rule by the Trumpanzise government - a highly authoritarian regime ...
In this global economy, much depends on the quality of education/training our workers are getting compared with other countries. In many cases, there are better educated workers elsewhere. It is not clear to me what the US is doing to stay competitive. Sure, we have top tier universities, but below this level, I think we are getting beat.
>53 million people earn low wages, with a median of just $10.22 per hour. That’s nearly half of the 18 to 64 workforce.
10.22 is just a number. It wouldn't be better if they earned $20.44 per hour because costs would double, too.
It's like the SF housing market: people spend what they have. SF residents could live luxurious lives if they wouldn't outbid each other and kept prices low. Likewise, the lower half of the workforce could buy more if they stopped spending it all.
Middle income people are not better with money. They just profit off the poor people who set the base line prices for mass-produced goods.
*edit:
To add to this: Purchasing power parity [1] shows that at least poor people in the US don't get the most for their Dollar. Goods can be sourced cheaper on the world market. In other words: they could drive prices down if they started paying less.
Doubling the minimum wage does not cause costs to double. This is a very flawed analysis- the minimum wage doesn't affect the entire population (less than half!) so raising that wage only raises the costs of things a small, proportional factor, if at all.
I find we tend to apply microeconomic theorems to macroeconomic activities far too often.
You have overlooked a key part of my argument: Costs are low because the lower half cannot afford to pay more. Vendors have to keep low prices to compete for the hard earned Dollars. Give the lower half more money and things will simply cost more because they are able to spend the money.
This alone will start a demand for higher wages which will end in a situation where everything will cost proportionally more for everybody. The only losers will be those with bonds and cash because inflation will eat away the value.
Additionally, I don't think that you can ignore the supply chains. If you have a maid and you have to pay double, do you stomach the increased cost or are you going to ask for a rise yourself? And don't forget that you have to pay taxes. So you don't ask for her increase but you double it.
Low wages are not for those who operate machines, where the wage doesn't matter because the value is created by the machine. Low wages exist where a huge part of the value is directly created by the person. So double that cost and you increase the prices of those goods.
I don't know how big the low-wage part is relative to the entire economy. If it is minuscule, increasing minimum wage doesn't matter. But as the article says, it's almost 50% of the workforce, so I doubt that costs will only rise a small, proportional factor, if at all.
People need to get that first job. That first job leads to skills, experience, knowledge of how to interact with coworkers, and so on. Few people start at minimum wage and then get stuck there. The ranks of the poor are fluid.
This is one reason why I’m against the minimum wage - by making it harder to get that first job, you make it increasingly difficult to get into the employment market.
I would be less opposed to allowing each city and town to set their own minimum wage. But a one-sized fits all approach doesn’t account for local differences. $15 federal minimum wage will drive low-wage work to the black market and the wages paid in cash.
The article is saying unemployment is very low so your point doesn't stand. The minimum wage isn't hurting employment. What's hurting people are the low wages.
I see a lot of protestant mentality here in comments valuing any kind of even inhumane labour which does not allow to meet basic needs over not having a job, but also not suffering from hunger thanks to the social support system.
In my opinion, we as a society should aim to work less and less, collectively making use of automation and technological progress. But it will be hard when we label this as being lazy and not valuable member of society.
Another issue is who owns these automation processes. If I used my vast financial resources to develop (i.e. pay people to develop) a new automation process, what rights do you have to my gains? Why should I share it with you?
This mentality and ownership really needs to be rethought.
Imagine if all improvements over the course of history would be kept in secret for gains of owners of capital. Who own rights to the invention of an axe? Probably the first one who put a stone on a piece of wood. Should he has all rights for it forever? I couldn't really agree.
There’s a difference between having the right to the concept of an axe and having the right to my specific axe. I think GP was speaking more towards the latter.
It seems, sadly, that in software we have conflated the two. My specific iPhone is a brick without a government-recognized license for a copy of Apple’s sequence of numbers that instruct it.
You having vast financial resources depends on the rest of society agreeing, otherwise what you have are numbers on a server somewhere and an angry mob around your house.
You're making a lot of assumptions about ownership. "Your" vast financial resources are just measures of debt (money is not personal property) secured by the government. We can always collectively decide that what you did to accrue that owed debt was not worth its valuation and take steps (e.g., taxation) to correct. "Your" automation process is built on publicly-funded research and using publicly-funded resources; the public can decide to recoup its investment, and whatever else it needs to secure its mission of providing for the general welfare.
Feudalism is over, dude. You're connected. You're beholden.
You have to wonder why we don't just tax a little more? Do we have plenty of resources already and we just don't give it to the people struggling who need it? Or do we really not have resources to help the overworked underpaid masses out here in opioid infested flyover country? If we don't have enough resources, why not tax a bit more to get the resources? If we do have the resources, why are we not helping these people out more?
Sometimes it's just baffling how everyone can see an obvious problem and no one moves to try to at least ameliorate it. Not even asking that it be completely solved, just try to make things a little better for those people.
This line of thinking ("we can tax you however we like") is backdrop of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In the book, the creatives/creators go on strike rather than suffer the taxes. Whatever you believe about the reality of that story, successful tax collection is a negotiation, not a diktat. It's probably best to have everyone believe in taxes, so it's important to have a discussion around it.
The feasability of the circumstances described in AS aren't a triviality, they're the crux of your argument. Tax collection has been unsuccessful even with the fig leaf of "negotiation"; what's better is to have everyone believe in what happens if you don't pay your taxes.
Generally-speaking, I'm betting that the wealthy would rather live in a world where they still have essentially unfettered freedom of movement and resource access with slightly less collective wealth, than one in which they have to hold back their gifts and always have to be looking over their shoulder.
> In my opinion, we as a society should aim to work less and less, collectively making use of automation and technological progress. But it will be hard when we label this as being lazy and not valuable member of society.
If the society had taken this view in 1950 and encouraged "laziness", then we wouldn't[1] have had as much technological progress since then. It would probably have created a great lifestyle for 1950's people. It is indeed a great question to ponder - do we want to optimize social setup for today's population or for future generations to come?
[1] I also think low-wage jobs are sometime essential to move the society forward, Uber being a good example. Taxi-based system was horrible in the US. Uber used a lot of low-paid workers to shake the status quo and the situation has improved remarkably since then. I don't think the solution offered by Uber is perfect and the setup should be improved further, but simple improvements like hailing a cab via an app, credit card payments or driver/passenger ratings were inconceivable with the taxi system (again, in the US). That progress might not have been possible in a system with UBI because no one would have driven for Uber for low wages. Again, presence of UBI would have certainly helped Uber drivers a lot but collective society would have been stuck with a shitty taxi-based system.
Thats total nonsense. Technological progress and capitalism are intertwined, but we didn’t achieve advancements because of the pure necessity to put food on the table or simply “work hard”. Weve advanced enough so we can provide the same basic needs like food and healthcare to everyone, just like everyone can now entertain themselves or travel anywhere in the world.
Exactly. The definition of 'employment' is the crux of the matter. Is a 30-hour week at minimum wage with no retirement or health 'employment'? Were serfs of feudal lords 'employed'? Is someone making valuable contributions without wage or recognition 'employed'? Are those serving the poor voluntarily 'employed'?
The term is mechanical, reductionist, and carelessly 'employed'.
Conservative perspectives often involve some sort of built-in need to proselytize, because they view life as a triumph of ego over intrinsic human weakness. There's an idea that all people need to hear the message of personal responsibility.
Sadly data is weaker than any bias of perspectives, and people find it impossible to think causally without some larger brittle philosophical framework.
>Conservative perspectives often involve some sort of built-in need to proselytize, because they view life as a triumph of ego over intrinsic human weakness. There's an idea that all people need to hear the message of personal responsibility.
If we're reducing political parties to extreme stereotypes, then perhaps the pressure of the distant right is an appropriate counter to the pressure from the distant left which encourages hedonism and infantilism well into adulthood, shuffling responsibility onto the magical collective to solve problems.
And in this way society isn't totally lost, on average, if it exists somewhere in the middle.
I do not find liberal philosophy more accurate. On almost every issue one can make reasonable evidentiary arguments for either perspective. The problem is people can't even make policy decisions on the basis of controlled statistics and the experimental method (when that's possible).
I just think that conservative thinking lends itself to an evangelical mindset, while liberals tend to view their philosophy as inevitable. Often they are content to wait for people to evolve to their level. Hillary's inaction in the previous campaign is a perfect example of that mindset.
Please don't take HN threads further in generic ideological directions. It leads to generic ideological flamewar, which is tedious and which we don't want here.
there is a catch though: automation and technology is not free , but there a high overhead cost that many businesses cannot afford. Also, may low skilled jobs cannot be automated.
I didn't mean to start religious discussion, rather used this term as in writings of Mark Weber (value of hard work etc.). This is more about set of principles that shaped Western and American societies, not really being related to religion anymore.
Alas, it's still related enough to religion to easily lead to religious flamewars on the internet. The burden is on the commenter to pack the point in less flammable packaging. "Protestant mentality" is too generic a phrase not to have religious associations for many readers. If you said "Protestant work ethic" that would have been better, and if you had made it clear that you were referencing Weber, there would be no problem. Far fewer internet users are likely to start a flamewar against Weber.
dang, please try to read charitably into the comments you choose to moderate. The concept of Protestant work ethic in the US is centuries old and is effectively divorced from any religious associations it might have had in the 1600's.
It's not centuries old, but comes from Max Weber's surprisingly readable and brilliant book on the topic. But from a moderation perspective we have to look at effects, not intents. If you lead with a comment like that, the odds of somebody getting triggered—for whatever reason—and taking the thread into flamewar go way up. This is not a deep or very interesting point, it's just basic fire prevention.
I don't think low unemployment is the unequivocal positive sign that politicians/ think it is ("We're putting millions of Americans back to work!").
Maybe it's not something to be so proud of. If people are having to come out of the woodwork to take jobs that aren't moving the average wage up, maybe they're doing it because they have to, in order to get by.
Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job because he/she can't pay the bills?
That or all the people working multiple of these mcjobs. If one job were enough for every American to at least provide for their basic needs and some reasonable leisures then I might be impressed by low unemployment.
Continuing to talk about "average" inflation, rather than housing / asset inflation, is borderline disingenuous. Of course the price of consumer products has fallen - that was the primary gain of technological progress and outsourcing it all to China. The price of housing (and healthcare, education) is what has everyone over a barrel, and that's a direct result of the policy to make that average continue to go up in the face of technological progress.
Was this comment meant for me? I think the parent commenter used the word "overall" and not "average". I was simply providing a source and not making any sort of argument from it.
Is it still good if that 60+ year old has never been a 'freeloader' and has made the best choices possible to provide for their self/family with the income that the person was able to make prior to retirement? If the 60+ year old has been a net benefit to society, should they not be provided a means of living after retirement age?
Are you discounting social security and Medicaid here? If you have to live on social security alone, you will have a meager existence, but you need not starve. If you want a better retirement, saving along the way is strongly recommended.
If that 60 year old is expecting to live until he is 90 then it is rather funny he or she thinks retirement at 60 is the thing unless that person has enough money to saved to cover half of his or hers lifetime.
Freeloader... like those women who have been unable to work due to being full-time caretaker for a disabled spouse or child, or cared for their own parents until death, and so didn't have much or any income to save from...
I don't think most politicians are ignorant enough to believe this.
It's part of the marketing used that also seeds self-doubt into many citizens and saves politician's faces:
"How can something so complex (at scale) and studied as unemployment be wrong? I must be the problem finding gainful employment, everyone else is doing great based on these numbers, I guess I need to work even harder to pickup my slack. My representatives even tell me everyone is doing great, look at the GDP and DOW soaring! What am I doing wrong?? Why cant I find a job, I guess I'll have to take whatever I can get." etc.
I guess the question is what age should a person retire? For those of us born after 1960, retirement with full benefits, is age 67. Technically, you can retire at age 62... and draw a percentage. (Bonus, if you can wait till you are 70, you get an even higher multiplier).
Most people don't have savings like they should. There are older folks who are gobbling up jobs tat were historically what younger kids would work. Those benefits are not large sums, so one could imagine someone working into the late 60's to maximize the actual retirement cash flow.
For those who did save... likely don't need to start pulling benefits early.
Over all... wages rise if there is competition for talent. Even if it is on the low end of entry level jobs. If there should be so many low end jobs, without 'normal' benefits... is another really good question.
> I don't think low unemployment is the unequivocal positive sign that politicians/ think it is ("We're putting millions of Americans back to work!").
It's just the kind of marketing that happens to work with the Protestant mentality of the majority of people here. And that's slowly starting to change, with Sanders and other progressive politicians asking about the well-being of Americans as opposed to raw numbers about whether they can work 4 part-time jobs or not.
It’s certainly a good thing if a 60+ year old can go to work because he/she can’t pay the bills or whatever other reasons they choose to add income. And when jobs are plentiful, it’s inevitable that wages go up as well. Employers are competing for employees, and the skilled and useful ones inevitably become better compensated as a result.
... and if the same conditions which create work for said sixty-year-old person to return to are the same conditions that led to them being unable to retire at sixty (perhaps because they never had the opportunity to do anything other than low laying work with no opportunity for growth and existed at the poverty line)?
Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job because he/she can't pay the bills?
A 60 year old who is voluntarily retired is not "unemployed". If they later end up taking a job due to financial hardship, that changes the unemployment rate very little; it just adds 1 to the denominator of people in the labor force.
To add to this, only those who are actively seeking work and are not employed, are considered unemployed. A retired person (or a person who has given up looking for work) is not counted as unemployed, but will be counted once employed.
I think they meant if lots of them were doing it, not just one, in which case the denominator would go up, well, a lot. I think this was also an example of a hypothesis:
Why have people doing crap jobs that are better automated just because they can’t afford to live otherwise? The system is broken, in that we need to better support the folks on the fringes so we can just automate away a lot of mindless, repetitive boring work. The remaining jobs can pay well, and we can stop benchmarking the economy of how many people we put to work regardless of the meaningfulness of what they’re doing.
Why waste a human life flipping burgers or banging away in the mines? Make robots do that, and let’s provide a solution to the displaced, like for instance basic income but totally open to alternatives.
> Why waste a human life flipping burgers or banging away in the mines? Make robots do that, and let’s provide a solution to the displaced, like for instance basic income but totally open to alternatives.
Because we don’t have the technology to actually do that? We don’t even have the technology to replace the guy taking drive through orders. (“You want one Big Mech?”).
This discussion is pointless and premature. There are enormous economic incentives to automate away every job that can be done efficiently though automation. It’s just that our technology is actually very primitive, and that shows when trying to apply it to replacing service workers.
We don’t even have the technology to replace the guy taking drive through orders
Yeah we do, touchscreen menus (or ATM style pushbutton menus in places with bad weather).
There are factories that assemble frozen mini burgers for supermarkets. There are pizza vending machines out there. So an entire fast food restaurant could be turned into a vending machine with current technology.
If you think the technology is there, what explains its lack of adoption? I don’t think McDonalds et al. are in the business of leaving easy optimization on the table.
(My own guess is that touch screens are still more expensive and buggy than humans, and machine-made food still trades off novelty to be profitable. But I don’t know.)
McDonald's already uses touchscreens in some locations. I'm guessing the rest comes down to tradition and the availability of cheap labor preventing the motivation to turn existing technology into a packaged franchise of automated restaurants.
McDonalds seems to be rolling them out slowly, but are actually cutting staff while simultaneously increasing their fleet of touchscreens. I see a lot more employees alternating between doing work in the kitchen vs. taking orders at the cashier. This is even during relatively high demand times with long customer wait lines. This is just an anecdote though, the data may disagree.
I'd also be curious to see any user interface studies on these touchscreens. In my limited experiences, they are completely slow and thus an awful experience. They clearly are trying to sell more at every step instead of being useful and efficient for the end user.
In my city almost all of them were replaced by big self-service touchscreen displays with credit card reader attached. It's usually 4-6 machines and one assistant on call from kitchen area / takeout area when someone wants to pay with cash. They also help clients use touchscreen display to make orders when someone don't understand how to work with them.
So my guess for lack of adoption can be explained by:
- inertia and lack of incentives (who said recession?),
- people with cash,
- people who aren't good with technologies,
- people who have no one to talk to (they don't know what they want to eat today and want your advice).
The point is there are a lot of people in this position. I personally know many people 65-75 working/trying to find work because of financial instability.
Edited to add that there's a further problem: it's hard to find work when you're 70, and it's even harder to find 'knowledge work' for most 70-yr-olds. So the 70-yr-olds I know looking for work are working freelance or contingent sorts of things, or working retail/post office/food service -- and some of those jobs are physically difficult. One guy I know was doing a 6-week temporary USPS gig, working 4 am-noon shifts loading things from here to there. He mentioned he'd never been as sore in his life as he was the first few weeks. Many people would not be able to physically do this work at that age, frankly.
The point is there are a lot of people in this position.
Even if there are, that's not going to lower the unemployment rate significantly; it's more likely to raise it. Say there are 100 million people in the labor force, of which 4 million don't have jobs. The unemployment rate is 4% (4/100). Now 10 million previously retired people suddenly realize that they need to go back to work, and they all get hired instantly. The unemployment rate falls to 4/110=3.6%, not a huge change. And in reality all of those people won't get jobs immediately, and while they're looking they're counted as unemployed. If 1 million out of the 10 million former retirees haven't found jobs yet, the unemployment rate rises to 5/110=4.5%.
Up until the 80's wages and productivity moved in lock step, and since then wages have flatlined due to a various factors (weakening of unions / globalization).
Furthermore, we are reaching the limits of what monetary stimulus is able to achieve in driving the economic wellbeing of everyday Americans; history has shown that fiscal stimulus is better at that. A decade of easy monetary policy and balance sheet expansion has yielded a large divide in inequality and asset inflation. The non-asset owning working class have effectively been left behind, with now a larger wall to climb in order build relative wealth.
I personally don't think unions and collective bargaining are the best solution, as it can in some cases be overbearing on industry---and the burden can be non-uniformly applied across industries. Also, due to globalization, there is effectively a fixed marginal cost for labor: any inefficiencies will be arbitraged abroad. Even if unions and collective bargaining were the solution, there is no inherent law that labor demand and labor supply will always be near parity---especially with increased automation.
I think the best solution to resolve this, both uniformly and with minimal aggregate complexity, would be expand the Federal's reserves responsibilities into the fiscal space.
The Fed currently has two mandates: low unemployment, and stable currency. I propose a third mandate: wage and productivity parity. This would be facilitated by direct fiscal policy in the form of a floating universal basic income. This would enshrine the fed with ability to affect fiscal policy without politics. The stimulus could be progressive, but would be much more uniform---unlike today's pork projects that have a smaller share of winners.
This coupled with universal health, easing the burden of hiring and firing, consolidation of existing entitlement/social programs, could really open up the economic landscape.
> would be expand the Federal's reserves responsibilities into the fiscal space.
This is a very complex solution for a problem we already have the tools to solve. Politicians should just execute proper fiscal policy instead of leaning on the fed for every solution. We already have a decent system for this, which has historically worked, but no one is using it.
Other countries are able to execute proper fiscal policy without complex central banking paradigms or measures.
The real issue is our inability to plan long term fiscal policies at almost every level of our political system.
Historically we've had the opposite problem. Countries tend to move toward austerity at the wrong moment in time, due to political pressures or pressure from debtors. (Though this is much more difficult to navigate when the country's debt is denominated in a foreign currency e.g. Japan with 200%+ debt to gdp which is having a hard time meeting inflation targets vs Argentina).
Even today, the European Central Bank is signaling that it has effectively done all it can do (without permanently harming the banking sector with negative rates), and that it is time to open the doors to fiscal stimulus; but, Germany, which is going through a manufacturing recession, is loath to update their constitution to facilitate fiscal stimulus.
> This would enshrine the fed with ability to affect fiscal policy without politics.
By what means would you give this third mandate to the Fed? Surely, politicians give this mandate, through the voters. In which case: how can you say it’s “without politics”? Because politicians create the laws that govern central banks, central banks cannot be said to be politically independent.
I guarantee you, if a central bank — any central bank — stopped monetizing its government’s bonds, the currency produced by its member banks would quickly lose its legal tender status and tax privileges.
I don't think politicians actually believe it's a positive. They can't possibly be that naive. They must have basic economic awareness of how $30 p/h FT job in their district has different implications than a couple $15 p/h PT jobs.
They don't discuss the important details because it doesn't drive votes. They also as a challenger during the election want to hold the incumbent to a standard they might not be able to maintain. Politicians, as a breed, are adverse to "live by the sword, did by the sword." As a result we get politician-speak as the normalized standard.
Yes it's a ludicrous notion that working for work's sake is a good thing.
I just watched the documentary "American Factory" (highly recommended), and it's pretty clear to me that doing repetitive manual labor work in a factory is grueling, mind-numbingly boring, dangerous, and not something we should be doing if we can automate it - not to mention low status and low pay. I'd bet that most of the politicians idealizing manufacturing jobs have never worked a manufacturing job before. It's absolutely nothing like any cushy office job. At the end of the movie when they talked about how they were replacing the humans with robots, that should be something to celebrate (but it's not because our society forces people into employment to make a living).
Those workers were making $12/hour at the Chinese owned company despite having made $29/hour in their unionized jobs at GM before it closed. It's not as if the $29/hour jobs were some utopia, but it's a massive difference in pay that affords one a middle class lifestyle. And as a worker, feeling like you have no representation and no say can make any job soul crushing.
Yet politicians talk about "jobs" as some unequivocally good thing as if we're all partners at law firms with corner offices making six figures or whatever they're used to (not that I'd ever want to be a lawyer). They're so clearly out of touch.
$29/hr wasn’t sustainable based on what the consumer would buy the product/service for, hence the inevitable closure.
Unskilled labor isn’t worth a whole lot, and our country has a lot of it.
How do you make everybody an engineer? or... is it not even possible? Are some (most?) people mentally incapable of being engineers with the proper education?
I wouldn't act like you're better than politicians when your "expertise" is based on a documentary. My experience is that factory work is not dangerous[1] and companies try to eliminate any danger if it's brought up because any OSHA/medical costs are very expensive. My experience is also that the work is pretty easy. It can be boring but so are most programming jobs. I don't understand how writing CRUD day after day isn't as boring as working in a factory.
As for whether it is something that should be done or not: why should programming be done? How do most apps benefit the average person. I'm willing to argue that FAANG companies have been detrimental to society.
I've also been well-payed at the factories I work at, but $20/hr in rural Iowa goes way further than in LA or wherever. There were quite a few people who had moved from cities to work where I was at.
The idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are. A lot of people were worried that long-term our jobs would be automated or moved to Mexico.
[1] This may depend on what is being done and more importantly on the age of the company.
I don't know why you're getting so defensive as I'm simply providing an anecdote from a documentary I just watched. I'm happy that your experience at the factory wasn't dangerous. In the documentary some of the workers suffered serious injurious, and many were justifiably greatly concerned with the safety of their working conditions. Working any hard labor job like construction is extremely grueling and involves coming home sore everyday in a way that no office job entails. Meanwhile the worst I've ever had to deal with as a software engineer is avoiding carpel tunnel and eye strain.
Great, if you like working in a factory, then all the power to you. Personally I'd probably be contemplating suicide if I had to work on an assembly line in a work environment similar to how the film portrayed the factory in China, working 12 hour days with only 4 days off per month for crap money.
I never claimed that all programming benefits society.
> the idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are
The fact that you'd write such a dumb baseless insulting comment shows how out of touch you are. Since you didn't provide an argument, I'm not going to waste my time trying to decipher whatever your reasoning was and respond to it. Also it doesn't even really matter if it's a good or bad thing because it's happening, and there's nothing you can do to stop it (unless you're suggesting some kind of ludditism movement of breaking machines for the sake of preserving jobs, which is just flat out stupid).
> The idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are.
That's such a ridiculous statement for someone on HN. If we were to believe such a thing, why would you want to advance at all, if not for removing/reducing the work load imposed on people, or, equivalently, improving productivity per working hour?
If the retiree didn't get a low-paying job (Uber driver etc.), his neighbors would be forced to care for him through social welfare taxes. With a job, he supports himself. All the resources freed up can be put to more productive use.
It's surprising to me that this comment is so highly upvoted, given how fundamentally it misunderstands unemployment.
What you are implying is that "low unemployment" means people who didn't want to work are being forced to. But that is not what the usually-quoted (and quoted here) unenmployment number means. When people quote "unemployment" they usually mean U3, which is the number of people who are actively looking for a job.
If what you describe were happening, that dire economic conditions were forcing more people to look for work, the "unenmployment rate" would go up, not down.
The unemployment rate is not the labor force participation rate. And even the labor force participation rate is deeply misleading, because it encodes demographic statistics in a way that has complex effects that are hard to account for.
Great article, but I find it only takes the "wage" side of the equation and not the "cost" side. I'm not an economic expert but the biggest line items for most people seem to be housing (high and regular), healthcare (high and irregular), education, and childcare.
If we fix these I'm sure the equation changes a lot for many, many, people.
If the market is broken for pricing these main things, then even if everyone suddenly gets an income increase, it probably wouldn't matter much.
It would still make these things more affordable. And, save perhaps childcare, increasing the cost of low waged labor would not have an outsized inflationary effect on them.
Certainly not on housing. The cost of housing/rent is predicated on a shortage of hoarded, largely untaxed land.
Untaxed as a verb. E.g. California reducing property taxes to absurdly low levels with prop 13, diverting the spoils of the land to the owners instead (in the form of ridiculously high valuations and streams of rental income).
Wouldn't be the opposite? Supply-constrained, limited housing. Everyone is suddenly twice as rich competing for the same fixed number of units. Price has to go up.
The standard macroeconomic approach is to keep inflation low so that wages will ‘catch up’ to costs. This isn’t working though, low wages seem to be sticky. This implies that there aren’t enough new jobs, and there are plenty of people who will take whatever they can get.
But if costs come down, that is effectively a raise in wages. The cost of many goods has come down (for some of the same reasons wages are down!), but as OP said housing/education/medical have gone up. So if we can target those rising costs, that can be very effective, without raising wages.
Agreed, this is mostly unsupported conjecture, but I think people underestimate how far mitigating healthcare costs would go. Since healthcare costs can be unpredictable (a sudden severe injury, or even just the opacity of health insurance) and costly, they force people to maintain more savings, take less risk, and generally constrain freedom as economic actors.
Do away with, or at least reduce, this bogeyman and I wonder how much economic activity we’d unlock.
There’s a supply and demand problem. Limited supply (real estate), lots of demand, therefore prices go up. Those who can afford it do pay it and are competing with each other to pay for the property they want. Why would New York or Bay area housing ever go down?
Time for more people to admit they can’t afford to live in the best + most popular places and instead move to “less desirable” places, like Iowa.
Low unemployment drives productivity gains that keep wages low and that contributes to increased unemployment. See the cycle play out here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=pTTx
Workers with skills that align add productivity see wage gains. Workers and entire businesses on the wrong side of the productivity wave end up dislocated.
I'm sure UBI and other public policy efforts can correct this, right about the time we can control weather, solar cycles and cure cancer. Or, we can just accept there's some things outside our control and plan for the ups and downs.
Low wage labor and UBI are actually two sides of the same coin. The less that low wage labor is available, the more that UBI would become necessary to support the economy. The more that low wage labor is available, the less that UBI becomes seen as a necessity. The more that UBI is offered, the less that individuals would seek low wage labor. The less that individuals seek low wage labor, the tighter the employment market for such service, which motivates employers to seek higher productivity and automation rather than increase wages, which furthers the cycle above.
These things are cumulative, not mutually exclusive. Working minimum wage on top of UBI would put someone in much better position than either one alone. Some people would choose only UBI, but most would want more than that.
In which case, UBI might increase the baseline for what is considered to be "subsistence". If all are entitled to UBI and can simultaneously earn income on top of that, then the base line cost for goods in demand increases so that all that UBI has done is ratcheted up the baseline for what is considered subsistence, i.e., a form of inflation.
Nursing and home aides, fast food, janitors, warehousing and trucking - these are all unproductive and low-skill occupations. It wouldn't look that sorry if the country implemented better industrial policies.
This is based off of 2016 data and an self admitted overly expansive view of what the proper cohort is.
(eg, they include college age students when they are usually left out because things like increase college enrollment would skew the numbers).
All their distributional data and numbers for what counts as low wage workers comes from a 2012-2016 Census Bureau survey. They then claim without much justification "we think it is unlikely our finding would change significantly if we considered more recent wage data" for the 2017-2019 period.
edits:
strangely enough they exclude graduate and professional student, but still include 18-24 year olds in high school or college. And they exclude self-employed for reasons similar to why you would want to exclude 18-24 year olds. And that 18-24 year old group accounts for only 4% of mid and high wage work, but 24.3% of low wage work, so it is clearly skewing the results.
And the largest category of low-wage workers (a plurality) is classified as "low-wage workers in a family with mid- to high- wage workers". I'm not really sure we care about that as much.
Reading more, they have some very strange inclusion/excisions, such as they exclude professional and grade students because they are seen as having a career path, they include "springboard jobs" because some might not transition out of them. That's just sloppy and lazy.
I would like to advance a different opinion. There are many that are proponents of Universal Basic Income (UBI). However, many state that one problem with UBI is that it comes at the expense of personal gratification and economic productivity.
I am of the opinion that low wage jobs are a form of UBI. In this manner, individuals are paid a basic income in exchange for their productivity. However, these jobs are not meant to create wealth. They're meant to provide subsistance. This is much the same goal of UBI.
For those that say that benefits (health, retirement, sick pay, family leave, vacation) are necessary in addition to low wage income which often does not supply many or any of these benefits, I would say that is the case for UBI as well.
For UBI to work, there must be a base of benefits to support the UBI. As such, I see UBI and low wage as fairly synonymous except that UBI is seen as providing income without any productivity required of the individual, and low wage being UBI with required productivity.
In many ways UBI and low wage work come at odds. The more that UBI is offered, the less that individuals would want to do low wage work. Rather than pushing up wages for low wage work, dis-incentivization of low wage will push employers towards automation. As such, low wage is a support of employment generally. The more that employers move towards automation, the more that low wage jobs are eliminated, the more that UBI becomes the only alternative to low wage. As such, low wage jobs do provide a necessary function in the economic system.
That is often the case. The function of the low wage job is for the benefit of the employer, not the employee. The function of UBI is neither to build wealth for the individual nor the economy as a whole. Wealth still becomes concentrated with the smaller pool of individuals in control of resources and means of production.
I think employers will move toward automation regardless, so in a way UBI has an advantage there. I also think preventing automation just so humans have something to do isn't reasonable. Let's progress technology, and think of ways to give more dignity to humans at the same time!
Lastly, the benefits point you made does make sense, except a "retirement" benefit shouldn't be needed (it only exists because eventually you can't do work but need money - basically what UBI already is)
Yes, Social Security and Pension benefits are indeed a form of UBI, earned through employment contributions.
Also to add to your points above, in the scenario where all possible low wage jobs are eliminated through automation, this would require a dramatic restructuring of the labor pool and economic environment. This is further evidence of the role low wage plays in current economy.
In the situation where low wage jobs are fully eliminated, all that remains are concentrations of high wage / self-employed pools and a very large amount of automation systems that would require management.
Perhaps one alternative to UBI is the creation of patronage systems that can support human endeavors where no productivity output is required, but human creativity output is desired. Something to think about.
The "goal" of a low wage job is for an employer to make a profit from someone else's labor, and to only allow them to subsist.
UBI promotes subsistence but crucially allows someone enough time to find more substantial opportunities.
And UBI won't necessarily kill low-wage work – in some ways, it makes space for it. I'm an EMT, and I make minimum wage, and I work 48-72 hours a week on the ambulance. UBI would make it so that I don't need another job to support a family, and could live healthily and with dignity on just those 48-72 hours a week.
>>The "goal" of a low wage job is for an employer to make a profit from someone else's labor
That is the goal of all jobs, high, low, middle
Employers are not charity, they do not employ people so they can have a good income.
Employers employ people because they need work done to make money off that work, the second you cost your employer more than they make off your work you are out of a job.
Sometimes that cut off is more direct (i.e if you make widgets your per hour the rate of manufacture can easily be factored into the cost of making the widget) but if you some do something more nebulous like cleaning the floors, or filing papers, that can be harder to calculate but every business does.
Ahh yes the classic HN blame capitalism for all of society problem.
What is a better model. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need"
Personally I like having control over what I choose to sell my labor for, and based on all the other times other models have been tried I would prefer not to have the government assign me a job, or give me bread credits where I have to wait in line for hours to get my "free" government bread
This is not the case - there's plenty of civil societies that have existed over the millennia that are subsistence economies. They aren't wealthy, but that isn't the point.
> However, these jobs are not meant to create wealth. They're meant to provide subsistance. This is much the same goal of UBI.
I'm not even a proponent of UBI, but I immediately see a few problems with your argument here:
1) They often don't provide subsistence, hence the necessity for many people to have multiple jobs. While we can adjust UBI accordingly (to some extent, obviously CoL is a thing), it's significantly more difficult to adjust around people working multiple jobs.
2) You're missing a critical component of UBI, which is that people are free to pursue whatever they might like (including nothing at all) without the fear of losing basic necessities. Low wage jobs obviously preclude you from doing that--because you're, well, spending your time working those jobs.
This is hyperbole of course, but we may very well be missing out on a modern-era Emily Dickinson or Darwin because they're spending all their time working minimum wage jobs.
3) Everyone's already moving heavily towards automation. Corporations don't employ people out of the goodness of their hearts. The second it becomes cheaper to automate something, those jobs will disappear. You can already see this to some extent with automated checkout lines, internet vs. retail shopping, etc. Unless you do something drastic ala NJ and Oregon with enforcing low-wage work like gas station attendants, those jobs quickly fade away.
> one problem with UBI is that it comes at the expense of personal gratification and economic productivity
I wholeheartedly disagree with this. UBI allows people to pursue what they are passionate about, work where they truly want to, and help start a new business. The data backs that people will not work less, but be able to have more freedom in what job they do work in. I highly recommend Yang's book about this: https://www.hachettebooks.com/titles/andrew-yang/the-war-on-...
It seems to me that the difference is that with UBI you can use the time that you would otherwise be working to prepare for a new job, look for a new job, or to do work that doesn't pay (e.g. art).
On the other hand, a low wage job takes up the same amount of time as a regular job but doesn't provide many of the benefits (e.g. financial security, sufficient discretionary money to pursue your goals, the ability to purchase a house, etc.).
Unfortunately the existing landscape of flipping burgers and driving for Uber Eats is fairly limited.
UBI allows people to be productive in ways that haven't always been appreciated by society such as raising children, producing a profound portfolio of art, or caring for the disadvantaged.
> However, many state that one problem with UBI is that it comes at the expense of personal gratification and economic productivity.
Personal gratification in the form of extremely boring, demeaning, repetitive work which barely gives you enough money to live in poverty?
> However, these jobs are not meant to create wealth. They're meant to provide subsistance.
Minimum wage jobs are not meant to provide subsistence. They're meant to extract maximum profit from financially vulnerable people.
> Rather than pushing up wages for low wage work, dis-incentivization of low wage will push employers towards automation.
That's already the case regardless of UBI.
> As such, low wage is a support of employment generally.
Not really, I doubt Google's software engineer hiring gets harder or doctors go out of work if less people are willing to work minimum wage at Walmart.
Why does it make sense to force private industry to provide a UBI? A minimum wage job puts a floor on what can be paid and this fundementally distorts the labor market. If a job does not provide enough value to the employer to meet minimum wage it will not exist for very long. This rules out many types of work where the value is hard to capture and pushes all of that work into the domain of either being funded by government or non-profits. This also potentially prevents labor participation by certain categories of handicapped individuals who have the potential to provide value to society and experience satisfaction in their work but can't compete in a marketplace distorted by a minimum wage.
If anything, a UBI enables low-wage work, especially when that work provides satisfaction to the employed. It also can increase economic productivity because the labor market will be able to distribute labor more efficiently.
This brings up the interesting (to discuss) idea that if a UBI is implemented, there should no longer be a minimum wage as the UBI places a floor on income. In many ways the minimum wage doesn't offer benefit in an economy where the self-employed will participate out of their free will in income generation through service such as Uber, DoorDash, Etsy. Often those self-income sources generate less on a per-hour basis than minimum wage, however, since the income earner is free to stop and start at will the presence of a floor of hourly wage has no impact.
It seems like you could pair a gradual introduction of a UBI with a commensurate reduction in the minimum wage and slowly find the sweet spot for our current economy. It seems like this could be a good form of economic stimulus during downturns.
Very tenuously tied to not starving. There are plenty of working-class people who have to avail themselves of community food pantries and at least in my large city the homeless have access to three meals a day.
And honestly, not starving is not a great metric for a wealthy and developed country like the USA. We should demand and strive for more than that terribly low standard.
When US Fed pours money in to unwind mortgage positions over a 30 year period(fall 2008 till fall 2038) barriers arise for job movement in form of high costs of rent or homeownership.
This was why when Argentina swapped out a job guarantee (plan jefes) with a UBI-type program, many of the women who did the job guarantee jobs of caring for the elderly, etc. kept doing the work in spite of the government telling them it wasn't "necessary" any more.
While it's theoretically possible that they might have spontaneously started doing these jobs if a UBI program had been initiated I'm not aware of any example where this has happened.
Yes. Many types of extremely valuable work in our society is not valued by the market and so is not compensated.
Caring for the elderly, caring for children, my elderly neighbour who sometimes picks up trash on the street, etc.
There are all kinds of crucial work our society desperately needs done, but which are often not even conceptualized as work because there's no wage attached to it.
Also, commercialization can create fake economic growth.
For example, suppose in the past one spouse worked a job for a wage/salary and the other spouse cared for some of the couple's ailing parents, provided childcare, and cooked for the couple's children and parents. Now instead, the second spouse also works a wage job, both spouses pay higher taxes some of which go to caring for the old people, and with the extra income they instead purchase prepared food and pay for daycare. The economy grew a lot because formally unpaid labor is now being paid for, but is everyone better off?
Note: I don't think women should be limited to being homemakers, this is just an example.
That's mostly the work that you want to do. The work you must do when being forced by economic factors, especially the extra job one might take in order to make ends meet, gives a sense of dread to a person's life. We can talk about a sense of purpose when people are more-or-less financially stable (at least nothing threatening their first level in Maslow's pyramid) and they get to pick whatever they get to work on. But when you're one step away from homelessness, the sense of purpose and the value derived from that takes the backseat.
If you like your job that's a very useful benefit.
If you don't like your job and you don't think it's actually worthwhile it serves as a reminder that you're wasting your potential, and that can be incredibly detrimental.
You can also hate your job and see that it serves no purpose, or worse that you are doing harm (like working collections for predatory lenders or in a factory that churns out bombs that will be dropped on someone).
Aren't all of these metrics that try to capture the bottom end inherently flawed because we don't know what an acceptable "minimum standard" for a long term job is?
For me, anything that doesn't pay enough to own property and eventually retire with some dignity is a "non-job"; which would put a country like the UK at >30% or so.
It's not clear to me that there is a standard basis. Someone might think affording rent on a small room and food is OK. Someone might think raising a family should be possible.
> Market failures abound: Education and health care are out of reach for many, child care is often prohibitively expensive (even as child care workers are woefully underpaid), and decent, affordable housing is scarce in many regions.
It’s utterly ridiculous to call these things “market failures.” Every single one of those areas is not a market but is heavily regulated in a way that limits supply. Education mostly a government service, even at the tertiary level. Fully 50% of college students attend a public school.
If the market were able to solve the problem better, private schools could just provide better service at lower costs (compared to public school cost + state subsidy) and few would still go to public schools right? State subsidies for public schools are not that large anymore (34% of budget for UC Berkeley comes from tuition+fees while 13% comes from state of California).
These are actually IMO all examples of Baumol's Cost Disease as healthcare, child care, and education simply do not scale or require less workers with improved technology (at least so far). The fact that BCD hits so hard is evidence of most of the efficiency gains over the last decade(s) not being shared with the majority of people.
How are private schools supposed to offer better service at a lower cost, when public schools are effectively free?
This is hardly a market. Even if people wish to move their children out of public schools en masse, it's not like governments are going to reduce property taxes accordingly.
Well in the example I provided, state money only amounted to a 28% subsidy (assuming if the state funding were cut, the only way to raise as much money would be to raise tuition+fees). Doesn't seem effectively free to me.
Keep in mind I was replying to a critique of "Education and health care are out of reach for many" which obviously implies higher education
Controversial opinion: I think everyone should have access to good education, and I don't see why a public system is incapable of providing it.
Private systems aren't outcome orientated, they're profit orientated. If a public school and a private school are both given $n to educate a kid, the private option will maximize the proportion they get to keep.
Elite schools are a different story because they have significantly more resources.
The free market is good at some things, but the public wellbeing isn't one of them.
A profit oriented system doesn’t make outcomes irrelevant. A grocery store could maximize their profit margins by selling rotten fruit at the same price as fresh fruit, but of course no one would buy it.
Maximizing your profit margin is one strategy for increasing profits, but growing market share by producing higher quality outcomes is another (arguably more common) strategy.
This is the case because markets have competition, which the public sector lacks. It’s why spending on public education continues to rise despite decreasing quality of outcomes.
A profit oriented system doesn’t make outcomes irrelevant. A grocery store could maximize their profit margins by selling rotten fruit at the same price as fresh fruit, but of course no one would buy it.
This argument falls on deaf ears to be honest, considering Amazon deals with a very similar situation due to rampant fakes and yet it's more profitable for them to simply do nothing.
The problem is that for-profit industries only work when the consumer and business interests are aligned. In education the best way to earn a profit is by offering a low quality degree and spending the least on teaching, facility etc. That's the entire reason why McDegrees exist. Considering schools are also highly tied to physical locations, there's less possible competition than you think.
I think Amazon is a bad example. First, because the Amazon problems are fairly recent on the scale of human reaction, let's see how it will go in 3-5 years. Look at Facebook drop in users after the scandals like Cambridge Analytica, it is real and this is where Amazon is heading to. Sooner or later, the market is fixing problems, even if sometimes it's slow and painful.
This example actually show the fundamental value of separating infrastructure from service.
Amazon's infrastructure (1 day delivery) is good and valuable, but their service (products, etc) are severely lacking. It would be beneficial, in the free market sense, for the government to break up Amazon, split out that infrastructure part make it rentable, and have the rest of Amazon compete with other providers to provide a service on top of this infrastructure.
Same goes for all natural monopolies (e.g. gas pipelines, optic fibre internet, rail, ...).
This exactly. private education has a greater incentive for raising quality than government education does - which is why private schools produces better outcomes.
> I think everyone should have access to good education
How do you define everyone, access and good?
Does access === free where I currently live?
If parents can’t afford to live in an area with good schools should they be forced to get better jobs or moved to LCOL area so their kids get a better education?
or no matter where you live or how you live a third party should make sure your kids get a proper education?
Everyone means everyone. Access means that based on where you reside, there is a school within a reasonable distance, or transportation to one. Good is more tricky to define for me because I'm not an educator. The US has metrics and tests for math skills and reading comprehension. I'm sure we can gin up something. Use other developed countries as a benchmark.
>Does access === free where I currently live?
Sure.
> If parents can’t afford to live in an area with good schools should they be forced to get better jobs or moved to LCOL area so their kids get a better education?
The whole point of my comment is that people shouldn't have to make that decision.
> or no matter where you live or how you live a third party should make sure your kids get a proper education?
parents should have to send their kids to a nearby school. The rest should be taken care of.
You're introducing way more complexity into this. Good schools vs bad schools, HCOL vs LCOL. Not every school has to be exceptional, just bring up the average.
I am one that actually agrees with the spirit of what you're saying. Unfortunately, where I have to admit shortcomings with that philosophy is that there's no evidence that the government of the United States can reliably yield good education for students. My own public schooling was a nightmare, and I know many who had an equally bad experience.
Part of this is due to the fact that there isn't (and probably shouldn't be) a singular national system for education. Another part is the fact that quality education is insanely high-priced because a parent has to pay for the public and the private system concurrently. This pressure pushes private tuitions upward and makes the private schools more exclusive because they can't take on kids below certain income thresholds at all.
This is one case where I believe regulation has actually hurt the US citizens a lot. No child left behind was a staggering failure, and most people would be better off making their educational choices for their children based on what makes the most sense for them, not based on a legislated prescription of certain topics (or the intentional avoidance of others, namely human health and biology...)
Let's not forget that george jr. And Biden made college debt slavery a thing. And no child left behind was meant to cripple public education. So you have poor uneducated kids mad at the system voting conservative. And then you have kids that escaped and went to college to only strap them with so much debt, they to become conservative. Saying, well I had to pay, why do they not have to have decades of their lives paying back bad faith loans?
> Another part is the fact that quality education is insanely high-priced because a parent has to pay for the public and the private system concurrently. This pressure pushes private tuitions upward and makes the private schools more exclusive because they can't take on kids below certain income thresholds at all.
How does that hurt public schools? I would assume that would help public schools. Because instead of the top 50% of kids (e.g.) going to private schools, now only the top 10% of kids go to private schools. Thus public schools are filled with smarter kids.
Realistically, it hurts private schools by reducing the number of students they could take on. Public schools, however, are governmentally forced to abide by a certain curriculum, which hurts students dramatically (basic biology and sex education is a big one here).
Because of this, what actually happens is the top half of students that can't go to private schools get an underwhelming education. Compounding on that, local districts can mismanage funds and security to an extent that reduces the likelihood of a student's success in the classroom to near-zero.
Net result - <10% of students get a great education and greater opportunity. 40% come out 'fine' but not particularly ready for entering the workforce or higher education. The rest come out with an education that is measurably substandard, resulting in a significant hardship.
> Private systems aren't outcome orientated, they're profit orientated
Based on what I've read about the US education system (primary schools), one of the main problems is the "no child left behind" policy, which makes the public system not "outcome oriented" either - kids simply have no incentive to even try (and are disruptive instead), as there's no valuable outcome to achieve - the (fake) "outcome" is the same for everybody (finishing school), regardless of their actual level of education.
I like to think I'm not too ideological about which sectors should be public and which should be private (this is not a moral question as far as I'm concerned). I think some sectors work better privately and others work better publicly. Essentially I think letting the free market do its thing is a good idea if I can be confident that the profit motive broadly aligns with public interest (and using regulation where it doesn't, for instance for pollution). Education is a sector where I have very little faith that the free market profit motive aligns with the public interest.
The problem lies with evaluating the quality of education. Children aren't very capable of evaluating the quality of their own education (and if they are they often aren't taken seriously or they don't have any choice in the matter anyway), and parents are too far removed or often don't know the subject matter very well themselves. The only way (and even that is an inaccurate way) to evaluate schools is by doing statistical analysis on outcomes. The crucial point is: the only data you have is outdated by years, perhaps even a decade or so. Education is a strongly reputation-based sector for a reason: reputation is the only way people have to evaluate your product. I don't believe there's a way around this.
In a for-profit corporation, particularly in a publicly-traded one, there's often pressure to optimize profits on the short term. So if I'm the unscrupulous CEO of a for-profit school, I can always deliver very easily by simply cutting costs even if it dramatically hurts the quality of the education, confident in the knowledge that by the time the effects start getting noticeable I'm long gone. The short term profit motive of a publicly traded corporation works perversely here: there's always the temptation to sell the reputation you built up yesterday to turn a bigger profit today; no one will be any the wiser until it's too late (and they paid a lot of money for sub-par education).
Of course public or non-profit institutions are also vulnerable to bad management, but at least no one has a strong incentive to gut their expenses, as no one stands to gain.
Maybe there's a way to align incentives? E.g. schools are (partially) government-funded, but the funding is a function of the taxes that people who have attended the school pay.
Still there are a few issues that would need to be fixed, off the top of my head: (1) the function should simply be a mean, to make schools focus on desired outcomes (e.g. the minimal (or 5th percentile) education) - otherwise they'd just focus on producing a few outliers, like VCs; (2) there needs to be a "default" funding available (e.g. average of all schools) to enable innovation (starting new schools); (3) there needs to be some funding available for "non-profit" education (e.g. art) but maybe there should be a limit on the number of people that can attend such schools (for free).
The types of education that are most like an efficient market are recognized and necessary certification based training in fields like nursing and agricultural tech/safety (probably other “skilled trades” too), the product of regulation. When you “deregulate” education, you get predatory actors like ITT Tech that try to imitate real trade education.
Childcare (aka mom has a child, goes back to work 6 weeks later, pays $x/week for daycare or a nurse) isn’t a government service and it’s very expensive. Why is it so expensive?
There is a child to caretaker ratio to maintain. And you have to pay for the caretaker wages and benefits, rent, liability insurance, support staff, etc. So those costs are divided among all who are paying for it. It will not scale any better than that.
Would that not just directly lead to it swallowing an amount of federal tax revenue proportional to other services that are subsidized? E.g. healthcare/education? And then proceed to munch on GDP bit by bit?
It might counterbalance a bit. It might create jobs for people. And having affordable childcare means someone might get back into the workforce and contributing taxes.
Labor market conditions are not acts of God, nor inevitable. They are shaped by policies, investments, and institutions.
This is a point I keep trying to make about UBI and seemingly utterly failing. It isn't "inevitable" that automation will lead to high rates of chronic unemployment.
I've been quiet of late on HN. I often am around Christmas time, but I also wonder if I'm just fed up with feeling like it's completely pointless.
Due to so-called identity politics, if I give my opinion about various things, it is seen as "political" in a way that it isn't for people who aren't me. There seems to be no amount of provisos or hedging my bet that adequately protects me from ridiculous personal attacks for speaking at all.
I'm skeptical that articles like this one are at all a reasonable picture of what's going on with the economy. I'm skeptical because I'm one of those poor people that makes too little money in the new economy and I'm quite clear this is the happy, shiny version of my life where unicorns fart rainbows.
Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly sick to death of being poor, struggling to make ends meet, etc. I'm sick to death of the classism and gender issues that help keep my financial problems alive.
But the reality is that I'm supposed to be dead. My life isn't supposed to work at all.
I have a genetic disorder and I have been getting myself well for a lot of years when that isn't supposed to be possible at all. It's been possible because of doing low paying gig work and my income is as low as it is in part because I don't work that much.
I hesitate to admit that because I know from long experience that people are quick to latch onto a detail like that and use it to justify making zero effort to address other issues, like classist and sexist BS that is also part of the problem.
Many years ago, I read a study that measured real world things like how many meals per day someone got. The conclusion was that less than one half percent of Americans were poor by the standards of less developed countries like India.
Similarly, I was a military wife for many years and found that it was nigh impossible to compare military compensation packages to civilian ones. A large part of the value of military compensation is in "benefits," not cash pay. It's very much an apples to oranges comparison and it's damn near impossible to articulate.
I'm unconvinced that we have a good means to adequately measure and understand current quality of life as compared to historical norms. I'm dirt poor and I'm currently broadcasting to the globe via a cheap ass smartphone and free membership on a public forum. That same smartphone holds multiple games, serves as my personal library and more.
When I was a military wife, we had multiple bookcases lining the walls of our living room. They held hundreds of books and, later, dozens of boxes from software that came with a paper booklet and a CD or floppy to install it.
I currently live in an SRO. My life could not work at all if I still needed hundreds of books and physical storage for software
It wouldn't work because I don't have the money for more space. It wouldn't work because papers make me sick. It wouldn't work for a long list of reasons.
I don't think we have any idea how to measure how much of our lives have moved from physical goods to virtual ones and how that presents itself to the eyes of the world as seeming poverty because we own so much less physically. To my mind, it's like magic. It's like having a DnD bag of holding for books, software and more.
Life is different these days. We don't have any idea how to incorporate that fact into our metrics for measuring things like poverty.
I desperately want the US to fix its health care issues and housing problems. These are very real problems that very negatively impact the country and weigh es...
There are basically two 'tracks' of things that people use in life.
Material goods like food, water, entertainment, etc are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. On long enough time scales this is true compared to wages. For the most part even the worst of jobs is sufficient to pay for that sort of thing.
I can't speak about healthcare as that's a particularly American problem.
But housing - that's literally an issue across the spectrum. It feels like every 'class' of person has basically taken a step down or two if you compare generation to generation. The upper-middle are looking at just about being able to afford starter properties in major cities. The middle class who would 30 years ago be settling down in suburban detached homes with kids are in pokey flats or sharing houses with other professionals.
Below that you have stuff like crappy flat shares, unofficial bunking up, or homelessness - to be honest looking at what graduates are doing I can't even imagine what say, a supermarket worker does if they don't have family.
> But housing - [...] The middle class who would 30 years ago be settling down in suburban detached homes with kids are in pokey flats or sharing houses with other professionals.
Real estate goes through cycles shorter than 30 years and it was not more expensive in 2012 than in 1990.
In the US, we've torn down about a million SROs in recent decades and largely zoned out of existence the creation of new Missing Middle Housing. This trend likely was worse in 2012 than in 1990.
We have a very serious housing supply issue in the US because while our housing supply has increasingly concentrated on the direction of upper class nuclear family, our demographics have gone in the opposite direction and moved away from that. We have a lot more small households (childless couples, single adults) and essentially no housing designed for them. Instead, we now default to expecting young adults to rent a home designed for a family and get roommates to fill the extra bedrooms and divide up the rent.
It's quite the serious problem and it's maddening to continue to see comments that act like there is no housing crisis. I have repeatedly had people tell me that the high cost of housing has nothing to do with homelessness, never mind that I can cite sources that show a very strong correlation.
I agree with the vast majority of what you said. I have always valued your contributions here on HN and elsewhere on your blogs. Thank you for choosing to speak up.
To clarify, are you suggesting that current “low wages” or “wage inequality” are not that important because they fail to account for quality of life (food, shelter, entertainment), which is still achievable, especially by global standards, on a “low” American wage?
I'm trying to say something like: When your caterpillar morphs into a butterfly, harping on how your butterfly is "failing to thrive according to standard, well-established caterpillar metrics used globally for the past thousand years and certified as super duper accurate for caterpillars by many respected institutions." is basically gibberish that says damn near nothing about the state of the butterfly's actual health for which we have zero established metrics, having never seen one before.
Just yesterday on HN, there was an article about someone spending 1 billion dollars to own every pop song ever recorded. Well, I can go to YouTube and listen to any pop song ever recorded (or very close to any), for free.
So: How rich am I? I'm sure not a billion dollars rich, and yet...
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] thread[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
I will indulge you, though I doubt my points will perhaps provide any clarity to your understanding of the situation. Trump has undertaken many efforts that will force the impoverished and disabled into the McJobs creation that Trump is so proud of during his tenure.
The Trump administration has cut benefits programs that our society's most vulnerable rely upon, like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program)[0][1] or Meals on Wheels[2] and reduced the number of people qualifying for disability benefits.[3]
Trump's plans for 2020 and beyond look to go even farther[4] in targeting the elderly, the disabled and children.
[0]https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/12/21/trump-...
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/04/trump-adm...
[2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/howardgleckman/2018/02/14/what-...
[3]https://www.thenation.com/article/chained-cpi-poverty-score/
[4]https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/12/18260271/t...
Whether it's generally accurate is another question.
But a Google Scholar search will (along with numerous false hits) turn up multiple discussions:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=une...
I've chosen Scholar rather than a general Web (or literature) search as the frequency of this accusation online or in the general press is so common as to be a trope, though you can repeat my query in either.
My own read is that unemployment is at best an incomplete metric for reasons expressed in the Brookings article: it fails to consider wages or compensation, and a large number of low-wage, low-skill, low-opportunity jobs really isn't commensurate with a strong labour sector.
People without college degrees get disability and stop seeking employment, making the economy worse off but making the employment statistics look better.
We used to take it for granted that tech was the industry of innovation and progress, but there seems to be very little of that any more. Just a few more ads on the page.
Not so exciting after all.
Having a shitty mind numbing job is hell.
Adam Smith wrote about it (paraphrasing) extreme division of labor will create servile, ignorant humans.
IMO billionaires suffer from it too. Offloading so much real doing and learning while existing in the context of abstract decision maker.
You think Bezos can do much more than validate or demean people around him? Bet he can barely rotate a tire.
On the upside for the first time in history, the oligarchs in America don’t also control armed gangs. The risk of toppling one is manageable: taxes.
Organizing abstract social metadata very particularly is way less useful and makes for way less interesting people, than real muscle memory built from doing a variety of types of work.
According to Wikipedia, Bezos "once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room" and "worked at McDonald's as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift".
I expect he's in the American average range for practical workaday skills.
I don't know whether or not he can specifically "rotate a tire"... but rotating just one tire is pointless anyway, you have to rotate the entire set to even out wear.
I would hazard this peculiar skill is uncommon.
HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Meaningful work, or contributing to the wellbeing of those around you -- that would be a worthwhile goal. Suffering just so your family isn't hungry is a harder sell.
Inevitably, someone will say they should just learn skills from the internet to improve their lot, and perhaps some will. I think most people on HN (especially me) are so insulated from the reality of working poverty that we just look for technical solutions. I wish there were some.
You don’t commute that far for minimum wage.
Anecdote, not data, but
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/low-pay-long-p...
You could argue the person in the story should get jobs closer to home, but it is probably more common than you think.
Due to how many North American cities are designed with urban sprawl and separation of living areas (suburbs) and productive areas (industrial/office zoning laws) it should actually be the norm to have a lengthy commute to work.
Hell, I live in a suburb with quite good public transport and it would take me almost 30 minutes to go to the grocery store by bus.
When I was a teenager and had no car, it took me about an hour to get to my minimum wage job by bus due to transfers. Once I could afford a car (because I lived with mum and dad and could save) that commute got cut to 20 minutes.
One of them used to stay really late at night at a Denny's because the buses didn't run when he needed to get to work, so he would spend the night (basically) at a Denny's so he was at work on time.
Your statement sounds like what would be typically written in an attention grabbing first paragraph of a news article in order to draw people in w/o providing any context as far as how common all or even most of those items you listed even exist. It is not realistic in any way at scale common sense says that. You are highlighting almost certainly an outlier not what is typical to make your point.
Let's take a look in particular into 'suffering just so your family isn't hungry'.
- Riding a bus for an hour in itself isn't suffering. - Four hour shift isn't suffering - Stressful minimum wage job? Any job can be stressful having a job pay more does not make it less stressful. - Manager is abusive. Abusive? This sounds like some characterization for impact to make a point. How realistic is it that the vast majority of jobs have people who are 'abusive' managers (as opposed to a percentage of them let's call it 10% arbitrarily).
- Workplace is unsafe? Where? In the US? You think 'all' or 'most' workplaces are unsafe? Or there are perhaps a percentage that are unsafe?
- Your mental health may suffer. Sure ok that one is fine. But maybe you are in the position that you are in the first place because of your mental health.
This got repetitive quickly, and the managers got really upset whenever you slacked off in the lulls. Groups of more than three people chatting while we had "downtime" were more or less immediately disbanded. Checking your phone, even to text your family, was a big no-no on company time. There was no such thing as a "smoke break" (I don't smoke, but man a five-minute break occasionally would've been really nice.)
I hated that job. I dealt with a bout of depression because of that job. The turnover there- among people who were talented- was exceptionally high (I lasted about two months before I found a better job) because the job was so menial- and the managers so demeaning- that all joy in working was lost fairly regularly.
It would've been better than staying at home and playing games all day long, but I'm sure that I could've done something more productive, without pay than I did with pay.
That sounds like a good outcome though. If the job weren't so bad you might have stuck with it. You could say that you (and others 'talented') were lucky it sucked so much.
But it doesn't. Occasionally it spurs on action, but just as often, it traumatizes.
>This doesn't mean 'make things really bad it's motivating'.
That's just what you said, it's simply the flipside of the following sentence, and it's untrue. If we have limited time and energy on this planet, every moment in the work you describe is wasted.
I think the point of the article is that relying on low unemployment as a main proxy of the health of the economy and how the workforce is doing overall, while pushing economic policies that try to mainly optimize that number, misses some pretty big points.
None of that contradicts what I originally said. Not having a minimum salary, and removing options for people to get by when they find themselves unemployed, creates a perfect environment for modern slavery. The OP that I replied to above seemed to think this is a good idea - it is obviously not.
Subjective opinion: jobs promote financial independence, mainly independence from the government. When the majority is not handcuffs and forced to give their votes to socialists to secure their welfare benefits (which, ironically, furthers their dependence on corrupted government and tightens handcuffs), democracy and sane vote prevail.
During the time without a job and when I am in poverty, I _NEVER_ sought for food stamp or any government help, I consider it is a shame to me per my own standard, and this is the only way I got out of the poverty.
These regulations upon regulations, shitty policies and "governing" from socialists are killing the market and gotta stop. It's dumb to interfere with the market and dictate how much your skills are worth. USSR as a reference? We know what financial top-down planning and dictatorship does to countries.
Minimum wage should be abolished.
I'm glad not everyone shares your particular morality.
We reward stupidity, promote mediocracy, and teach dependency.
I grew tremendously as a person working jobs I didn't enjoy. I only work on what I want to now, and I couldn't imagine I'd be very satisfied with my life I didn't navigate to this position through hard work.
EDIT: to clarify - it's not that I look down on any jobs. Trash pickup is very much needed profession. What I'm saying is: Let's say person wins a lottery and suddenly has all the money they need for the rest of their lives. I can imagine that many software developers will still continue to program, writers or musicians would continue writing novels or songs, but I'm pretty sure noone would voluntarily continue their trash pickup work.
Do they love it like I love programming? Maybe; maybe not, but it seems possible.
People tend to frame things selectively in response to the audience in question. People in vulnerable positions are usually aware of it and acting to protect themselves.
The idea isn't that you don't need a job, the idea is that you are less dependent on finding a job right away so that you can find a good fit between your skills and your goals and your job. This not only will lead to a better life for you, but more overall economic productivity.
"Any job" doesn't help people find stable work as well as training and a safety net do. SOME jobs provide this, but forcing people into jobs that don't is counterproductive. This is a common misunderstanding people have.
That seems to be the definition of an acceptable job.
To me a good job is one which you wouldn't mind doing every day for the rest of your life. The occupation needs to actually be desirable in the long run, and a decent paycheck does not fit the bill.
If yes: imagine a world where more people are willing to do other jobs more social because money becomes less relevant.
I have experiences with many jobs that were not enjoyable. By "not enjoyable", I don't only mean they were dull office jobs. I had a lot of jobs in my early twenties, often through temp agencies but not always: working in warehouses, working as a manual laborer in large institutional buildings (moving furniture etc), two different jobs working on factory assembly lines, working in old office buildings to pull network cable through ceilings and floors, working on receiving docks, etc. Well over ten or fifteen jobs, as they tended to last for a summer, or a few months or weeks. As someone with computer skills and ultimately a pretty promising career ahead of me, I always had the sense in these temp jobs that they were just that, "temporary". However, most everyone I worked with in these roles were not there as temps, they were the people for whom life had worked out such that these kinds of jobs were close to the best they were going to get. There is no amount of "hard work" that someone in these roles can apply to move to a new station in life, there are too many strikes against them: educational, cognitive/developmental, health-wise, criminal backgrounds, etc. that make it extremely unlikely they would ever have much better of a station in life. And like me, all of these people were entirely aware of this element of who they were; they were the "lifers".
One of the worst jobs I had which I could only handle for about two weeks was working in a factory that manufactured rolls of ink ribbon for line printers and typewriters. My job was to be handed a large metal bar called the "spindle" onto which I would pull out 30 or so rolls, stick all the rolls onto the spindle with spacers in between them, then hand them off to this other woman who had whatever minor skill was required to put this spindle into the machine that would roll the ink ribbon onto them. You do this in a dark and smelly factory for 8 hours a day. This job was for me, a valuable experience, as I can look back on it with all the perspective offered by doing that kind of job. But for all the other folks working in that place including the woman who I handed the spindle off towards, that was it for them. They were all at most high school grad or less, they were people for whom there were no opportunities. The job paid minimum wage. They were "lifers". These people are counted as part of "the employed". But they live paycheck to paycheck with minimal benefits or health care, in a dangerous and unhealthy environment, low life expectancy, poor nutrition, all of it. I don't consider low employment numbers to be very interesting when one notes how miserable life is for so many of the "employed".
> On average, the unemployed experience lower life satisfaction than the employed by about 0.3 standard deviations in Canada and the United States, by 0.32 standard deviations in the United Kingdom and by 0.47 standard deviations in Germany.[1]
Your claims relies on the assumption that unemployment in Canada is more tolerable than unemployment in the US. Yet large-scale surveys do not reflect that for the average jobseeker.
Therefore we can conclude that higher unemployment in Canada vis-a-vis the US is almost certainly driven by a lower supply of jobs, rather than as you posit a lower demand for employment. The same also holds true for the major Western European economies surveyed.
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2018408...
You can get health insurance without having a job. It's expensive, but it's not like it's cheap through employers. Just cheaper.
Health care - at least, treatment for life-threatening emergencies - is a right protected by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act in the US.
You edited your post to add a line about emergency healthcare being a legal obligation of hospitals - we both know that emergency healthcare (i.e. "I am literally dying right this second") is not the total of necessary healthcare for many people. I invite you to try surviving very long as a diabetic when the only treatment option is to go to A&E when you are literally dying.
[1] https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medica...
I'm not offering an opinion here. I just think the distinction between health care and insurance is important.
The original post I was responding to implies to some that you need a job to receive treatment. It also conversely implies that having a job means you can get treatment. I've actually talked to people outside the US who think that because of how our discussions are often worded.
> You edited your post to add a line about emergency healthcare being a legal obligation of hospitals
I'm sorry. I often think of things to add to my post right after submitting. I was editing it before I saw your response.
> we both know that emergency healthcare (i.e. "I am literally dying right this second") is not the total of necessary healthcare for many people.
I agree, which is why I specified that the right only extends to life-threatening emergencies.
If you believe that, you've bilged a test of basic humanity. If you don't, perhaps re-think what drives your well-actuallies in the future?
[0] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elderly-couple-found-dead-in-ap...
Stop projecting opinions that are not mine onto my post. I believe the health care and insurance industries in the US is broken and does not adequately serve a huge portion of citizens with low incomes. I have never suggested the current system is okay.
If your opinion is reliant on misinformation, you should reevaluate it. Otherwise, you should not be concerned with someone like me "splitting hairs".
My intention is not to say "you're just broke, you're not dead". Quite the opposite. My intention is to say that health care access is not limited by whether you have a job - it's whether you have money. Plenty of people have money but no job and even more have jobs but no money.
The US has the highest cancer survival rate in the world, which would not be possible if poorer populations were not having their cancers proactively treated.
On the other hand, it's basically dismissive of a very real problem here. I read a lot about homelessness. I've seen far too many people indicate they are homeless in part because they have cancer and it's ruining them financially.
America is hardly some utopia where we take wonderful care of all our people, regardless of ability to pay.
This way, you die with treatment and our system does not seem cruel. Even advanced, expensive chemotherapy is paid for, sometimes exceeding hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Affordable Care Act provides subsidies for health insurance based on income, not assets. If you're diagnosed with cancer and lose your job (because chemo is tough), and have assets, pay the Cobra until next sign up period. Sell all assets and invest to make about $20-$30k a year. Your premiums will be low and you'll have access to quality care. Move near large academic institutions because they do medicaid / bad insurance care. This way you minimally touch assets.
Rich people hate the Affordable Care Act because they don't get subsidies on premiums, which are about $3500 / month for a family now, and they have to pay 4.8% Medicare tax on all income over $250k . So, in essence, someone that makes $1m a year pays $78k/year in health care costs.
Lastly, I take care of a Pizza Hut delivery person who gets his insurance through the Affordable Care Act and only pays $40 / month for it, because of the subsidies.
Just for clarity's sake:
Medicare is a health insurance program for all citizens of U.S. whereas Medicaid is health coverage for low income group and people with disabilities.
Medicare is federal-supported program and Medicaid is a joint program by the state and the federal government. As such the eligibility and coverage for Medicaid vary from state to state.
https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-medicar...
The US isn’t bad in that respect, but according to Wikipedia, this statement isn’t even true for the subset of countries on their list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality...
It is attributable almost entirely to more aggressive (and expensive) diagnostics combined with many new cancer therapies being available in the US years before they trickle down to the rest of the world.
No it doesn't.
But even if it was true (and it isn't) you should also specify which type of cancer.
No country gets every type of cancer better than any other.
For example if we consider stomach cancer, South Korea is on top with 57.90% survival rate, USA is 30 points lower at 29.10%
> which would not be possible if poorer populations were not having their cancers proactively treated
It wouldn't also be possible if rich people couldn't get the same treatments other countries have developed by traveling abroad or having them for cheap in Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela.
But to put it in another way: take breast cancer, where USA leads the charts with 88.87% survival rate.
According to the sources "About 1 in 8 U.S. women (about 12%) will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime."
In Italy, where I come from, we measure breast cancer as patients over 100,000 women, not in %.
"Breast cancer is the leading tumor among women in Italy ... The incidence per age group was estimated to exceed 100 new cases every 100,000 women ≥ 40 years of age"
100 over 100,000 is one in a thousands or 0,1%, which is 120 times better than U.S. 12%.
It means that every 120 women that develop breast cancer in USA there is only one Italian woman in the same condition.
That's what really an universal health care system make possible: to not develop the diseases.
Cancer incidence rates are primarily the product of genetics and environment, which is why it varies across countries. It has little to do with access to healthcare. Stanford hospital has given state-of-the-art treatment for both liver and stomach cancer for free to poor members of my family.
I'm sorry, but that's not how it works.
For example only 1 in 4 breast cancers are attributed globally to risk factors (i.e genetics or environment)? [1]
Since you're bringing it up, I know a things or two about cancer, my father worked in health care, in pulmonary oncology, my mother worked in health care too, in infective diseases, most of my family is tied to Italian public health care, my aunts and uncles worked for it, our family best friends worked there, one of their children and one of my best friends is now a geneticist and is researching rare disease (some types of cancers among the others).
If it was simply about environment and genetics, looking at the numbers, one would assume that in Africa or India they have a very resilient genetic pool and the best environment in the World and in USA they've got some serious problem [2] [3].
Of course that's not the entire story, in those places people don't develop cancer because they die for many other (curable) diseases before cancer gets them.
So what makes survival rates so high in the US?
Well, this Forbes article [4] explains it quite well: overtreating.
But at what price? (not talking about raw monetary value here)
Cancer insurgence is tightly related to aging [5], I've brought up the example of Italy because it's the second oldest population in the World on average after Japan.
And we know that the best cure for cancer is (still) avoiding it.
We have a system here that tries to prevent cancer: women are called in for regular check ups for a number of diseases (including breast cancer), men are checked regularly for prostatic cancer when they are 40 or older and its for free.
Companies, by law, have to send their employees to regular check ups every five years.
I have high blood pressure, I have to attend mandatory check ups every year, because I am more at risk than the others.
It's all paid by the Company.
Would you prefer to develop breast cancer and have a 90% chance of survival or not develop it at all?
Breast cancer is by far the most common type of cancer for women [6] and it has high levels of survival rates in all the western World [7].
What's particularly controversial about the way US counts average survival rates is that they also count breast cancer in situ, which is not a try cancer, but it's used to inflate breast cancer statistics [8]
One statistics is particularly interesting, despite the fact that since the 90s sales of cigarettes per adult per day dropped dramatically and are among the lowest in the west [9] the share of cancer deaths attributed to tobacco is still pretty (alarmingly) high [10].
What's really important in cancer prevention and cure is that globally the chances of going back to an average life expectancy is rising, not only the survival rate after 5 years. In Italy 25% of cancer patients can expect to go back to a normal life, I haven't found the numbers relative to USA.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-cancer-deaths-at...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates?tab=ma...
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/06/13/why-the-us-has...
[5] Nuzzerino ↗ From a profit standpoint, the health industry (providers, not payers) have every incentive to delay care for chronic conditions until they can't get away with not doing it. Once a patient is sick enough, more resources and justification tends to be thrown against the insurers to pressure them to pay up, no matter the cost. One might recall Michael Moore's infamous protests for a dramatic example of this. jkoudys ↗ Yep. And I don't see it being fixed in the US, because the anti-single-payer crowd erroneously believes that US healthcare exists under a "free market". In truth, the budget per capita for healthcare in the states is actually _higher_ than in Canada. So Americans pay more for a lot less.
It turns out a few turn-your-head-and-coughs in your 30s is a way better deal than waiting for it to become a trip to the ER in your 50s.
That's hilarious.
I mean, you are correct that employers bundle employees together. But without massive government intervention during and after WWII, the industry would have been wildly different, and the way the trend began was highly historically contingent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942
Econ 101 is insufficient for understanding the world.
It is very useful to look at other countries - we have lots of natural experiments in health care markets. If bundling were determinative of market structure, you'd see the same pattern elsewhere.
"Emotionally tolerable" is a very different thing from "financially risky". Indeed, people should be willing to tolerate temporary dissatisfaction to achieve a better long term outcome in ways that they are not willing to tolerate complete financial ruin and the potential loss of major assets that will decrease their long term outcomes.
[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.536...
You are also citing a study that looks at the financial stress levels of employed mental health professionals and then trying to use that to reason about the economic choices made by unemployed people.
This is not how you use data responsibly. You can't just use a 30% correlation in an unrelated dataset to justify conflating two different measures without actually doing statistical analysis to show that that there is reason to believe that that correlation not only exists in a different population, but also isn't washed out by an a other factors.
The parent argues that Americans disproportionately boast about their unemployment figures compared to Canadians despite US unemployment carrying an exponentially greater risk of causing financial ruin due to medical expenses.
You dismissed his comment outright by citing that self-reported stress levels of unemployed Canadians and Americans are about the same, although this is at best tangentially related.
Your data is not relevant to the hypothesis. The surveys were conducted in different time-frames (Canada: 2009-2014, USA 2005-2010), which I shouldn't need to tell anyone why that dataset is not useful for rigorous comparison, but I will anyway: one surveys people who were just recently hit by a recession and tracks them throughout the economy's recovery; while the other surveys people who recently experienced massive economic growth (exuberance) and tracks them throughout their economy crashing. Both, Canda's and the USA's, economies were intertwined during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and this should be accounted for -- but it isn't.
Furthermore, the data DOES hold up to the GP's assertion: that as the unemployment rate goes up, the gap in life satisfaction between employed and unemployed approaches zero (chart 2). That is, 20% nationwide unemployment, unemployed and employed Canadians have the same life satisfaction (chart 1).
Lastly, this is social sciences. We cannot conclude anything from the data without experimentation. At best, this data is observational reason to pursue deeper inquiry, at worst it's idealogical fodder to drive other people's agends by lying with statistics. Everyone does it. Statistics don't really mean anything on their own, and lay-people give them too much weight!
>1). There is a relationship in your data
>2). There isn't a relationship in your data
From there, you can then setup further experiments to better understand why there is or isn't a relationship -- and perhaps find the opposite is true!
It's the same reason you don't assume a theory is "true;" you don't conclude "that higher unemployment in Canada vis-a-vis the US is almost certainly driven by a lower supply of jobs, rather than as you posit a lower demand for employment" (GGP), because that's bad science!
What the GGP did is create an inference -- one based on misread data and faulty assumptions about scientific methods -- and expressed it as de facto. Now, in order for his inference to have weight, he must either support it with further evidence (DIY meta-analysis) or carry out some other type of experiment to test said inference.
Here's a very brief primer: https://socialresearchmethods.net/kb/concval.php
Huge surveys long showed a correlation between smokers and increased incidence of cancer. But it took decades of research to rule out confounding factors. For example, it may have been the case that industrial work was causing the cancer and industrial workers just happened to be more likely to be smokers.
There is one tool that really nails causation fairly quickly which is a double blind controlled experiment. But usually in social science it's very hard to or even immoral to conduct such experiments.
For example, assigning babies at random to be smokers or not for some period would be pretty hard to carry out and certainly be immoral if you thought the smoking may lead to cancer.
They succeeded in corrupting the political process though. I don't think you should need 100% scientific certainty to begin regulatory action. Maybe 80% or 90% of the way is good enough. The industry succeeded in requiring 150% certainty before a public health response could begin.
Me expressing my opinion, but I don't like either. So I try to steer away from expressing "my opinion," and sticking to only things that have a high probability of being true, which in this case, is the GGGP using an imperfect study incorrectly.
It's standard for all data, but must be enforced more strictly in social sciences where controlling for all variables (let alone knowing what they all are!) is impossible, and your correlations are more likely to be pure chance.
See: reproducibility crisis in social sciences
If so, all it says is that unemployment sucks and fails to really compare across borders. I've seen some stuff that indicates American parents are some of the most stressed out and dissatisfied parents on the planet due to our lack of family-friendly policies, including but not limited to our sucky healthcare policies.
It does not count those taking time off.
That would be the UNDERemployment rate.
But yes, the standard unemployment rate that’s talked about does not account for a lower participation rate, people who could be working or looking for a job but aren’t.
Clinton found a way to exclude all those pesky minorities. He renamed them from "minority" to "discouraged" workers and dropped them off the books! Pig ...
Edit: I should have specifically said that I'm talking about expensive prescription drugs and required ancillary care that is not paid for by the province. Also, each province is different. Ex: cancertaintyforall.ca
The Canadian healthcare system doesn’t even have the concept of “pre-existing condition”. That term is deeply flawed and was constructed by the healthcare insurance system in the USA.
The term used in Canada is “medical history”.
I’m at an age where I’m watching my friends in Canada deal with family suffering from long term illnesses and ultimately, death.
They all deal with anguish, grief, heartbreak, and in some cases depression.
But none of them are dealing with medical bills.
My experience is anecdotal from close relatives in Alberta having severe diseases early in life. Their drugs and "required care" was expensive and not entirely covered by their private insurance. Their private insurance had caps (annual and/or lifetime), and after, their medical history made it difficult or impossible to get private insurance with adequate coverage.
The bills were significant, but maybe each province has programs to cover the difference for those that cannot afford the bills?
Some people with chronic conditions that fall through the various provincial drug plans are spending fair chunks of money on prescription drugs that may be necessary for them to have a good life.
For example there is a drug you can take before chemo that reduces the side effects, it costs a lot, wasn't covered by the province and isn't free with private insurance. It can make a terrible experience a little more tolerable.
Neither does the US since the passage of ACA in 2010:
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/pre-existing-conditions/
Private insurance in Canada barely exists, and primarily covers prescription coverage and paramedial (acupuncture, chiropracty, TCM, etc.) Inpatient prescriptions are covered by provincial health. Doctor's visits are covered by provincial health. Dental may or may not be covered. Hospital stays, urgent care, ER visits, routine checkups, mental health are covered by provincial health. Health hotlines (call a nurse) are literally free. There's no such thing as "pre-existing". There's no such thing as medical billing.
It varies from province to province in its specifics, but the majority of working-age Canadians have private insurance through their employer. This is expected to cover everything from physiotherapy to psychotherapy to prescription medications.
People without such insurance have a limited patchwork of public programs and usually either have to pay themselves or go without.
Case in point: A friend injured his back, and while the surgery and doctor's consultations were covered, everything else including medication and physiotherapy was not. He ended up spending tens of thousands out of pocket to be able to stand again.
The private health insurance market in Canada is closer to a truly free market and isn't regulated like in the USA, and that means the insurers happily and routinely deny coverage for pre-existing or self-inflicted conditions (as the insurance contract may define them).
Another case in point: A friend of mine is HIV+, and was denied group coverage through his employer. He pays thousands of dollars out of pocket for antivirals every year.
When the public insurer doesn't cover you, it's an absolute wild west of unregulated private insurance coverage and usually boils down to pay or suffer and die.
Private insurance for prescriptions, dental, vision, etc. is offered by most big employers in Canada.
"As CBC News points out, private health insurance is “a crucial part of the system,” and Canadians spent about $43.2 billion on private coverage in 2005."
https://thinkprogress.org/can-canadians-purchase-private-hea...
I don't think that's actually true, I think it's a political talking point that we are all hit over the head with repeatedly. A key progressive talking point is that the issue of so-called "prosperity" is not as simple as "everyone has a job". This is where the issue of people having multiple jobs, minimum wage, benefits, unions, etc. all come into play but that all requires more cognitive overhead, something that is in scarce supply with a nation steeped in distraction.
https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/employment-rate, https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate
About 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with $400 for an unexpected expense, and most wouldn't even be able to borrow any money.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many-americans-...
It's a staged premise - which was entirely unsupported - to launch into the America Bad talking point. If you don't use a primer to launch into that, it looks particularly biased on a forum. So what you do instead, is you set up something ugly (those boasting Americans!) that can never be backed up, and that provides your on-ramp.
This is a comedy routine here on HN at this point.
Consider that the Americans boasting premise was the whole foundation to the parent comment and the parent made zero effort to back it up (it'd be impossible to support, the US is far too large, insular, and diverse for it to be likely true). The same country that, yes, largely doesn't know where Iran is at on a map, pays deep attention to Canadian economic statistics.
Pre-2000, 65% of adults 18+ were in the workforce; Today that sits at shy of 60%. You'd expect the cycle of liquidity crisis driven by reserveless lending would result in a stable graph over long periods of time, instead over an elongated period of time, it's pointing downard.
The problem with this is you leave a lot of people on the sidelines\wayside, and it takes years of working, of gaining experience, even doing something like janitorial work, to be considered competent.
Walmart has a drug rehab program today they run at many of their stores; they drug test 100 applicants, 99 fail the drug test. They have no other way of finding people to staff basic positions.
The entire concept and point of minimum wage was to ensure people wouldn't fall into this kind of disarray and businesses that complain about minimum wage hikes are parasites that have to literally eat people alive to survive, except today they hire PR Firms to cover it up. This is not the way to run a society. A lot of the reason our government allows this to go on has to do with controversial tech firms like Uber being funded by foreign entiteis with questionable morals such as the Saudi Oil fund, the US Government allowing china to buy 100bn+ in bonds every year, and other such "arrangements". We had 2 presidential candidates last election the Russians government admitted to compromising.
Congress has sold certain segments of people up the river and genuinely doesn't know how to get them out.
If you look at the growth rate in US Census data and private studies of men over 45 never married, no chilren, and look at the trend and how that has been correlated with a declining fertility rate that's starting to rival the USSR's collapse.
We haven't even begun to recover from 2000, and there's one heck of a powder keg forming.
And none of those people who make up that powder keg care about whether or not our health system is superior or inferior to canada's.
Sorry for being the "cite please" guy, but where on Earth did you find this? It's not in your link.
Understand this is a company that advertised converting their employee's to all part-time in 2008 to save on health insurance and then lost their proverbial behinds when they had to hire 8x as many hands whom stole 100x as much merchandise. Some stores had 7 figure shrink numbers. They're under indictment under FCPA by the SEC right now.
If you want some REALLY fun numbers, go look at BLS OES Job wage data for number of warehouse supervisors vs number of warehouse workers. More supervisors than workers. Walk into a warehouse sometime and look around, lots of people who can't speak english.
Not hard to find statistics on how these kinds of outfits work.
The danger of being purely quantitatively driven by these historically useful metrics is that there is an absolute focus on keeping the numbers at the right level or moving in the right direction while simultaneously doing things that undercut the value of those metrics. In the previous century, falling unemployment numbers used to indicate that factory workers were returning to work at their old wage and benefits or better that new jobs were being created. However, today it often means that the factory worker who lost their job is now an Uber driver for a fraction of the pay. You used to see stories like 'factory X is bringing back Y thousand good paying jobs as it (re)opens a production line' now the story is 'unemployment is below 4%... shut up and like it'
[1] If all else isn't equal, whether comparing economy A to economy B or a previous version of itself, you are right it isn't a meaningful metric at all.
This is an issue with the government, not the economy or medical system. They literally make cheap treatment illegal.
PS: For anyone in this situation, search online for FISH MOX or FISH PEN. Amoxicillin and Penicillin respectively. Aquarium stores usually carry them. Saved my life a few times! Sadly, no longer on Amazon.
In Canada, you'd go to the doctor and then continue you on your way.
In the USA, with the situation you described above, you would now be homeless. And in debt.
So yes, they're both stressful. But one is worse.
I'd be fucked. I have no msp coverage currently and haven't for a couple years. I can't actually go to a doctor right now unless I get hurt at work and wcb covers it.
You guys believe a lot of bullshit fairy tales about things up here honestly.
As someone who lives in the US, I’ve never heard anyone even mention Canada’s unemployment rate.
It’s just not on the radar.
I've literally never heard anyone in America discuss Canada's unemployment numbers in any context whatsoever. I think your premise may be off.
Canada is also pretty tiny (smaller than California; much smaller GDP than California) so I'm not sure why we would care.
Please keep nationalistic flamebait off this site. It leads to nationalistic flamewars, which we seriously don't want here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Right away, they're presenting some large number that's actually double the real number of people below that threshold. If the median is $10.22, that means only half of them make less than that.
They then make a bunch of broad statements about the entire group.
I clicked through to https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/11/21/low-wag..., which linked me to https://www.brookings.edu/research/meet-the-low-wage-workfor..., which says the definition is on page 5 of https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/201911_.... It's actually on page 6 and 7 that we finally get the definition:
> While there is no universal definition of a low-wage worker, we use the often-employed threshold of two-thirds median wages for full-time/full-year workers, with slight modification. When determining median wages, we consider only wages for males. This raises the threshold, since men earn more than women on average, but using the typical male worker as the benchmark limits the extent to which gender inequality in wages effects our definition. While this is a less common approach to take, we are not the first to do so.
...
> The average of the national threshold across our five years of data, in 2016 real dollars, is $16.03, and the adjusted thresholds range from $12.54 in Beckley, W.Va. to $20.02 in San Jose, Calif.
They should probably include some of this info without sending you through 3 different links to track it out, but whatever.
Moving on:
>However, imagine that everyone without a college degree suddenly earned one. The jobs that pay low wages would not disappear. Hospitals would still need nursing assistants, hotels would need housekeepers, day care centers would need child care workers, and so on.
If everyone had a college degree, and assuming in the hypothetical that they had higher human capital (since the hypothetical doesn't really make sense under signalling theories of education), then productivity would be higher in other jobs, which would increase pay for their example jobs due to the Baumol effect.
>Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades, even as costs for basic inputs to a stable life—such as health care, housing, and education—have skyrocketed.
For the stagnation claim, their own source disproves them:
>After adjusting for inflation, wages are only 10 percent higher in 2017 than they were in 1973, with annual real wage growth just below 0.2 percent.
Those numbers are themselves somewhat misleading, there's nuances with measures of inflation, total compensation vs wages, etc, but even their source is sufficient to disprove the claim that "Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades"
The other half is a weird claim. "health care, housing, and education" are part of the inflation index. If your wages are higher after adjusted for inflation, then you can afford more "health care, housing, and education" than before. Yes, they will cost more, but by definition other parts of the inflation index will have gone down, and your total cost to purchase the same basket of goods is now lower as a perce...
Laughing hard here. You just invented “trickle-down pay raises”!
If everybody has a degree, the degree doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Being a bachelor of economics will not make you a better burger deliverer. Plus the effect only hold due to a few sectors like IT paying disproportionately - overall, productivity increases over the last 70 years have not been reflected in purchasing power or work hours. The gains disappear into the upper deck.
We need to stop this bullshit mentality that people need to ‘educate themselves more’ to earn a decent living. The shit jobs will always exist, and they should pay well just for being shit jobs, which is what happens in northern Europe where minimum wages are more than enough to live comfortably as a bartender. There should be absolutely no shame in working for McDonalds (except about the food itself).
This is the result Google currently features for "productivity effect on wages". The chart shows total compensation tracking productivity very closely, although it only goes back a quarter century.
A $1000 slice of pizza is still only 1 slice of pizza.
No one said it did. But if your other option is something that's more productive, then the only way you'll agree to deliver burgers is if you're paid as much as the alternative. This has been known for half a century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
Pay rises in industries without productivity increases to match those in industries with productivity increases because of competition.
Of course, this is in the hypothetical where everyone has a college degree and assuming that the value of a degree is in human capital, which I pointed out explicitly was something I'm assuming.
Here's hours worked, shows a clear decline over time.
Perhaps the best measure that matters is the U6 underemployment which cleverly captures the utilisation of education and skill. It looks like this is as good as it gets as of right now in the US.
There are 15+ measures of inflation indeed, varying from 0 to 20%. Inflation is further segmented by demographics, younger people suffer far more inflation than older people (mostly due to housing, education and legacy cheaper medical plan expenses). Poor people also suffer higher inflation than the others.
The rabbit hole is deep and confusing. You can make just about any claim and it will be accurate for some definition of unemployment or inflation. And it's very easy to find contradictions. I'm sure somebody understands all this stuff, but this privilege is probably reserved for the top finance gurus.
Hard disagree. Inflation is affected by wages, but it's not a 1:1 relation and I'm not aware of anyone seriously making that claim. Of course there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages, but not seriously advocated today as far as I know.
>Inflation is further segmented by demographics
This is actually a really interesting point. Elizabeth Warren made exactly this point in her 2004 book The Two Income Trap, with regard to middle class families with kids having higher housing costs due to competition over school districts.
I am talking about "real wages" to avoid the gotchas associated with nominal wage and inflation definitions. I think this makes the controversy go away. When you extend the nominal wage growth beyond the productivity gains in real terms, any extra purchasing power from a nominal wage gain will have no real basis and thus instantly triggering inflation as defined for your specific personal definition by demographic and income.
Say if you are really rich, your personal consumer basket that defines your personal purchasing power (and your personal inflation) will be dominated by expensive luxury items and investments while regular food/medical price increases will not impact you at all because they are a small part of the basket. However if your "demographic" (that has similar personal consumer basket) wage increases there is nothing to stop the price increase on such goods. There are small exceptions, but we can ignore them for the most part.
When you break down the demographics into small enough micro-groups you can get rid of the guesswork about what is inflation and how it affects everybody on average. This way you should be able to see how the relationship between wages and inflation is really 1:1. It's indeed not 1:1 when you mix dissimilar baskets and work with averages.
Even that doesn't necessarily increase inflation 1:1. Your models are off.
You can't talk about a single demographic because multiple demos buy the same products. The demand curves have multiple customers.
> Even that doesn't necessarily increase inflation 1:1. Your models are off.
Assuming you use the example rich demographic I gave, what would be an example scenario that systemically breaks the 1:1 ratio?
> You can't talk about a single demographic because multiple demos buy the same products.
I know what you mean here but you can bypass the dependencies between demos by letting the system play itself out and taking the numbers when you have access to them. You can pick any demographic or a person and you can get their personal basket, calculate inflation, calculate their purchasing power and how it changes every single tick just from their credit card statements. It doesn't matter what other people buy when you can see the actual purchases for each individual. What other demos buy is already taken into account in the numbers you see in the credit card statements so to speak.
What source are you using that adjusts for productivity when reporting real wages? Real is defined as inflation adjusted only.
>Assuming you use the example rich demographic I gave, what would be an example scenario that systemically breaks the 1:1 ratio?
>Say if you are really rich, your personal consumer basket that defines your personal purchasing power (and your personal inflation) will be dominated by expensive luxury items and investments while regular food/medical price increases will not impact you at all because they are a small part of the basket. However if your "demographic" (that has similar personal consumer basket) wage increases there is nothing to stop the price increase on such goods.
You're assuming perfectly inelastic supply, among other things. If there's elasticity, then additional money will result in some additional supply of luxury goods and greater quantity demanded.
Also, investments != purchases. Investments are a decision to defer consumption to the future.
We imported Chinese social problems.
which means we imported severe rural poverty of subsistence living! We decided it was smart to compete with that so that our execs could have a few more dollars of bonuses. We even imported authoritarian behavior from the Chinese government!
It's the one-party no-listening rule by the Trumpanzise government - a highly authoritarian regime ...
10.22 is just a number. It wouldn't be better if they earned $20.44 per hour because costs would double, too.
It's like the SF housing market: people spend what they have. SF residents could live luxurious lives if they wouldn't outbid each other and kept prices low. Likewise, the lower half of the workforce could buy more if they stopped spending it all.
Middle income people are not better with money. They just profit off the poor people who set the base line prices for mass-produced goods.
*edit:
To add to this: Purchasing power parity [1] shows that at least poor people in the US don't get the most for their Dollar. Goods can be sourced cheaper on the world market. In other words: they could drive prices down if they started paying less.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity
I find we tend to apply microeconomic theorems to macroeconomic activities far too often.
This alone will start a demand for higher wages which will end in a situation where everything will cost proportionally more for everybody. The only losers will be those with bonds and cash because inflation will eat away the value.
Additionally, I don't think that you can ignore the supply chains. If you have a maid and you have to pay double, do you stomach the increased cost or are you going to ask for a rise yourself? And don't forget that you have to pay taxes. So you don't ask for her increase but you double it.
Low wages are not for those who operate machines, where the wage doesn't matter because the value is created by the machine. Low wages exist where a huge part of the value is directly created by the person. So double that cost and you increase the prices of those goods.
I don't know how big the low-wage part is relative to the entire economy. If it is minuscule, increasing minimum wage doesn't matter. But as the article says, it's almost 50% of the workforce, so I doubt that costs will only rise a small, proportional factor, if at all.
This is one reason why I’m against the minimum wage - by making it harder to get that first job, you make it increasingly difficult to get into the employment market.
I would be less opposed to allowing each city and town to set their own minimum wage. But a one-sized fits all approach doesn’t account for local differences. $15 federal minimum wage will drive low-wage work to the black market and the wages paid in cash.
This is false. The US ranks very poorly for economic mobility- in fact, even 3rd world countries like Pakistan rank higher.
In my opinion, we as a society should aim to work less and less, collectively making use of automation and technological progress. But it will be hard when we label this as being lazy and not valuable member of society.
This mentality and ownership really needs to be rethought.
That’s quite a bit more acceptable to me than someone deciding that Apple’s phones should be theirs because reasons.
Feudalism is over, dude. You're connected. You're beholden.
Sometimes it's just baffling how everyone can see an obvious problem and no one moves to try to at least ameliorate it. Not even asking that it be completely solved, just try to make things a little better for those people.
Generally-speaking, I'm betting that the wealthy would rather live in a world where they still have essentially unfettered freedom of movement and resource access with slightly less collective wealth, than one in which they have to hold back their gifts and always have to be looking over their shoulder.
If the society had taken this view in 1950 and encouraged "laziness", then we wouldn't[1] have had as much technological progress since then. It would probably have created a great lifestyle for 1950's people. It is indeed a great question to ponder - do we want to optimize social setup for today's population or for future generations to come?
[1] I also think low-wage jobs are sometime essential to move the society forward, Uber being a good example. Taxi-based system was horrible in the US. Uber used a lot of low-paid workers to shake the status quo and the situation has improved remarkably since then. I don't think the solution offered by Uber is perfect and the setup should be improved further, but simple improvements like hailing a cab via an app, credit card payments or driver/passenger ratings were inconceivable with the taxi system (again, in the US). That progress might not have been possible in a system with UBI because no one would have driven for Uber for low wages. Again, presence of UBI would have certainly helped Uber drivers a lot but collective society would have been stuck with a shitty taxi-based system.
The term is mechanical, reductionist, and carelessly 'employed'.
Sadly data is weaker than any bias of perspectives, and people find it impossible to think causally without some larger brittle philosophical framework.
If we're reducing political parties to extreme stereotypes, then perhaps the pressure of the distant right is an appropriate counter to the pressure from the distant left which encourages hedonism and infantilism well into adulthood, shuffling responsibility onto the magical collective to solve problems.
And in this way society isn't totally lost, on average, if it exists somewhere in the middle.
I just think that conservative thinking lends itself to an evangelical mindset, while liberals tend to view their philosophy as inevitable. Often they are content to wait for people to evolve to their level. Hillary's inaction in the previous campaign is a perfect example of that mindset.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please keep religious flamebait off this site. It leads to religious flamewars, which we seriously don't want here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Maybe it's not something to be so proud of. If people are having to come out of the woodwork to take jobs that aren't moving the average wage up, maybe they're doing it because they have to, in order to get by.
Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job because he/she can't pay the bills?
And in the most recent years, wages are going up across the board at the low pay tier: https://www.wsj.com/articles/rank-and-file-workers-get-bigge...
90-60 = 30
30 is 0.5 of 60.
It's part of the marketing used that also seeds self-doubt into many citizens and saves politician's faces:
"How can something so complex (at scale) and studied as unemployment be wrong? I must be the problem finding gainful employment, everyone else is doing great based on these numbers, I guess I need to work even harder to pickup my slack. My representatives even tell me everyone is doing great, look at the GDP and DOW soaring! What am I doing wrong?? Why cant I find a job, I guess I'll have to take whatever I can get." etc.
Most people don't have savings like they should. There are older folks who are gobbling up jobs tat were historically what younger kids would work. Those benefits are not large sums, so one could imagine someone working into the late 60's to maximize the actual retirement cash flow.
For those who did save... likely don't need to start pulling benefits early.
Over all... wages rise if there is competition for talent. Even if it is on the low end of entry level jobs. If there should be so many low end jobs, without 'normal' benefits... is another really good question.
It's just the kind of marketing that happens to work with the Protestant mentality of the majority of people here. And that's slowly starting to change, with Sanders and other progressive politicians asking about the well-being of Americans as opposed to raw numbers about whether they can work 4 part-time jobs or not.
Someone who is not working by choice is not unemployed.
A 60 year old who is voluntarily retired is not "unemployed". If they later end up taking a job due to financial hardship, that changes the unemployment rate very little; it just adds 1 to the denominator of people in the labor force.
Why have people doing crap jobs that are better automated just because they can’t afford to live otherwise? The system is broken, in that we need to better support the folks on the fringes so we can just automate away a lot of mindless, repetitive boring work. The remaining jobs can pay well, and we can stop benchmarking the economy of how many people we put to work regardless of the meaningfulness of what they’re doing.
Why waste a human life flipping burgers or banging away in the mines? Make robots do that, and let’s provide a solution to the displaced, like for instance basic income but totally open to alternatives.
Because we don’t have the technology to actually do that? We don’t even have the technology to replace the guy taking drive through orders. (“You want one Big Mech?”).
This discussion is pointless and premature. There are enormous economic incentives to automate away every job that can be done efficiently though automation. It’s just that our technology is actually very primitive, and that shows when trying to apply it to replacing service workers.
Yeah we do, touchscreen menus (or ATM style pushbutton menus in places with bad weather).
There are factories that assemble frozen mini burgers for supermarkets. There are pizza vending machines out there. So an entire fast food restaurant could be turned into a vending machine with current technology.
(My own guess is that touch screens are still more expensive and buggy than humans, and machine-made food still trades off novelty to be profitable. But I don’t know.)
I'd also be curious to see any user interface studies on these touchscreens. In my limited experiences, they are completely slow and thus an awful experience. They clearly are trying to sell more at every step instead of being useful and efficient for the end user.
So my guess for lack of adoption can be explained by:
- inertia and lack of incentives (who said recession?),
- people with cash,
- people who aren't good with technologies,
- people who have no one to talk to (they don't know what they want to eat today and want your advice).
You will ultimately order on your phone or a kiosk
Edited to add that there's a further problem: it's hard to find work when you're 70, and it's even harder to find 'knowledge work' for most 70-yr-olds. So the 70-yr-olds I know looking for work are working freelance or contingent sorts of things, or working retail/post office/food service -- and some of those jobs are physically difficult. One guy I know was doing a 6-week temporary USPS gig, working 4 am-noon shifts loading things from here to there. He mentioned he'd never been as sore in his life as he was the first few weeks. Many people would not be able to physically do this work at that age, frankly.
Even if there are, that's not going to lower the unemployment rate significantly; it's more likely to raise it. Say there are 100 million people in the labor force, of which 4 million don't have jobs. The unemployment rate is 4% (4/100). Now 10 million previously retired people suddenly realize that they need to go back to work, and they all get hired instantly. The unemployment rate falls to 4/110=3.6%, not a huge change. And in reality all of those people won't get jobs immediately, and while they're looking they're counted as unemployed. If 1 million out of the 10 million former retirees haven't found jobs yet, the unemployment rate rises to 5/110=4.5%.
Furthermore, we are reaching the limits of what monetary stimulus is able to achieve in driving the economic wellbeing of everyday Americans; history has shown that fiscal stimulus is better at that. A decade of easy monetary policy and balance sheet expansion has yielded a large divide in inequality and asset inflation. The non-asset owning working class have effectively been left behind, with now a larger wall to climb in order build relative wealth.
I personally don't think unions and collective bargaining are the best solution, as it can in some cases be overbearing on industry---and the burden can be non-uniformly applied across industries. Also, due to globalization, there is effectively a fixed marginal cost for labor: any inefficiencies will be arbitraged abroad. Even if unions and collective bargaining were the solution, there is no inherent law that labor demand and labor supply will always be near parity---especially with increased automation.
I think the best solution to resolve this, both uniformly and with minimal aggregate complexity, would be expand the Federal's reserves responsibilities into the fiscal space.
The Fed currently has two mandates: low unemployment, and stable currency. I propose a third mandate: wage and productivity parity. This would be facilitated by direct fiscal policy in the form of a floating universal basic income. This would enshrine the fed with ability to affect fiscal policy without politics. The stimulus could be progressive, but would be much more uniform---unlike today's pork projects that have a smaller share of winners.
This coupled with universal health, easing the burden of hiring and firing, consolidation of existing entitlement/social programs, could really open up the economic landscape.
This is a very complex solution for a problem we already have the tools to solve. Politicians should just execute proper fiscal policy instead of leaning on the fed for every solution. We already have a decent system for this, which has historically worked, but no one is using it.
Other countries are able to execute proper fiscal policy without complex central banking paradigms or measures.
The real issue is our inability to plan long term fiscal policies at almost every level of our political system.
Which countries?
Even today, the European Central Bank is signaling that it has effectively done all it can do (without permanently harming the banking sector with negative rates), and that it is time to open the doors to fiscal stimulus; but, Germany, which is going through a manufacturing recession, is loath to update their constitution to facilitate fiscal stimulus.
By what means would you give this third mandate to the Fed? Surely, politicians give this mandate, through the voters. In which case: how can you say it’s “without politics”? Because politicians create the laws that govern central banks, central banks cannot be said to be politically independent.
I guarantee you, if a central bank — any central bank — stopped monetizing its government’s bonds, the currency produced by its member banks would quickly lose its legal tender status and tax privileges.
They don't discuss the important details because it doesn't drive votes. They also as a challenger during the election want to hold the incumbent to a standard they might not be able to maintain. Politicians, as a breed, are adverse to "live by the sword, did by the sword." As a result we get politician-speak as the normalized standard.
I just watched the documentary "American Factory" (highly recommended), and it's pretty clear to me that doing repetitive manual labor work in a factory is grueling, mind-numbingly boring, dangerous, and not something we should be doing if we can automate it - not to mention low status and low pay. I'd bet that most of the politicians idealizing manufacturing jobs have never worked a manufacturing job before. It's absolutely nothing like any cushy office job. At the end of the movie when they talked about how they were replacing the humans with robots, that should be something to celebrate (but it's not because our society forces people into employment to make a living).
Those workers were making $12/hour at the Chinese owned company despite having made $29/hour in their unionized jobs at GM before it closed. It's not as if the $29/hour jobs were some utopia, but it's a massive difference in pay that affords one a middle class lifestyle. And as a worker, feeling like you have no representation and no say can make any job soul crushing.
Yet politicians talk about "jobs" as some unequivocally good thing as if we're all partners at law firms with corner offices making six figures or whatever they're used to (not that I'd ever want to be a lawyer). They're so clearly out of touch.
Unskilled labor isn’t worth a whole lot, and our country has a lot of it.
How do you make everybody an engineer? or... is it not even possible? Are some (most?) people mentally incapable of being engineers with the proper education?
As for whether it is something that should be done or not: why should programming be done? How do most apps benefit the average person. I'm willing to argue that FAANG companies have been detrimental to society.
I've also been well-payed at the factories I work at, but $20/hr in rural Iowa goes way further than in LA or wherever. There were quite a few people who had moved from cities to work where I was at.
The idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are. A lot of people were worried that long-term our jobs would be automated or moved to Mexico.
[1] This may depend on what is being done and more importantly on the age of the company.
Great, if you like working in a factory, then all the power to you. Personally I'd probably be contemplating suicide if I had to work on an assembly line in a work environment similar to how the film portrayed the factory in China, working 12 hour days with only 4 days off per month for crap money.
I never claimed that all programming benefits society.
> the idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are
The fact that you'd write such a dumb baseless insulting comment shows how out of touch you are. Since you didn't provide an argument, I'm not going to waste my time trying to decipher whatever your reasoning was and respond to it. Also it doesn't even really matter if it's a good or bad thing because it's happening, and there's nothing you can do to stop it (unless you're suggesting some kind of ludditism movement of breaking machines for the sake of preserving jobs, which is just flat out stupid).
That's such a ridiculous statement for someone on HN. If we were to believe such a thing, why would you want to advance at all, if not for removing/reducing the work load imposed on people, or, equivalently, improving productivity per working hour?
EDIT: An article in the NYT regarding this topic came to my mind - about automation/robots etc. in Sweden. Can highly recommend it: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/business/the-robots-are-c...
If the retiree didn't get a low-paying job (Uber driver etc.), his neighbors would be forced to care for him through social welfare taxes. With a job, he supports himself. All the resources freed up can be put to more productive use.
What you are implying is that "low unemployment" means people who didn't want to work are being forced to. But that is not what the usually-quoted (and quoted here) unenmployment number means. When people quote "unemployment" they usually mean U3, which is the number of people who are actively looking for a job.
If what you describe were happening, that dire economic conditions were forcing more people to look for work, the "unenmployment rate" would go up, not down.
The unemployment rate is not the labor force participation rate. And even the labor force participation rate is deeply misleading, because it encodes demographic statistics in a way that has complex effects that are hard to account for.
If we fix these I'm sure the equation changes a lot for many, many, people.
If the market is broken for pricing these main things, then even if everyone suddenly gets an income increase, it probably wouldn't matter much.
Certainly not on housing. The cost of housing/rent is predicated on a shortage of hoarded, largely untaxed land.
Not everyone makes makes minimum wage.
Do away with, or at least reduce, this bogeyman and I wonder how much economic activity we’d unlock.
There’s a supply and demand problem. Limited supply (real estate), lots of demand, therefore prices go up. Those who can afford it do pay it and are competing with each other to pay for the property they want. Why would New York or Bay area housing ever go down?
Time for more people to admit they can’t afford to live in the best + most popular places and instead move to “less desirable” places, like Iowa.
This is just artificially limited, because existing home owners don't like to see their property prices fall due to increased supply.
Workers with skills that align add productivity see wage gains. Workers and entire businesses on the wrong side of the productivity wave end up dislocated.
I'm sure UBI and other public policy efforts can correct this, right about the time we can control weather, solar cycles and cure cancer. Or, we can just accept there's some things outside our control and plan for the ups and downs.
Nursing and home aides, fast food, janitors, warehousing and trucking - these are all unproductive and low-skill occupations. It wouldn't look that sorry if the country implemented better industrial policies.
(eg, they include college age students when they are usually left out because things like increase college enrollment would skew the numbers).
All their distributional data and numbers for what counts as low wage workers comes from a 2012-2016 Census Bureau survey. They then claim without much justification "we think it is unlikely our finding would change significantly if we considered more recent wage data" for the 2017-2019 period.
edits:
strangely enough they exclude graduate and professional student, but still include 18-24 year olds in high school or college. And they exclude self-employed for reasons similar to why you would want to exclude 18-24 year olds. And that 18-24 year old group accounts for only 4% of mid and high wage work, but 24.3% of low wage work, so it is clearly skewing the results.
And the largest category of low-wage workers (a plurality) is classified as "low-wage workers in a family with mid- to high- wage workers". I'm not really sure we care about that as much.
Reading more, they have some very strange inclusion/excisions, such as they exclude professional and grade students because they are seen as having a career path, they include "springboard jobs" because some might not transition out of them. That's just sloppy and lazy.
Sounds like some serious data hacking going on.
I am of the opinion that low wage jobs are a form of UBI. In this manner, individuals are paid a basic income in exchange for their productivity. However, these jobs are not meant to create wealth. They're meant to provide subsistance. This is much the same goal of UBI.
For those that say that benefits (health, retirement, sick pay, family leave, vacation) are necessary in addition to low wage income which often does not supply many or any of these benefits, I would say that is the case for UBI as well.
For UBI to work, there must be a base of benefits to support the UBI. As such, I see UBI and low wage as fairly synonymous except that UBI is seen as providing income without any productivity required of the individual, and low wage being UBI with required productivity.
In many ways UBI and low wage work come at odds. The more that UBI is offered, the less that individuals would want to do low wage work. Rather than pushing up wages for low wage work, dis-incentivization of low wage will push employers towards automation. As such, low wage is a support of employment generally. The more that employers move towards automation, the more that low wage jobs are eliminated, the more that UBI becomes the only alternative to low wage. As such, low wage jobs do provide a necessary function in the economic system.
This is just food for thought.
Lastly, the benefits point you made does make sense, except a "retirement" benefit shouldn't be needed (it only exists because eventually you can't do work but need money - basically what UBI already is)
Also to add to your points above, in the scenario where all possible low wage jobs are eliminated through automation, this would require a dramatic restructuring of the labor pool and economic environment. This is further evidence of the role low wage plays in current economy.
In the situation where low wage jobs are fully eliminated, all that remains are concentrations of high wage / self-employed pools and a very large amount of automation systems that would require management.
Perhaps one alternative to UBI is the creation of patronage systems that can support human endeavors where no productivity output is required, but human creativity output is desired. Something to think about.
UBI promotes subsistence but crucially allows someone enough time to find more substantial opportunities.
And UBI won't necessarily kill low-wage work – in some ways, it makes space for it. I'm an EMT, and I make minimum wage, and I work 48-72 hours a week on the ambulance. UBI would make it so that I don't need another job to support a family, and could live healthily and with dignity on just those 48-72 hours a week.
That is the goal of all jobs, high, low, middle
Employers are not charity, they do not employ people so they can have a good income.
Employers employ people because they need work done to make money off that work, the second you cost your employer more than they make off your work you are out of a job.
Sometimes that cut off is more direct (i.e if you make widgets your per hour the rate of manufacture can easily be factored into the cost of making the widget) but if you some do something more nebulous like cleaning the floors, or filing papers, that can be harder to calculate but every business does.
What is a better model. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need"
Personally I like having control over what I choose to sell my labor for, and based on all the other times other models have been tried I would prefer not to have the government assign me a job, or give me bread credits where I have to wait in line for hours to get my "free" government bread
My position pays well and I'm an expert. I can choose my job to a certain degree and people are looking for me to keep me.
This is luxury. You are at the grace of your shift manager.
Our society needs a way to ubi to find a new more fulfilling future with tons of automatization. Like in Star trek.
I'm not even a proponent of UBI, but I immediately see a few problems with your argument here:
1) They often don't provide subsistence, hence the necessity for many people to have multiple jobs. While we can adjust UBI accordingly (to some extent, obviously CoL is a thing), it's significantly more difficult to adjust around people working multiple jobs.
2) You're missing a critical component of UBI, which is that people are free to pursue whatever they might like (including nothing at all) without the fear of losing basic necessities. Low wage jobs obviously preclude you from doing that--because you're, well, spending your time working those jobs.
This is hyperbole of course, but we may very well be missing out on a modern-era Emily Dickinson or Darwin because they're spending all their time working minimum wage jobs.
3) Everyone's already moving heavily towards automation. Corporations don't employ people out of the goodness of their hearts. The second it becomes cheaper to automate something, those jobs will disappear. You can already see this to some extent with automated checkout lines, internet vs. retail shopping, etc. Unless you do something drastic ala NJ and Oregon with enforcing low-wage work like gas station attendants, those jobs quickly fade away.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this. UBI allows people to pursue what they are passionate about, work where they truly want to, and help start a new business. The data backs that people will not work less, but be able to have more freedom in what job they do work in. I highly recommend Yang's book about this: https://www.hachettebooks.com/titles/andrew-yang/the-war-on-...
On the other hand, a low wage job takes up the same amount of time as a regular job but doesn't provide many of the benefits (e.g. financial security, sufficient discretionary money to pursue your goals, the ability to purchase a house, etc.).
UBI allows people to be productive in ways that haven't always been appreciated by society such as raising children, producing a profound portfolio of art, or caring for the disadvantaged.
Personal gratification in the form of extremely boring, demeaning, repetitive work which barely gives you enough money to live in poverty?
> However, these jobs are not meant to create wealth. They're meant to provide subsistance.
Minimum wage jobs are not meant to provide subsistence. They're meant to extract maximum profit from financially vulnerable people.
> Rather than pushing up wages for low wage work, dis-incentivization of low wage will push employers towards automation.
That's already the case regardless of UBI.
> As such, low wage is a support of employment generally.
Not really, I doubt Google's software engineer hiring gets harder or doctors go out of work if less people are willing to work minimum wage at Walmart.
If anything, a UBI enables low-wage work, especially when that work provides satisfaction to the employed. It also can increase economic productivity because the labor market will be able to distribute labor more efficiently.
And honestly, not starving is not a great metric for a wealthy and developed country like the USA. We should demand and strive for more than that terribly low standard.
When US Fed pours money in to unwind mortgage positions over a 30 year period(fall 2008 till fall 2038) barriers arise for job movement in form of high costs of rent or homeownership.
Its not going away and its going to get worse.
While it's theoretically possible that they might have spontaneously started doing these jobs if a UBI program had been initiated I'm not aware of any example where this has happened.
Caring for the elderly, caring for children, my elderly neighbour who sometimes picks up trash on the street, etc.
There are all kinds of crucial work our society desperately needs done, but which are often not even conceptualized as work because there's no wage attached to it.
For example, suppose in the past one spouse worked a job for a wage/salary and the other spouse cared for some of the couple's ailing parents, provided childcare, and cooked for the couple's children and parents. Now instead, the second spouse also works a wage job, both spouses pay higher taxes some of which go to caring for the old people, and with the extra income they instead purchase prepared food and pay for daycare. The economy grew a lot because formally unpaid labor is now being paid for, but is everyone better off?
Note: I don't think women should be limited to being homemakers, this is just an example.
If you don't like your job and you don't think it's actually worthwhile it serves as a reminder that you're wasting your potential, and that can be incredibly detrimental.
For me, anything that doesn't pay enough to own property and eventually retire with some dignity is a "non-job"; which would put a country like the UK at >30% or so.
It's not clear to me that there is a standard basis. Someone might think affording rent on a small room and food is OK. Someone might think raising a family should be possible.
It’s utterly ridiculous to call these things “market failures.” Every single one of those areas is not a market but is heavily regulated in a way that limits supply. Education mostly a government service, even at the tertiary level. Fully 50% of college students attend a public school.
These are actually IMO all examples of Baumol's Cost Disease as healthcare, child care, and education simply do not scale or require less workers with improved technology (at least so far). The fact that BCD hits so hard is evidence of most of the efficiency gains over the last decade(s) not being shared with the majority of people.
This is hardly a market. Even if people wish to move their children out of public schools en masse, it's not like governments are going to reduce property taxes accordingly.
Keep in mind I was replying to a critique of "Education and health care are out of reach for many" which obviously implies higher education
It's actually even worse than that because you pay for public education even if you don't use it.
So in that regard, if you send your kids to private schools, you're paying for their education twice.
This makes it very difficult to compete, and as a rayiner pointed out, isn't a real market.
I think the best solution to this is vouchers, which is a nice blend of public dollars but competitive schools.
Private systems aren't outcome orientated, they're profit orientated. If a public school and a private school are both given $n to educate a kid, the private option will maximize the proportion they get to keep.
Elite schools are a different story because they have significantly more resources.
The free market is good at some things, but the public wellbeing isn't one of them.
Maximizing your profit margin is one strategy for increasing profits, but growing market share by producing higher quality outcomes is another (arguably more common) strategy.
This is the case because markets have competition, which the public sector lacks. It’s why spending on public education continues to rise despite decreasing quality of outcomes.
This argument falls on deaf ears to be honest, considering Amazon deals with a very similar situation due to rampant fakes and yet it's more profitable for them to simply do nothing.
The problem is that for-profit industries only work when the consumer and business interests are aligned. In education the best way to earn a profit is by offering a low quality degree and spending the least on teaching, facility etc. That's the entire reason why McDegrees exist. Considering schools are also highly tied to physical locations, there's less possible competition than you think.
Amazon's infrastructure (1 day delivery) is good and valuable, but their service (products, etc) are severely lacking. It would be beneficial, in the free market sense, for the government to break up Amazon, split out that infrastructure part make it rentable, and have the rest of Amazon compete with other providers to provide a service on top of this infrastructure.
Same goes for all natural monopolies (e.g. gas pipelines, optic fibre internet, rail, ...).
How do you define everyone, access and good?
Does access === free where I currently live?
If parents can’t afford to live in an area with good schools should they be forced to get better jobs or moved to LCOL area so their kids get a better education?
or no matter where you live or how you live a third party should make sure your kids get a proper education?
Everyone means everyone. Access means that based on where you reside, there is a school within a reasonable distance, or transportation to one. Good is more tricky to define for me because I'm not an educator. The US has metrics and tests for math skills and reading comprehension. I'm sure we can gin up something. Use other developed countries as a benchmark.
>Does access === free where I currently live?
Sure.
> If parents can’t afford to live in an area with good schools should they be forced to get better jobs or moved to LCOL area so their kids get a better education?
The whole point of my comment is that people shouldn't have to make that decision.
> or no matter where you live or how you live a third party should make sure your kids get a proper education?
parents should have to send their kids to a nearby school. The rest should be taken care of.
You're introducing way more complexity into this. Good schools vs bad schools, HCOL vs LCOL. Not every school has to be exceptional, just bring up the average.
Part of this is due to the fact that there isn't (and probably shouldn't be) a singular national system for education. Another part is the fact that quality education is insanely high-priced because a parent has to pay for the public and the private system concurrently. This pressure pushes private tuitions upward and makes the private schools more exclusive because they can't take on kids below certain income thresholds at all.
This is one case where I believe regulation has actually hurt the US citizens a lot. No child left behind was a staggering failure, and most people would be better off making their educational choices for their children based on what makes the most sense for them, not based on a legislated prescription of certain topics (or the intentional avoidance of others, namely human health and biology...)
How does that hurt public schools? I would assume that would help public schools. Because instead of the top 50% of kids (e.g.) going to private schools, now only the top 10% of kids go to private schools. Thus public schools are filled with smarter kids.
Because of this, what actually happens is the top half of students that can't go to private schools get an underwhelming education. Compounding on that, local districts can mismanage funds and security to an extent that reduces the likelihood of a student's success in the classroom to near-zero.
Net result - <10% of students get a great education and greater opportunity. 40% come out 'fine' but not particularly ready for entering the workforce or higher education. The rest come out with an education that is measurably substandard, resulting in a significant hardship.
Example numbers, based on your comment.
Based on what I've read about the US education system (primary schools), one of the main problems is the "no child left behind" policy, which makes the public system not "outcome oriented" either - kids simply have no incentive to even try (and are disruptive instead), as there's no valuable outcome to achieve - the (fake) "outcome" is the same for everybody (finishing school), regardless of their actual level of education.
It's a hard problem.
The problem lies with evaluating the quality of education. Children aren't very capable of evaluating the quality of their own education (and if they are they often aren't taken seriously or they don't have any choice in the matter anyway), and parents are too far removed or often don't know the subject matter very well themselves. The only way (and even that is an inaccurate way) to evaluate schools is by doing statistical analysis on outcomes. The crucial point is: the only data you have is outdated by years, perhaps even a decade or so. Education is a strongly reputation-based sector for a reason: reputation is the only way people have to evaluate your product. I don't believe there's a way around this.
In a for-profit corporation, particularly in a publicly-traded one, there's often pressure to optimize profits on the short term. So if I'm the unscrupulous CEO of a for-profit school, I can always deliver very easily by simply cutting costs even if it dramatically hurts the quality of the education, confident in the knowledge that by the time the effects start getting noticeable I'm long gone. The short term profit motive of a publicly traded corporation works perversely here: there's always the temptation to sell the reputation you built up yesterday to turn a bigger profit today; no one will be any the wiser until it's too late (and they paid a lot of money for sub-par education).
Of course public or non-profit institutions are also vulnerable to bad management, but at least no one has a strong incentive to gut their expenses, as no one stands to gain.
Still there are a few issues that would need to be fixed, off the top of my head: (1) the function should simply be a mean, to make schools focus on desired outcomes (e.g. the minimal (or 5th percentile) education) - otherwise they'd just focus on producing a few outliers, like VCs; (2) there needs to be a "default" funding available (e.g. average of all schools) to enable innovation (starting new schools); (3) there needs to be some funding available for "non-profit" education (e.g. art) but maybe there should be a limit on the number of people that can attend such schools (for free).
This is a point I keep trying to make about UBI and seemingly utterly failing. It isn't "inevitable" that automation will lead to high rates of chronic unemployment.
I've been quiet of late on HN. I often am around Christmas time, but I also wonder if I'm just fed up with feeling like it's completely pointless.
Due to so-called identity politics, if I give my opinion about various things, it is seen as "political" in a way that it isn't for people who aren't me. There seems to be no amount of provisos or hedging my bet that adequately protects me from ridiculous personal attacks for speaking at all.
I'm skeptical that articles like this one are at all a reasonable picture of what's going on with the economy. I'm skeptical because I'm one of those poor people that makes too little money in the new economy and I'm quite clear this is the happy, shiny version of my life where unicorns fart rainbows.
Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly sick to death of being poor, struggling to make ends meet, etc. I'm sick to death of the classism and gender issues that help keep my financial problems alive.
But the reality is that I'm supposed to be dead. My life isn't supposed to work at all.
I have a genetic disorder and I have been getting myself well for a lot of years when that isn't supposed to be possible at all. It's been possible because of doing low paying gig work and my income is as low as it is in part because I don't work that much.
I hesitate to admit that because I know from long experience that people are quick to latch onto a detail like that and use it to justify making zero effort to address other issues, like classist and sexist BS that is also part of the problem.
Many years ago, I read a study that measured real world things like how many meals per day someone got. The conclusion was that less than one half percent of Americans were poor by the standards of less developed countries like India.
Similarly, I was a military wife for many years and found that it was nigh impossible to compare military compensation packages to civilian ones. A large part of the value of military compensation is in "benefits," not cash pay. It's very much an apples to oranges comparison and it's damn near impossible to articulate.
I'm unconvinced that we have a good means to adequately measure and understand current quality of life as compared to historical norms. I'm dirt poor and I'm currently broadcasting to the globe via a cheap ass smartphone and free membership on a public forum. That same smartphone holds multiple games, serves as my personal library and more.
When I was a military wife, we had multiple bookcases lining the walls of our living room. They held hundreds of books and, later, dozens of boxes from software that came with a paper booklet and a CD or floppy to install it.
I currently live in an SRO. My life could not work at all if I still needed hundreds of books and physical storage for software
It wouldn't work because I don't have the money for more space. It wouldn't work because papers make me sick. It wouldn't work for a long list of reasons.
I don't think we have any idea how to measure how much of our lives have moved from physical goods to virtual ones and how that presents itself to the eyes of the world as seeming poverty because we own so much less physically. To my mind, it's like magic. It's like having a DnD bag of holding for books, software and more.
Life is different these days. We don't have any idea how to incorporate that fact into our metrics for measuring things like poverty.
I desperately want the US to fix its health care issues and housing problems. These are very real problems that very negatively impact the country and weigh es...
There are basically two 'tracks' of things that people use in life.
Material goods like food, water, entertainment, etc are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. On long enough time scales this is true compared to wages. For the most part even the worst of jobs is sufficient to pay for that sort of thing.
I can't speak about healthcare as that's a particularly American problem.
But housing - that's literally an issue across the spectrum. It feels like every 'class' of person has basically taken a step down or two if you compare generation to generation. The upper-middle are looking at just about being able to afford starter properties in major cities. The middle class who would 30 years ago be settling down in suburban detached homes with kids are in pokey flats or sharing houses with other professionals.
Below that you have stuff like crappy flat shares, unofficial bunking up, or homelessness - to be honest looking at what graduates are doing I can't even imagine what say, a supermarket worker does if they don't have family.
Real estate goes through cycles shorter than 30 years and it was not more expensive in 2012 than in 1990.
We have a very serious housing supply issue in the US because while our housing supply has increasingly concentrated on the direction of upper class nuclear family, our demographics have gone in the opposite direction and moved away from that. We have a lot more small households (childless couples, single adults) and essentially no housing designed for them. Instead, we now default to expecting young adults to rent a home designed for a family and get roommates to fill the extra bedrooms and divide up the rent.
It's quite the serious problem and it's maddening to continue to see comments that act like there is no housing crisis. I have repeatedly had people tell me that the high cost of housing has nothing to do with homelessness, never mind that I can cite sources that show a very strong correlation.
So: How rich am I? I'm sure not a billion dollars rich, and yet...
As you say, the metrics don't compute very well.
There are many things that are more or less free, but a lot of basic essentials really aren't.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-wage-growth-for-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/02/minimum-w...