Easy solution: either raise wages or lower prices. As it stands wages are too low to attract workers given prices, especially the price of real estate.
How will someone lower prices when the government has done nothing but print money in the last 4 years...let alone the free cash giveaways in the last 18 months. People are using that money to buy bigger or more houses...thus driving up the price of real estate.
>In economics, inflation (or less frequently, price inflation) is a general rise in the price level of an economy over a period of time. When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation reflects a reduction in the purchasing power per unit of money – a loss of real value in the medium of exchange and unit of account within the economy.
You could buy houses in cash in half the cities in Ohio for 6 months unemployment + 3 stimulus checks. There are plenty of places like this in the US - Alabama, Mississippi, etc.
Sure - that is not the reason house prices in Marin are up 30%.
That's probably got more to do with central banks pushing up equities >30%. And probably because when you cut mortgage interest rates by 1 percentage point (which they did), you can afford ~15% more house.
In real terms - monthly payments for new housing purchases are down.
Sure, you could buy a house in the extremely small cities of Ohio with little to no jobs or economic future. I doubt many are. Almost all the population growth in the US is in major metro areas. If those cities are close to commute to Cleveland, Columbus, or Cincinnati, sure.
I live in the rust belt. No one is buying those 30k homes. Why? They're unmaintained, falling apart, need completely rewired, completely new plumbing. The housing stock in the rust belt is OLD. This is what makes prices "so cheap" to you lot looking in from the coasts.
But the reality is no one is buying the discount properties that need major work. They're in run down neighborhoods with vacancies everywhere and sit on the market for months. They're almost unsellable - many are held onto with the hope that a neighborhood will get gentrified. Cities like Detroit and Cleveland see Pittsburgh's resurgence and think that will happen there. But for every expensive Pittsburgh neighborhood there's a Clairton and McKeesport.
I don’t know how but my sister and my brother in law bought a brand new Harley in the middle of the pandemic, while they were both unemployed and collecting benefits.
Pretty discouraging to me, I feel like a sap that I kept working. Why do they get twice as much assistance when my wife doesn’t work because we decided to have her be a stay at home mom?
The obvious answer to your last question is not that your sister and BIL should not get assistance, but that your wife should also get more assistance. We don't do enough to support people across the country. 2020 showed some rare aid to people in a reasonable fashion (at least for a couple of months). We can do more of that.
We have fiat currency after all, let's take advantage of it!
You think that's the only money that got issued? The loans that went to companies was absurdly abused and had almost no oversight. Trillions of dollars went into the economy in a matter of months...
You're right it does not help in the short term, but we've been speaking about the Bay Area problems (for example) for two decades and vigorously discussing it in the past decade -- building five years ago could have solved today's problem.
Similarly, we could speak about it for another decade, or we could build now and solve part of the problem in five years.
This also doesn't exclude other fixes that can happen orthogonally.
It does not have to take nine months (the national average) to build a house or a hundred houses. Housing can be and in times of necessity has been built rapidly and well. My favorite example is Hilton Village in Newport News, VA, built to house workers at Newport News Shipyard at the tail end of and after World War I. Five hundred units were constructed within two years, and they were built cheaply yet with a randomization to the sequence of models and detailing that kept the houses from feeling like a cookie-cutter development, avoiding pitfalls into which many suburbs today fall. A hundred years later the homes remain occupied and in fact prized today for their charm.
The barriers to affordable, desirable, swiftly built housing are artificial.
Manufactured housing is probably the best bet for "built cheaply yet with a randomization", but most high-cost-of-living areas lack the available land. So then you need to build up, and that opens the Pandora's box of building code compliance, labor costs and material cost.
The city of Los Angeles presumably has access to average material costs and average labor costs, but the simple apartment complex they developed to house the homeless still ended up at $746,000 a unit https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/las-homeless-ho...
Won’t cure all. Building costs are soaring. Try building something new for less than $200/sf and you’ll see that the price of dirt is only part of the cost.
Accurate. I used to have about 20 neighbors on the adjoining two lots, until the previous owner pushed them all out and then sold to some investors who wanted to convert the properties into condos. They gathered dust for 2 years then there's been 18 months of half-assed construction. Why rush? They're accruing value by the day.They didn't even get proper permits, but the fine is nominal.
I would love to see this, getting rid of all the less than 20% down and 30 year fixed rate taxpayer subsidized mortgages in the US would help lower house prices very quickly.
Not necessarily, currently there are a lot of Wall Street companies buying real estate at any price (Zillow, etc). That is contributing some to the price inflation. My house has increased insanely in just the past 30 days for no obvious reason.
Yes, but how? Monetary authority can change nominal interest rate but has little control of real interest rate, and it's real interest rate you want to change.
Real interest rates will certainly increase if Fed increases nominal rates.
The real rate is of course the inflation adjusted rate, and Fed policy has been one of the prime drivers of higher inflation.
If they weren't printing 120B a month, or monetizing government spending, real rates would go up. Treasury yields are artificially suppressed by their bond buying.
Beyond asset purchases, simply raising short term rates would immediately dampen inflation, though has economic consequences as well (slow business activity).
Unfortunately the Fed seems more interested in supporting markets than doing what's right for the longer term health of the economy. Wealth inequality has been primarily perpetuated through monetary policy... Though fiscal plays a role too, of course.
Decommoditize it. Penalize investors. Make it prohibitively expensive to own a property but not live in it. Expropriate investment properties from those who do have them, as Berlin is currently considering.
"Supply" is the "just spin up more instances" of housing. It's an incantation that libertarians invoke to make the elephant in the room vanish. We'd be better served long term by addressing a fundamental inefficiency: literal rent seeking.
> Make it prohibitively expensive to own a property but not live in it.
How does this decrease my rent? I do not want to own property because I do not want my entire wealth invested in a single asset. For me, renting is ideal and then my money goes in to a wide array of assets which provides a better safety net than expecting that house prices will always stay the same or go up in the future.
Renting also affords me the ability to move whenever I feel like upgrading or downgrading without being stuck trying to sell the previous property and paying insane taxes each time.
> because I do not want my entire wealth invested in a single asset
That's the idea: with cheaper real estate you won't have to put your entire wealth into it, trading it would also be easier, and so ownership would be more attractive option.
I don't see how this is possible. The building I live in cost about $100M in construction fees and has 200 apartments. If we make a dumb assumption that they all cost the same amount, thats $500k per apartment on just cost of building before any kind of supply and demand affects the final sales price. These apartments sold new for $600k and I rent one for $480 a week. (All Australian dollars)
Currently I would comfortably put $20,000 in to housing as an asset. I can not see any way possible that banning rentals would allow me to buy a $500k construction cost apartment for $20k.
So this change forces me to invest in a market I do not want to invest in to. Buying one of these apartments is an incredible risk as it will likely devalue over time and be difficult to sell on when I want to move. So every time I move under this system I am risking massive losses Vs just having a weekly price and no commitment or risk.
I plugged your numbers into this mortgage calculator[0], and it looks like the payment on a 30 year loan of 500k with 20k down @ the average interest rate is less than your rent payment.... and you'd then be able to sell the asset when you move.
It doesn't sound like your landlord is doing you any favors.
The thing is, I don't want to buy this apartment. I don't trust the local builders enough for that and I believe that it will devalue faster than my rent payments. I also don't plan on living here for more than a few years. That calculator puts me at $537/week in just loan repayments for 30 years and does not include strata fees, council rates, sewerage fees, building insurance, etc.
To buy a property means paying tens of thousands in taxes each time you buy. If I stay here for 2 years and sell I would pay more in just taxes than the entire rent would have been and I am on the hook for any issues with the building or changes in value.
And I am perfectly happy to pay a known weekly amount which is well within my budget and put my savings in to other investments which don't tie me down to living in a particular place, do not require taking out multi decade loans and are easy to sell back for cash later.
Make it illegal for Private Equity to increase their current large nationwide ownership of over 300K single family homes in the United States, which they rent out, do not maintain, and push rental rates higher nation-wide. This behavior generates large scale misery and should be illegal.
There’s a bit over 120 million households in the US. How could ownership (and productive rental) of a mere 300k SFRs meaningfully shift the market and generate level scale misery? That’s a PE-owned rental for every 400 households.
The real hill to die on is the private equity firms buying trailer parks, then extorting poor people who own trailers but not the land under them. Imagine having a 50 year old trailer you grew up in and you inherited, and it’s your only asset but it’s too old to move. Suddenly the trailer park is bought by a hedge fund and rent is increased to an unaffordable level. This is happening all over America right now.
1. Change property tax laws that ensure an always increasing property value.
2. Ensure that real estate is zone and rezoned quickly to ensure supply in a market.
3. Create policy that makes it uneconomical to hold unused real estate.
4. Quickly make underused or misused real estate re-enter the market. E.g. speed up clean up and demolition of vacated real estate.
Gentrification is a racist term that reduces market forces on housing down to "white middle class people need to stop moving into previously lower class areas."
It can be very easy if there's the political will. Look at what China did when they built all those empty cities... which are now pretty much filled.
If we built 30 million new housing units in the next few years, I guarantee you the cost of housing would decline significantly. If it's profitable to build, builders will do it.
Unfortunately the US government has been more keen on supporting housing prices rather than lowering them.
At least in the UK, we may see an improvement if government stopped inflating real estate prices with new schemes every year (help-to-buy or the latest stamp duty suspension) and if investing in property to rent it, attracted as much tax as investing in training to get a better job.
Also, in the UK, stronger regulations (such as a set of first-world tenant-protection laws and stronger requirements for landlod to look after their properties) would help.
If someone dies, thereby leaving a job without applying for unemployment benefit, and someone on benefits replaces them, thereby leaving the unemployment stats, does that count as a job being "created"?
Most people work but most dont necessarily have to, at least as much as we do. People enter the "rat race" because it gives them something, not just a source of money but other achievement and identity stuff.
I think a lot of those incentives are changing. My take on work is that it's getting more exploitive, more administrative, less fun and less satisfying. Between politics and policies and management, work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs. It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before. And it's my theory anyway that a lot of people have had enough.
A simpler way to say it is that more people would rather exist outside society, in a sense, and do their own thing, than put up with all the BS that comes with working for someone else. Even if the pay is worse. I bet most Uber Eats drivers make less than fast food employees, but I also bet they have less non work corporate BS to deal with, and outside whatever algorithmic unfairness can work as they want. In corporate jobs, the situation is magnified because the requirements of conformity are much greater, but so generally are the options.
> It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before.
I think the industrial world would love to disagree. Working at a factory my grandma would have carefully regulated break times, food times, etc. All controlled by a central clock for everyone on shift.
It makes sense when you consider factory line workers as part of the machine, but it's also kinda bullshit from a human perspective.
And that was after the big wins of the labor movement in the early 1900's. Imagine how bad it was in the late 1800's.
The new innovation our generation introduced is that because everyone is supposed to be following their dream and passion, you not only have to be a good worker, you also have to love it. If you don't, you are expected to perform the part of someone who does.
> Most people work but most dont necessarily have to, at least as much as we do. People enter the "rat race" because it gives them something, not just a source of money but other achievement and identity stuff.
You also have less incentive to be in the race if you do not have kids/spouse, which fewer people have.
I'm wondering... people who don't have kids/commitments outside of work could - theoretically - give more effort for their work (e.g. time to commute wouldn't be seen as quite as bad). But they also probably expect more returns from work to make it worthwhile. So if the last part is not given, they will seek out alternatives (other work or other fulfilling roles outside of work).
I expect overtime work, evenings, nights, on call type work to get more expensive, since before, a person with dependents might have felt pressured to need to earn the extra income working a second job or extra hours, but for a single person, they might not feel the need to give up their free time.
> It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before.
Sure we have, serfdom. Serfs were not only expected to provide labour to their “employers”, but to fight for them, believe what they believe, and pledge their fealty.
Like serfs, and unlike the period from the industrial revolution to the postwar years, it’s becoming less common for people to change careers, an occupation being more than a job and becoming an identity. Sure we might change employers frequently, but it is not often (and is in fact a spectacle) when someone makes a drastic change of occupation.
This book was ahead of its time. Millionaires who live like college kids. Overworked and stressed out devs working for a faceless corporation. I read it a long time ago, but I recall it was super good.
Not changing careers is an inevitable result of specialization and the state of the art getting more and more demanding. I think it’s a net positive though as this evolution also provides many opportunities.
Occupation being an identity is a very long tradition though (going all the way to surnames). If anything, social media allowed ordinary people to express themselves outside of - and in disconnection from - their professional environment. Maybe this is part of why people are disassociating from their employers to some extent.
It goes back to prehistory as we have evidence of a scribe class and accounting classes in Mesopotamia and vicinity via the clay tablets that survived.
I think it’s as natural as there being leaders of packs. Some people have specific qualities making them better than another person in a specific endeavor. That other person might be better in another area. Unless a hermit, it makes sense there was specialization and we don’t do much pursue jacks-of-all-trades.
>"social media allowed ordinary people to express themselves outside of..."
In a limited fashion, yes, but speak of something your employer disagrees with and one may regret that take as unrelated to doing your job it may be.
Most people in the history of civilization were subsistence peasants, because throughout most of civilization, agricultural productivity was so low that it couldn't afford more than a small fraction of the population to work as 'professionals'.
> Serfs were not only expected to provide labour to their “employers”, but to fight for them
That was never expected. It was never going to be expected. Fighting was much too prestigious for serfs to be doing it.
> believe what they believe
This changed over time. Mostly serfs were too unimportant for their non-Christian beliefs to matter. But it was always a formal expectation, and as the centuries went by it did develop into an actual expectation.
> and pledge their fealty.
Indeed. This is the difference between a W2 worker and a contractor; it escapes me why so much public rhetoric focuses on W2 status as if getting it were a victory for the employee.
What an weird nonsequitor, of course not? It would make you eligible for all of the benefits that Uber gives to it's W2 employees though. Which is obviously the point.
I have a meeting today today to negotiate with another audit team that my TPS reports can be proven to be accurate. I only did this 2 months ago with external audit. Shoot me now.
Hasn't work always sucked . The difference now is ppl have more ways of making money that does not involve traditional employment. Also, there is more wealth than ever flowing around., so pplcan live off inheritances or with relatives or friends who have money. Wealth is growing at 20 percent per year since 2010 in terms of stock market gains but population growth just 1 percent. Even if the gains are dispropprante to the top, that is still a lot of wealth sloshing around.
Most people work but most dont necessarily have to, at least as much as we do.
You need to spend your time doing something. If you aren't spending a good chunk of it making money, you may be spending too much of it blowing through money out of boredom.
I hypothesize that this is a significant part of why 2/3 of lottery winners are bankrupt within 5 years: They quit their job and start spending like there's no tomorrow. And then, oops, the money shockingly doesn't go very far when all you do every minute of every day is spend money like a drunken sailor.
Another part might be the people who play the lottery a lot are more prone to win than those who play rarely. Those who play the lottery a lot are probably not the most financially/mathematically savvy to start with, so if they win, they’re not likely to suddenly turn into Mr Money Mustache.
I think another major factor is that people imagine winning the lottery will solve all their problems because they feel like "money" is their single biggest problem and if that would go away, their life would work.
In reality, they trade poor people problems for rich people problems and don't have rich people coping skills. They run out of money before developing them or they resist developing them because they are hesitant to be that cynical and jaded and they run out of money trying to prove to themselves that life does not boil down to "I've got dozens of friends and the fun never ends, that is as long as I'm buying."
Exactly. It might be hard to find peace and a sense of meaning in life without having some sort of responsibility, even if one thinks ultimate freedom is the lack of responsibility.
In some ways, I imagine being rich (without that being the almost coincidental side effect of a strong passion) and especially winning the lottery is for many going to be like throwing money into a bottomless pit.
Though that doesn't necessarily mean I would mind giving it a try...
>Between politics and policies and management, work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs. It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before.
Multiple comments have pointed out how this is wrong, but I have one more to add to the list.
Look up Henry Ford's Sociological Department. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class, but in order to qualify for his $5 per day wage you had to subject yourself to random inspections by the company's Sociological Department. This meant your employer would routinely check up on all aspects of your personal life. Your pay was docked if you weren't married, your home was too dirty, you didn't save enough of your wages, you didn't speak English well enough, your kids weren't regularly attending school, and if you got drunk after work. Nothing employers do today comes close to that.
This is literally the path towards fascism. There was a reason Ford was such a big fan of Hitler. Society can be a lot more efficient when everyone is forced to comply with what our leader thinks is best for us. In comparison to that I would take today's corporate paternalism that basically amounts to "don't be an asshole" any day of the week.
Interesting to see the different takes. I think the comment you replied to was being tongue in cheek with the essential point that the (I agree horrible) interventions by Ford were at least attempting to be constructive. What we see today is something very different, and in my view much closer to "power for power's sake" control that I think you're associating with facism.
>What we see today is something very different, and in my view much closer to "power for power's sake" control that I think you're associating with facism.
I'm not really sure what you are implying here. Can you give some examples of this power for power's sake behavior? Everything that I can think of has a plausible even if misguided motive.
Lots of non-fascist societies put less weight on unbridled individual self determination and more weight on social infrastructure to help people make good decisions.
I’d argue we lean too heavily in the direction of thinking everyone should figure life out by themselves with no external pressure. This hurts young people, who lack experience and the benefit of hindsight, and less intellectually gifted people, who may lack judgment and impulse control.
People these days indeed actively give destructive advice. Thinking of abandoning your stable long term relationship? “Follow your heart!”
The problem I had was not the split between individualism and collectivism. The problem is that these "lessons" are coming from an employer with corrupted incentives. They aren't trying to make a better citizenry. They are making a better cog for the machine. Hence the fascism angle.
If you want to teach these lessons, teach them through the education system.
Hitler was a fan of Ford's. Complete opposite. Hitler used Ford techniques. Your assertion is probably "common knowledge" but it is completely wrong. You should probably read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich before commenting further on that window of history. There are also several documentaries that cover this as well. An especially good one is: Hitler: A career (1977).
Already been noted, but what an unbelievably sinister sentiment. "Effective life behaviors" which include being married. Social conformity enforced through corporate power with the approval of the state, and people willing to countenance it as long as the mores being enforced are reactionary instead of disingenuously "progressive".
Being married is a proven effective life behavior. So is saving money, etc. Progressive ideas, by contrast, pretty much by definition lack demonstrated effectiveness. They have unknown and typically unpredictable effects on society.
I’m not suggesting that corporate enforcement of behavior is the best way to go. But we should obviously do it for things that are proven to work before we do it for things that are untested.
I don't know if that is actually proven. It isn't like through a lot of history women have had much choice about the whole thing, nor could they leave someone toxic in many cases. Is it an "effective life behavior" if you don't have a lot of other choices?
You could use the same words to state that hetero marriage is "proven", when realistically, people didn't have the choice.
Today's employers do similar things in subtler ways. After all, it's been 100+ years, things have changed. Lots of things have changed including the average quality of life, and the Sociological Department has kept up and changed with the times too.
You pointed some of this out yourself. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class. I bet upwards of 90% of corporate workers today would agree with a statement that Ford was such a champion. This convincing by way of constant Ford-praising literate is a first step in itself.
Sociological Departmentalism now manifests itself in subtler ways, like superiors throwing out casual questions about your personal lives, "team dinners" where people bring their spouses, and the ever so lightly dropped "see you early in the office tomorrow!" at the end (never "you must be tired – don't come to the office tomorrow, take some time off!").
I would invite you to consider the possibility that the intents of such practices have not changed since Ford's time, the methods have.
If I don’t bring my SO or spouse to a team dinner, my pay is not docked. If I don’t want to answer a personal question, I can decline without fearing it will show up on my performance review or pay slip.
The central theme of my comment was "it has become subtler". I...don't see a conflict between this and your statements?
To take your examples concretely – sure, you won't see your pay docked, but you may find that the teammate who does bring their spouse along and participates in the bullshit rituals gets consistent pay rises that you don't.
Or at least, this used to happen routinely prior to the pandemic making it impractical to conduct such affairs unnecessarily blending work and life. Yet another reason why a lot of management is itching to "get back to the office".
It's on a case by case basis, but try saying "I do not wish to discuss my personal life at work" in response to any questions about your personal life, and see how it goes :)
Caveat: You have to be in a large company with a lot of managers.
>> try saying "I do not wish to discuss my personal life at work" in response to any questions about your personal life, and see how it goes
No one will bat an eye at that answer. There are some managers / employees / peers where I know their personal life well and there are some I don't know at all. It has never been relevant.
Saying "It's none of your business and you can't force me to answer" send a very different message than "It's going alright. Did you watch the game last night? Pretty cool, huh?"
>> but you may find that the teammate who does bring their spouse along and participates in the bullshit rituals gets consistent pay rises ... Yet another reason why a lot of management is itching to "get back to the office".
I am curious what the basis of your world view is. I worked as a manager in some pretty big companies and this doesn't resonate with how I or anyone I knew acted, nor does it make sense to structure things this way from an incentive point of view.
I would say there's an angle there where people that like their work and co-workers more are generally more productive than those who punch the clock. So I could see that there could be some (mild) correlation - not causation - between better performance/higher team cohesion and interest in work social events, it would be silly to pay people based on the later because we can just pay them on the former.
It seems pretty noncontroversial to me that managers are more likely to promote people they like, and that this effect magnifies at higher ranks where performance metrics are less objective. Obviously a worker who only focuses on politics is going to be seen as redundant pretty quickly, but I've seen some very good workers who didn't get the promotions they should have because they didn't engage with politics at all.
I agree with that - people need to know who you are. It's very different than the "you didn't bring your wife to the party so we won't promote you" nonsense (frankly) that I am responding to.
Or up until last year, you could have been fired based exclusively off the gender of your SO.
Things aren't universally better and they aren't getting better quick enough for most of our liking, but let's not ignore that improvements have been made.
I have no idea about your personal position, but the GPs point is that it's more subtle and you're not refuting that. There is not a box on your pay about these things (or any other form of orthodoxy, I'm not necessarily suggesting those examples are the main problem), but that in no way means they dont relate to your career trajectory. Sorry for the double negatives
> This meant your employer would routinely check up on all aspects of your personal life. Your pay was docked if you weren't married, you home was too dirty, you didn't save enough of your wages, you didn't speak English well enough, your kids weren't regularly attending school, and if you got drunk after work.
Employers can demand you give them urine, blood or hair samples to prove that you haven't smoked a joint sometime within the last 30 days. They can give you psychological assessments, and personal value assessments, and deny you employment based on the results. Sometimes they assess the level of your conformity, by assessing how well you'll fit into their culture.
They can deny employment based on your credit score, or via private background checking companies that don't have to give them accurate information about you. They can use your biometrics to track you, and they can hand those biometrics to private companies like Clearview AI[1] to track you outside of work. While you're at work, they can point several cameras at you, recording everything you do and say from multiple angles, and storing it indefinitely. Some companies will spy on you with monitoring apps on your phones and computers, a risk that goes up exponentially if you need certain apps to do your job, or if you're using company equipment. If they don't like what you're doing, they'll fire you.
Somehow your post reminded me of John Lennon's Working class hero which basically captures this entire discussion, and was written in 1970. So I'm questioning my post above a little bit, although I don't think Lennon was contemplating the modern situation.
I disagree with almost all of those practices, but they are all arguably related to job performance in one way or another while many of the checks Ford conducted didn't have that clear connection (although he would probably argue otherwise). For example, I don't think it is necessarily accurate to believe that someone with worse credit is more likely to embezzle company funds, but it is a much straighter line to that conclusion than a married employee being a better worker.
And as I said further down this thread:
Things aren't universally better and they aren't getting better quick enough for most of our liking, but let's not ignore that improvements have been made.
Especially back then, but even now, it is thought that married men are, on average, are more likely to be the settled type. Dependable and boring. It was not a belief idiosyncratic to Ford. I think the idea is the man has children and a wife to feed to keep him in place and coming in to work, and also to keep him so busy and tired he stays out of trouble.
Whether this weird psychological theorizing is true of course, I don't know. (Married men do die in car crashes less, today.) See all that psychometry stuff some employers do. Seems no more reliable.
> I think the idea is the man has children and a wife to feed to keep him in place and coming in to work, and also to keep him so busy and tired he stays out of trouble.
A bit cynical, but this is in my opinion a large part of the reason why politics is so utterly dysfunctional these days: when large parts of the population don't have the time to participate in democracy because they have to work two or more jobs to make rent, there are a couple effects from that:
1) the weight of those rich enough to go voting matters more. Basically, vote day not being a holiday in the US gives the votes of rich people and old retirees vastly more weight than they should have in a world where everyone had equal possibility to go and vote.
2) the opinion of those who have enough time and resources (paywalls...) to access decent journalism matters more, because under-informed people voting "by outrage" got manipulated in their decisionmaking process.
3) People who have to worry about getting fired for getting sick definitely won't unionize or go on strike.
Personally I'm happy for opportunities to work. Just my opinion...but no employer owes me anything, other than compensation for work performed. You mention that reigning in these "exploitative practices" is the role of government, but I respectfully disagree. The role of government [to me] is physical safety against foreign invaders, and enforcing our laws. If these practices you speak of are so exploitative that they violate [labor] laws, then the governments role is to step in and enforce their laws. Otherwise, it seems like asking for government to decide what they accept/reject as "acceptable", and I don't trust my government(US) to do that.
Labor laws are not a mysterious force of nature; they were created by government, precisely to prevent exploitation by employers. The role of government is not only to enforce laws, but also to create new laws which reflect the collective understanding of fairness and create economic incentives which are beneficial to society as a whole.
A society where laws are set in stone and unchanging is a society doomed to stagnation and decline.
My take is that a highly productive globalized industrial society necessitates high abstraction of work and supply chains.
Buying a chair on an e-commerce site has many layers, each with its own sublayers (shipping <- fulfillment <- e-commerce site <- payments <- warehousing <- distribution <- manufacturing <- supply chain <- design <- product research <- market research — I'm skipping a bunch). Each layer and sublayer has its own bureaucracy to keep things running and to interface with other layers.
A pair of pants will be touched by fashion consumer researchers, fashion designers, textile designers, product managers, supply chain managers, marketing managers, analysts, social media managers, advertisers, merchandisers, software engineers, accountants, data scientists (clothing companies are turning to ML to assess fashion trends and demand), and many, many more. All to make it possible for you discover and buy a cheap pair of pants and have it delivered in 2 days.
Because of its efficiencies, the high abstraction economy outcompeted and replaced the old low abstraction economy. The driving force is the fact that it's easy for people to indirectly 'vote' for a high abstraction economy by overwhelmingly preferring to buy cheaper and more stuff; but it's very difficult for people to 'vote' for a low abstraction economy, even if people will occasionally buy something handmade.
I think that this force will endlessly drive the economy to become ever more abstract. Consumers want cheaper, better stuff. The economy will become more abstract, evolving ever narrower niche roles in order to serve consumer wants.
People will find themselves in those ever narrowing roles in order to afford the good life. And there is no low abstraction economy to flee to for the simple life because it has been outcompeted and replaced.
I think you've just illustrated the problem with laissez faire economics. It rewards only efficiency (and short term efficiency at that - resilience is often not accounted for), even if that's not what people might choose (they can choose otherwise, but not for long becauss those other modalities will be outcompeted out of existence).
We could have a way out of this if we restructured our economy so that decision making power didn't solely rest with owners of capital, and taxed companies ina more strongly progessive manner to prevent winner-takes-all situations. That would enable companies to make decisions that were not solely for financial reasons and allow for more diversity in business models and practices.
Efficiency is rewarded by consumer buying (voting with money) efficiently produced products.
It's not some abstract evil ideal that drives the market. It's people doing purchases.
Now, good markets need good (perfect to be precise) information. If people knew this is where we would end up (say most production moved to Asia), would they have made different choices (say to preserve manufacturing in US EU with better worker conditions)?
I would argue our economic system is just fine. But we fail in political, educational and ethical issues. Especially ethical, people know about horrible conditions in sweatshops, still there are massive queues to shop at low cost brands. I feel clothing as the most egregious, because there are decent alternative choices.
> Efficiency is rewarded by consumer buying (voting with money) efficiently produced products.
Right, but the fact that our economic outcomes are decided by consumers is an artifact of our economic system, not some necessary truth. There are a lot if upsides to such a system, but as discussed in this thread there are also downsides.
> I would argue our economic system is just fine. But we fail in political, educational and ethical issues
I disagree here. Our economic system makes sweatshop clothes cheaper (we could for example regulate or raise tariffs against them). That means that making thw ethical choice becomes a sacrifice of sorts, and not only that but it puts people who don't make that choice at a comparative advantage (they have more money left over), which effectively makes their influence over the rest of the economy greater.
We should be doing better in terms of political and ethical education, but we should also be ssetting up economic incentives to do the ethical thing not the opposite.
I'll go on the record predicting the opposite. Higher abstraction societies have higher co-ordination costs, something we're seeing now in ever growing administrative overhead. Much of what people are complaining about upthread is the higher percentage of resources going towards nonproductive, bureaucratic managerial tasks. We're probably going to get a reprieve in the short term as more of these are automated, but once the really profitable co-ordination jobs are replaced the overall administrative overhead will increase again. And it's nonlinear - co-ordination costs probably rise with the number of connections within a network, so every additional node adds more of these costs when joining a larger network than a smaller.
I actually expect we'll have two broad classes of society which value more or less abstraction. A few enclaves like Singapore surrounded by a lot of Amish country.
Everyone knows in a perfectly efficient market profits naturally go to 0. Recently I worked out that platforms - for example iOS and Android apps - where developers and users form a two-way market where the network effect dominates, naturally causes for the few platform owners to form a cartel with no need to compete. New platform owners can't enter into the market as they need both developers and users to take a chance, so the duopoly is stable. So you can't get to a perfectly efficient market in such an environment.
I hadn't realized until this thread that this is actually everywhere. Our supply chains are nothing more than nested Matryoshka dolls of tightly bound interfaces. The cartel formed by these platforms are the most profitable way to be in business. Everyone is seeking to become a platform that others expend energy building on top of.
Now that these interfaces are tightly bound, Metcalfe's law and it's associated n^2 communication costs mean that one participant can't make a change unless someone down the line changes. And they can't change unless someone else changes. It's the exact same problem as refactoring a big ball of mud.
> My take on work is that it's getting more exploitive, more administrative, less fun and less satisfying. Between politics and policies and management, work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs. It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before.
Maybe I’m showing my age, but I have to disagree hard with this idea that working conditions are worse in 2021 than they were in the past.
Modern jobs are quite comfortable and flexible relative to what was expected a few decades ago. Companies today bend over backwards to retain employees. I’m not exactly old, but I’m old enough to have experienced a significant shift toward better treatment of workers.
At the upper end (e.g. us engineers earning above-average wages), the level of employee pampering we get at modern tech companies feels unreal, even outside of the stereotypical FAANG offices. The amount of flexibility, respect, and attention showered on us (meaning tech workers) now is miles ahead of working conditions decades ago.
Just ask anyone who worked through past recessions what it’s like to work in a crowded job market with far more workers than jobs and where everyone is trying to outperform each other to avoid the next round of layoffs. It’s nothing like our job market today where you can walk out of one company and into another in a matter of weeks or days.
> Modern jobs are quite comfortable and flexible relative to what was expected a few decades ago. Companies today bend over backwards to retain employees.
Some modern jobs.
On the other end of the spectrum you have Amazon drivers pissing in bottles--something that a steel mill laborer would never have had to do.
> On the other end of the spectrum you have Amazon drivers pissing in bottles--something that a steel mill laborer would never have had to do.
Are you really suggesting that laboring at a steel mill decades ago was a more comfortable job than being an Amazon worker? That's incredibly out of touch.
Even modern steel mills, with all of our technology and safety regulations, are difficult jobs. That's why they pay more than being an Amazon warehouse employees or drivers.
Older steel mill jobs were absolutely hellish. The struggles at modern Amazon jobs have been greatly exaggerated or cherry-picked in the news. There's no comparison between the two.
That's an unnecessary (inflammatory) diversion from the comparison, which is the core of the thread. I understand you want to elevate the conversation to what YOU feel strongly about, but posting it on impulse is not constructive.
The person I was replying to was trying to minimize the crap job that Amazon workers were subject to by comparing it to job conditions 100 years earlier. I applied the argument to his example to show how silly it was to dismiss current working conditions like that. What he was doing is the same arguments used for the last 40 years to make our work lives worse and worse. Like I said, it's a race to the bottom mentality.
I mean what point do you think he was trying to make? That he respects the hard work steel workers endured? Sure, I guess, but I suspect the overriding narrative he was trying to convey was that Amazon workers ain't got it so tough. They should suck it up. That's how I read it.
Remember how Chinese workers were killing themselves in factories and the first counter argument was along the lines of, "their lives were much worse before, they should be thankful for those jobs." Guess who's propaganda that was.
Not sure how it was inflammatory but your scolding / virtue signaling wasn't very constructive either, bud.
> The person I was replying to was trying to minimize the crap job that Amazon workers were subject to by comparing it to job conditions 100 years earlier.
You're personalizing a fairly dry back and forth discussion about subjective experience and then deciding that it's constructive to minimize their attempt at coming to a common ground in service of some moral recognition of a higher level wrong.
> Not sure how it was inflammatory but your scolding / virtue signaling wasn't very constructive either, bud.
I tried to explain why you're not being constructive. Good luck with whatever.
Not sure about how the situation is in the States but the people driving those quick delivery vans over here in Eastern Europe (and over much of Western Europe, too, my country is in the EU so their companies can send them anywhere from Varna to close to Gibraltar at a moment's notice) have a very, very tough life, with many of them doing 14-16-hour driving stints. Apart of the huge stress that entails and the accompanying health conditions many of them also get into fatal road accidents because of said overwork and tiredness.
Fortunately the work of drivers driving big lorries is more tightly regulated with the worker's wellbeing also taken into consideration so that there's a fixed time interval per day you are allowed to drive, after which you have to literally stop at the first parking spot at the side of the road, no matter what the boss screams in your phone from half-way across the continent.
> Are they not required to comply with driving time trackers?
Unfortunately not for the smaller vans. In your link they mention:
> road haulage and passenger transport vehicles,
which "road haulage" I'm pretty sure means the regular big lorries we all think about. But when driving a Mercedes Sprinter [1] the same rules don't apply. You can actually drive that Sprinter with a regular driver's license, while for a regular lorry you need to take additional exams so that you can get into the "you can drive a lorry/big truck" category.
But a lot of door-to-door delivery these days uses "independent contractors" who use their personal vehicles and fuel, and get paid e.g. £120 for 180 deliveries.
Nobody's enforcing digital tacho cards for people's personal vehicles.
So, did my grandfather. He also went on strike and got shot at by Pinkertons.
However, working in a modern steel mill is a far cry from that. Even back in the 1970s (which is several decades ago please note), "Get the book" (operating manual which specified procedures, training, safety equipment, how many men were required, etc.) was a standard retort when managers ordered you to do something dumb. And the union protected you when you told the manager to go pound sand because it was outside the manual.
Amazon warehouse workers are schlepping around heavy stuff--just like many old school manufacturing jobs. And get crushed, injured, etc. just like many old school manufacturing jobs. However, they have zero protection and not much training and no backup to tell managers to get stuffed.
Now, would I trade a programming job for a steel mill one? Absolutely not. Would I trade an Amazon warehouse job for a steel mill one? That's not as clear to me.
Anecdotally, at the very start of the pandemic I had read a similar complaint from someone whose relative worked in delivery - with offices (and retail) on the lockdown there were fewer potential pit stops along the route.
The real issue isn't whether people have to pee in a bottle sometimes--it's the nature of the business--but how prevalent it is. That is, do the drivers on routes with available facilities have the time to make use of them? But that's a far more nuanced question that doesn't make for good sound bites.
Once can be very sympathetic to the experiences of Amazon drivers — and to be clear, the peeing-in-a-bottle story does appear to refer to a real incident — while still recognizing the enormous improvements in the working conditions of the average blue collar laborer.
It's sometimes a bit too easy to look at the past through sepia-colored lenses, and assume that the present must be worse. As an antidote to that tendency, it's worth reading this description of the actual reality of working in one of Andrew Carnegie's steel mills at the turn of the 20th century:
> Indeed, flames, noise, and danger ruled the Carnegie mills. "Protective gear" consisted only of two layers of wool long-johns; horrible injuries were common. Wives and children came to dread the sound of factory whistles that meant an accident had occurred.
> "They wipe a man out here every little while," a worker said in 1893. "Sometimes a chain breaks, and a ladle tips over, and the iron explodes.... Sometimes the slag falls on the workmen.... Of course, if everything is working all smooth and a man watches out, why, all right! But you take it after they've been on duty twelve hours without sleep, and running like hell, everybody tired and loggy, and it's a different story."
I've worked blue collar jobs and I've worked white collar jobs, and I'd take Bezos over Carnegie any day. And the very fact that sounds like such faint praise highlights how far we've come.
True. I certainly agree with your example of 1890. And for 1940 and maybe 1970. But it does seems at least conceivable that workers may have been more safe in say 1985 than today.
Also, aside from risk in objective terms, which was surely a consequence of technology and level of material wealth available to some degree -- how seriously did the society and culture generally take the issue?
Luckily, we don't have to guess based on what is conceivable. The US government keeps statistics on this.
Even since 1985, the rate of both workplace injuries [1] and fatalities [2] have fallen significantly. (the fatality graph doesn't go all the way back to 1985, but if you look at the source data they cite, the trend continues)
Americans don't work industrial jobs anymore. All the steel mill maimings are happening in China. What's the rate within a specific profession? Has it stayed constant for e.g. electrical line repair workers? (Not just trying to deflect here, sorry. I should have anticipated your point there. I was aware of the trend you speak of.)
To answer my own question: I pieced together a partial picture from scattered data for fatalities and serious injuries in electrical utility workers from the late 80s onward for Ireland, UK and USA. It seems to have got a bit better through the early 2000s and is maybe flat recently. In any case not worse than the 80s as I conjectured carelessly, though not sharply better either.
Maybe I’m showing my age too (51 is around the corner), but I actually agree with the OP that things are getting worse. It would be interesting to delve into why you and I are having different experiences as we age. Is it the industries? Or other aspects?
I think it’s a bit of a choice, but also a result of tech workers definitionally being higher leverage employees. I worked at a giant employer in SF with a tall tower, and I had plenty of periods where I had to grind 12+ hours a day to perform at a high level, because my managers knew I’d do it if they dangled things in front of me, and if I didn’t, it was going to be visible enough to be very problematic for my career there.
Then I had periods where I’d crushed the before time, and could get away with walking the street shooting photography for 4 hours, as long as I didn’t have meetings. My attainment wasn’t that different in either case, I just got put on easier stuff, because I’d made it.
The shitty part is how easily the wrong manager can throw you back into that first place and effectively squeeze you, if you’re not an unequivocal top performer. In the past, I don’t get the sense that companies were as ruthlessly efficient and eager to cut out people who were good enough, but not excellent. It seems like it was easier to hang around, whereas now you have to grind and be the best for a nontrivial period of time to earn the right to relax a bit.
I'm 58 and it definitely seems worse. It could be that we're experiencing some level of ageism so that comparing with when we were younger it feels worse. I find it really depends on the workplace & people, though. Mostly it seems like I've had good experiences working in smaller companies than large corporations over the last decade. The two large corporations I worked for in during that period were not great experiences mostly due to managers not being good at managing people - stuff like micromanaging their whole team because they were very insecure and didn't trust any of their direct reports. I don't recall running into this level of distrust 20+ years ago.
For the white collar, everything has gotten better.
For the blue and especially pink collar, worse.
I understand your perspective as it's one that I shared, nearly 20 years ago. I was a minimum wage laborer for a few years, and when getting my first desk job, I couldn't believe how easy it was, and yet how so many complained. And it's only gotten more surreal since. When your back hurts from shoveling all day, it's really hard to sympathize with someone in an office who complains they didn't get a perfect review. The one thing it did teach me is that people just like to grieve, whether it's from black lung or a small monitor.
It definitely gave me humility, and perspective. Service workers are treated as disposable trash, to this day, by both their employer and customers. I'm beyond excited they're quitting.
I used to do electrical work when I was younger for my dad's company. The innovations in the blue color field might seem trivial but they are absolutely real.
Just the transition to modern romex with push in receptacles saves tons of time and effort in the part of the job you spend 90% of the time doing.
It's still manual labor but it's much less strenuous than it used to be and it's also much more efficient.
Good rebuttal. I forget at times skilled trades are blue collar. Those people in this time are making a killing. My cousins are pipefitters, and make twice what I do as a 'Software Engineer', and I have no complaints, they deserve it.
I guess I was thinking of the lower tier blue collar laborers, where I had worked (landscaping, auto parts, etc) and especially 'pink collar', which I did not know existed until I googled it.
2. In a decent union, like local 6, it's not bad work. It's much better working conditions, and pays much more than the other trades.
3. If you are working non-union--it's a bitch. Terrible working conditions, low pay, supply your own tools, exploitive owners.
4. Yes--Romex, Scothlocks, and MC Cable, revolutionized the industry. It revolutionized it for the contractor.
5. Meaning they (the contractor) just except to you to work quicker.
6. In the old days, with knob/tube wiring, and soldering, the profession was more of an art. Today--it's about speed.
7. Today, a union electrician is expected to wire a new residential home in one day. (Believe me that's backbreaking work.)
8. While working as a electrician today it is much safer today, but the work is just as hard for non-union electricians. Non-union electricians work very hard. (In the past the death rate was so high for electricians, only Irish immigrants were doing the work.)
9. If any aimless youth reads this, and likes construction, get you C-10 license, or get into a union. Become a electrician, or elevator mechanic. Only use a non-union job as experience for your C-10 license.
(Come from a family of electricians, and 1 year working at Packbell park as an apprentice. I found another career, but do miss the regular income/benefits.)
As a kid, I was the IT for a mid-sized union shop, about 200 electricians in the field. Those electricians had it great. Certainly much better than me. Of course, I've met many tradespersons, union and non-union. The union workers generally have materially better lives.
My (idiot) son is a residential electrician with ambitions of growing his own business. I begged him to join the hall. Instead, he's worked for every kind bad employer. Been seriously injured multiple times. Wage theft. Etc.
At about 25, he wouldn't further debase himself by starting over at the hall. So he keeps being exploited.
Being non-union is probably fine if you have the ambition and chops to build up your own business.
They are worse for whoever next has to swap out the outlet. Electrically it's probably slightly higher resistance than the alternatives, but it doesn't seem to really matter.
I added additional power outlets in my house to locations above existing outlets, and I had to struggle to get the push in clamp to release the wire at least half the time. I guess the builder used the cheapest outlets, but the screw option is much easier for servicing.
Resistance in push-in clamp contacts is a little higher than soldered contacts, and about the same as screwed ones. Consistency for push-in contacts is far far better: Cold and sloppy soldering just doesn't happen, loose screws don't happen. Corrosion resistance is worse both for screwed and push-in contacts, but the push-in ones are self-healing: just wiggle it a little and it is fine again. Solder does also age and corrode, but very slowly. Both solder and screwed contacts are prone to loosen and break under vibration and movement (which shouldn't happen when wiring a house, but relevant e.g. for cars). You can do aerospace-grade soldering, which together with proper wiring design to reduce transferred force and vibration, will be sturdier than anything else, but also far far more difficult and expensive. Soldered contacts are also prone to degrade quickly when heated, e.g. when overtaxing a circuit or the (sloppily done) solder joint, which can happen at less than the circuit rating. Push-in clamps keep the contact pressure even with heat expansion, movement and deforming ageing wires.
So there are specifics one has to be aware of, but in most cases, you want push-in clamps. Soldering is the only alternative, but isn't really viable without the proper skills of the worker and inspection of all solder joints.
Set-screw Marr? How the hell are those even legal anywhere, they are unusable without getting electrocuted when connecting them. Screw-on insulator cap? You are giving me the shivers...
You are correct and it's weird that so many people are disagreeing. The backstab connectors are more prone to wire breakage than the traditional screw connector.
It is a relative thing though. We're talking about more likely to break after 10-15 years of the repetitive stress of plugging in stuff.
> the transition to modern romex with push in receptacles saves tons of time and effort in the part of the job you spend 90% of the time doing
If you will excuse me,
<cheap quip>
it is also case that the transition from toilet breaks to peeing in used soda bottles is adding crucial minutes of productivity to the Amazon warehouse worker's day.
</cheap quip>
I think the different experiences are two sides of the same coin: an increasing proportion of the working class are seeing a relentless pressure to optimise productivity in a way reminiscent of Taylor's Scientific Management. Where the setup needs the worker to be listened too, such as your light manufacturing example, this results in cumulative improvement. Otherwise, the tendency is to allow the workplace to become nakedly exploitative.
> The innovations in the blue color field might seem trivial but they are absolutely real.
Not an innovation in the field per-se but nevertheless an innovation that improves the daily routine of many people working in the field is the mobile phone and especially the very cheap data and voice subscriptions (compared to 10-15 years ago, say).
Just yesterday I had to call a locksmith at my apartment so that he would fix something at the bathroom door. During his entire intervention (45 minutes - one hour) he was also on his phone (via headphones) talking with one of his other coworkers and at some point with (what seemed to be) a close relative. That reminded me seeing the same scene with a public cleaning worker from our city talking with someone close on a phone (friend or relative) while raking the autumn leaves in front of my building.
Again, it's not something that improves their "productivity" or anything like that but imo it reduces some of the alienation of being cut off from your friends and close relatives for at least 8 or 9 hours a day because of work.
The new push in connections and joins are really amazing. I used some a few months ago for a small project. At first, I was skeptical of them, but after I used them, I saw how amazing they are. No more wire nuts.
Remote working is the peak of this. My company has pretty much resigned itself to the idea that they cannot create a better work environment than the one I create for myself. If I’m not happy I could easily be poached away by another other company anywhere on the planet, and the only switching cost on my end would be getting to know some new team members and logging into a different workspace.
It is not a good position to be in if you wanted to treat an employee like shit. There is far less leverage.
For some places it was... EDS (Ross Perots company) did it. I want to say IBM did it as well ?
Though - to give Perot his due, when his employees got trapped in Iran...EDS planned and executed a military style raid on a foreign country to get them back. You don't see that kind of loyalty from employers any more.
by the fact they make less than minimum wage in many cases, I think gig workers are struggling even more than corporate minimum wage workers to get back. not having a "corporate environment" isn't worth 60+ hours a week just to make rent and food
As a developer, who suffered from sudden back issues that meant i could not sit down for 1+yrs.... i came to the conclusion early in my career that my time was worth much more then the prospect of success or early retirement. I quit my job in my late 20s, sold everything, and went off to the Amazon to aim my dev skills at the study of the boto dolphins in an effort to live and work in different ways.
That journey i took 10yrs ago took me all over the world eventually, and reinforced my pre-trip skeptism of what success in life was. To me, climbing the corporate ladder simply meant trading my time for more money and more stress.
So while others looked at me and skoffed at the 80$k i spent travelling the world for 2 years in a search for meaning... I now look at a post-covid world and take solace that i did it. I did it, just before the world changed, forever. I saw the world, the coral reefs, the rivers, the rainforests, before climate change, people destroyed them. No matter how much money you eventually get, or how many peers you impress, you cannot get that experience that I had.
And thats really what you are doing by chasing the startup dream. Your trading your life for status and money amoung your peers.
I came to the realisation that what drives me in life not my peers. it was love.... as i travelled around the world and saw poor families with not much nestled into natural environments that provided for them i saw satisfaction. They had a balance. They were poor, but balanced. They took joy in the love that they could give eachother and sharing that time with eachother reinforced that.
So fast forward 10 yrs since that trip. What did i learn? Money cannot by love. No matter how popular you are with your peers, without love, you go home from that recognisition into an abyss of loneliness. You are rish, respected, but alone.
Eventually I came back to life and attempted one last startup venture before figuring that its time i start working Remotely and start living everyday the way i wanted. I love to code, and finding a company that is stimulating and open to this relationship means i will give them the best everyday, day or night.
I thank covid for giving others that shake they all needed. Remote working is much more accessible now. Covid hasnt changed my life at all. I literly have not felt a single day in lockdown, even while the majority of people around me snarl in fear (i also gave up TV, so havnt even seen a covid-news-cast yet). I sit here watching my peers panic buy, while i never go a day without something i desire. I gave away more toilet paper then i bought.
To all those who have those doubt. Dont ignore them. The risks are worth the rewards. You will be calmer inside.
> I did it, just before the world changed, forever. I saw the world, the coral reefs, the rivers, the rainforests, before climate change, people destroyed them.
This made me melancholic. I never thought the changes that we saw last two years would be so drastic. I hope we didn’t run out of time as a species yet.
That's the traditional experience vs. money trade-off. It seems people at a larger stage in life are happier about experiences they've had rather than money or status per se.
Though if you really want to travel or raise a happy family, you're also going to need some of the latter. And for most, that means being part of the rat race to some extent, once beyond your early twenties.
Moral entrepreneurs have flooded workplaces with memes that enable petty tyrants to bully people in a way that is difficult and unrewarding to fight back against.
>>>> Most people work but most dont necessarily have to, at least as much as we do.
I work as much as I do because I don't know what's going to happen next. Someone in my family could get sick. The economy could go into the crapper. I could live longer than normal (my parents are 90).
Probably the worst corporate BS I could imagine would be commuting an hour or more, and I'm lucky that my commute is less than 1/2 hour by bike.
The "society" created around the routines of most corporate jobs is artificial, inauthentic, and provides material comforts. Having death staring you down during a pandemic for this long is a good motivator for letting go of baggage, including said jobs, especially if material comforts were the main reason to stay in it.
Another problem is that the gap between the rank-and-file worker and the top tier is ballooning out of proportion. 50 years ago you would bust your ass at work and your CEO would be driving a fancy car with the profits you made him. Today you have a slightly nicer car and your CEO has a private island.
> work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs
> Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality, or as one says sometimes, our "personality package", for something. Now, this is not so true for the manual workers. The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile. But what you might call the "symbolpushers" , that is to say, all the people who deal with figures, with paper, with men, who manipulate - to use a better, or nicer, word - manipulate men and signs and words, all those today have not only to sell their service but in the bargain they're to sell their personality, more or less. There are exceptions.
For the reasons you enlist, I think we'll see a big shift towards working for DAOs or other forms of value creating decentralized and distributed organizations.
They allow more independence, you only work on stuff you like and the interests are more aligned.
> Most people work but most dont necessarily have to
I see this quite a bit on HN (the other day someone was saying to no fanfair that he doesn't work because he doesn't like the corporate setting) and other parts of the internet, enough so to assume it must be true, but this notion really confuses me, as it's certainly never been a choice for myself.
Genuinely interested, maybe I'm missing a trick in life, how would you pay for rent, food, electricity, ect... I do genuinely think when I read things like this or see things casually mentioned in the news that there's some alternative route in life nobodies ever told me about
Everyone has an opinion on that matter, but if you’re making software engineer money then this might be a viable option: mrmoneymustache.com
Maybe you’ve already heard of tha blog, maybe not. In a nutshell: rethink your life and your expenses so you’re able to save 50+% of your income. Put it into low cost ETFs (which particular one depends on what’s available where you live), and after a while (13 years at 50%, much less at more saving), you’ll have the option to not work anymore and still cover all your life expenses etc.
Not selling anything, not looking to start a debate, just mentioning it because parent might be interested or curious.
Huh, maybe that is it, at least here on HN. I'm perhaps a bit younger than a lot of the people on here (24), and maybe I dont earn as much, so the answer may well just be time, which is disappointingly not the bombshell I was hoping for, but does make a lot more sense.
Might be true for people posting here and getting paid 300-500k per year, but this is simply not possible for people working for lower salaries in non SF companies, especially for people in Europe.
If you are able to spend 300k a year, you will be working until end of your days anyways.
I can tell you I’m paid nowhere near these SV-Unicorn numbers and saving over 50% of our net income is really not that much effort. And we’re renting, we don’t own.
People have to pay for basic needs. But there is a wild difference from living in shared accommodation, consuming the non-branded products, biking, vacationing as a backpacker in hostels etc. to living in a private apartment, eating out, having a car, vacationing in hotels / resorts etc.
As a person who spend most of my life studying on just a little income my expenses are only slowly increasing. Much slower than my earnings.
My guess is if one got a permanent job early on it might be hard to imaging how to live frugally.
Another commenter pointed me to the obvious that it probably does come down to savings, which makes sense because I do already do those things. I do have a car, but thats from pre-WFH, so I could probably get rid of that now, and I don't go away for vacations at all, I just stay at home or at most go to a caravan site.
I think what people just learned over the last year is that half the population can stay home,
and a third can work less or just not work at all, and the world didn’t collapse. There was enough money to go around. In many cases people got paid more to sit home than to work. Some things were more difficult, but it was a good trade off for minimum wage workers or people doing mindless office work.
There's a big gap between young single people's perception of the options available, and the view that comes with age and a family of dependents. I don't think anyone with kids thinks that it would be ok to not have a job for a protracted period, but if I was single I'd be able to quit work in six months.
I am young, single, and don't have kids, or any dependants. By "quit work", do you mean (potentially) for good, or for 3-4 months? Because for me, even with a year of intensive saving, I don't see see how I could possibly live off that for anything more than another year.
More like "quit work" as in quit a regular '9-5' permanent employment. I've known (single, child-less) people who have managed to go a long time by repeatedly working intently a few month at whatever temporary job shows up (fishing industry, bar/restaurant work, construction, warehouse work etc.) and then taking several month off to do whatever.
It is very possible to have a room in an apartment and food and heat and a cell phone and used clothes and access to public busses for less than 14k/year in many towns and cities
There are plenty of people who feel like they have to live in a high cost of living city. And plenty of people who feel like they have to drive a new car and live in a 4 bedroom house and take their family to Disney World. But those are all choices people make in how they want to live.
14k/year is still quite a lot of money to just have laying around, assuming you wanted to retire for 20 years thats at least 336k, not even including all the "ad hoc" money you'd need to have.
Maybe most people do have 350k in savings though, but yeh, sadly I do not
>I bet most Uber Eats drivers make less than fast food employees, but I also bet they have less non work corporate BS to deal with, and outside whatever algorithmic unfairness can work as they want.
From my experience of seeing grumpy Deliveroo and Uber Eats drivers mouth off at poor fast food and restaurant employees when the food isn't ready yet, and the general way they drive on the streets, I don't agree with that sentiment at all.
Large corporation really didn't do anything lately to improve their image.
I opted for smaller monetary rewards for working in a smaller company with extensive freedom. Stress is mostly positive when projects get released. I have paid vacations and sick days, industry is secure that I can probably work until I get my pension if I wanted to. You also get much more invested in the company and other employees.
I still recommend doing a corp run for a year or two to get to know this world. It also help to negotiate your rates. But I don't see how you would not get a dislike about how things are done. It also seem to attract a certain kind of person.
I highly suggest you dig into Marx and economic leftist thought (Richard Wolff is a very clear modern source and a well respected Marxist economist) because this kind of exploitation has long been identified by those critical of capitalism as endemic to capitalism. Roughly, a key line of Marxist thought suggests that Capitalism is designed to alienate the worker so that they are more easily exploited by the capital owning class. People now want to live “outside society” because capitalist incentives necessarily eliminate the ability of people to even build a community or society in their own interest because nearly everything they must do to subsist robs them of the opportunity (long working hours, long commutes, a distinct lack of agency in life under exploitative management, and so on).
I could never do it justice here, but you might find it valuable knowing how and when people have very legitimately been making the same point (roughly) that you’re saying here for generations.
> Most people work but most dont necessarily have to, at least as much as we do. People enter the "rat race" because it gives them something, not just a source of money but other achievement and identity stuff.
What? In 2020, 50-78% of Americans earned just enough to pay their bills each month. Worldwide, a poll found that 85% of people are disengaged at work. I guarantee you that most people work -- even work long hours -- because they have no real choice.
I would add that it's misleading to generalize the experience of tech workers to workers at large.
We're in a weird and fortunate spot because we work as in a well capitalized industry as highly specialized skilled artisans. So often we get autonomy, leverage, and a good paycheck. This is not the experience for workers in general.
>I would add that it's misleading to generalize the experience of tech workers to workers at large
I would add that it's misleading to generalize the experience of american tech workers to tech workers at large. Anywhere else, you're most likely just as underpaid and overworked as the rest.
Being generous, OP might have been referring to plain survival.
You can buy actual homes for $10-20k in the US, youtube has told me, with enough land to grow enough food to sustain yourself. It's certainly not impossible to survive on a very small amount of money (until you die of a horribly expensive health problem).
That might not be the path most of us choose, but it's still there.
One of the reasons food is cheap in the west is the automation, but the machines used for that automation are big and expensive, and only make sense if you’re feeding a lot of people rather than your immediate family. That leaves you with inefficient farming, hard work even though the $€£ cost is low.
A cheap home and a part-time job to buy necessities, letting you take advantage of economies of scale and specialisation? That can work, but it’s rare to find a cheap home with access to the labour market — where the jobs exist, you compete against those willing to work longer hours as a customer in housing market, and where you rely on remote work you risk being outsourced to someone willing to do ten times the hours for a tenth the hourly rate in the labour market.
> In 2020, 50-78% of Americans earned just enough to pay their bills each month
It is questionable what the signal of that statement is. I know people earning top tier salaries who can "just pay their bills". Truth is that their bills cover their mortgages on which savings they plan to retire -- If one count in adding money to you savings account, the I reckon 100% person of all people earn just enough to cover their bills.
Isn't the number of people living paycheck to paycheck more a measure of how few people save money vs how many people work more than they need to? I imagine plenty of people fall into both categories.
I think you're partially on the right track but the replies disputing whether work is now easier or harder suggests worker dissatisfaction has changed for a different reason. I'd say that work is generally easier but people (anecdotally from people I talk to) are less interested.
I wonder if part of it is exposure to alternatives. Once upon a time, your awareness of an alternate life was a movie, or newspaper article, or a friend showing you their travel photos. Now, if you are ever on social media, you face a bombardment of peers or randoms having long lunches during work hours, travelling around, in the sun, at the beach, etc - or maybe it's just my feed. Hard to feel like you have your work mix right if your daily vibe doesn't compare to the aggregated freedom.
I used to work in US and Europe and in last decade work life balance is basically shot there.
As a result I took my savings and move back to India. Now I've a small farm here, since the market is soo inefficient in India specially for farm produce and labor abundant I am able to work only 1 hour a day and enjoy rest of my day on things I like.
In US and Europe proportion of smart people with access to resources is vastly more compared to India where either smart people lack resources or the ones with resources aren't smart enough.
> Your correspondent recently suffered the indignity of having to board a red-eye from JFK airport entirely sober because all the airport bars were still shut.
What a Karen.
TFA is the usual superficial Economist tripe - there's no analysis there.
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
In particular, please don't copy the most objectionable thing in an article and then paste it here to indignantly object to it. That's a trope of shallow discussion. We're hoping for something more interesting here.
The writer was asserting that employment in service industries hasn't returned to pre-Covid levels because people don't want to work, but immediately goes on to describe seeing several closed places of business in that sector. That seems schizophrenic (in the dictionary definition), and makes it seem like he has done no real research.
Casually boasting about air travel, one of the main carbon emission sources, during the pandemic and in the context of the global warming caused floods and wildfires in Europe, makes the writer seem entitled and tone-deaf. Complaining, even jokingly, about service not being normal in a pandemic just makes that worse.
Really? I thought that was one of the best parts of the article. Nothing wrong with slipping a joke in, it doesn't have to be all serious. That's one of the things I appreciate about the economist
Do we really want a bunch of armed people flying on planes? There seems to be enough assaults on flight crew as it stands today. Do we really want to add firearms and other weapons to the mix?
We were doing just fine keeping guns off of planes without the TSA. That's why the 9/11 hijackers had to use mace and small knives.
ETA: I base most of my thinking on this on Bruce Schneier's points, so I'm just going to link his blog here. https://www.schneier.com/tag/air-travel/page/8/ And a quote from an Atlantic interview: “Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.” This assumes, of course, that al-Qaeda will target airplanes for hijacking, or target aviation at all. “We defend against what the terrorists did last week,” Schneier said. He believes that the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11 levels. “Spend the rest of your money on intelligence, investigations, and emergency response.”
The TSA also has to enforce things like liquid bans, and making sure there are no explosive assembly components built into the heel of your shoe and yes those are still important.
A reinforced cockpit door is not going to help you when you sneak on individual components for plastic explosives and assemble them in the lavatory.
That wasn't in the USA and it was pre-9/11. And they were discovered by local police checking out a fire, not airport security, which strengthens the point about investing in intelligence instead.
Highly questionable if this security theatre is worth it. I can only be justified if you don't rationally quantify risk. There are a lot of emotion attached to security in aviation of course.
Yeah, 20 years ago he was saying "invest in hospital beds", that not only helps you be resilient against a ton of different potential terrorist threats, but also against natural disasters. Looks even more sensible today.
The funny thing is supposedly today, there are hospital beds, but insufficient healthcare workers due to insufficient pay relative to quality of life at work.
Billions of people have had to take off their shoes at every airport check in for nearly 2 decades now because one half-baked extremist unsuccessfully attempted to detonate a bomb in his shoe.
There's security and then there's paranoid irrationality, which is what we have at present.
But hey, now you can pay the government an extra tax ($80 to $100 every 5 years) to not have to do that or pay a private company (Clear) even more to be an even more privileged citizen who deserves more trust than the average citizen.
TSA aside you're right, compared to most of the developed world the US does have an awful lot more jobs of greeters, wait staff, doormen, security and other people standing around helping. Its marginally better service but feels like a waste of people.
How many people are not working because they suddenly no longer have a reliable place for child care? Lots of jurisdiction's protocols will shut down day cares or in-person schooling for a week or more after a single case. In that environment, who are you going to get to take care of your child that may have been exposed?
I disagree completely. If we were satisfied with a lower standard of living, one parent could stay home to take care of the kids. Keynes predicted 15 hour work weeks but he missed that we would increase our standard of living faster than the productivity gains.
> I disagree completely. If we were satisfied with a lower standard of living, one parent could stay home to take care of the kids. Keynes predicted 15 hour work weeks but he missed that we would increase our standard of living faster than the productivity gains.
Is that productivity really needed/used for standard of living gains? Or do you need two incomes now because of a combination of capital taking bigger cut and dual-incomes bidding up the price of things.
Also you have the phenomenon of companies trying to increase sales by reducing the service life of their products, which just increases churn without increasing living standards.
If Keynes "missed" anything, it might have been that labor compensation would cease to have anything to do with productivity. The capitalists are consuming more and more, so there is nothing left for ever-more-productive labor.
>The capitalists are consuming more and more, so there is nothing left for ever-more-productive labor.
That's a plausible explanation, but a bunch of charts with no analysis other than red arrows[1] pointing to the early 70s, makes for a terrible argument in support of it.
Some people see those charts and immediately recognize something they already knew. It's fine that you didn't. It's not as though there are that many links in this whole thread. I appreciate anyone with the stones to counter an argument by data with an argument by xkcd.
>Some people see those charts and immediately recognize something they already knew
In other words, you know it's not trying to prove something, but rather reaffirm what some people already believe? I'm not sure that's any better. If anything that's worse, because you're knowingly engaging in lowering the quality of conversation on this forum.
>It's not as though there are that many links in this whole thread.
But why add a random site that does nothing but contribute to the noise?
>I appreciate anyone with the stones to counter an argument by data with an argument by xkcd.
The onus is on the person making the claim to prove it, not on the respondent to disprove it. If all you're presenting is a bunch of charts with arrows on them, I don't see why I have to debunk each individual chart[1]. It suffices to show that the argumentation style is flawed.
I don't consider the St Louis Fed to be "a random site", but perhaps you have some sort of special term for why citing government economists is also out-of-bounds. It almost seems as if you prefer to police rhetoric rather than actually engage with the argument.
If schooling were about actual education and not signaling, there would be competitive pressure to improve product quality (like any consumer good: TVs, computers, microwaves, cars…).
There is no competitive pressure to improve educational outcomes because society doesn’t really care. It’s a signaling mechanism for the top quintile and a childcare holding pen for the rest.
Not sure why that matters. The point is that parents want their kids in school and the current pandemic conditions restricts that, so parents are forced to be at home with their kids instead of working at a job.
It turns out the question isn't "what provides the best education for kids (at home/in person)", it's "what provides the most convenience for parents".
You could have parental-supervised online learning be 5x as good as in-person, but society demands we send kids to school to get them out of the house so a parent can work. We pay lip service to the actual education of the child.
No real point except pulling the veil from our revealed preferences.
The bus driver is just a component of the system; the quality of transportation system itself should be getting better (cost per mile, electrification, GPS tracking, etc.). I can pull up my bus schedule and its current location in an instant. A decade ago I'd be waiting in the cold for a bus that may never come.
In theory, the quality of the education system itself should be improving (online classes & evaluation, recorded lectures, more materials, sharing of the best techniques, etc.), of which the teachers are a single input. But, we know how that's turned out. Education is a political football and society doesn't actually care about the outcome.
It is both childcare and education and that's not bad. Anybody thinking otherwise is straight up delusional and should talk to a couple of working parents with children aged ~6-16.
I find it strange that people are surprised that a significant component (but by no means all) of schooling is childcare. It is also education, socialization, and general development, but having a smaller number of adults providing childcare makes sense as a society, even before we think about childcare aptitude.
It can't be that many though. At a certain age kids don't need to really be cared for as long as someone is home with them. And they'd have online school to do while you work.
It's only specific age kids who need to be cared for. School was never childcare. Children past a certain age have always been capable of staying home.
> How many people are not working because they suddenly no longer have a reliable place for child care?
This was the first potential explanation TFA examined. It said that this effect was "negligible":
> It is commonly believed that school closures have made it impossible for parents, particularly mothers, to take a job. The evidence for this is mixed, though. Analysis by Jason Furman, Melissa Kearney and Wilson Powell III concludes that extra joblessness among mothers of young children accounts for a “negligible” share of America’s employment deficit. Despite talk of a “shecession” early in the pandemic, in most rich countries the worker deficit for men remains larger.
Pandemic restrictions are pretty much nonexistent in large swaths of the US that have similar problems.
There is certainly a worker deficit. Our society has moved up the stack and isn't bringing in enough cheap immigrant labor anymore to work the jobs even poor americans won't accept anymore.
Example, in North Dakota where you can get a union Costco job for 18$+/hr (or chick fila for 17/hr) there are plenty of places (including hospitals) offering 15$/hr and they can't find people to fill the slots. Your dog grooming is paying 11$/hr? That's just another business going bust.
Businesses who were on a shoestring fail and yuppies continue to move in. The regional+national inflation has simply left large chunks of business in the dust without very cheap (immigrant) labor. This causes the makeshift infrastructure to weaken and the communities start to come apart.
What does that even mean? How do you incentivize automation for things like surgical tool sterilization (the aforementioned 15$/hr) or pet grooming, for which there is no "automation". Especially when you're working with populations in the thousands or 10s of thousands (eg cities like Bismarck or Billings), who would invest in that? Amazon is dropping in distribution centers from time to time at 15$ an hour when a municipal area gets to be over 100k pop, but that's just one vendor and one vertical.
I was under the impression that Costco only had union employees in California and a couple east coast states. The vast, vast majority of Costco employees are not in a union.
And stats concerning women in the workforce definitely paint a different picture.
> There are be talent and location mismatches that make both of these true.
So employers need to pay more and offer remote work or pay relocation expenses.
There's also a dearth of $1000 new automobiles on the market but no one's suggesting forcing automakers to offer them. Why do we expect labour to bend to the will of companies? They need to offer competitive compensation.
Just raise wages. We seem to always get this "worker shortage" marketing campaign every few years from our fat cat leaders. There is no shortage. If I want a wagyu steak but only want to spend $5.00, does that mean there's a food shortage? Labor, goods and services are all subject to supply and demand. Let it work itself out. No special government subsides for people whining about shortages.
I want a trip on one of these orbital space ships. Is there a space ship shortage?
I'd propose a somewhat opposite explanation: worker shortage is an illusion created by a sort of accounting which decided to keep positions open and not fill them, even when qualified candidates come.
So, not only there is no space ship shortage :) there is actually much bigger worker shortage, as I keep a billion positions open (I want slaves, of all kinds, especially with Wall Street experience) and can't fill them (I don't bother to try).
You can tell your staff that you're trying to hire more people but it's hard, and if they can just put in the extra effort now it'll be easier in the future. Meanwhile, you get to save paying for an extra person and get more from your staff, so profits go up.
Employees have to temporarily take on extra work while managers promise that the open headcount for the senior dev who just left will be filled as quickly as possible. In fact, you should refer your friends! (who will all be promptly rejected)
Believe it or not, this has become a political issue where conservative media is trying to spin this as people being too lazy to work, or welfare being too good. This is being called "the war on work" by conservative media [0]. The goal is to get popular support to weaken an already laughable welfare situation in the US so that workers have no choice but to go to work at terrible wages/benefits/conditions. This is a shared goal of conservatives and business owners.
This also further divides people because of the consistent use of the "Welfare Queen" [1] stereotype by conservatives to vilify people on welfare.
Employers keep doors open for really stellar candidates - they keep interviewing - and if such a candidate comes, a position can be created, with overall goal of improving quality of employees. However the pool of extraordinary candidates is shallow, so the stable state is "positions are supposedly opened - interviewing happens - nobody get hired", with rare exceptions. This skews the statistics - everybody reports "hiring and can't find (exceptional) candidates", but workers in fact can't find a job for a long time.
It's not whining, it's a strategy, when interviewing costs relatively little. Even startups spend weeks of interviewing for a single candidate, because prevailing opinion is that it's more costly to hire a subpar employee than to do those interview rounds, even in a jurisdiction where laws allow firing with relative ease.
Raising wages doesn’t create more workers, though. It will just convince them to leave other jobs for the higher paid alternatives. This creates new job openings that still need to be backfilled.
I don’t think it’s obvious that large numbers of people are choosing to stay home and earn $0/hour instead of getting a job working $10/hour because they really wanted $15/hour. The worker shortage is a real phenomenon of more jobs existing than people in the workforce.
On the other hand, raising wages would produce inflationary pressure on everything from housing prices to food prices, which would force more people to get jobs just to survive. Not exactly what you meant, I know.
> Raising wages doesn’t create more workers, though.
Of course it does. My wife doesn't work because there's nothing that particularly motivates her to work rather than doing her hobbies. If you offered her more money, it might motivate her to re-enter the work force.
And if you can get 100k without a degree people who would be in college will be in the work force instead.
Also, there’s less demand to buy labor for $20/hr than to buy it for $10/hr. So, all else being equal, fewer companies will demand workers if they’re more expensive, which will also reduce the deficit.
If I follow you maximum demand to buy labor is at $0/hr.
But if don't pay labor, no one is going to buy your product at the end of the day. If you pay more for labour, that's more money to spend on product and services.
Always makes me wonder when people say that about jobs in service and food sector. Isn't those people exactly the ones that spend largest part of their income on those services? So if they earned more they would be first one to spend more... And labour isn't that high percentage of costs anyway...
Taking your scenario a bit further all, pay is limited by productivity. As wages rise, the least productive uses of time won't be able to keep up and will either fall out of the economy entirely, find a way to improve productivity, find a workforce that they did not consider previously or find consumers who are willing to pay more.
I don't really see how any of this is a bad thing. This has to happen from time to time for the economy to remain efficient. This is the phase in the cycle where the capital owners take their lumps and workers make big career making moves.
Are capital owners suffering currently or recently? I don’t see a ton of evidence for that and if I turn on CNBC or open up my brokerage and 401(k) statements, I see some evidence to the contrary.
I suspect they will be relatively soon, although I never said suffering, just a few lumps. For example I think Amazon is going to have some tough times in regards to workers over the next few years. Similarly, public sentiment is in a place where I can see legislation happening that is unfriendly to capitol. The current ruling party is talking about a new deal fairly often, depending if that pans out over the next few years and what specifically that entails that could hurt a bit.
If you zoom in a little closer you can see lots of little victories happening all the time in the boarder economy. Lots of workers moving into better positions for more pay and leaving behind employers who can only find more expensive and less able replacements, if any at all. My personal observation is workers in service industry jobs seem more casual than a year and a half ago, less hurried, perhaps less fearful of losing a job than can be replaced in a few hours.
If I create a job that pays $100,000 per hour for making me a coffee whenever I ask, I assure you that plenty of people will come off the sidelines and apply for that job.
> Raising wages doesn’t create more workers, though. It will just convince them to leave other jobs for the higher paid alternatives. This creates new job openings that still need to be backfilled.
Others have correctly pointed out that the supply curve is not flat. But even if it were, well, economics is about the allocation of scarce resources that have alternate uses (Thomas Sowell's definition). If people are scarce, and they go where they produce the most value, and places where they would produce less value don't get filled, is that a problem? Isn't that exactly what you would want to happen?
Fine, there is a shortage of cheap/affordable labor. These corps don't want wagyu...they want chicken fingers. They can't afford wagyu. Wagyu wouldn't even fit the occasion! They're not hosting a dinner party man; they're drunk in an Uber on the way home from the club.
It's possible that we're simply in a new world with less and more expensive stuff to buy than there was in 2019. It's still an interesting question how that came to be and whether it will last, which is what's actually explored in TFA. There is no call for subsidies.
I’ve been trying to coach my partner (who works in retail) that companies could hire more workers tomorrow if they wanted to participate competitively in the labor market. She’s constantly stressed at work to the point of it physically affecting her wellbeing because her store is under staffed. It’s not some act of god that the store is not staffed. People didn't just disappear. It’s on her company and its management to create a successful business. It’s not on her to go the extra mile and literally harm herself to keep the store running. It’s really hard to convince people stand up for themselves when they’re used to being exploited by their employer over and over (in different ways) their entire career.
Maybe I'm repeating what you've already said, but it is really harder to stand up for yourself when you're used to being exploited, and your employer is likely to take your very reasonable boundaries as contempt when they are accustomed to exploiting you.
We really need to empower all kinds of front-line workers to enforce reasonable boundaries with both customers and management.
Not OP but the fundamental problem is workers not having enough power to ensure good working conditions. There are lots of ways they can get more power - labor shortages, unions, workplace democracy, regulations (kinda) - but you gotta fix the problem, not the symptoms of it. If managers are scared of pushing their workers too hard because they could be voted out, managers will get a lot more reasonable.
Well, right now companies have to compete with government benefits in many states. Benefits that exceed the free market wage by a significant margin in most cases.
Why would companies raise wages now when they can wait a few months to see if the situation changes?
People seem upset by this, but if you have a free market economy, you should anticipate that actors will work in their own best interest.
Changing regulations around compensation will be much more effective versus hoping that a company will act on a specific moral principle.
Businesses have no right to exist. If you can't pay the prevailing wage, then you don't belong in business.
I know that sounds harsh but that's the reality that workers live with every day. Can't pay the prevailing rent? You have to sleep in the streets. Can't pay for medical insurance? You get to die from a treatable disease. Why should there be more consideration for businesses than there is for human beings?
> If you can't pay the prevailing wage, then you don't belong in business.
They may be able to pay an increased wage when the rest of the economy catches. So it may be optimal for the economy as a whole to support businesses temporarily.
That's fine. I'm not against temporary subsidies, especially during particularly weird times. But I am frustrated by how the same people who regularly preach about how we need to let the free market work are now mewling about the wage market being too hot.
Nobody is claiming that businesses have a right to exist. Workers need jobs so that they don't end on the street and die. The concern is viable job opportunities disappearing and not being replaced. Businesses closing is an important subject to monitor because nobody wants to live in a failed economy where most of the population is unemployed and starving.
>As some businesses go out of business due to wages, that will put downward pressure on wages and keep things affordable for the remaining businesses.
Not necessarily. 1) there can be regulatory floors on wages. Half the folks in this thread are calling for higher minimum wage. 2) if cost of living outpaces wages, there may not viable business model at all for low wage employers. 3) it may be the case that in some markets working at all lowers the effective income due to welfare cliffs.
And the other side is to raise supply by making immigration easier. Maybe the pandemic is a good excuse to not consider this right now (I don't think it is, but it's an argument I'm at least willing to listen to), but there are a lot of people willing to work that get turned away at the border.
It's not a worker deficit, it's just the market finally catching up with the huge discrepancy between knowledge worker productivity (in real physical terms) and traditional knowledge worker pay levels.
We've only had "knowledge workers" in the current high tech industrial sense for a couple of hundred years and our understanding of the value of one person's labour is still firmly based in the trades. It's still a relatively new idea that a single person working in the right way (eg. designing automated equipment) could produce hundreds or thousands of times as much as a person trying to directly produce the same thing. We've barely started to process the idea that a single person working in the right breakthrough technology could be almost infinitely productive.
It's definitely true that an individual can be many times more productive than another.
However, the end state of software/SaaS is likely low margins, as regulations will be put into place to foster competition.
SaaS has high margins due to the low marginal cost to produce additional units, which is close to free, in many cases. But it's also 0 marginal cost for any competitior.
So in theory, in a perfectly competitive market, margins should be low, as two companies can produce roughly similar software. The problem comes in when you consider network effect and other factors that lead to a sort of natural Monopoly for a software company.
Likely these factors will begin to get regulated over the coming years. For example, you could require that all SaaS companies provide an API that's sufficient to allow you to switch to a competitor at a click of a button.
Circling back to your comment. My point is that pay in software is unlikely to remain abnormally high in the decades to come. Eventually supply of labor will increase, and business margins will decrease... Which effectively caps how much you can pay employees.
Somewhat related; China has realized that fostering competition rather than allowing monopolies to form is likely to produce better long term outcomes for society... which is why they are enacting all of these new regulations. The logic makes sense, but it remains to be seen in the long run.
I believe the US will follow, but it's a story that will take decades to play out fully.
There is no such thing as a worker deficit in a market economy. "The Economist" knows this. We have to stop engaging with anyone who speaks this way as legitimate actors. They only deserve scorn and mockery for their brazen dishonesty.
To clarify, putting my own words to what I think you're implying:
The Economist is pushing the dishonest narrative that there's an employee shortage, when actually there's a glut of greedy "we don't want to pay higher wages" employers.
The Economist is, therefore, enabling these greedy employers.
It's like me complaining there is a shortage of new Porsches, when I'm only willing to pay $10K. Just can't find any, and I've called around every dealership. Must be a shortage.
Depending on independent actors in a free market system to act on specific moral principles rather than in their own best interest is not going to work in practice.
You'll get some that adhere to those principles, and others that don't.
If society deems minimum wage too low, government is the one responsible for regulating it to reflect those morals.
Rather than see the employers as greedy, just accept that they'll most likely do whatever they can within the confines of the law to help themselves, and then change the law to shape the incentive.
Anything else is just wishful thinking. Well intentioned, but not realistic to achieve the purported goal.
>The Economist is, therefore, enabling employers to do whatever they can within the confines of the law to help themselves.
Saying 'greedy' just saves 13 words. But I'm being flippant with what I consider to be an important topic. Let me be be positive, this:
Depending on independent actors in a free market system to act on specific moral principles rather than in their own best interest is not going to work in practice.
Feels like a variation of a "tragedy of the commons[0]" / "race to the bottom[1]" situation, which is where this:
government is the one responsible for regulating it
is exposed as the causal failure - in large part because, I think, the same people that influence the angle The Economist is taking are those who 'donate' to various members of government. The more I'm talking through this, the more I see the problem as voter apathy. If a member of government only gets feedback from industry lobbyists, that's all they'll be able to base their decisions on.
Write your local members! Use your voice! Vote! (I'm saying this to myself as much as anyone else). Only politics can solve politics.
>If society deems minimum wage too low, government is the one responsible for regulating it to reflect those morals.
The minimum wage is pushed up by large corporations to squeeze out small corporations.
If "society" deems minimum wage too low, they stop accepting jobs at that wage. That's what's happening right now in my area. There are no employers offering the legal minimum wage and even fast food places are offering hiring bonuses. The law is largely irrelevant and only affects a very narrow window of workers/jobs at the edge.
Well, certainly there can be structural shortages. Imagine all people under 60 disappeared/died (for whatever reason).
You'd still have many elderly consumers, but nobody to serve them.
Of course we can get into immigration and a long tangential discussion. My only point being, there can be structural shortages that wages aren't able to fix.
Another more realistic example would be a shortage of labor with a specific skillset. Wages can potentially fix this in the longer run by enticing people to pick up these skills (we see this in tech).
So this is 95% just employers being unwilling to raise wages which will fix most shortages pretty quickly. In the longer term there may indeed be worker shortages as more countries face a demographic shift towards older people. In pretty much every developed economy the % of the population that's retired grows every year. Japan is now over 28% 65+, the US is 16% and growing, even China is facing the same issue. Long-term it's a smaller portion of the population supporting the economy. I'm sure it will stop at some point, but it isn't for now.
Anywhere where the product can be imported from abroad. If you can buy product A from Mexico for 10 USD, but can't get workers to produce the same product for 10 USD in USA, you cannot realistically increase the price.
In that case the price could rise, but does not need to as the market is sufficiently supplied at a lower price point.
A shortage occurs when buyers want to pay more, and need to pay more for the market to clear, but cannot do so for some reason (the law, for example). A decent indicator of there being a shortage is if the recipient of a product or service is determined by a non-price based mechanism, such as a lottery or a needs-based determination, as the usual 'highest bidder wins' method is not possible.
Price gouging laws are a good example of a mechanism that can prevent price from rising. One some of us got to experience at the onset of the pandemic last year.
I was talking with the head of HR at a medium sized company. We were talking about worker shortages and she said they had raised their wages and still had vacancies. I offered to just raise them more and her response was you can only pay someone so much to manufacture a 100 dollar product. It kinda opened my eyes that there was a cap and that we will likely see prices of goods rise in response to this. Wage growth is well overdue but it will come with inflation.
Prices may possibly rise, very true. We as a society/economy have gotten hooked on cheap goods. Perhaps too cheap in some cases.
It's also possible that certain businesses and products we've grown accustomed to, at the prices we are used to, are simply not viable anymore as the market changes.
The market giveth and the market taketh away. A lot of business owners complaining about a "labor shortage" love being pro free market when it works in their favor, but whine when it turns around on them.
> A lot of business owners complaining about a "labor shortage" love being pro free market when it works in their favor, but whine when it turns around on them.
Nail on the head, right here. "Burger flippers" are entitled if they expect to live off their work, but when no "Burger flippers" will come work for them, oh woe is me.
They'll preach about survival of the fittest until they figure out they're not the fittest, and then suddenly its not such a good idea
Exactly. Another comment on this submission (on a completely different thread) put it very well- businesses have no intrinsic right to exist. If you or me decided we didn't want to pay for the rising cost of food, rent, etc., we could be out on the streets and it's their fault. If businesses decide they don't want to pay for the rising cost of labor, a bunch of armchair economists come out and defend them.
Why we feel the need to treat businesses better than we treat other people is beyond me.
Of course when you say this you get a bunch of people saying "But think of the small businesses", as if exploitation is okay as long as your a small business.
Employee's have no right to an employer: Absolutely fine, no issues there, the way things should be
Employers have no right to an employee: Blasphemy! What a cruel, terrible world we live in
I don't think it was speculators thinking the oil price was too high. It was that nobody wanted to take delivery on a contract expiring that day, partly because there wasn't any space at the Oklahoma storage facility to take delivery, which presents a massive storage problem. The price promptly returned to its previous level the next day, even within that day, I think. -$40/barrel was panic, not speculators pushing prices down.
(Not only does one not want to take delivery of a commodity unless you are actually using it, but I think crude oil gives off hydrogen sulfide, which is poisonous in small quantities, making storage even more problematic)
This was what happened, and why you heard people saying things like 'I've got some barrels in my garage we could use.'
I reiterate that not once ever have gas/oil speculators lowered prices because they went too high, but they damn sure froze prices when they thought they were dipping too low.
I seem to remember people saying back when it 'dipped too low' (speculators'/tycoons' words) that they most certainly would retard prices if they went too high. They pinky-double-scouts'-honor swore.
Never happened. Especially scummy because oil prices affect everything.
I believe it was late 90s, the last time gas dipped to $1/gal and below. It didnt last but a few days but to hear the oil companies cry it was the end of times and they were going bankrupt.
As an aside has anyone seen the Dubai videos of the children of these tycoons getting bored and racing/flipping/destroying $500k+ cars? If not search Saudi super car stunts/flips/races/wheelies/crashes/whatever.
Obviously oil prices are priced accurately and the companies/families that own them are making the slimmest of margins, we should cut them slack- oh wait, that's every business now.
Kind of makes me think back to the 70s/80s when consumer electronics were truly cost prohibitive to most people. Maybe that's kind of how it should be. Maybe a smartphone shouldn't be $500, it should be $3000 instead.
You shouldn't have that kind of conversation without speaking also about profits.
If there is real competitiveness, a company that suffers shortages of an input (workers in this case), would see an increase in price and a fall in profits. Did your friend mentioned profits in the conversation?
Because I'm seeing a lot of this discussions where not even profits is mentioned. Including the article we are discussing by the way, where the word 'profits' doesn't appear.
And this is why raising minimum wage can lead to opposite effect than expected. Person making that 100 dollar product may be already at the limit of profitability for that specific product for the company. Raising minimum wage can cause them to become unprofitable, which means that the worker is let go.
For those with low skills, this can mean unemployment, even permanent one.
I think that a lot of the "worker shortage" is in fact companies being unwilling to understand that they are being outcompeted in the market, someone is able to make that 100 dollar product less costly and thus can attract more workers, or alternatively workers/resources cost less abroad.
It's trailing off, but remember that employers are competing with government unemployment benefits.
There's something called the backward bending supply curve of labor. At some point, people work fewer hours because they make enough money that more money won't affect their quality of life. Various closures, and, interestingly, labor shortages, have given people fewer ways to spend their money, lowering the inflection point of the curve.
80% of those deaths are of people retirement age and older[1], only ~130,000 working age Americans have died of COVID. That's significant, but definitely doesn't explain the extent of worker shortages we're seeing. There are a lot of things going on, but some of them might be there are many people who are now simply willing and able to not work, because that's what they had to figure out during COVID lockdowns.
> So this is 95% just employers being unwilling to raise wages which will fix most shortages pretty quickly.
Don't be so quick to think this. Society can't just poof into existence more qualified skilled workers. It takes years to train nurses and a decade or more to do so with M.Ds/O.Ds.
Right now, traveling nurses are being offered pretty insane salaries, up to and including low five figures a week. It hasn't helped bring more people in, or fixed the burnout. People are just traveling to work for the highest bidder. I suspect most are planning to leave the game after they've saved up enough money.
Sure, these reports tend to lump nurses and fast food workers together, which is of course nonsensical. Indeed shortages of skilled workers in the US have to do with the unaffordability of higher education in the US.
That said, in theory the US could raise wages enough to attract skilled professionals in from other countries. Except that the US also has extremely restrictive immigration laws and a housing shortage making it extremely difficult to pay people enough to live where they're needed.
A 1 bedroom place where I live costs $1400-1600 (it’s an unusually expensive tourist town) and things are closing down once in a while because of worker shortages (Eg, lifeguard shortage was the most recent I saw). Where are these workers supposed to live? I know other places aren’t nearly this bad. I just can’t believe anyone is able to work in retail or food here
This is hitting the nail dead center: the mock surprise at worker shortages is missing the fact that every metric pointed to this happening pre-COVID as well - the US a whole was in a march towards pricing all it's workers out of their homes at their current wages. COVID has just accelerated the trend.
Ding ding ding, we have the answer. I was in Lake Tahoe recently and my relatives there were saying how I should move there because there’s so many well paying jobs available… but the cheapest rent was like 1600!! This used to be an issue only in tourist towns but now that houses are priced based on how much they can make on Airbnb, versus the traditional model of how much a worker in the area could afford over 30 years, we’re absolutely screwed. Legislation needs to start with vacation rentals.
Employment, and employees, are not fungible - why do people (and more importantly: the news-media and the people elected to direct the economy) continue to speak of it as though it is?
> Employment, and employees, are not fungible - why do people (and more importantly: the news-media and the people elected to direct the economy) continue to speak of it as though it is?
I've seen this mentioned a few times on HN. I find it a confusing concept.
My position is 100% fungible. I write code to solve problems. There are thousands of people that can write equivalent code to solve the same problems.
I'm legitimately interested: can you expand on how my position isn't fungible?
It's fungible only when the entire set of available workers shares your competence (i.e. your skill-set, relevant experience, and business domain knowledge) - or - can be quickly trained to acquire such competence.
...and I'll wager that the vast majority (90%-ish?) of the working-age and almost-working-age population in your country is both unqualified to write software professionally and is not interested in spending 2-4 years of their life to study CS or SE to a level sufficient to do the work you currently do. Of the other 10% at least 9.95% of them won't have your business domain knowledge needed to do your job such that you make the right decisions early-on or slow down others by bringing them in for help, and so on.
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What I was complaining about was when it's reported in the news, or ever really said by anyone, that "opening this new coal-mine in Greenhippieville, CA will create 5,000 jobs!" or that "the economy added 10,000 jobs this month" - because the "jobs" those numbers refer to could be anything without further qualification, and doing that will make the conversation too technical for a general audience.
> ...and I'll wager that the vast majority (90%-ish?) of the working-age and almost-working-age population in your country is both unqualified to write software professionally and is not interested in spending 2-4 years of their life to study CS or SE
You left out the most salient point here, most people are entirely unable to write software even if their life depended on it. Just like I doubt I'd be able to write a symphony in 4 years even with a ticking time bomb strapped to my skull.
Eh, maybe at a senior dev 10x level. I'd wager that a large segment of the population is totally capable of writing relatively non complex code, given the training/resources that many software devs have (university, internships, online bootcamps, time for side projects). Just like I bet you could write a symphony in 4 years- It probably wouldn't be Mozart, but good enough to meet whatever time bomb requirements.
I have never seen any non-complicated code in business. There are droves of people working overtime to complicate nearly every corner of software and systems to unmaintainable levels. The developers, the good ones, simply try to fulfill requirements and mitigate the mess the best they can in the time allowed while learning enough new material each day to scare anyone.
A developers' core skill is not getting overwhelmed after being blindsided by new shit from every angle on a constant basis.
We have 30% of out team just dealing with auto-reported vulnerabilities in our code base. No choice. Getting an "exception" takes an architect about a week for a vuln that has no material impact and which can't be mitigated with a simple library update. Tip of the ice berg.
This is at an excellent tech focused company (relatively great place to work).
I agree with all of your facts about why engineers aren't fungible. However most jobs I've had management behaves as though they are fungible. For example I've seen companies fail to give raises needed to retain top talent and lose millions of dollars but they don't seem to be able to acknowledge that. They just act as though the replacement is just as good as the last one.
> My position is 100% fungible. I write code to solve problems. There are thousands of people that can write equivalent code to solve the same problems.
Gold is fungible. You can mine gold anywhere in the world and it's worth the same.
The level of skill to be able to code effectively is not something a large proportion of the population has. People have scoffed at the idea that programming requires a high IQ (let's call it what it is), calling it elitist or something, but you don't expect any random joe to be able to be a professional illustrator, musician, juggler, diver, climber, writer or mathematician.
The real problem, has Jordan Peterson points out, is what will society do with people on the low end of the IQ curve, as more and more skills are required and unskilled labor is being eliminated by technology?
This is definitely evident in the UK: job shortages in parts of the country with low housing costs worker shortages in parts of th country with high housing costs.
roommates are a critical social developmental step in your life.
They teach you how to negotiate boundaries without a direct authority figure.
They teach you how to live in a common space with somebody else.
roommates teach you that you must be responsible for your actions which affect the other people who live with you.
roommates teach you the importance of financial responsibility because when the rent is due you both need to pay up.
You may be lazy You may not want to do the dishes, but you know if you take that messy ass plate and you just throw it in the sink it will become a mountain of dirty ass shit and you owe it to somebody else to do your part.
If both of you hold up your end of the bargain and perform 3 seconds of work to place that dish in the dishwasher it avoids this tragedy of the commons.
roommates teach you that self-discipline is critical for a tolerable society.
? In a comparison between having a roommate and living alone, i think living alone is more responsibility. There's nobody to call you on your BS when you live alone, just yourself.
E.g. Forget to pay your share of the rent when you live with a roommate? Room-mate yells at you. When you live alone you get an eviction notice.
Self-discipline is about the self after all. If you need another person there to be disciplined, then you are clearly not self-disciplined.
(That said, nothing wrong with roommates, it often makes financial sense and some people like having them, i just dont see the connection to responsibility)
Reminds me of Wendy's in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii years ago. They were so desperate for workers they put application forms on the tray when you bought food. Unsurprisingly, they closed down not long after.
Wage should be calibrated according to local cost of living. If average rent is $1400, wages after taxes should be $4200 - $5600 a month (3x / 4x rent) minimum. A $15 / hour minimum wage at a reasonable 40 hours / week only gets you $2400 a month, not even considering taxes.
And keep in mind, if you get paid minimum wage, your employer is telling you they'd pay you less if they could.
> A 1 bedroom place where I live costs $1400-1600 (it’s an unusually expensive tourist town) and things are closing down once in a while because of worker shortages (Eg, lifeguard shortage was the most recent I saw). Where are these workers supposed to live? I know other places aren’t nearly this bad. I just can’t believe anyone is able to work in retail or food here
This is the crux, because what's happening is that housing is highly inflationary (especially in desirable locations) and wages are failing to match inflation, so entry level workers are being pushed further out to the boonies. Why would they commute all the way into the city centers if they don't actually pay better?
An interesting side effect of all the rampant real estate speculation and bidding wars is that cities are becoming dramatically more expensive to live in than the exurbs. I feel like eventually this will result in a much higher cost of living across the board as employers need to account for this difference in their pay scales. The entry level / service industry jobs in these places with insane housing prices will need to pay much better to attract workers, thus making these already expensive-to-live places even more expensive.
Perhaps it will eventually create some kind of equilibrium where new towns can provide some of the same quality of life benefits at a fraction of the cost since their real estate isn't so astronomical.
Related Q: The coverage I've seen talks about the worker shortage mostly in the minimum wage / lower income jobs. How is the tech sector doing? Are companies perceiving a shortage in tech workers due to changing attitudes around remote work and moving out to suburban or rural areas?
There's a hiring spree in Indian tech sector as of now, but that is mostly about folks changing companies at a rapid pace more than anything else. It didn't help that a lot of companies did not hire last year and all the open job positions had to be filled in this year. Companies being what they are, only wanted people with experience, bumping up the pay scale significantly.
Subtler is true...constant changes to the employee handbook...leaders being told in conference that their behavior outside reflects on the company, and to actively report those employees who are seen acting irresponsibly.
The social media stigma is also well known and reviled.
I know of one very real case pretty close to home where a group of “enterprising” fellas are fraudulently using the no questions asked forgivable payroll loans to line their pockets. They literally don’t need to work when we’re just handing out relief money and looking the other way. Would they be in trouble if they ever got audited? Likely. Will they ever get audited? Doubtful. One of the guys works with a friend who is still hard at work because he’s honest. It’s pretty discouraging.
The demand-side of the labor market simply isn't willing to pay what the supply-side expects, and is childishly throwing a tantrum that for once they have to compromise to market forces.
The so called "worker deficit" only exists below ~15-20/h. Above that there's no issue whatsoever.
There was never a worker shortage. What there has been is a re-evaluation by workers of the value of their own work.
Even without Covid this would have happened as low-income workers in many areas were either rapidly approaching being unequivocally priced out of living anywhere remotely near their work, or already were.
Covid just forced the issue sooner and faster, rather than letting it fester.
Why would anyone continue working for subsistence wages that can't even pay rent where they live and work? Their only sensible options are demanding more pay or leaving.
In major cities, with current rents, it simply isn't feasible to pay janitors, garbage collectors, fast-food workers, restaurant employees, etc as little as they've been paid, for the very simple reason that they can't afford to live there on those wages.
Unless we're willing to give up sanitation, garbage collection, fast food, and cheap restaurants in those cities, there is no reasonable solution except increasing wages. (There are of course unreasonable solutions such as exploiting immigrants, wage theft, and prison labor).
> What there has been is a re-evaluation by workers of the value of their own work.
I think a component of this is hazard pay. The pandemic has made a lot of these low pay jobs more dangerous. If everything else is the same, but the job is now more dangerous, fewer people will take the employment.
i heard (from a recruiter) many companies put on hiring freeze during covid... now that it looks like we are coming out of it, backlogged hiring is now being worked on...
1) People getting government assistance so they are able to survive without their current employer enabling them to quit
2) People re evaluating the risk reward ratio of their jobs, perhaps due to COVID bringing risks into view that previously were not focused on, and also comparing themselves to all the people they see working remotely getting paid more for not taking risks
3) People have time to research other work options since they were able to quit (or lost their job)
4) Demographic changes becoming more apparent as fewer children mean more and more of the working population ages out every year, and if not replaced by immigrants, then there are objectively fewer people competing to sell their labor
> Compare America and the EU. In the spring of 2020 aggregate working hours in both economies tanked. America then passed gargantuan stimulus packages, while European governments chose more modest measures. The recovery in working hours since then has been only marginally better in America—not much extra labour for a lot of extra cash.
Does this take the difference in automatic stabilizers into account? There was probably quite a lot of extra cash injected from the stronger social net in the EU.
Eg https://www.nber.org/papers/w16275 says "In the case of an unemployment shock 47 percent of the shock are absorbed in the EU, compared to 34 per cent in the US."
If we have dealt with all but the highest levels in the hierarchy of needs (according to Maslow) we turn to the top, self-actualisation. No wonder people in the west start questioning their jobs and careers.
With all the valid arguments about pay here, subject seems a bit stretched: I'd expect more than 3% lower employment, given the traveling restrictions alone. Not taking into account business closures, shift to online work, overall health impact of the pandemic etc.
The Pandemic seems to be an acceleration of the latter trend, and perhaps a partial reversal of the former, with more women deciding to exit the workforce either temporarily or permanently.
No. It's the result of massive inflation but the information exchange is still ongoing, at some point the market will correct and things will get very ugly.
The economy has been forcefully closed. We're in our second year (the longest "14 days to flatten the curve" ever) of people being locked down in their homes.
Two natural assumptions are that there is less demand for economic activity and that people are depressed / have less mental bandwidth for work.
Without being able to do most of the fun stuff in life thanks to our authoritarian governments, I burnt out at my job, quit and dedicated solely to running my side business.
I make way less money than before but it's not something I could mentally handle anymore.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] thread>In economics, inflation (or less frequently, price inflation) is a general rise in the price level of an economy over a period of time. When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation reflects a reduction in the purchasing power per unit of money – a loss of real value in the medium of exchange and unit of account within the economy.
Beyond everything else, this is just mathematically absurd.
There isn't anyone poor getting rich off unemployment. It's not the reason for the housing boom.
Sure - that is not the reason house prices in Marin are up 30%.
That's probably got more to do with central banks pushing up equities >30%. And probably because when you cut mortgage interest rates by 1 percentage point (which they did), you can afford ~15% more house.
In real terms - monthly payments for new housing purchases are down.
This is even more true for Detroit.
But the reality is no one is buying the discount properties that need major work. They're in run down neighborhoods with vacancies everywhere and sit on the market for months. They're almost unsellable - many are held onto with the hope that a neighborhood will get gentrified. Cities like Detroit and Cleveland see Pittsburgh's resurgence and think that will happen there. But for every expensive Pittsburgh neighborhood there's a Clairton and McKeesport.
Pretty discouraging to me, I feel like a sap that I kept working. Why do they get twice as much assistance when my wife doesn’t work because we decided to have her be a stay at home mom?
The obvious answer to your last question is not that your sister and BIL should not get assistance, but that your wife should also get more assistance. We don't do enough to support people across the country. 2020 showed some rare aid to people in a reasonable fashion (at least for a couple of months). We can do more of that.
We have fiat currency after all, let's take advantage of it!
Eventually everyone will make six figures and a loaf of bread will be $16 but housing will be rationally priced again with starter homes at $500k.
Similarly, we could speak about it for another decade, or we could build now and solve part of the problem in five years.
This also doesn't exclude other fixes that can happen orthogonally.
It does not have to take nine months (the national average) to build a house or a hundred houses. Housing can be and in times of necessity has been built rapidly and well. My favorite example is Hilton Village in Newport News, VA, built to house workers at Newport News Shipyard at the tail end of and after World War I. Five hundred units were constructed within two years, and they were built cheaply yet with a randomization to the sequence of models and detailing that kept the houses from feeling like a cookie-cutter development, avoiding pitfalls into which many suburbs today fall. A hundred years later the homes remain occupied and in fact prized today for their charm.
The barriers to affordable, desirable, swiftly built housing are artificial.
The city of Los Angeles presumably has access to average material costs and average labor costs, but the simple apartment complex they developed to house the homeless still ended up at $746,000 a unit https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/las-homeless-ho...
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne...
They don’t rent them, they don’t lower the target price.
They’ll wait for months or years for the sale to come in order to maximize their returns, and they have enough liquidity to be able to wait.
There is no subsidy on residential mortgages in the UK but still the same problems with house prices.
The real rate is of course the inflation adjusted rate, and Fed policy has been one of the prime drivers of higher inflation.
If they weren't printing 120B a month, or monetizing government spending, real rates would go up. Treasury yields are artificially suppressed by their bond buying.
Beyond asset purchases, simply raising short term rates would immediately dampen inflation, though has economic consequences as well (slow business activity).
Unfortunately the Fed seems more interested in supporting markets than doing what's right for the longer term health of the economy. Wealth inequality has been primarily perpetuated through monetary policy... Though fiscal plays a role too, of course.
One can't simply raise interest rates on a whim.
How does this decrease my rent? I do not want to own property because I do not want my entire wealth invested in a single asset. For me, renting is ideal and then my money goes in to a wide array of assets which provides a better safety net than expecting that house prices will always stay the same or go up in the future.
Renting also affords me the ability to move whenever I feel like upgrading or downgrading without being stuck trying to sell the previous property and paying insane taxes each time.
That's the idea: with cheaper real estate you won't have to put your entire wealth into it, trading it would also be easier, and so ownership would be more attractive option.
Currently I would comfortably put $20,000 in to housing as an asset. I can not see any way possible that banning rentals would allow me to buy a $500k construction cost apartment for $20k.
So this change forces me to invest in a market I do not want to invest in to. Buying one of these apartments is an incredible risk as it will likely devalue over time and be difficult to sell on when I want to move. So every time I move under this system I am risking massive losses Vs just having a weekly price and no commitment or risk.
It doesn't sound like your landlord is doing you any favors.
0. https://moneysmart.gov.au/home-loans/mortgage-calculator
To buy a property means paying tens of thousands in taxes each time you buy. If I stay here for 2 years and sell I would pay more in just taxes than the entire rent would have been and I am on the hook for any issues with the building or changes in value.
And I am perfectly happy to pay a known weekly amount which is well within my budget and put my savings in to other investments which don't tie me down to living in a particular place, do not require taking out multi decade loans and are easy to sell back for cash later.
Discourage owning empty homes with taxation.
Make evictions more difficult, even for squatting.
Require mixed use and prohibit office-only / mall-only areas and McMansions.
Rezone for more density.
Allow building with less red tape.
Government incentives to build.
It can be very easy if there's the political will. Look at what China did when they built all those empty cities... which are now pretty much filled.
If we built 30 million new housing units in the next few years, I guarantee you the cost of housing would decline significantly. If it's profitable to build, builders will do it.
Unfortunately the US government has been more keen on supporting housing prices rather than lowering them.
Gee, I wonder what the problem could be?
https://youtu.be/NBHHFnUqo5o?t=119
(You can wind back to the start to see the underlying cause of unemployment as well)
I think a lot of those incentives are changing. My take on work is that it's getting more exploitive, more administrative, less fun and less satisfying. Between politics and policies and management, work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs. It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before. And it's my theory anyway that a lot of people have had enough.
A simpler way to say it is that more people would rather exist outside society, in a sense, and do their own thing, than put up with all the BS that comes with working for someone else. Even if the pay is worse. I bet most Uber Eats drivers make less than fast food employees, but I also bet they have less non work corporate BS to deal with, and outside whatever algorithmic unfairness can work as they want. In corporate jobs, the situation is magnified because the requirements of conformity are much greater, but so generally are the options.
I think the industrial world would love to disagree. Working at a factory my grandma would have carefully regulated break times, food times, etc. All controlled by a central clock for everyone on shift.
It makes sense when you consider factory line workers as part of the machine, but it's also kinda bullshit from a human perspective.
And that was after the big wins of the labor movement in the early 1900's. Imagine how bad it was in the late 1800's.
The new innovation our generation introduced is that because everyone is supposed to be following their dream and passion, you not only have to be a good worker, you also have to love it. If you don't, you are expected to perform the part of someone who does.
Charlie Chaplin satirized this in his 1936 film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)
You also have less incentive to be in the race if you do not have kids/spouse, which fewer people have.
Sure we have, serfdom. Serfs were not only expected to provide labour to their “employers”, but to fight for them, believe what they believe, and pledge their fealty.
Like serfs, and unlike the period from the industrial revolution to the postwar years, it’s becoming less common for people to change careers, an occupation being more than a job and becoming an identity. Sure we might change employers frequently, but it is not often (and is in fact a spectacle) when someone makes a drastic change of occupation.
Maybe it’s the cultural distance between the 90s and today. Or maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood for it.
I do think it covered some interesting ground and gave me a better understanding of the 90s in tech.
Occupation being an identity is a very long tradition though (going all the way to surnames). If anything, social media allowed ordinary people to express themselves outside of - and in disconnection from - their professional environment. Maybe this is part of why people are disassociating from their employers to some extent.
I think it’s as natural as there being leaders of packs. Some people have specific qualities making them better than another person in a specific endeavor. That other person might be better in another area. Unless a hermit, it makes sense there was specialization and we don’t do much pursue jacks-of-all-trades.
>"social media allowed ordinary people to express themselves outside of..."
In a limited fashion, yes, but speak of something your employer disagrees with and one may regret that take as unrelated to doing your job it may be.
That was never expected. It was never going to be expected. Fighting was much too prestigious for serfs to be doing it.
> believe what they believe
This changed over time. Mostly serfs were too unimportant for their non-Christian beliefs to matter. But it was always a formal expectation, and as the centuries went by it did develop into an actual expectation.
> and pledge their fealty.
Indeed. This is the difference between a W2 worker and a contractor; it escapes me why so much public rhetoric focuses on W2 status as if getting it were a victory for the employee.
wealth, or just money?
You need to spend your time doing something. If you aren't spending a good chunk of it making money, you may be spending too much of it blowing through money out of boredom.
I hypothesize that this is a significant part of why 2/3 of lottery winners are bankrupt within 5 years: They quit their job and start spending like there's no tomorrow. And then, oops, the money shockingly doesn't go very far when all you do every minute of every day is spend money like a drunken sailor.
In reality, they trade poor people problems for rich people problems and don't have rich people coping skills. They run out of money before developing them or they resist developing them because they are hesitant to be that cynical and jaded and they run out of money trying to prove to themselves that life does not boil down to "I've got dozens of friends and the fun never ends, that is as long as I'm buying."
Exactly. It might be hard to find peace and a sense of meaning in life without having some sort of responsibility, even if one thinks ultimate freedom is the lack of responsibility.
In some ways, I imagine being rich (without that being the almost coincidental side effect of a strong passion) and especially winning the lottery is for many going to be like throwing money into a bottomless pit.
Though that doesn't necessarily mean I would mind giving it a try...
Multiple comments have pointed out how this is wrong, but I have one more to add to the list.
Look up Henry Ford's Sociological Department. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class, but in order to qualify for his $5 per day wage you had to subject yourself to random inspections by the company's Sociological Department. This meant your employer would routinely check up on all aspects of your personal life. Your pay was docked if you weren't married, your home was too dirty, you didn't save enough of your wages, you didn't speak English well enough, your kids weren't regularly attending school, and if you got drunk after work. Nothing employers do today comes close to that.
I'm not really sure what you are implying here. Can you give some examples of this power for power's sake behavior? Everything that I can think of has a plausible even if misguided motive.
I’d argue we lean too heavily in the direction of thinking everyone should figure life out by themselves with no external pressure. This hurts young people, who lack experience and the benefit of hindsight, and less intellectually gifted people, who may lack judgment and impulse control.
People these days indeed actively give destructive advice. Thinking of abandoning your stable long term relationship? “Follow your heart!”
If you want to teach these lessons, teach them through the education system.
They say this about a lot of things, but it’s hard to imagine a worse “target metric” than marriage.
I’m not suggesting that corporate enforcement of behavior is the best way to go. But we should obviously do it for things that are proven to work before we do it for things that are untested.
You could use the same words to state that hetero marriage is "proven", when realistically, people didn't have the choice.
Today's employers do similar things in subtler ways. After all, it's been 100+ years, things have changed. Lots of things have changed including the average quality of life, and the Sociological Department has kept up and changed with the times too.
You pointed some of this out yourself. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class. I bet upwards of 90% of corporate workers today would agree with a statement that Ford was such a champion. This convincing by way of constant Ford-praising literate is a first step in itself.
Sociological Departmentalism now manifests itself in subtler ways, like superiors throwing out casual questions about your personal lives, "team dinners" where people bring their spouses, and the ever so lightly dropped "see you early in the office tomorrow!" at the end (never "you must be tired – don't come to the office tomorrow, take some time off!").
I would invite you to consider the possibility that the intents of such practices have not changed since Ford's time, the methods have.
To take your examples concretely – sure, you won't see your pay docked, but you may find that the teammate who does bring their spouse along and participates in the bullshit rituals gets consistent pay rises that you don't.
Or at least, this used to happen routinely prior to the pandemic making it impractical to conduct such affairs unnecessarily blending work and life. Yet another reason why a lot of management is itching to "get back to the office".
Caveat: You have to be in a large company with a lot of managers.
No one will bat an eye at that answer. There are some managers / employees / peers where I know their personal life well and there are some I don't know at all. It has never been relevant.
Saying "It's none of your business and you can't force me to answer" send a very different message than "It's going alright. Did you watch the game last night? Pretty cool, huh?"
I am curious what the basis of your world view is. I worked as a manager in some pretty big companies and this doesn't resonate with how I or anyone I knew acted, nor does it make sense to structure things this way from an incentive point of view.
I would say there's an angle there where people that like their work and co-workers more are generally more productive than those who punch the clock. So I could see that there could be some (mild) correlation - not causation - between better performance/higher team cohesion and interest in work social events, it would be silly to pay people based on the later because we can just pay them on the former.
Things aren't universally better and they aren't getting better quick enough for most of our liking, but let's not ignore that improvements have been made.
Employers can demand you give them urine, blood or hair samples to prove that you haven't smoked a joint sometime within the last 30 days. They can give you psychological assessments, and personal value assessments, and deny you employment based on the results. Sometimes they assess the level of your conformity, by assessing how well you'll fit into their culture.
They can deny employment based on your credit score, or via private background checking companies that don't have to give them accurate information about you. They can use your biometrics to track you, and they can hand those biometrics to private companies like Clearview AI[1] to track you outside of work. While you're at work, they can point several cameras at you, recording everything you do and say from multiple angles, and storing it indefinitely. Some companies will spy on you with monitoring apps on your phones and computers, a risk that goes up exponentially if you need certain apps to do your job, or if you're using company equipment. If they don't like what you're doing, they'll fire you.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681207
And as I said further down this thread:
Things aren't universally better and they aren't getting better quick enough for most of our liking, but let's not ignore that improvements have been made.
Especially back then, but even now, it is thought that married men are, on average, are more likely to be the settled type. Dependable and boring. It was not a belief idiosyncratic to Ford. I think the idea is the man has children and a wife to feed to keep him in place and coming in to work, and also to keep him so busy and tired he stays out of trouble.
Whether this weird psychological theorizing is true of course, I don't know. (Married men do die in car crashes less, today.) See all that psychometry stuff some employers do. Seems no more reliable.
A bit cynical, but this is in my opinion a large part of the reason why politics is so utterly dysfunctional these days: when large parts of the population don't have the time to participate in democracy because they have to work two or more jobs to make rent, there are a couple effects from that:
1) the weight of those rich enough to go voting matters more. Basically, vote day not being a holiday in the US gives the votes of rich people and old retirees vastly more weight than they should have in a world where everyone had equal possibility to go and vote.
2) the opinion of those who have enough time and resources (paywalls...) to access decent journalism matters more, because under-informed people voting "by outrage" got manipulated in their decisionmaking process.
3) People who have to worry about getting fired for getting sick definitely won't unionize or go on strike.
Given, you need to have leverage on the working market of course. But if you have, not using it would not be to your benefit.
A society where laws are set in stone and unchanging is a society doomed to stagnation and decline.
And now we have ideological inspections.
My take is that a highly productive globalized industrial society necessitates high abstraction of work and supply chains.
Buying a chair on an e-commerce site has many layers, each with its own sublayers (shipping <- fulfillment <- e-commerce site <- payments <- warehousing <- distribution <- manufacturing <- supply chain <- design <- product research <- market research — I'm skipping a bunch). Each layer and sublayer has its own bureaucracy to keep things running and to interface with other layers.
A pair of pants will be touched by fashion consumer researchers, fashion designers, textile designers, product managers, supply chain managers, marketing managers, analysts, social media managers, advertisers, merchandisers, software engineers, accountants, data scientists (clothing companies are turning to ML to assess fashion trends and demand), and many, many more. All to make it possible for you discover and buy a cheap pair of pants and have it delivered in 2 days.
Because of its efficiencies, the high abstraction economy outcompeted and replaced the old low abstraction economy. The driving force is the fact that it's easy for people to indirectly 'vote' for a high abstraction economy by overwhelmingly preferring to buy cheaper and more stuff; but it's very difficult for people to 'vote' for a low abstraction economy, even if people will occasionally buy something handmade.
I think that this force will endlessly drive the economy to become ever more abstract. Consumers want cheaper, better stuff. The economy will become more abstract, evolving ever narrower niche roles in order to serve consumer wants.
People will find themselves in those ever narrowing roles in order to afford the good life. And there is no low abstraction economy to flee to for the simple life because it has been outcompeted and replaced.
We could have a way out of this if we restructured our economy so that decision making power didn't solely rest with owners of capital, and taxed companies ina more strongly progessive manner to prevent winner-takes-all situations. That would enable companies to make decisions that were not solely for financial reasons and allow for more diversity in business models and practices.
It's not some abstract evil ideal that drives the market. It's people doing purchases.
Now, good markets need good (perfect to be precise) information. If people knew this is where we would end up (say most production moved to Asia), would they have made different choices (say to preserve manufacturing in US EU with better worker conditions)?
I would argue our economic system is just fine. But we fail in political, educational and ethical issues. Especially ethical, people know about horrible conditions in sweatshops, still there are massive queues to shop at low cost brands. I feel clothing as the most egregious, because there are decent alternative choices.
Right, but the fact that our economic outcomes are decided by consumers is an artifact of our economic system, not some necessary truth. There are a lot if upsides to such a system, but as discussed in this thread there are also downsides.
> I would argue our economic system is just fine. But we fail in political, educational and ethical issues
I disagree here. Our economic system makes sweatshop clothes cheaper (we could for example regulate or raise tariffs against them). That means that making thw ethical choice becomes a sacrifice of sorts, and not only that but it puts people who don't make that choice at a comparative advantage (they have more money left over), which effectively makes their influence over the rest of the economy greater.
We should be doing better in terms of political and ethical education, but we should also be ssetting up economic incentives to do the ethical thing not the opposite.
What if people just don't care?
I actually expect we'll have two broad classes of society which value more or less abstraction. A few enclaves like Singapore surrounded by a lot of Amish country.
I hadn't realized until this thread that this is actually everywhere. Our supply chains are nothing more than nested Matryoshka dolls of tightly bound interfaces. The cartel formed by these platforms are the most profitable way to be in business. Everyone is seeking to become a platform that others expend energy building on top of.
Now that these interfaces are tightly bound, Metcalfe's law and it's associated n^2 communication costs mean that one participant can't make a change unless someone down the line changes. And they can't change unless someone else changes. It's the exact same problem as refactoring a big ball of mud.
Maybe I’m showing my age, but I have to disagree hard with this idea that working conditions are worse in 2021 than they were in the past.
Modern jobs are quite comfortable and flexible relative to what was expected a few decades ago. Companies today bend over backwards to retain employees. I’m not exactly old, but I’m old enough to have experienced a significant shift toward better treatment of workers.
At the upper end (e.g. us engineers earning above-average wages), the level of employee pampering we get at modern tech companies feels unreal, even outside of the stereotypical FAANG offices. The amount of flexibility, respect, and attention showered on us (meaning tech workers) now is miles ahead of working conditions decades ago.
Just ask anyone who worked through past recessions what it’s like to work in a crowded job market with far more workers than jobs and where everyone is trying to outperform each other to avoid the next round of layoffs. It’s nothing like our job market today where you can walk out of one company and into another in a matter of weeks or days.
Some modern jobs.
On the other end of the spectrum you have Amazon drivers pissing in bottles--something that a steel mill laborer would never have had to do.
Are you really suggesting that laboring at a steel mill decades ago was a more comfortable job than being an Amazon worker? That's incredibly out of touch.
Even modern steel mills, with all of our technology and safety regulations, are difficult jobs. That's why they pay more than being an Amazon warehouse employees or drivers.
Older steel mill jobs were absolutely hellish. The struggles at modern Amazon jobs have been greatly exaggerated or cherry-picked in the news. There's no comparison between the two.
I mean what point do you think he was trying to make? That he respects the hard work steel workers endured? Sure, I guess, but I suspect the overriding narrative he was trying to convey was that Amazon workers ain't got it so tough. They should suck it up. That's how I read it.
Remember how Chinese workers were killing themselves in factories and the first counter argument was along the lines of, "their lives were much worse before, they should be thankful for those jobs." Guess who's propaganda that was.
Not sure how it was inflammatory but your scolding / virtue signaling wasn't very constructive either, bud.
You're personalizing a fairly dry back and forth discussion about subjective experience and then deciding that it's constructive to minimize their attempt at coming to a common ground in service of some moral recognition of a higher level wrong.
> Not sure how it was inflammatory but your scolding / virtue signaling wasn't very constructive either, bud.
I tried to explain why you're not being constructive. Good luck with whatever.
Fortunately the work of drivers driving big lorries is more tightly regulated with the worker's wellbeing also taken into consideration so that there's a fixed time interval per day you are allowed to drive, after which you have to literally stop at the first parking spot at the side of the road, no matter what the boss screams in your phone from half-way across the continent.
Are they not required to comply with driving time trackers?
From https://ec.europa.eu/transport/modes/road/social_provisions/...:
"Daily driving period shall not exceed 9 hours, with an exemption of twice a week when it can be extended to 10 hours."
Unfortunately not for the smaller vans. In your link they mention:
> road haulage and passenger transport vehicles,
which "road haulage" I'm pretty sure means the regular big lorries we all think about. But when driving a Mercedes Sprinter [1] the same rules don't apply. You can actually drive that Sprinter with a regular driver's license, while for a regular lorry you need to take additional exams so that you can get into the "you can drive a lorry/big truck" category.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/20...
But a lot of door-to-door delivery these days uses "independent contractors" who use their personal vehicles and fuel, and get paid e.g. £120 for 180 deliveries.
Nobody's enforcing digital tacho cards for people's personal vehicles.
However, working in a modern steel mill is a far cry from that. Even back in the 1970s (which is several decades ago please note), "Get the book" (operating manual which specified procedures, training, safety equipment, how many men were required, etc.) was a standard retort when managers ordered you to do something dumb. And the union protected you when you told the manager to go pound sand because it was outside the manual.
Amazon warehouse workers are schlepping around heavy stuff--just like many old school manufacturing jobs. And get crushed, injured, etc. just like many old school manufacturing jobs. However, they have zero protection and not much training and no backup to tell managers to get stuffed.
Now, would I trade a programming job for a steel mill one? Absolutely not. Would I trade an Amazon warehouse job for a steel mill one? That's not as clear to me.
You spelled "half a century" wrong (:
This might be true but the comparison is profoundly misleading.
We should instead contrast the improvement in quality of working life with the improvement of other jobs and society in general.
Humanity (and US especially) has amassed an incredible amount of wealth, knowledge and technology in the last decades.
Switching from employment to "gigs" is as huge step backward and the quality of life is dropping for many people.
Anecdotally, at the very start of the pandemic I had read a similar complaint from someone whose relative worked in delivery - with offices (and retail) on the lockdown there were fewer potential pit stops along the route.
The real issue isn't whether people have to pee in a bottle sometimes--it's the nature of the business--but how prevalent it is. That is, do the drivers on routes with available facilities have the time to make use of them? But that's a far more nuanced question that doesn't make for good sound bites.
It's sometimes a bit too easy to look at the past through sepia-colored lenses, and assume that the present must be worse. As an antidote to that tendency, it's worth reading this description of the actual reality of working in one of Andrew Carnegie's steel mills at the turn of the 20th century:
> Indeed, flames, noise, and danger ruled the Carnegie mills. "Protective gear" consisted only of two layers of wool long-johns; horrible injuries were common. Wives and children came to dread the sound of factory whistles that meant an accident had occurred.
> "They wipe a man out here every little while," a worker said in 1893. "Sometimes a chain breaks, and a ladle tips over, and the iron explodes.... Sometimes the slag falls on the workmen.... Of course, if everything is working all smooth and a man watches out, why, all right! But you take it after they've been on duty twelve hours without sleep, and running like hell, everybody tired and loggy, and it's a different story."
(Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carnegi...)
I've worked blue collar jobs and I've worked white collar jobs, and I'd take Bezos over Carnegie any day. And the very fact that sounds like such faint praise highlights how far we've come.
Also, aside from risk in objective terms, which was surely a consequence of technology and level of material wealth available to some degree -- how seriously did the society and culture generally take the issue?
Even since 1985, the rate of both workplace injuries [1] and fatalities [2] have fallen significantly. (the fatality graph doesn't go all the way back to 1985, but if you look at the source data they cite, the trend continues)
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/surveillance/images/laborfo...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/surveillance/images/laborfo...
Then I had periods where I’d crushed the before time, and could get away with walking the street shooting photography for 4 hours, as long as I didn’t have meetings. My attainment wasn’t that different in either case, I just got put on easier stuff, because I’d made it.
The shitty part is how easily the wrong manager can throw you back into that first place and effectively squeeze you, if you’re not an unequivocal top performer. In the past, I don’t get the sense that companies were as ruthlessly efficient and eager to cut out people who were good enough, but not excellent. It seems like it was easier to hang around, whereas now you have to grind and be the best for a nontrivial period of time to earn the right to relax a bit.
For the white collar, everything has gotten better.
For the blue and especially pink collar, worse.
I understand your perspective as it's one that I shared, nearly 20 years ago. I was a minimum wage laborer for a few years, and when getting my first desk job, I couldn't believe how easy it was, and yet how so many complained. And it's only gotten more surreal since. When your back hurts from shoveling all day, it's really hard to sympathize with someone in an office who complains they didn't get a perfect review. The one thing it did teach me is that people just like to grieve, whether it's from black lung or a small monitor.
It definitely gave me humility, and perspective. Service workers are treated as disposable trash, to this day, by both their employer and customers. I'm beyond excited they're quitting.
Just the transition to modern romex with push in receptacles saves tons of time and effort in the part of the job you spend 90% of the time doing.
It's still manual labor but it's much less strenuous than it used to be and it's also much more efficient.
I guess I was thinking of the lower tier blue collar laborers, where I had worked (landscaping, auto parts, etc) and especially 'pink collar', which I did not know existed until I googled it.
2. In a decent union, like local 6, it's not bad work. It's much better working conditions, and pays much more than the other trades.
3. If you are working non-union--it's a bitch. Terrible working conditions, low pay, supply your own tools, exploitive owners.
4. Yes--Romex, Scothlocks, and MC Cable, revolutionized the industry. It revolutionized it for the contractor.
5. Meaning they (the contractor) just except to you to work quicker.
6. In the old days, with knob/tube wiring, and soldering, the profession was more of an art. Today--it's about speed.
7. Today, a union electrician is expected to wire a new residential home in one day. (Believe me that's backbreaking work.)
8. While working as a electrician today it is much safer today, but the work is just as hard for non-union electricians. Non-union electricians work very hard. (In the past the death rate was so high for electricians, only Irish immigrants were doing the work.)
9. If any aimless youth reads this, and likes construction, get you C-10 license, or get into a union. Become a electrician, or elevator mechanic. Only use a non-union job as experience for your C-10 license.
(Come from a family of electricians, and 1 year working at Packbell park as an apprentice. I found another career, but do miss the regular income/benefits.)
As a kid, I was the IT for a mid-sized union shop, about 200 electricians in the field. Those electricians had it great. Certainly much better than me. Of course, I've met many tradespersons, union and non-union. The union workers generally have materially better lives.
My (idiot) son is a residential electrician with ambitions of growing his own business. I begged him to join the hall. Instead, he's worked for every kind bad employer. Been seriously injured multiple times. Wage theft. Etc.
At about 25, he wouldn't further debase himself by starting over at the hall. So he keeps being exploited.
Being non-union is probably fine if you have the ambition and chops to build up your own business.
So there are specifics one has to be aware of, but in most cases, you want push-in clamps. Soldering is the only alternative, but isn't really viable without the proper skills of the worker and inspection of all solder joints.
If you need something with a screw, use https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%BCsterklemme#/media/Datei...
But almost always, really really, use Wago 221 (preferred) or Wago 2273. You won't want anything else anymore.
It is a relative thing though. We're talking about more likely to break after 10-15 years of the repetitive stress of plugging in stuff.
If you will excuse me,
<cheap quip>
it is also case that the transition from toilet breaks to peeing in used soda bottles is adding crucial minutes of productivity to the Amazon warehouse worker's day.
</cheap quip>
I think the different experiences are two sides of the same coin: an increasing proportion of the working class are seeing a relentless pressure to optimise productivity in a way reminiscent of Taylor's Scientific Management. Where the setup needs the worker to be listened too, such as your light manufacturing example, this results in cumulative improvement. Otherwise, the tendency is to allow the workplace to become nakedly exploitative.
Not an innovation in the field per-se but nevertheless an innovation that improves the daily routine of many people working in the field is the mobile phone and especially the very cheap data and voice subscriptions (compared to 10-15 years ago, say).
Just yesterday I had to call a locksmith at my apartment so that he would fix something at the bathroom door. During his entire intervention (45 minutes - one hour) he was also on his phone (via headphones) talking with one of his other coworkers and at some point with (what seemed to be) a close relative. That reminded me seeing the same scene with a public cleaning worker from our city talking with someone close on a phone (friend or relative) while raking the autumn leaves in front of my building.
Again, it's not something that improves their "productivity" or anything like that but imo it reduces some of the alienation of being cut off from your friends and close relatives for at least 8 or 9 hours a day because of work.
It is not a good position to be in if you wanted to treat an employee like shit. There is far less leverage.
Or having to bring your wife to job interviews...
Or having to wear a suit and tie :-P
or ...
or ...
It really does seem better then I remember it 'last century' :-D
Though - to give Perot his due, when his employees got trapped in Iran...EDS planned and executed a military style raid on a foreign country to get them back. You don't see that kind of loyalty from employers any more.
That journey i took 10yrs ago took me all over the world eventually, and reinforced my pre-trip skeptism of what success in life was. To me, climbing the corporate ladder simply meant trading my time for more money and more stress.
So while others looked at me and skoffed at the 80$k i spent travelling the world for 2 years in a search for meaning... I now look at a post-covid world and take solace that i did it. I did it, just before the world changed, forever. I saw the world, the coral reefs, the rivers, the rainforests, before climate change, people destroyed them. No matter how much money you eventually get, or how many peers you impress, you cannot get that experience that I had.
And thats really what you are doing by chasing the startup dream. Your trading your life for status and money amoung your peers.
I came to the realisation that what drives me in life not my peers. it was love.... as i travelled around the world and saw poor families with not much nestled into natural environments that provided for them i saw satisfaction. They had a balance. They were poor, but balanced. They took joy in the love that they could give eachother and sharing that time with eachother reinforced that.
So fast forward 10 yrs since that trip. What did i learn? Money cannot by love. No matter how popular you are with your peers, without love, you go home from that recognisition into an abyss of loneliness. You are rish, respected, but alone.
Eventually I came back to life and attempted one last startup venture before figuring that its time i start working Remotely and start living everyday the way i wanted. I love to code, and finding a company that is stimulating and open to this relationship means i will give them the best everyday, day or night.
I thank covid for giving others that shake they all needed. Remote working is much more accessible now. Covid hasnt changed my life at all. I literly have not felt a single day in lockdown, even while the majority of people around me snarl in fear (i also gave up TV, so havnt even seen a covid-news-cast yet). I sit here watching my peers panic buy, while i never go a day without something i desire. I gave away more toilet paper then i bought.
To all those who have those doubt. Dont ignore them. The risks are worth the rewards. You will be calmer inside.
This made me melancholic. I never thought the changes that we saw last two years would be so drastic. I hope we didn’t run out of time as a species yet.
Though if you really want to travel or raise a happy family, you're also going to need some of the latter. And for most, that means being part of the rat race to some extent, once beyond your early twenties.
I work as much as I do because I don't know what's going to happen next. Someone in my family could get sick. The economy could go into the crapper. I could live longer than normal (my parents are 90).
Probably the worst corporate BS I could imagine would be commuting an hour or more, and I'm lucky that my commute is less than 1/2 hour by bike.
The "society" created around the routines of most corporate jobs is artificial, inauthentic, and provides material comforts. Having death staring you down during a pandemic for this long is a good motivator for letting go of baggage, including said jobs, especially if material comforts were the main reason to stay in it.
> Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality, or as one says sometimes, our "personality package", for something. Now, this is not so true for the manual workers. The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile. But what you might call the "symbolpushers" , that is to say, all the people who deal with figures, with paper, with men, who manipulate - to use a better, or nicer, word - manipulate men and signs and words, all those today have not only to sell their service but in the bargain they're to sell their personality, more or less. There are exceptions.
-- Erich Fromm, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu-7UDT0Xe4&t=94s
I see this quite a bit on HN (the other day someone was saying to no fanfair that he doesn't work because he doesn't like the corporate setting) and other parts of the internet, enough so to assume it must be true, but this notion really confuses me, as it's certainly never been a choice for myself.
Genuinely interested, maybe I'm missing a trick in life, how would you pay for rent, food, electricity, ect... I do genuinely think when I read things like this or see things casually mentioned in the news that there's some alternative route in life nobodies ever told me about
Maybe you’ve already heard of tha blog, maybe not. In a nutshell: rethink your life and your expenses so you’re able to save 50+% of your income. Put it into low cost ETFs (which particular one depends on what’s available where you live), and after a while (13 years at 50%, much less at more saving), you’ll have the option to not work anymore and still cover all your life expenses etc.
Not selling anything, not looking to start a debate, just mentioning it because parent might be interested or curious.
Cheers!
If you are able to spend 300k a year, you will be working until end of your days anyways.
I don't even think I'm badly paid, but 300k a year is silly money
As a person who spend most of my life studying on just a little income my expenses are only slowly increasing. Much slower than my earnings.
My guess is if one got a permanent job early on it might be hard to imaging how to live frugally.
So yeh, might just be a waiting game.
If you look at median net worth of individuals. You'll see that over 50% of people have enough money to live for years without working. Hence, the "most people" phrase. https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-ame....
There are plenty of people who feel like they have to live in a high cost of living city. And plenty of people who feel like they have to drive a new car and live in a 4 bedroom house and take their family to Disney World. But those are all choices people make in how they want to live.
Maybe most people do have 350k in savings though, but yeh, sadly I do not
From my experience of seeing grumpy Deliveroo and Uber Eats drivers mouth off at poor fast food and restaurant employees when the food isn't ready yet, and the general way they drive on the streets, I don't agree with that sentiment at all.
I opted for smaller monetary rewards for working in a smaller company with extensive freedom. Stress is mostly positive when projects get released. I have paid vacations and sick days, industry is secure that I can probably work until I get my pension if I wanted to. You also get much more invested in the company and other employees.
I still recommend doing a corp run for a year or two to get to know this world. It also help to negotiate your rates. But I don't see how you would not get a dislike about how things are done. It also seem to attract a certain kind of person.
I could never do it justice here, but you might find it valuable knowing how and when people have very legitimately been making the same point (roughly) that you’re saying here for generations.
What? In 2020, 50-78% of Americans earned just enough to pay their bills each month. Worldwide, a poll found that 85% of people are disengaged at work. I guarantee you that most people work -- even work long hours -- because they have no real choice.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown...
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/212045/world-broken...
We're in a weird and fortunate spot because we work as in a well capitalized industry as highly specialized skilled artisans. So often we get autonomy, leverage, and a good paycheck. This is not the experience for workers in general.
I would add that it's misleading to generalize the experience of american tech workers to tech workers at large. Anywhere else, you're most likely just as underpaid and overworked as the rest.
You can buy actual homes for $10-20k in the US, youtube has told me, with enough land to grow enough food to sustain yourself. It's certainly not impossible to survive on a very small amount of money (until you die of a horribly expensive health problem).
That might not be the path most of us choose, but it's still there.
One of the reasons food is cheap in the west is the automation, but the machines used for that automation are big and expensive, and only make sense if you’re feeding a lot of people rather than your immediate family. That leaves you with inefficient farming, hard work even though the $€£ cost is low.
A cheap home and a part-time job to buy necessities, letting you take advantage of economies of scale and specialisation? That can work, but it’s rare to find a cheap home with access to the labour market — where the jobs exist, you compete against those willing to work longer hours as a customer in housing market, and where you rely on remote work you risk being outsourced to someone willing to do ten times the hours for a tenth the hourly rate in the labour market.
It is questionable what the signal of that statement is. I know people earning top tier salaries who can "just pay their bills". Truth is that their bills cover their mortgages on which savings they plan to retire -- If one count in adding money to you savings account, the I reckon 100% person of all people earn just enough to cover their bills.
I wonder if part of it is exposure to alternatives. Once upon a time, your awareness of an alternate life was a movie, or newspaper article, or a friend showing you their travel photos. Now, if you are ever on social media, you face a bombardment of peers or randoms having long lunches during work hours, travelling around, in the sun, at the beach, etc - or maybe it's just my feed. Hard to feel like you have your work mix right if your daily vibe doesn't compare to the aggregated freedom.
As a result I took my savings and move back to India. Now I've a small farm here, since the market is soo inefficient in India specially for farm produce and labor abundant I am able to work only 1 hour a day and enjoy rest of my day on things I like.
In US and Europe proportion of smart people with access to resources is vastly more compared to India where either smart people lack resources or the ones with resources aren't smart enough.
> Your correspondent recently suffered the indignity of having to board a red-eye from JFK airport entirely sober because all the airport bars were still shut.
What a Karen.
TFA is the usual superficial Economist tripe - there's no analysis there.
In particular, please don't copy the most objectionable thing in an article and then paste it here to indignantly object to it. That's a trope of shallow discussion. We're hoping for something more interesting here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The writer was asserting that employment in service industries hasn't returned to pre-Covid levels because people don't want to work, but immediately goes on to describe seeing several closed places of business in that sector. That seems schizophrenic (in the dictionary definition), and makes it seem like he has done no real research.
Casually boasting about air travel, one of the main carbon emission sources, during the pandemic and in the context of the global warming caused floods and wildfires in Europe, makes the writer seem entitled and tone-deaf. Complaining, even jokingly, about service not being normal in a pandemic just makes that worse.
ETA: I base most of my thinking on this on Bruce Schneier's points, so I'm just going to link his blog here. https://www.schneier.com/tag/air-travel/page/8/ And a quote from an Atlantic interview: “Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.” This assumes, of course, that al-Qaeda will target airplanes for hijacking, or target aviation at all. “We defend against what the terrorists did last week,” Schneier said. He believes that the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11 levels. “Spend the rest of your money on intelligence, investigations, and emergency response.”
A reinforced cockpit door is not going to help you when you sneak on individual components for plastic explosives and assemble them in the lavatory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot
There's security and then there's paranoid irrationality, which is what we have at present.
Is that productivity really needed/used for standard of living gains? Or do you need two incomes now because of a combination of capital taking bigger cut and dual-incomes bidding up the price of things.
Also you have the phenomenon of companies trying to increase sales by reducing the service life of their products, which just increases churn without increasing living standards.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
That's a plausible explanation, but a bunch of charts with no analysis other than red arrows[1] pointing to the early 70s, makes for a terrible argument in support of it.
[1] https://xkcd.com/925/
https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synops...
In other words, you know it's not trying to prove something, but rather reaffirm what some people already believe? I'm not sure that's any better. If anything that's worse, because you're knowingly engaging in lowering the quality of conversation on this forum.
>It's not as though there are that many links in this whole thread.
But why add a random site that does nothing but contribute to the noise?
>I appreciate anyone with the stones to counter an argument by data with an argument by xkcd.
The onus is on the person making the claim to prove it, not on the respondent to disprove it. If all you're presenting is a bunch of charts with arrows on them, I don't see why I have to debunk each individual chart[1]. It suffices to show that the argumentation style is flawed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
There is no competitive pressure to improve educational outcomes because society doesn’t really care. It’s a signaling mechanism for the top quintile and a childcare holding pen for the rest.
You could have parental-supervised online learning be 5x as good as in-person, but society demands we send kids to school to get them out of the house so a parent can work. We pay lip service to the actual education of the child.
No real point except pulling the veil from our revealed preferences.
E.g. the cost and quality of your average bus driver has not changed appreciably in 4 decades.
In theory, the quality of the education system itself should be improving (online classes & evaluation, recorded lectures, more materials, sharing of the best techniques, etc.), of which the teachers are a single input. But, we know how that's turned out. Education is a political football and society doesn't actually care about the outcome.
It's only specific age kids who need to be cared for. School was never childcare. Children past a certain age have always been capable of staying home.
This was the first potential explanation TFA examined. It said that this effect was "negligible":
> It is commonly believed that school closures have made it impossible for parents, particularly mothers, to take a job. The evidence for this is mixed, though. Analysis by Jason Furman, Melissa Kearney and Wilson Powell III concludes that extra joblessness among mothers of young children accounts for a “negligible” share of America’s employment deficit. Despite talk of a “shecession” early in the pandemic, in most rich countries the worker deficit for men remains larger.
Maybe they should fix some of the issues preventing people from returning to work (childcare, pandemic restrictions) before complaining...
There is certainly a worker deficit. Our society has moved up the stack and isn't bringing in enough cheap immigrant labor anymore to work the jobs even poor americans won't accept anymore.
Businesses who were on a shoestring fail and yuppies continue to move in. The regional+national inflation has simply left large chunks of business in the dust without very cheap (immigrant) labor. This causes the makeshift infrastructure to weaken and the communities start to come apart.
The article claimed this was negligible.
> How can anyone say there's a worker deficit when we're so far below pre-pandemic employment?
There are be talent and location mismatches that make both of these true.
And stats concerning women in the workforce definitely paint a different picture.
> There are be talent and location mismatches that make both of these true.
So employers need to pay more and offer remote work or pay relocation expenses.
There's also a dearth of $1000 new automobiles on the market but no one's suggesting forcing automakers to offer them. Why do we expect labour to bend to the will of companies? They need to offer competitive compensation.
I want a trip on one of these orbital space ships. Is there a space ship shortage?
So, not only there is no space ship shortage :) there is actually much bigger worker shortage, as I keep a billion positions open (I want slaves, of all kinds, especially with Wall Street experience) and can't fill them (I don't bother to try).
It’s a free rider problem of profitable corporations on labor of society.
This also further divides people because of the consistent use of the "Welfare Queen" [1] stereotype by conservatives to vilify people on welfare.
0 - https://reason.com/2021/06/01/the-bipartisan-war-on-work/
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen#In_political_dis...
It's not whining, it's a strategy, when interviewing costs relatively little. Even startups spend weeks of interviewing for a single candidate, because prevailing opinion is that it's more costly to hire a subpar employee than to do those interview rounds, even in a jurisdiction where laws allow firing with relative ease.
I don’t think it’s obvious that large numbers of people are choosing to stay home and earn $0/hour instead of getting a job working $10/hour because they really wanted $15/hour. The worker shortage is a real phenomenon of more jobs existing than people in the workforce.
On the other hand, raising wages would produce inflationary pressure on everything from housing prices to food prices, which would force more people to get jobs just to survive. Not exactly what you meant, I know.
Of course it does. My wife doesn't work because there's nothing that particularly motivates her to work rather than doing her hobbies. If you offered her more money, it might motivate her to re-enter the work force.
And if you can get 100k without a degree people who would be in college will be in the work force instead.
That’s the theory at least.
But if don't pay labor, no one is going to buy your product at the end of the day. If you pay more for labour, that's more money to spend on product and services.
There's an optimum somewhere between the two.
Presenting only one side is a polical statement.
I don't really see how any of this is a bad thing. This has to happen from time to time for the economy to remain efficient. This is the phase in the cycle where the capital owners take their lumps and workers make big career making moves.
If you zoom in a little closer you can see lots of little victories happening all the time in the boarder economy. Lots of workers moving into better positions for more pay and leaving behind employers who can only find more expensive and less able replacements, if any at all. My personal observation is workers in service industry jobs seem more casual than a year and a half ago, less hurried, perhaps less fearful of losing a job than can be replaced in a few hours.
If I create a job that pays $100,000 per hour for making me a coffee whenever I ask, I assure you that plenty of people will come off the sidelines and apply for that job.
Others have correctly pointed out that the supply curve is not flat. But even if it were, well, economics is about the allocation of scarce resources that have alternate uses (Thomas Sowell's definition). If people are scarce, and they go where they produce the most value, and places where they would produce less value don't get filled, is that a problem? Isn't that exactly what you would want to happen?
We really need to empower all kinds of front-line workers to enforce reasonable boundaries with both customers and management.
Why would companies raise wages now when they can wait a few months to see if the situation changes?
People seem upset by this, but if you have a free market economy, you should anticipate that actors will work in their own best interest.
Changing regulations around compensation will be much more effective versus hoping that a company will act on a specific moral principle.
I know that sounds harsh but that's the reality that workers live with every day. Can't pay the prevailing rent? You have to sleep in the streets. Can't pay for medical insurance? You get to die from a treatable disease. Why should there be more consideration for businesses than there is for human beings?
They may be able to pay an increased wage when the rest of the economy catches. So it may be optimal for the economy as a whole to support businesses temporarily.
As some businesses go out of business due to wages, that will put downward pressure on wages and keep things affordable for the remaining businesses.
Not necessarily. 1) there can be regulatory floors on wages. Half the folks in this thread are calling for higher minimum wage. 2) if cost of living outpaces wages, there may not viable business model at all for low wage employers. 3) it may be the case that in some markets working at all lowers the effective income due to welfare cliffs.
https://cafexapp.com/
https://misorobotics.com/
We've only had "knowledge workers" in the current high tech industrial sense for a couple of hundred years and our understanding of the value of one person's labour is still firmly based in the trades. It's still a relatively new idea that a single person working in the right way (eg. designing automated equipment) could produce hundreds or thousands of times as much as a person trying to directly produce the same thing. We've barely started to process the idea that a single person working in the right breakthrough technology could be almost infinitely productive.
However, the end state of software/SaaS is likely low margins, as regulations will be put into place to foster competition.
SaaS has high margins due to the low marginal cost to produce additional units, which is close to free, in many cases. But it's also 0 marginal cost for any competitior.
So in theory, in a perfectly competitive market, margins should be low, as two companies can produce roughly similar software. The problem comes in when you consider network effect and other factors that lead to a sort of natural Monopoly for a software company.
Likely these factors will begin to get regulated over the coming years. For example, you could require that all SaaS companies provide an API that's sufficient to allow you to switch to a competitor at a click of a button.
Circling back to your comment. My point is that pay in software is unlikely to remain abnormally high in the decades to come. Eventually supply of labor will increase, and business margins will decrease... Which effectively caps how much you can pay employees.
Somewhat related; China has realized that fostering competition rather than allowing monopolies to form is likely to produce better long term outcomes for society... which is why they are enacting all of these new regulations. The logic makes sense, but it remains to be seen in the long run.
I believe the US will follow, but it's a story that will take decades to play out fully.
The Economist is pushing the dishonest narrative that there's an employee shortage, when actually there's a glut of greedy "we don't want to pay higher wages" employers.
The Economist is, therefore, enabling these greedy employers.
You'll get some that adhere to those principles, and others that don't.
If society deems minimum wage too low, government is the one responsible for regulating it to reflect those morals.
Rather than see the employers as greedy, just accept that they'll most likely do whatever they can within the confines of the law to help themselves, and then change the law to shape the incentive.
Anything else is just wishful thinking. Well intentioned, but not realistic to achieve the purported goal.
>The Economist is, therefore, enabling employers to do whatever they can within the confines of the law to help themselves.
Saying 'greedy' just saves 13 words. But I'm being flippant with what I consider to be an important topic. Let me be be positive, this:
Depending on independent actors in a free market system to act on specific moral principles rather than in their own best interest is not going to work in practice.
Feels like a variation of a "tragedy of the commons[0]" / "race to the bottom[1]" situation, which is where this:
government is the one responsible for regulating it
is exposed as the causal failure - in large part because, I think, the same people that influence the angle The Economist is taking are those who 'donate' to various members of government. The more I'm talking through this, the more I see the problem as voter apathy. If a member of government only gets feedback from industry lobbyists, that's all they'll be able to base their decisions on.
Write your local members! Use your voice! Vote! (I'm saying this to myself as much as anyone else). Only politics can solve politics.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom
The minimum wage is pushed up by large corporations to squeeze out small corporations.
If "society" deems minimum wage too low, they stop accepting jobs at that wage. That's what's happening right now in my area. There are no employers offering the legal minimum wage and even fast food places are offering hiring bonuses. The law is largely irrelevant and only affects a very narrow window of workers/jobs at the edge.
You'd still have many elderly consumers, but nobody to serve them.
Of course we can get into immigration and a long tangential discussion. My only point being, there can be structural shortages that wages aren't able to fix.
Another more realistic example would be a shortage of labor with a specific skillset. Wages can potentially fix this in the longer run by enticing people to pick up these skills (we see this in tech).
Incorrect. It will depend on how long lockdowns last.
Do you have an example of this?
A shortage occurs when buyers want to pay more, and need to pay more for the market to clear, but cannot do so for some reason (the law, for example). A decent indicator of there being a shortage is if the recipient of a product or service is determined by a non-price based mechanism, such as a lottery or a needs-based determination, as the usual 'highest bidder wins' method is not possible.
It's also possible that certain businesses and products we've grown accustomed to, at the prices we are used to, are simply not viable anymore as the market changes.
The market giveth and the market taketh away. A lot of business owners complaining about a "labor shortage" love being pro free market when it works in their favor, but whine when it turns around on them.
Nail on the head, right here. "Burger flippers" are entitled if they expect to live off their work, but when no "Burger flippers" will come work for them, oh woe is me.
They'll preach about survival of the fittest until they figure out they're not the fittest, and then suddenly its not such a good idea
Why we feel the need to treat businesses better than we treat other people is beyond me.
Employee's have no right to an employer: Absolutely fine, no issues there, the way things should be
Employers have no right to an employee: Blasphemy! What a cruel, terrible world we live in
Not once, ever, have the oil speculators thought the prices were too high and yanked them back down.
(Not only does one not want to take delivery of a commodity unless you are actually using it, but I think crude oil gives off hydrogen sulfide, which is poisonous in small quantities, making storage even more problematic)
I reiterate that not once ever have gas/oil speculators lowered prices because they went too high, but they damn sure froze prices when they thought they were dipping too low.
I seem to remember people saying back when it 'dipped too low' (speculators'/tycoons' words) that they most certainly would retard prices if they went too high. They pinky-double-scouts'-honor swore.
Never happened. Especially scummy because oil prices affect everything.
I believe it was late 90s, the last time gas dipped to $1/gal and below. It didnt last but a few days but to hear the oil companies cry it was the end of times and they were going bankrupt.
As an aside has anyone seen the Dubai videos of the children of these tycoons getting bored and racing/flipping/destroying $500k+ cars? If not search Saudi super car stunts/flips/races/wheelies/crashes/whatever.
Obviously oil prices are priced accurately and the companies/families that own them are making the slimmest of margins, we should cut them slack- oh wait, that's every business now.
I hate what humanity has become.
If there is real competitiveness, a company that suffers shortages of an input (workers in this case), would see an increase in price and a fall in profits. Did your friend mentioned profits in the conversation?
Because I'm seeing a lot of this discussions where not even profits is mentioned. Including the article we are discussing by the way, where the word 'profits' doesn't appear.
I'm just saying that is surprising how is not even discussed, like if it was not a factor in what we are talking about.
For those with low skills, this can mean unemployment, even permanent one.
I think that a lot of the "worker shortage" is in fact companies being unwilling to understand that they are being outcompeted in the market, someone is able to make that 100 dollar product less costly and thus can attract more workers, or alternatively workers/resources cost less abroad.
There's something called the backward bending supply curve of labor. At some point, people work fewer hours because they make enough money that more money won't affect their quality of life. Various closures, and, interestingly, labor shortages, have given people fewer ways to spend their money, lowering the inflection point of the curve.
[1]: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_totaldeaths
30% of deaths are from 85+, 27% for ages 75-84, 21% for ages 65-74
Source: same site as you https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics
1 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm
No, 80% of them were 65 and older.
For people who are 65 this year, full retirement age (as defined by Social Security) is 66 years, 4 months.
And lots of people aren't able, financially, to retire ar “full" retirement age.
Many people who are retired can't financially afford to retire, but are more willing to make changes in their consumption habits than go back to work.
Don't be so quick to think this. Society can't just poof into existence more qualified skilled workers. It takes years to train nurses and a decade or more to do so with M.Ds/O.Ds.
Right now, traveling nurses are being offered pretty insane salaries, up to and including low five figures a week. It hasn't helped bring more people in, or fixed the burnout. People are just traveling to work for the highest bidder. I suspect most are planning to leave the game after they've saved up enough money.
That said, in theory the US could raise wages enough to attract skilled professionals in from other countries. Except that the US also has extremely restrictive immigration laws and a housing shortage making it extremely difficult to pay people enough to live where they're needed.
> “jobs”
Employment, and employees, are not fungible - why do people (and more importantly: the news-media and the people elected to direct the economy) continue to speak of it as though it is?
I've seen this mentioned a few times on HN. I find it a confusing concept.
My position is 100% fungible. I write code to solve problems. There are thousands of people that can write equivalent code to solve the same problems.
I'm legitimately interested: can you expand on how my position isn't fungible?
It's fungible only when the entire set of available workers shares your competence (i.e. your skill-set, relevant experience, and business domain knowledge) - or - can be quickly trained to acquire such competence.
...and I'll wager that the vast majority (90%-ish?) of the working-age and almost-working-age population in your country is both unqualified to write software professionally and is not interested in spending 2-4 years of their life to study CS or SE to a level sufficient to do the work you currently do. Of the other 10% at least 9.95% of them won't have your business domain knowledge needed to do your job such that you make the right decisions early-on or slow down others by bringing them in for help, and so on.
----------------
What I was complaining about was when it's reported in the news, or ever really said by anyone, that "opening this new coal-mine in Greenhippieville, CA will create 5,000 jobs!" or that "the economy added 10,000 jobs this month" - because the "jobs" those numbers refer to could be anything without further qualification, and doing that will make the conversation too technical for a general audience.
You left out the most salient point here, most people are entirely unable to write software even if their life depended on it. Just like I doubt I'd be able to write a symphony in 4 years even with a ticking time bomb strapped to my skull.
A developers' core skill is not getting overwhelmed after being blindsided by new shit from every angle on a constant basis.
We have 30% of out team just dealing with auto-reported vulnerabilities in our code base. No choice. Getting an "exception" takes an architect about a week for a vuln that has no material impact and which can't be mitigated with a simple library update. Tip of the ice berg.
This is at an excellent tech focused company (relatively great place to work).
Gold is fungible. You can mine gold anywhere in the world and it's worth the same.
The level of skill to be able to code effectively is not something a large proportion of the population has. People have scoffed at the idea that programming requires a high IQ (let's call it what it is), calling it elitist or something, but you don't expect any random joe to be able to be a professional illustrator, musician, juggler, diver, climber, writer or mathematician.
The real problem, has Jordan Peterson points out, is what will society do with people on the low end of the IQ curve, as more and more skills are required and unskilled labor is being eliminated by technology?
roommates are a critical social developmental step in your life.
They teach you how to negotiate boundaries without a direct authority figure.
They teach you how to live in a common space with somebody else.
roommates teach you that you must be responsible for your actions which affect the other people who live with you.
roommates teach you the importance of financial responsibility because when the rent is due you both need to pay up.
You may be lazy You may not want to do the dishes, but you know if you take that messy ass plate and you just throw it in the sink it will become a mountain of dirty ass shit and you owe it to somebody else to do your part.
If both of you hold up your end of the bargain and perform 3 seconds of work to place that dish in the dishwasher it avoids this tragedy of the commons.
roommates teach you that self-discipline is critical for a tolerable society.
E.g. Forget to pay your share of the rent when you live with a roommate? Room-mate yells at you. When you live alone you get an eviction notice.
Self-discipline is about the self after all. If you need another person there to be disciplined, then you are clearly not self-disciplined.
(That said, nothing wrong with roommates, it often makes financial sense and some people like having them, i just dont see the connection to responsibility)
But when housing costs are such that you have people in their late 20's and early 30's still living with roommates it seems like a societal problem.
And keep in mind, if you get paid minimum wage, your employer is telling you they'd pay you less if they could.
This is the crux, because what's happening is that housing is highly inflationary (especially in desirable locations) and wages are failing to match inflation, so entry level workers are being pushed further out to the boonies. Why would they commute all the way into the city centers if they don't actually pay better?
An interesting side effect of all the rampant real estate speculation and bidding wars is that cities are becoming dramatically more expensive to live in than the exurbs. I feel like eventually this will result in a much higher cost of living across the board as employers need to account for this difference in their pay scales. The entry level / service industry jobs in these places with insane housing prices will need to pay much better to attract workers, thus making these already expensive-to-live places even more expensive.
Perhaps it will eventually create some kind of equilibrium where new towns can provide some of the same quality of life benefits at a fraction of the cost since their real estate isn't so astronomical.
The social media stigma is also well known and reviled.
"We are watching" is the new normal.
The demand-side of the labor market simply isn't willing to pay what the supply-side expects, and is childishly throwing a tantrum that for once they have to compromise to market forces.
The so called "worker deficit" only exists below ~15-20/h. Above that there's no issue whatsoever.
It's a seller's market. Suck it up.
What are the market forces that led to this, when there wasn't a worker shortage just a little over a year ago?
Even without Covid this would have happened as low-income workers in many areas were either rapidly approaching being unequivocally priced out of living anywhere remotely near their work, or already were.
Covid just forced the issue sooner and faster, rather than letting it fester.
Why would anyone continue working for subsistence wages that can't even pay rent where they live and work? Their only sensible options are demanding more pay or leaving.
In major cities, with current rents, it simply isn't feasible to pay janitors, garbage collectors, fast-food workers, restaurant employees, etc as little as they've been paid, for the very simple reason that they can't afford to live there on those wages.
Unless we're willing to give up sanitation, garbage collection, fast food, and cheap restaurants in those cities, there is no reasonable solution except increasing wages. (There are of course unreasonable solutions such as exploiting immigrants, wage theft, and prison labor).
I think a component of this is hazard pay. The pandemic has made a lot of these low pay jobs more dangerous. If everything else is the same, but the job is now more dangerous, fewer people will take the employment.
1) People getting government assistance so they are able to survive without their current employer enabling them to quit
2) People re evaluating the risk reward ratio of their jobs, perhaps due to COVID bringing risks into view that previously were not focused on, and also comparing themselves to all the people they see working remotely getting paid more for not taking risks
3) People have time to research other work options since they were able to quit (or lost their job)
4) Demographic changes becoming more apparent as fewer children mean more and more of the working population ages out every year, and if not replaced by immigrants, then there are objectively fewer people competing to sell their labor
Does this take the difference in automatic stabilizers into account? There was probably quite a lot of extra cash injected from the stronger social net in the EU.
Eg https://www.nber.org/papers/w16275 says "In the case of an unemployment shock 47 percent of the shock are absorbed in the EU, compared to 34 per cent in the US."
"The working-age employment rate (the share of 16- to 64-year-olds in a job) was at an all-time high in over half of rich countries."
Yes, because about half the population - women - who previously weren't counted as part of the "work force" are now counted.
However, looking at males alone, they have been dropping out of the workforce at an alarming rate: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191725/us-male-civilian-....
The Pandemic seems to be an acceleration of the latter trend, and perhaps a partial reversal of the former, with more women deciding to exit the workforce either temporarily or permanently.
Two natural assumptions are that there is less demand for economic activity and that people are depressed / have less mental bandwidth for work.
Without being able to do most of the fun stuff in life thanks to our authoritarian governments, I burnt out at my job, quit and dedicated solely to running my side business.
I make way less money than before but it's not something I could mentally handle anymore.
There's no deficit, labor participation is pathetic and socialism and central banks are to blame.