Labour that wont be filled by anybody as they try to find people working for "some bucks" an hour.
Expect more automated systems, robotic cookers, less waitress and more "self service" from now on.
> "some bucks" are defined by how much people are willing to pay for goods.
In a lot of cases, the company owners rake in hundreds of thousands to millions and sometimes billions of dollars a year in profit. The benefit of becoming so large that competition barely exists or simply cannot keep up with economies of scale. Even if you're barely making one cent of profit per unit sold: if you manage to scale up so massively you can sell 100 million pieces of it, you'll still make a million dollars profit overall.
Their profit is your opportunity then: open a competing company, pay people better while still making a decent profit and enjoy!
Most of the current crop of companies being seen as "unbeatable monopolies" did not exist a quarter centuries ago or they were small startups people did not give a chance.
But they persisted and won. It can be done again. It is done every day, but just not by people saying "it can't be done".
The problem is: you can't compete with the scale of these mega-corporations unless you have something like a sovereign wealth fund backing you. It is simply unviable to try and open up an alternative to Amazon or Walmart - network effects, exclusivity deals, credit history, officials letting it slide to pay your workers pittances because they don't want to battle with the lawyers a billion dollar company can put up against you... and especially, if you do try it, then the mega corporations can and will price-dump you out of business. Subsidising losses for one location for a year or two is nothing for Wal-Mart, especially not if every other store around them is closed afterwards and you are the only player left.
Oh, and not to mention that while $VENDOR is willing to give Wal-Mart a special deal for, say, a bottle of soda for 20 cents in exchange for Wal-Mart placing an order for a million bottles, they will not give that same price to your small corner store. You cannot compete with that without going into loss leader territory, which is highly dangerous.
Just take supermarkets as an example. In Germany, 3/4 of the market has been taken by the four largest chains [1], which poses an immense competition problem for vendors like farms, or for small corner stores which have vanished in large parts of the country because they can't compete with the big-box store 20km away.
How much of that is just consumer choice? Of course you can’t compete against large grocery stores if you charge a higher price but offer nothing of higher value.
That level of profit oppptunity doesn't occur until the company is massive. Small business owners, in contrast, mostly run on tight margins and have to live with a high likelihood of their business failing.
Effectively, you're asking us to solve the income gap by becoming billionaires ourselves. Can you see the irony in that?
Jeff Bezos managed to. I wish more people would try, instead of saying "can't be done".
Of course very few would succeed or become billionaires but in the process they will create jobs and companies and tremendous value for a society that needs that much more than it needs the current wailing and gnashing of teeth against the "evil billionaires" that tried and succeeded.
Just look at how long it took Amazon to get as big as it did - and Amazon didn't have much competition in its first few years ffs, they were the pioneers of e-commerce. The survivors from the first dot-com boom are so entrenched by now they are literally impossible to ever unseat unless government regulation intervenes - either in the form of marketplace regulation, anti-trust action or, like the EU is trying to break PayPal, forcing banks to offer fast payments.
> GAF(AM)s didn't even exist a quarter of a century ago !
Yes, and look how entrenched they have become. Search engines, for example, are dominated by Google holding 80%+ for well over a decade. Even Bing, with Microsoft's deep cash coffers, can't get above 9% [1]. Facebook just went ahead and bought the biggest threats (Whatsapp, Instagram) or copied the features of competitors to destroy them (Snapchat). The only threat in the social media marketplace comes from TikTok, who are backed by the Chinese government. Twitter is tiny and Musk is driving it to the ground. Amazon, while "only" at 38% market share in e-commerce, still leaves everyone else including Wal-Mart in the dust [2]. Microsoft utterly dominates the PC and laptop market [3] as well as the office suite market [4].
Even with these multi-billion companies fighting against each other, they can't manage to land any kind of significant blows - so how should a small startup stand a chance?
> P.S.: What makes you think Amazon had no competition ? Were there no other booksellers, or generalist stores selling books ?
Amazon had no competition online, mostly because the competition was asleep at the wheel. And by the time the competition woke up, it was too late - and now "classic" book stores are dying out left and right, not to mention other kinds of specialized stores. Here in Munich, all the small electronics specialty stores closed down, even famous chain Conrad closed down because they couldn't compete any more.
Jeff Bezos is not seen by most as evil, because he is rich, but because he became rich by exploiting working people and other buisnesses wherever possible.
It is not possible for everyone to successfully exploit others. You need some victims, too.
If you cannot see the asymmetry of power between an individual warehouse worker and Amazon, then everything progressive will sound like forced choice.
If you start from the assumption that people should live and die under reasonable expectations of health, growth and participation in labor, able to bring up their children to aspire to a better living standards than their own, then progressive policies will make sense.
If you start from the assumption that people deserve the life they have and everyone can pull themselves from their bootstraps, and only thing people lack is ambition and hard work, then the progressive policies will sound like stealing from the successful people.
I personally believe that corporations should exist to serve their customers, their workers and then the shareholders, in that order.
Actually I want what "progressives" say they want:
> people should live and die under reasonable expectations of health, growth and participation in labor, able to bring up their children to aspire to a better living standards
But I have enough real-world experience and I've been lied to by enough politicians to know that we will never get that through policies. We can only get it though the same mechanisms that pulled us out of poverty and exploitation and offered us this amazing bounty of choice we are enjoying every day in non-government-controlled-domains: free markets.
This is why I support less restrictions and more opportunities for companies and startups.
> I personally believe that corporations should exist to serve their customers, their workers and then the shareholders, in that order.
I do not believe these are separate classes and instead they should mix together instead: anybody should be able to become shareholder at the company they work or consume from, start their own company or simply work for whomever they want.
Bezos got three hundred thousand dollars from his parents to start Amazon. Gates only got the DOS deal because of his mother's connection to IBM. Zuckerberg's mother was a doctor, and his father a dentist. Musk's father owned an emerald mine.
Growing under communism, my parents were dirt-poor. So after the fall I had to do it the hard way: first got a job, saved enough money to have a little runway, then start a small business, etc.
But I have nothing against people who grew up under a humane system, got help from parents or VCs and made something of themselves. Because I know plenty of bums who had everything they ever needed and did absolutely nothing with it.
Have you tried? VCs beg you to spend the money they give you as long as that increases your chances of success. That is how IT workers got to enjoy the tremendous salaries and benefits we currently have.
If clients ain't willing to pay enough to pay salary workers are willing to work for... Maybe there's no product-market fit and/or business model just does not work?
Though that they are still focusing on growth as a goal is somewhat perplexing, since this is what got us in this situation (and we are going to pay for it for the next decades, centuries, even millenia...)
Yes. Products and services would get more expensive. Overall reducing consumption in volume. Which may be negative for the „growth“ in neoliberal sense. But positive in crapload of other metrics.
It can be more complex than that. My town has a lot of hairdresser salons. It’s hard to make the argument that there’s too many, but that would be my feeling. It’s a small town and the most popular business type on the high street is a food venue followed in 2nd place by hair salons. I’d have expected convenience stores or pubs.
However, there’s actually a lot of demand for hair styling. Maybe even enough demand to fill all those salons given how long my wife waits for an appointment.
But there’s not enough staff to satisfy all the demand. Chairs in the salons sit empty as you walk past.
So what’s happening? There’s already salons with empty chairs, there’s still excess demand and… new salons are being opened!
According to n=1 (i.e. anec-data), staff who used to work at an existing salon are opening their own. Meanwhile existing salon is proclaiming to all customers that no one wants to work. I don’t know how they square this world view with their ex staff opening their own salon.
>> Unless the owners of the new shop are more skilled than average
Why? It's the same workers cutting and styling hair. as when they worked in the existing salons. Many of their customers follow "their" hairdresser to whatever new venue they work at.
>> What about a coop shop?
There's another existing model for temporary hairdressers where they begin working at a salon and they keep all income from all clients they serve. In turn they pay the owner a fixed price to rent their chair for the day. AIUI this is no longer popular but i don't know the specifics. It seems to me that renting a chair should be a lot cheaper than starting up & marketing a salon.
Relative to your first point, two shops with two chairs each have much more overhead than one shop with four chairs.
Whether or not customers follow is a complex social issue, assuming an average haircut.
But, it’s human nature to try to do better. Most small businesses fail fairly quickly.
Renting out chairs is a reasonable business model, but it’s not the same as a co-op, because the proprietor gets greedy (or is perceived to be so) and bossy.
>> Relative to your first point, two shops with two chairs each have much more overhead than one shop with four chairs.
I don't think that follows - the business rates, heating costs, energy usage, insurance, etc. will all be cheaper in the 2-chair shops than the 4-chair shop. The 4-chair shop just has extra chairs (but they remain unused since there aren't staff available to fill them) . At the same price point for customers, it's less viable.
If he owns it, he will want to recover his overhead and make profit beyond that to compensate for his risk and extra effort. That profit typically isn't shared with the other stylists. On the other hand, the owner will likely diligently pursue his own interest in making the shop as profitable as possible by attracting the most customers to the best service, which may greatly benefit the stylists (and make them willing to pay more for use of the chair).
If it's a co-op, all expenses and profits will be split among the members. (I'm assuming that the co-op members are limited to the stylists in this case.) The business is not likely to be pursued as diligently as it would be if it was a sole proprietorship, as an individual member will not be proportionately compensated for making an outsized effort. If the co-op is large enough to require a full-time employed manager and other staff, then it's just a privately held corporation, and will perform as such.
I was thinking about a hairdresser having a salon with a single chair for himself.
Full-on co-op wouldn't work if 1 hair dresser is super popular and 2 others are not so popular. It's a very personal business and a big part of it is one's own contacts. Now if only salon is co-op and hairdressers have to decide together how much they charge per chair to split among themselves... That may get interesting. If hairdresser pays a %, then worse performers may get a chunk of better-off profits. If hairdresser pays for chair days, then worse performers may be subsidising the better ones.
Owning a salon was a financially sustainable lifestyle, so you get more salons.
Working at a salon for minimum wage + tips is not a sustainable lifestyle, so you get empty chairs in those salons.
All it takes to open a salon is the ability to work there and easy credit. So you get a lot of salons.
Think of the fast food model. The owner of a McD used to make $200K+/yr, so there is intense demand to open new fast food restaurants. The employees make less than it takes to survive even with massive government program assistance, so the restaurants are empty with help wanted signs posted and early closing hours and drive-thru only. Then the prices have to go up until it takes $25 to take your daughter to burger king for lunch (true story...) so the customers all go away. Its not real food anyway. Then the owners of McDs make $0. "Everyone knows" you'll be a millionaire if you open a fast food restaurant and credit is very easy so there's an infinite line of people trying to make $200K but getting $0K. The cycle takes some time to stabilize. All those people in line have to get educated (LOL thats not happening) or go bankrupt one at a time, it takes awhile.
Service businesses always collapse from the bottom up. I've seen this in food stores, when an area has too much grocery store sq footage for its population. The collapse always starts with permanent help wanted signs and poor service, but it ends with "nobody would open a grocery store here, the just go out of business".
You guys are missing the point. If we take X percent of the workers out of the market due to retirement (and age discrimination?) there will simply not be enough people to do all the work. Paying more at any or all levels will not create more workers.
Inflation is starting to affect retirement plans, and some are coming out. But companies need to want them.
> Their state pension increases in line with inflation thanks to the penion "triple lock" in the UK (this is temporarily the "double lock" for 22/23).
In that case you have a feedback loop creating infinite inflation that goes faster than those rate adjustments goes. There is no magical wand to wish away inflation like that.
You don't need more workers, though. Supply and demand. As prices rise, demand wanes, not requiring as many workers.
When labour is free the amount of work is infinite, but with a higher price some work is no longer worth doing and workers get reallocated into the jobs that are still viable.
If demand is so low that under-paid staff is needed to keep things afloat, is the business even worth the effort from a societal view-point? Or even as a business case?
Only if the demand for underpaid jobs is large enough, I assume.
Eh from a superficial view no, but there will be a cascade event. The after effects are more complex
For example, many small businesses that are not "big mean corporations" that run on already small margins either jack up their prices enough to afford paying more. The customer then gets screwed with much higher prices.
OR all these mom and pop places go under because they still can't find labor, then more people are out of work - where do they then get jobs?
I agree that this isn't a black and white thing; and that wasn't the point I was making.
It's kinda like the tireless recruiters on LinkedIn, who keep spamming people about call center jobs. I.e. the problem in that case isn't people don't want to work; the problem is that call centres are a toxic work environment that has systematically burnt through the entire 80's generation of self-taught IT-techs only to find out they were a finite resource and that they're almost out.
As for Mom and Pop places, it's a sad situation, but if we want to help smaller stores then the key is specialization and finding niches that can't be handled online. As with everything specialized, feasability is a matter of supply and demand, and wages shouldn't be kept down artificially just to keep them running.
> Expect more automated systems, robotic cookers, less waitress and more "self service" from now on.
For what it's worth: it would be a good goal on its own to reduce the weekly workload for everyone. 2x40h plus commute? That's not sustainable nor healthy and is a major reason why young people push having children to the future.
However, societies must tax the profits that companies generate by replacing people with machines and redistribute these profits - otherwise we just end up with neo-feudalism, with a tiny caste of extremely wealthy people controlling all the machines.
I expect it to get easier to tax capital in the current climate where globalization is being reversed by a few notches. Both trends are likely to contribute to higher inflation, though.
> Both trends are likely to contribute to higher inflation, though.
Not if governments don't sleep at the wheel. In the 80s, CEO compensation was a fraction of what it is today [1], and there were only a couple dozen billionaires or billionaire families [2]. Today, we're at at least 735 billionaires in the US, and at least 2668 worldwide [3].
There is nothing preventing governments from seizing all that excessive wealth gain and redistributing it, or to limit corporate hoarding of cash and assets, corporate payouts like dividends or stock buybacks - the latter, most egregious practice, was only legalized in 1982 [4].
FFS - what happened to the Ford-era tradition of paying people enough cash for their work so that they could actually live on these wages and buy all the products?! That was the key for the post-WW2 economic success wave, after all.
> There is nothing preventing governments from seizing all that excessive wealth gain and redistributing it, or to limit corporate hoarding of cash and asset
Wealth and consumption are different things, though. And CPI inflation is mostly driven by consumption, not assets.
As it is, the wealthiest people still do not make up a very large part of total consumption. In fact, this is a core reason why they're accumulating so much wealth.
My point is that by taxing assets then, sure, we can transfer wealth from the rich to either governments or poor people. But this will not necessarily make it possible for "regular people" to consume more. Once people try to buy more in aggregate than what is produced by the economy, inflation will instantly bring prices up to a level where consumption is brought down to the production capacity.
Also, this idea leaves out a core mechanism. A lot of people that gain nominal wealth tend to want to use that wealth to buy more spare time. They work less, retire early, etc. Increased taxes on wealth tends to only make such choices more rational.
And when people work less, less is produced in aggregate and so less can be consumed. This effect can easily be much greater than the reduction in consumption (private jets etc) within the billionaire class. In other words, the wealth transfer may actually lead to the contraintuitive effect that the ability of "normal people" to consume actually goes down.
In countries that take this kind of wealth transfer to the extreme (Venezuela, for instance) this is exactly what happens. At first, it seems nice, but pretty soon aggregate production goes down so much that everyone (except the corrupt leaders) become poor.
Now I'm not arguing for the other extreme, either. Too little demand in an economy with excess production capacity is not much better, and that's why the Ford-era stimulus approaches work in such economies (either through wages, Ford style, or government spending, Keynes style).
But the reality is that most western countries are already close to a perfect balance between the supply and demand sides (for the purpose of maximizing consumption ability). This is why the extra liquidity that has been provided recently has been leading to so much inflation, world wide.
In practice, though, if you want to transfer consumption ability to poor people, you have to transfer it from demographics that actually contribute to a large part of total consumption, which basically means the upper middle class. This is how it's done in Scandinavia (where I happen to live), and it actually does work for minimizing the Gini coefficients.
Venezuela actually has an income-gini-coefficient not very different from the USA, even if they're a lot poorer, while the only countries with total wealth close to the US while still having low inequality are social democracies in Europe.
> No, people buy more wealth with it. There are more and better ways to do that if your budget is larger.
Some will invest it, some will spend it. That's how it's always been. I'm sure you know some people with good incomes that still live paycheck to paycheck.
It is (mathematically) possible for individual people to work fewer hours with the workstation being manned for exactly the same amount of hours. It just requires paying salary to more people and higher administrative overhead. And slowing down creative types of work.
Whether it’s possible for enterprises to suck up the reductions in profit – that’s a different question. For developed societies being all about The Economy.
Yep. One thing I noticed on a recent plane trip (my first since the pandemic began) was that practically all of the food options involved ordering and paying via tablet or online (assisted by QR code). Front staff just had to bring the food, no time spent taking orders or doing the payment dance. I've seen this trend increasing in non-airport settings too, but it seems to have reached an apex there. Also saw a delivery bot trundling along the sidewalk in Madison, so that's a thing too.
As a customer, I have preferred this when it's an option. My order is wrong less often and I'm not sitting around waiting for a check when I'm ready to leave.
This and the other news that jobs will be lost to robotics, ML/AI doesn't add up--which is it? It's not like automation was to make up for retirees, it's to reduce costs so if anything we should be glad for retirees not taking jobs.
I don't mean to defend xenophobic attitudes against immigration, but labor shortage should lead to higher wages, so the argument against immigration that they depress wages would still hold.
Specifically, labor shortages lead to higher salaries for those groups who no longer have to compete with the type of immigrants that used to come, and only if the demand is limited.
But for most other groups, it may lead to a reduction in real salaries, due to price inflation. Fewer carpenters makes housing more expensive, and fewer tech workers can make many businesses (especially those outside core tech that still depend on such workers) more expensive to run.
And for workers in global hubs, one could argue that the concentration in one geographic location (including immigration) has actually lead to higher demand due to the increase in vibrancy and rate of innovation, leading to an increase in salaries.
It isn't. You are saying it "should"...wages in the UK are rising 4% slower than inflation, so there is real erosion of wages WHILST there is the biggest labour shortage in the history of the UK.
Just speaking generally, labour tends to be a market in which there is massive govt intervention (this is particularly the case in the UK). The normal rules of economics do not hold.
One very big factor in the UK is universal credit. You can Google this for yourself but the relevance here is that it acts as a wage subsidy for employers, this gets people into work but there is very little incentive to work more hours (despite the govt being able to remove universal credit from people who refuse to work more).
The UK has got read of the persistently high unemployment under left-wing govts of the 2000s but has failed to improve productivity. We employ more people but they are barely producing more on aggregate. Immigration, more women working (universal credit generally supports more women more), it is all coalescing, nothing is working properly.
> We employ more people but they are barely producing more on aggregate
Yes, and this is a management/underinvestment problem. Either better working practices need to be introduced or capital investment to substitute for labour.
...right because universal credit is a benefit target at poor people. Almost everyone who is on universal credit will receive a rent subsidy too (add it up: employer subsidy, landlord subsidy...everything is subsidized). The main issue with UC is that it is too generous and significantly reduces the incentive to work (and btw, UC was introduced specifically to increase the incentive to work and get rid of structural unemployment...it did the latter but has failed totally at the former...all we did is give employers a wage subsidy, and it didn't actually lead to more productivity or more anything).
No, it isn't. Because labour is not a substitute for a machine, you can get rid of a worker for a machine but a machine doesn't vote, can't riot, etc. You still need to feed and clothe a human. The UK has, literally, millions of people who need work and will be unable to support themselves with the economy at the current size. I don't know what the solution is, but we won't be able to grow our way out of this (we tried in the early 2010s, it didn't work, we tried in the 2000s, it didn't work). One issue is that we spend massive amounts of money on subsidies but don't invest in skills (a lot of the problem today is with older people...so improving education won't work there).
The scale of the underemployment is probably ~5m people...in a working population of 32m...it is far bigger than people think AND we are bringing 1m people a year into the economy whose fertility is significantly higher...it is a very big problem.
And giving someone a wage subsidy for low-paid work hasn't worked either.
Ask any person whether they deserve to earn more? Your point is completely devoid of any attempt to reason objectively. We have a minimum income system already (UC was designed to be a taper like NIT or UBI). People are quite happy to accept free food if it is being offered, but look at how much we spend on welfare...it is staggering (if you look at stats on food bank usage, you will also see that usage is highest amongst groups i.e. single people who don't receive the really valuable UC benefits i.e. CTCs...food bank usage is generally terribly uninformative though because if you give free food, people will take it).
Yes there is evidence of a hidden army of unemployed, that is why I mentioned repeatedly that people often don't understand.
If you are familiar with DWP stats, you would know that unemployment benefit is now being phased out totally. But some people on UC who do not work are not recorded as unemployed (this numbers 3.9m). And there is evidence that a lot of the people on ESA are claiming because they are also unable to work (at least, 500k iirc). And, of course, the point of UC was to get people back into work...but it has led to people earning £15k/year working min wage for 10 hours/week, that gap is money that would have been unemployment twenty years ago but isn't now. So we have swapped paying unemployment for a wage subsidy...again, you don't appear to understand this, the point was: we will pay people to work rather than sit on the dole (through offering a subsidy that lifts low wage), this should have led to more output...it didn't.
Btw, this is all obvious without having detailed knowledge of DWP statistics...you are saying how desperately poor everyone is...unemployment is the lowest it has been for five decades, how does that make sense to you? Wage growth is 4% below inflation, how does that make sense to you? Just saying lol, increase productivity...okay, that is what UC was for...this has been tried before, the problem is that there far too many people in the UK and not enough work (it is zero-sum because population growth is so far in excess of productivity growth).
Labor shortage is a capital euphemism for "the labor market isn't completely saturated and we are starting to have to return some of the rewards of work to the workers as opposed to the capital side". Personally I wouldn't allow any low skill immigration (happy to import lower priced doctors, etc in areas where costs have gone insane) until the standard of living for the poor increases to a more reasonable level, it has shifted to be far more in favor of capitol over the past 50 years or so.
In before the lump of labor folks wake up, low immigration can't simutainously explain why inflation is high (due to high wages) and also not cause lower wages when you increase it.
It's not so slanted. It just means jobs arent filled. It could be lack of able workers. It could be lack of pay. It could be lack of product market fit. Probably some combination of all. You're reading the rest in.
There were labor shortages to work the oil sands which is how you ended up with people making $30-40 hr to work McDonald’s (because if they didn’t pay that high the employees would go work the sands).
The article explains that the low-paid EU workers are no longer there to fill service sector jobs. Domestic employees won't accept those wages or working conditions.
We can see real time in the UK the effect that mass immigration has on wages: it keeps them way lower than the market rate otherwise.
You can already see it. The early 2010s was a period of very high population growth due to immigration, the economy has flatlined. This year has seen the same thing: rather than employ the large number of workless Brits, record visa numbers...no growth.
Btw, something interesting about the UK is that there has been zero growth in the natural population for (I believe) almost three decades. All the growth has been immigration and natural growth from immigrants (who often have significantly higher fertility).
That's most of the developed world now. People are having fewer kids and having them later, all or almost all population growth is being driven by the developing world.
Personally, I don't know how the UK puts up with it. My colleagues over there make 1/3 of what I make, have 1/3 the size house, and pay 5x as much for it.
Disposable income per capita is high relative to Europe. Prices are relatively low (at a cost, food is one of the highest inflation categories, meat highest within that...I still don't understand how chicken is so cheap, animal welfare is generally high...but it just shouldn't be this cheap...same thing with vegetables, retail is so consolidated that farmers have been getting short-changed for decades). Generally, it is good to be a consumer.
The issues that the UK are similar to a lot of developed countries just worse, and made worse by unusually bad govt interventions over decades. The frustrating thing about the UK is that a lot of the hard stuff is done well but it is just thrown away by nonsense policy in other areas (i.e. we have a great tertiary education system, and absolutely horrible primary/secondary so relatively few Brits can actually get value of more education...it is just nonsensical)
If planning/housing was solved conclusively, it would resolve 75% of the issues impacting consumers.
Interesting is that the children of immigrants adopt the reproductive habits of the native population, so their total fertility rate as a group drops below replacement from one generation to the next (unless very religious, but they see a drop too). See Canada, american hispanics, asian-americans (Korean, Vietnamese), muslims in Scandinavia, etc.
Which only works if the rate of immigration isn't increasing...but it is in the UK. This year was the largest gross immigration level (and it is widely acknowledged that net numbers are likely not accurate).
You see this in London and some cities outside (Glasgow is one) where there are primary schools with one or two white students (not making a racial point here, I making a point about immigration, Scotland is 99% white so these people have to be immigrants) in a class of 30 students.
Labour should always be in short supply and 'reassuringly expensive'. That way there is an incentive to replace it with machinery - which is where productivity and an improved standard of living comes from.
If a firm wants to use 'foreigners' then they should build the factory where the foreigners live and repatriate the profits. That way social capital is maintained.
We shouldn't judge economic success by how far away from your mum you have to live to get a job.
If you look at the NHS, this is clearly happening because training is so expensive here (the govt pay for it). Easier to hire someone from West Africa or East Asia whose training cost £1k than hire someone from the UK who will require, at least, £50k+ for training (and ofc, when Covid hit...some of these people just left).
This is multi-faceted. The rise in health problems is related to the collapse in the NHS. Early retirement was related to the Covid stimmy (and you are seeing people come back). There is a massive issue with training, with how companies hire...but it is also the case that high levels of immigration aren't helping (particularly at the low-skill end, the NLW is £10/hour...how are you supposed to compete with someone who will work for £3/hour cash-in-hand because they have govt-subsidized accommodation and don't pay tax).
I don't see how this gets fixed. If you talk to most Brits they will tell you that H2/21 was the best labour market for workers for years, there was unprecedented job switching...that happened to follow a period when immigration was low, ignoring this kind of stuff because you think immigration is always good (it isn't for the countries that are left with no workers either) is committing the same error that you accuse others of.
I London cost of living makes any low payed job unlivable. I wonder of the trend is that people start to realize this? Or that it have gotten so much worse compared to 10 years ago.
I imagine if you’re willing to live four to a bedroom things get substantially more affordable. There are plenty of people who are willing to do that, though fewer in the legal economy. If building housing was legal that demand would be satisfied by new building but that’s democracy for you. The people get what they want, good and hard.
I’m not sure you can treat the lack of affordable housing as an indictment of democracy as an institution. Of course there’s more nuance to the issue, but it’s not as simple as people get what they want.
It’s why the ruling class keeps importing people from the third world where people have far lower expectations for living standards. In your example of London that manifested itself by the low paying jobs that serve the support the ruling class being filled by people willing to live in multi generational family units and far more people per square footage. It’s not all that different in places like Paris either.
What is really going on OSS that aristocracy and slavery are, and really already have been reconstituted in a different form.
Importing/exploring brown people to serve the will and whims of the ruling class at the expense of the native/ their own population. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s of course exactly the foundations of slavery and aristocracy.
And yes, it has gotten worse because the process by which the ruling class had defrauded and swindled trillions of dollars and euros from the pockets of their own abused populations has not faced any opposition at all worth mentioning, let alone something serious.
But it could be generationally different than many industries with a disproportionate number of the workers being younger genX and millennial compared to other industries. So I don’t see it as weird.
> My hunch is that many tech cos will soon realize that they're short-staffed too, and will have to start to hire again.
Tech companies have a staff distribution problem: Meta, Twitter, Google - they all had way too many engineers chasing after the "next big thing" to achieve an early foothold and then expand the massive scale of these companies to utter dominance, while they neglected stuff like content moderation or customer support.
Yep, that has been the difference between companies that grew and the ones that didn't (if you look at Monzo, they needed to hire hundreds of devs overnight...they created an actual HR strategy rather than just posting a listing on Indeed, running bad interviews based around random questions and probing for social cues, and then hiring no-one).
Tech jobs in the UK aren't even particularly high skill, tons of applicants for every role but hiring is run by people who have never hired before, have no business knowledge, and end up rejecting everyone...and then they lobby the govt for easing visa rules...it is all very puzzling.
Btw...there are businesses in the UK that hire almost anyone with a degree, put them through a three-month bootcamp, and then hire them out £70k/year pro-rata rate. According to most tech companies, this should be impossible...yet these guys do it. The skills required aren't even complex, and we are struggling...shocking.
Reminder: there is no such thing as shortage in a free market. The market, in it's infinite wisdom, will supply exactly the right number of jobs/workers. If you want more, you need only raise prices. This was a cold hard fact of reality for decades when jobs were scarce and workers suffered. Now it is a cold hard fact for employers.
This year that was coordinated lobbying to increase visa numbers to the UK. The result was that 2022 was the highest level of immigration...ever.
And, of course, this started out with only being "skilled labour" but was quickly expanded to professions earning £20k/year. Productivity has gone nowhere, there are millions either unemployed or under-employed (there is reason to believe that the UK is under-reporting unemployment significantly due to how the welfare system works)...quite simply, whether you believe immigration is bad or good in theory, the supply of labour is massively in excess of demand in the UK.
So you have someone on a student visa from West Africa (this is overwhelmingly the source of this problem), they bung £10k to someone who runs a "university", they bring over their extended family (5-10 people), and there is basically no way to deport them now even once the student visa ends.
I agree, the statistics are basically unknown precisely...but the context would indicate that the size of flows are understated (the reproduction rate of non-migrants in the UK is not enough to produce population growth...since 1990, UK population is up 18%).
They are also required to be financially self sufficient : "As part of the visa application dependants must have sufficient funds to cover living costs in the UK. This is £680 for each month the visa will be valid, up to a maximum of 9 months. This is a total of £6,120 per dependant if the visa will be granted for 9 months or more"
> basically no way to deport them now even once the student visa ends
Bearing in mind the hostile environment - if your visa has expired you can no longer work, rent or have a bank account - and the fact that the government can and does deport people; I think this isn't true.
That very page you linked says "However, the estimates of emigration by
former student immigrants are experimental, and the ONS advises against
using them to calculate net migration of international students"
Because the UK does not do passport checks on exit, unlike Schengen, it's impossible to properly count people who've emigrated again.
No, it isn't dependent children but dependents...very big distinction in practice.
Being financially self-sufficient makes no difference because they are still using more resources. We aren't selling citizenship like St Kitts, it isn't a car boot sale.
What hostile environment? Every other country in Europe is deporting Albanians, we can't. Denmark is returning Syrians, we can't. If your visa expires, there are ways to claim right to remain if you are already here.
Okay, and that is why I gave the gross number...which is the highest number ever. And again, the evidence suggests that the UK is retaining more students than expected now (it was the opposite a few years ago).
They can't get a visa. They come as dependents of someone who has a visa. You just need to read the news, the govt is producing legislation to stop this.
Congress is certainly willing to bust strikes in order to keep people from getting sick days. Finally something both sides can agree on! Bipartisanship. As long as it's all about crushing the power of labor.
Sorry, The "price" I was referring to was the price of labour (aka wages), not the end price for the consumer. How the business funds that is up to them and I agree completely about cutting other expenses...
No, you just misunderstood the comment. They are saying that workers are always hit with the "the free market will sort everything out" when workers are suffering but the same concept doesn't seem to apply in a worker's market.
My comment is partly tongue in cheek but also serious.
I don't honestly believe in the infinite wisdom of markets. I like markets. But they're not infinitely wise. That is the peak "/s"
But at the same time, those who live by X can die by X. And since plenty of people were happy with the market's wisdom when it helped them, (like many CEOs, the current governing party in the UK etc), they cannot change course now without being hypocrites...
In a truly free market, economy of scale rules, and all workers with non-unique skills will be working at the margin, and so will any smaller businesses that survive.
You can try unions, but then they get greedy and you end up like the US auto industry did fifty years ago.
If only there were some agreement or treaty possible in which young workers from neighboring countries could easily (without red tape) come to provide low cost labor, and even allow retirees to easily move to lower cost areas.
If there was already adequate housing for everyone then yeah, cause otherwise you're going to make getting housing harder for the countries poor, just look at the cost of living in Paris
The UK's housing issues are largely a housing policy problem.
Its not that the UK has a shortage of accommodation units, its largely that the free market rewards property value speculation over actually occupying those accommodation units in areas of high demand, and having actual tenants is seen as a liability.
There is an imperial assload of empty residential units across the UK (and especially in London) where the owners are deriving greater value from pure speculation than rent seeking.
There's other aspects to the issue than this, but that's one of the bigger issues that could be resolved with policy changes to penalize the fucking absurd practice of keeping properties empty.
It makes no sense for these young workers to come. I know people from Eastern Europe use to come to work in UK because even the low cost labor was enough for them to get some money for back home, but the neighboring countries have a much higher cost of living than Eastern Europe, so it is economically not attractive. Also moving permanently to UK is not attractive for a bunch of reasons, from weather to weird laws. Did you know more people are arrested yearly in UK for posting online on social media than in Iran?
> Did you know more people are arrested yearly in UK for posting online on social media than in Iran?
This isn't exactly true.
The Mal Comms laws are a fucking travesty, but the reporting on them has tended to be wildly inaccurate.
Most incidents of "suspected mal comms" are resolved with what's called "words of advice", followed by no further action.
Words of Advice happens like so: you call Karen a slag on Facebook, Karen reports you to the cops, the cops are obliged to "do something", so a neighborhood officer swings by and let's you know its been reported, don't do it again, no further action is taken.
More serious cases tend to involve an invitation for a voluntary interview, usually resulting in no further action or (rarely) a caution or (even rarer still) the CPS deciding to prosecute.
Voluntary interview is a bit of a misnomer - if you refuse to come in for said interview, there is two possible outcomes. Either it gets no further actioned and binned off, or they now have the option to arrest you for the purposes of an interview.
Most of the time when someone is actually arrested for "malicious communication" its something high profile and/or they already refused that so called "voluntary interview" and/or they have been repeatedly given said words of advice.
Personally I think the UK is a fucking hellscape and a police state, but I find the online commentary about the Malicious Communication laws - especially on primarily American forums - wildly inaccurate.
You mean a sink of human capital that would in the process destroy the social fabric of the neighboring countries by robbing it of their best, while at the same time give no reason for a country's most profitable companies to feel inclined to raise how much they are willing to pay for labor?
Or you meant a way to ignore that a country does have a way to make young workers and expand towards attracting outside young workers, while ignoring the reasons the local sources of young workers fail?
"socio-political degeneration absorbs and neutralizes a decaying trend of techno-economic advance"?
I'm so glad to hear that your primary concern around immigration is the impact on other countries.
Good news! It turns out that while your thesis sounds reasonable it is in fact not the case.
Here in the US our two largest immigrant groups are people from Indian and China. It turns out that both of these countries seemed to have benefit greatly from the exchange. While many very talented migrants have chosen to remain in the US, a sizable number of taken the skills and experience they've learned here and brought them back to their home countries.
Not only that but during our period of highest immigration, salaries from those very companies hiring the most migrant workers were some of the highest in the world, much higher than typically seen in, for example, the UK. At the same time we've also seen salaries rise in India and China.
I'm guessing on seeing that your theoretical concerns don't pan out in the real world you'll likely change your stance on the issue. If not that there must be some other logic I'm missing that is guiding your opinions on the topic.
History shows that when goods and people can move around between two regions, both regions prosper. This is exactly what has happened with USA <-> China and India. These are literally the 3 gigantic economies that are growing rapidly today.
That's an argument to observe prosperity happen, not to ignore failure to raise a generation of workers nor to ignore that people see reasons to leave their countries.
> I'm so glad to hear that your primary concern around immigration is the impact on other countries
You are not. Rather, you are being facetious.
> It turns out that while your thesis sounds reasonable it is in fact not the case.
It's not a thesis, but meant to derail a conversation, implying there's one true answer just like the comment I was replying to did. And yours as well, as you don't address what I raised.
> Here in the US
The UK is not the US.
> It turns out that both of these countries seemed to have benefit greatly from the exchange.
So you agree damaging the country that provides young workers is bad. Thank you.
> While many very talented migrants have chosen to remain in the US, a sizable number of taken the skills and experience they've learned here and brought them back to their home countries.
So to have some immigrants go back is desirable? Can you phrase it as policy? Something like "we don't want you to remain here for as long as too many of your cohort do the same". It goes against the comment I was replying, that specifically asked for low barrier to move and work.
> Not only that but during our period of highest immigration, salaries from those very companies hiring the most migrant workers were some of the highest in the world, much higher than typically seen in, for example, the UK. At the same time we've also seen salaries rise in India and China.
It says nothing about what they would be should there have been not as much immigration.
> I'm guessing on seeing that your theoretical concerns don't pan out in the real world you'll likely change your stance on the issue. If not that there must be some other logic I'm missing that is guiding your opinions on the topic.
You missed that this was not a conversation, and you did not make it one. The comment I replied to assumed there was only one answer. And you assume all the counters I raised are misplaced because they can be countered with your comment. Answer my main points.
Does brain drain not exist? Do you want to exfiltrate the young generation from worse off countries? Do you want to incentivize young workers to leave their native countries instead of whatever else you must think young workers can contribute there? Do you want to signal to the local young workers they are wrong in refusing the local salaries because someone from abroad will take them? Do you want to signal to the local population that there's no incentive in raising the next generation because the solution is to have people born and educated abroad to come here to work temporarily and then abandon (with their savings, I assume) the country once they had enough? Do want to continue to degrade the social fabric by insisting in economic advancement instead of fixing what leads to lack of workers?
Of course, I've seen it within regions of the US. Imagine how insane it would be to say that NY city should resist hiring workers from NJ because it hurts small NJ towns. My experience is that the root cause of brain drain is the regional government, keeping talented individuals there only stifles the growth of those individuals, it doesn't improve the region. In fact we see this locally a lot, many more people do move back to NJ from NYC than do to PA from NYC since the former tends to have a lot more to offer returners than the latter.
> Do you want to exfiltrate the young generation from worse off countries?
Of course! From what I've seen either two paths are followed. When local governments have no plans to improve the country they lose all their talent and those individuals succeed. The other path is the China/India path, they improve their economies through exchange eventually become attractive and more youth return and newer generations are more likely to stay.
> Do you want to incentivize young workers to leave their native countries instead of whatever else you must think young workers can contribute there?
Absolutely! It's one of the reasons the US has been able to rise to the level of technological success it has. Most of our greatest scientists where fleeing countries in decay. My experience both locally and globally is that talent staying in an area that is in decline only hurts the talent. Typically it is the governments of failing countries that try to halt immigration out first.
> Do you want to signal to the local young workers they are wrong in refusing the local salaries because someone from abroad will take them?
Yes! I've worked in poor US towns and I always encouraged the best and brightest students to go to a major metro area, expand their skills and get paid more. Would you not encourage a brilliant student from an area of the UK in decline to head off to London to further their career? If the poor town shows improvement they can return and improve the town and live with their families, if the town does not improve then they at least don't waste their skills.
> Do you want to signal to the local population that there's no incentive in raising the next generation because the solution is to have people born and educated abroad to come here to work temporarily and then abandon (with their savings, I assume) the country once they had enough?
I'm not sure the logic of this question. Again, I live in the US where nearly the entire population has their origins in immigration at one point in time. We've never had a challenge with raising the next generation while being open to immigration. Our biggest problem is not immigrants coming in, but jobs going out (as far as manufacturing goes). Your critique of "abandonment" also doesn't make sense given your earlier points. I have plenty of Chinese friends who have stayed in the US and start the path to citizenship and plenty who have gone back to take leading roles in Chinese companies. I consider both of these paths to be a net win.
> Do want to continue to degrade the social fabric by insisting in economic advancement instead of fixing what leads to lack of workers?
I think by definition nobody wants to "degrade the social fabric", and I'm not sure what you mean by this? Do you mean you don't want foreign people mixing with your locals? Again, as an American my experience is that diverse ethnic influence is precisely what makes communities stronger. One of the favorite parts of my neighborhood is the Polish butcher (I have no Polish background), I love being able to go to a Chinese neighborhood and not hear a word of English for an entire afternoon.
Can you point to a single example of a country that has halted immigration and "fixed what leads to a lack of workers?"
It seems like the UK is experimenting with tighter controls but from what I've witnessed it&...
> Of course, I've seen it within regions of the US. Imagine how insane it would be to say that NY city should resist hiring workers from NJ because it hurts small NJ towns.
Yes, how insane would it be if some entity or some coordination between the two states existed that would allow both to prosper, in the eventuality that it became true that New Jersey human capital was leaking into New York? Not too insane, I imagine. Do you want New York not to feel responsible for the incentives it creates in the region? Or New Jersey to feel happy to leak generations? Maybe New York could but New Jersey and just use it a breeding grounds. Maybe administer their schools and hospitals.
> My experience is that the root cause of brain drain is the regional government.
The regional government of New Jersey did not not make New York the center of the world. It's a feedback loop.
> keeping talented individuals there only stifles the growth of those individuals
Find a use for them. It's people that could build community bonds. Would you say the person with the best potential should be placed where they can enact the most impact in the world? How about every 25 years we scout the world for the latest litter of humans and shuffle them about to where they can have the most impact? Sounds like a great reductio ad absurdum, we could take all the "talented individuals" (borderline eugenics here, be careful) and just shove them into the best pipelines. People are just talents, are they? They are not. It's not a closed matter. That countries bordering (lol, India?) the UK leak good people is something for India to prevent and for the UK to notice what it signals to the locals. Not to be ignored and up to the free market, free flow of capital (human or not).
> [exfiltrate?] Of course!
Another path is to understand that things create feedback loops, and the feedback loop of "people leave" is "governments have no plans for people that leave". You seem to have it down to "let's ignore the present and let things even out later". It's an answer, in that letting a fire burn down is an answer to a fire. It's giving up. Just be clear in your answers: "everyone, listen, we do not care about your particular situations and your particular worries today, because tomorrow someone will have managed to reach the future and live there, and it will be good for the economy and for them, maybe. Die out, emigrate, I can't care any less."
> [incentivize young workers to leave their native countries?] My experience both locally and globally is that talent staying in an area that is in decline only hurts the talent. Typically it is the governments of failing countries that try to halt immigration out first.
I mentioned nothing that implied I would halt immigration. I raise concerns I hoped you would agree with. Instead, you welcome them. Your experience is the experience of a factory. Inputs, outputs, time passes. Life is not a factory, it's the shared day to day. Yes, let's make everyone believe the standard is to move around, not to make places livable.
> Would you not encourage a brilliant student from an area of the UK in decline to head off to London to further their career?
One person. We discuss incentives at the scale of countries. The purpose of the area of the UK in decline is not to decline.
> if the town does not improve then they at least don't waste their skills.
Yes, why would anyone waste their skills by living with their families. Maybe people should even be made to forget they have families, if it dampens their individual intuition (lol) to go where they can best be exploited by whatever is built there.
> Again, I live in the US
Ok.
> I think by definition nobody wants to "degrade the social fabric", and I'm not sure what you mean by this? Do you mean you don't want foreign people mixing with your locals?
You managed to include the implication of xenophobia, leading m...
Only works as a temporary solution. Eventually you'll run out of wage-slaves even if you hire from the entire planet as young people can't afford having children with those salaries.
What if shareholders were happy with a bit less money, and companies used that money instead to provide a decent wage? Seems more sustainable to me than mass migration of the working poor.
> But who's is going to do this? Who's going to push this change?
Look around you, the economy is trying to rebalance itself but leaders around the world via central banks and immigration policies are fighting it tooth and nail. Leave it alone and higher wages will follow shortly.
Theoretically speaking, labour shortage should affect economy in a way that wages rise to attract more people, right? Why aren't we seeing something like that?
Rising wages cause massive panic about inflation. That causes rate rises in order to reduce demand. Also, wage rises can't be as easily negotiated in the public sector, which is why so many parts of the UK are on strike around now.
I believe the second chapter of the linked report went into considerable detail about how covid had primary and secondary effect in a very small range of industries and otherwise had little long term effect in other industries.
As a primary effect of covid, the public has been scared the public away from the healthcare field, which was collapsing and is now collapsing even faster. Its a good time to get out of healthcare and a bad time to get into healthcare. If they would just hurry up and collapse the system quickly so as to enter the stable rebuilding phase, then they could get workers.
As a secondary effect of covid, massive income instability in hospitality has scared people away from that field. Those jobs are all going to be replaced by apps and service robots or go out of business anyway. Conveniently many ag jobs opened with brexit and that field is doing MUCH better than healthcare or hospitality. Hospitality used to be very low pay, but at least it was extremely reliable. With covid lockdowns that job could go away in a sneeze and they're all being replaced by apps and robots anyway. Hospitality is the new bottom of the barrel job and as such will always have staffing problems going forward until it goes away entirely. A society can function quite well without overpaying someone else to hand you a beer or kebabs to avoid getting it yourself LOL.
> Theoretically speaking, labour shortage should affect economy in a way that wages rise to attract more people, right? Why aren't we seeing something like that?
Because attracting more people into the labor market assumes that there are people sitting on the sidelines, waiting for higher wages. The labor force in most western countries is already tapped out, exhausted and cannot do any more work.
All the above I’ve seen multiple people (in each bucket) retire for in the past two years. I also know multiple young people who switched roles for the same reason.
One buddy of mine worked in an out patient surgery center on contract (he’d work / sell machines for a fee per-surgery). After a 12-18 months of sparse work he had to switch jobs (and was living on food stamps at this point). I hired him for odd jobs to help him pay the mortgage. He started his own business and is doing okay now ~12 months in.
Automation (particularly of agriculture) should be the focus of national strategy.
God forbid we return to the 20th-century solution of throwing more bodies at the problem (uncontrolled mass immigration), which will only exacerbate the underlying issue as immigrants settle and age.
The reality is that the first waves of immigration from the EU (skilled workers from developed nations) were hugely beneficial for the UK economy. But as the EU expanded into destitute former Soviet states, later waves of immigration were not the same demographic, from an economic point of view.
At some point we have to weigh up the benefits of cheaper fruit and veg, nannies and cleaners versus the cost of providing subsidised housing and wildly expensive public services to immigrant workers on the min wage, who are a net burden on the Treasury. It just doesn't stack up, from the perspective of productive taxpayers.
Housing and public services currently have a crisis of demand, not supply. The Tories increased the NHS budget by £40bn in real terms since 2010, but it's still unable to cope with the weight of demand.
The British people have been going around for years now, holding a smoking handgun, trying to figure out how this painful hole in their foot got there.
First off, the retirement age is ludicrous anyway. I believe it is now 67 for men in the UK. The average years of good health in this country is 63, but in some parts of the country is as low as 55 [1]. Who wants to essentially work until they get sick then keel over and die? People are wising up to the fact it’s absolutely ridiculous and getting out and enjoying life while they still can rather than putting more money in the pocket of some shareholders. There is no community solidarity when your supposed leaders have been raking in over 20%+ pay rises for years whilst worker pay has declined in real terms, especially when inflation is now what it is. It’s an absolute disgrace what they are trying to fob off nurses and other public workers with atm. Not to mention the fact that working conditions are dire because some MBA has decided all quality of life metrics are irrelevant and all that matters is the bottom line.
Good on the people who are dropping out. Make the exploiters squirm.
Yeah, I'd like to see an occasional article describing the same facts as an "opportunity abundance" instead of a "labor shortage". Isn't anyone in the media or government on the side of working people?
From a worker's perspective, having lots of available jobs and the leverage to negotiate for better pay seems like a good thing, especially after decades of decreases in real worker pay.
> lots of available jobs and the leverage to negotiate for better pay
The market is always portrayed as efficient money-for-time but reality is the market is often based around risk minimization and pounding square pegs into round holes and "proving" there's no one available for our immigration or other government program paperwork.
Plenty of openings are posted with no intention of filling them.
A shortage occurs when the buyer (in the case of labour, the employer) is prevented from paying more. While there are certain labour segments, healthcare in particular, where government often prevents buyers from paying more, there is no real constraint on the general labour pool in this regard.
This means that the only reason there is a shortage is because labour is choosing to not charge higher rates for their work. When the media/government states that there is a labour shortage they are saying: "Hey workers, charge more already!" If that's not pro-labour, I don't know what is.
This isn't how governments or corporations define a labor shortage. Their working definition appears to be "businesses can't find workers at the (low) price point they previously could." This is typically then used as justification for undermining workers through increased immigration rates, temporary foreign worker programs, raising the retirement age, and other policy interventions that benefit the shareholding class over workers.
That's not how anyone else defines shortage, though. It literally contradicts the meaning of shortage. So, when the message is spread to the people they are going to take from it that they aren't charging enough, even if that wasn't the original intent of the message. And, indeed, claims of a labour shortage do end up met with higher labour prices.
While I agree with you that there are potential upsides, the problem is that this shift has happened so incredibly rapidly that markets and policies haven't had a chance to adapt. The boomer retirement wave has been anticipated for a while, and it was happening pre-COVID, but the pandemic supercharged things.
While I've not personally dug into the numbers, the reporting I've come across suggests decent portion of the inflation we've seen wasn't a result of labour shortages leading to wage spirals and supply shocks.
That inflation then destroys any gains made due to salary increases.
>Isn't anyone in the media or government on the side of working people?
Definitely not. Here in the EU some newspapers published articles saying "the hyper inflation is caused by workers earning too high wages, pushing the prices up. So if we cut down on wage growth, and we cut down on unemployment benefits to force people to take any job, we can solve this"
It's definitely not caused by opportunistic companies and conglomerates that compete on who can raise prices the fastest, seeing massive profits and shareholder returns in this market, especially in the energy sector. /s
Just a thought, there is technology available today that allows a worker in say in Nigeria to make a bowl of salad for city worker in the UK. Be it a lot slower than a human but perhaps more accurate.
This type of 'teleprescence' technology from what I have seen is evoloving fast, where things cant be fully automated or a human might need to step in, this concept opens up a countries labour market in a whole new way.
Of course the knowedge/service sector has been doing this for over a decade via outsourcing.
I'm fairly certain that I'll never be able to "retire" in the conventional sense.
It may be that I'll be forced out of my career somewhere around 60 or so (I'm currently 40) due to ageism. However, I'll probably just have to pivot to a different career at that point.
I'll have savings and investment money to live off of, but probably not enough to sustain a reasonable quality of life until I expire. And everything I'm paying into Social Security will probably end up taken away by the government for some concocted reason or other before I can use it. So, that means I don't get to retire.
> It may be that I'll be forced out of my career somewhere around 60 or so (I'm currently 40) due to ageism
If this is in reference to programming, somebody will have to maintain the mountains of C++ that all the younger devs don't want to learn.
Personally, I'll probably be working 10-20h a week or so by 60 as consultant. Your retirement burn rate is much, much lower if you have cash coming in, even if it isn't covering all expenses.
>somebody will have to maintain the mountains of C++ that all the younger devs don't want to learn
Don't know how old you are but why do I have the feeling that by the time you're 60 the following could happen:
"The AI tool subscription we have is already trained on the mountains of existing high quality C++ code written by seasoned graybeards such as yourself, so thanks for training it, but sorry sir, your services are no longer required." "Watch this: Hey ChatGPT 9.0, fix this codebase. Done." "What we're looking for is devs experienced in the latest MonkeButt frontend framework as it just came out so there's no trained models for it yet." "Enjoy your early retirement sir" :)
Yes it still requires someone with understanding to decide that the "autocompletion" value makes sense.
I might start writing the most obtuse code ever so that all the models get skewed by ludicrous amounts of template nonsense, overuse of auto and tonnes of lambda functions where an ordinary function would do (or maybe many static struct with operator() to confuse matters and make the call stack obtuse). That'll guarantee job security.
I've seen a few high-profile younger Rust programmers doing C++ work since mozilla laid so many off. I think younger people will do that work going forward, especially if there are too many workers relative to jobs, itself a product of industry "learn to code" marketing. As an older worker now I guess I could do Cobol or something, but that stuff is ancient even for me (I did use it for a week in college).
The link is a report of a report of many reports. I read, well, skimmed, the linked secondary source, although I didn't even examine the primary sources:
Its extremely sector specific. No shortage at all in FIRE or retail, huge shortage in hospitality and healthcare.
Most of the hypothesis in the report seems to boil down to COVID caused everything followed by raw data disproving that. hospitality is extremely low paying but USED to be stable reliable income, but now someone in China sneezes and your income disappears for months, so people will do anything to avoid hospitality as a field. It seems the low end job of choice is agriculture now. As for health care, I suspect that however trendy and cool it is to compliment our brave health care workers by making congratulatory social media posts for karma, very few people want to get involved in that mess. Much like voluntary soldier recruitment after an unpopular war is an uphill battle for awhile.
A truly remarkable number of older people are out of the job market on disability. Cardio trends are flat (edited: slope 0) to declining so its probably not obesity related although the UK is certainly not getting thinner? Mental health is on a flat growth rate (edited, flat line upward slope not slope being zero) of about 2% additional of the population per decade which is starting to add up significantly over time. Fewer students than ever are going to school while working, the market seems too competitive to risk their grades by working and/or student loans make more sense than working. Between those very young and very old ages there is little change.
There is some inevitability to the UK problems, because as per Chapter 3's intro, the current problem is caused by a 2% decline in working age labor force participation rate, which would have happened anyway in a decade due to the 2% increase in mental health disability cases per decade. I mean something like the future is distributed unevenly, and in a sense this is all a straight line extrapolation of more than decades old trends and the UK is economically speaking in 2032 rather than 2022. Everything happening now was going to happen in a couple years, not now. Any surprise about the situation is fake PR.
Several graphs explaining access to health care in the UK is in a long term collapse, 1 in 20 adults are on a waiting list of some sort, etc. The report strongly implies without stating that ongoing collapse of the medical system is not helping old people stay in the workforce.
It seems most of the UKs problems are frozen by divide and conqueror approach; after the health care system completely collapses and is replaced (by what?) the situation will resolve itself, but interests on all sides are too entrenched to fix anything until after it breaks.
TL;DR: for the most part, people don't work because they can. People who saved enough, refuse to work is exploitative, toxic, sweatshop industries like deliveries and catering? Big surprise!
>Changes to the structure of migration have had an impact on vacancies, which recently hit record high levels. In recent years many EU workers, who filled lower paid roles (especially in sectors like agriculture and hospitality), have left the UK. In numerical terms, their departure has been counterbalanced by the arrival of non-EU workers, who were granted visas under the new immigration system which prioritises skilled workers. This has contributed to a mismatch within the labour force, accentuating vacancies and labour shortages in certain sectors.
Good for them. I hope whoever filled those lower paid roles found a better life elsewhere. I can't stand the false equivalency between immigration and labour shortage. I live in Italy and our media is always sharing sob stories from tycoons who "just can't find hard-working employees anymore". The issue is that the very foundation of our economy is built on masses of disenfranchised serfs forced to e.g. pick veggies for 3€/h. but instead of questioning the dehumanizing working conditions of blue-collar jobs, the real problem is always finding more suckers who have no other choice.
194 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadIn a lot of cases, the company owners rake in hundreds of thousands to millions and sometimes billions of dollars a year in profit. The benefit of becoming so large that competition barely exists or simply cannot keep up with economies of scale. Even if you're barely making one cent of profit per unit sold: if you manage to scale up so massively you can sell 100 million pieces of it, you'll still make a million dollars profit overall.
Most of the current crop of companies being seen as "unbeatable monopolies" did not exist a quarter centuries ago or they were small startups people did not give a chance.
But they persisted and won. It can be done again. It is done every day, but just not by people saying "it can't be done".
Oh, and not to mention that while $VENDOR is willing to give Wal-Mart a special deal for, say, a bottle of soda for 20 cents in exchange for Wal-Mart placing an order for a million bottles, they will not give that same price to your small corner store. You cannot compete with that without going into loss leader territory, which is highly dangerous.
I mean, clearly that’s not true or else we’d live in a world where old companies don’t die and no new companies come about.
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/4916/umfrage/...
Have you ever tried? You can always compete - your imagination is the only limit. Innovate your way against established players for fun and success.
Effectively, you're asking us to solve the income gap by becoming billionaires ourselves. Can you see the irony in that?
Of course very few would succeed or become billionaires but in the process they will create jobs and companies and tremendous value for a society that needs that much more than it needs the current wailing and gnashing of teeth against the "evil billionaires" that tried and succeeded.
P.S.: What makes you think Amazon had no competition ? Were there no other booksellers, or generalist stores selling books ?
Yes, and look how entrenched they have become. Search engines, for example, are dominated by Google holding 80%+ for well over a decade. Even Bing, with Microsoft's deep cash coffers, can't get above 9% [1]. Facebook just went ahead and bought the biggest threats (Whatsapp, Instagram) or copied the features of competitors to destroy them (Snapchat). The only threat in the social media marketplace comes from TikTok, who are backed by the Chinese government. Twitter is tiny and Musk is driving it to the ground. Amazon, while "only" at 38% market share in e-commerce, still leaves everyone else including Wal-Mart in the dust [2]. Microsoft utterly dominates the PC and laptop market [3] as well as the office suite market [4].
Even with these multi-billion companies fighting against each other, they can't manage to land any kind of significant blows - so how should a small startup stand a chance?
> P.S.: What makes you think Amazon had no competition ? Were there no other booksellers, or generalist stores selling books ?
Amazon had no competition online, mostly because the competition was asleep at the wheel. And by the time the competition woke up, it was too late - and now "classic" book stores are dying out left and right, not to mention other kinds of specialized stores. Here in Munich, all the small electronics specialty stores closed down, even famous chain Conrad closed down because they couldn't compete any more.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-of-t...
[3] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
[4] https://blogs.gartner.com/craig-roth/2022/08/02/market-share...
For instance :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33751805
What makes you think they didn't? There are hundreds of thousands (or way more) who 'failed' for every self-made billionaire.
It is not possible for everyone to successfully exploit others. You need some victims, too.
If you start from the assumption that people should live and die under reasonable expectations of health, growth and participation in labor, able to bring up their children to aspire to a better living standards than their own, then progressive policies will make sense.
If you start from the assumption that people deserve the life they have and everyone can pull themselves from their bootstraps, and only thing people lack is ambition and hard work, then the progressive policies will sound like stealing from the successful people.
I personally believe that corporations should exist to serve their customers, their workers and then the shareholders, in that order.
> people should live and die under reasonable expectations of health, growth and participation in labor, able to bring up their children to aspire to a better living standards
But I have enough real-world experience and I've been lied to by enough politicians to know that we will never get that through policies. We can only get it though the same mechanisms that pulled us out of poverty and exploitation and offered us this amazing bounty of choice we are enjoying every day in non-government-controlled-domains: free markets.
This is why I support less restrictions and more opportunities for companies and startups.
> I personally believe that corporations should exist to serve their customers, their workers and then the shareholders, in that order.
I do not believe these are separate classes and instead they should mix together instead: anybody should be able to become shareholder at the company they work or consume from, start their own company or simply work for whomever they want.
How rich are your parents?
But I have nothing against people who grew up under a humane system, got help from parents or VCs and made something of themselves. Because I know plenty of bums who had everything they ever needed and did absolutely nothing with it.
Though that they are still focusing on growth as a goal is somewhat perplexing, since this is what got us in this situation (and we are going to pay for it for the next decades, centuries, even millenia...)
However, there’s actually a lot of demand for hair styling. Maybe even enough demand to fill all those salons given how long my wife waits for an appointment.
But there’s not enough staff to satisfy all the demand. Chairs in the salons sit empty as you walk past.
So what’s happening? There’s already salons with empty chairs, there’s still excess demand and… new salons are being opened!
According to n=1 (i.e. anec-data), staff who used to work at an existing salon are opening their own. Meanwhile existing salon is proclaiming to all customers that no one wants to work. I don’t know how they square this world view with their ex staff opening their own salon.
What about a coop shop?
Why? It's the same workers cutting and styling hair. as when they worked in the existing salons. Many of their customers follow "their" hairdresser to whatever new venue they work at.
>> What about a coop shop?
There's another existing model for temporary hairdressers where they begin working at a salon and they keep all income from all clients they serve. In turn they pay the owner a fixed price to rent their chair for the day. AIUI this is no longer popular but i don't know the specifics. It seems to me that renting a chair should be a lot cheaper than starting up & marketing a salon.
Whether or not customers follow is a complex social issue, assuming an average haircut.
But, it’s human nature to try to do better. Most small businesses fail fairly quickly.
Renting out chairs is a reasonable business model, but it’s not the same as a co-op, because the proprietor gets greedy (or is perceived to be so) and bossy.
I don't think that follows - the business rates, heating costs, energy usage, insurance, etc. will all be cheaper in the 2-chair shops than the 4-chair shop. The 4-chair shop just has extra chairs (but they remain unused since there aren't staff available to fill them) . At the same price point for customers, it's less viable.
If it's a co-op, all expenses and profits will be split among the members. (I'm assuming that the co-op members are limited to the stylists in this case.) The business is not likely to be pursued as diligently as it would be if it was a sole proprietorship, as an individual member will not be proportionately compensated for making an outsized effort. If the co-op is large enough to require a full-time employed manager and other staff, then it's just a privately held corporation, and will perform as such.
Full-on co-op wouldn't work if 1 hair dresser is super popular and 2 others are not so popular. It's a very personal business and a big part of it is one's own contacts. Now if only salon is co-op and hairdressers have to decide together how much they charge per chair to split among themselves... That may get interesting. If hairdresser pays a %, then worse performers may get a chunk of better-off profits. If hairdresser pays for chair days, then worse performers may be subsidising the better ones.
Working at a salon for minimum wage + tips is not a sustainable lifestyle, so you get empty chairs in those salons.
All it takes to open a salon is the ability to work there and easy credit. So you get a lot of salons.
Think of the fast food model. The owner of a McD used to make $200K+/yr, so there is intense demand to open new fast food restaurants. The employees make less than it takes to survive even with massive government program assistance, so the restaurants are empty with help wanted signs posted and early closing hours and drive-thru only. Then the prices have to go up until it takes $25 to take your daughter to burger king for lunch (true story...) so the customers all go away. Its not real food anyway. Then the owners of McDs make $0. "Everyone knows" you'll be a millionaire if you open a fast food restaurant and credit is very easy so there's an infinite line of people trying to make $200K but getting $0K. The cycle takes some time to stabilize. All those people in line have to get educated (LOL thats not happening) or go bankrupt one at a time, it takes awhile.
Service businesses always collapse from the bottom up. I've seen this in food stores, when an area has too much grocery store sq footage for its population. The collapse always starts with permanent help wanted signs and poor service, but it ends with "nobody would open a grocery store here, the just go out of business".
And customers are probably not willing to pay higher prices to attract more workers into this line of work..
Inflation is starting to affect retirement plans, and some are coming out. But companies need to want them.
Labour doesn't pay for their retirement.
>> inflation will eat up all their retirement
Their state pension increases in line with inflation thanks to the penion "triple lock" in the UK (this is temporarily the "double lock" for 22/23).
>> until there is enough labor
Adding labour has no direct impact on pension income, there can't be "enough labour" to reinstate a standard of living in a person's pension situation
Instead what will happen is existing groups who are already below water (e.g. foodbank users) will suffer more pain.
In that case you have a feedback loop creating infinite inflation that goes faster than those rate adjustments goes. There is no magical wand to wish away inflation like that.
When labour is free the amount of work is infinite, but with a higher price some work is no longer worth doing and workers get reallocated into the jobs that are still viable.
In the aggregate, people who want a job already have better paying skilled labour options. Why take a job as a cashier for example?
Only if the demand for underpaid jobs is large enough, I assume.
For example, many small businesses that are not "big mean corporations" that run on already small margins either jack up their prices enough to afford paying more. The customer then gets screwed with much higher prices.
OR all these mom and pop places go under because they still can't find labor, then more people are out of work - where do they then get jobs?
It's kinda like the tireless recruiters on LinkedIn, who keep spamming people about call center jobs. I.e. the problem in that case isn't people don't want to work; the problem is that call centres are a toxic work environment that has systematically burnt through the entire 80's generation of self-taught IT-techs only to find out they were a finite resource and that they're almost out.
As for Mom and Pop places, it's a sad situation, but if we want to help smaller stores then the key is specialization and finding niches that can't be handled online. As with everything specialized, feasability is a matter of supply and demand, and wages shouldn't be kept down artificially just to keep them running.
This means that there's plenty of extra money to pay salaries. The people at the top just don't want to use it for that.
For what it's worth: it would be a good goal on its own to reduce the weekly workload for everyone. 2x40h plus commute? That's not sustainable nor healthy and is a major reason why young people push having children to the future.
However, societies must tax the profits that companies generate by replacing people with machines and redistribute these profits - otherwise we just end up with neo-feudalism, with a tiny caste of extremely wealthy people controlling all the machines.
Not if governments don't sleep at the wheel. In the 80s, CEO compensation was a fraction of what it is today [1], and there were only a couple dozen billionaires or billionaire families [2]. Today, we're at at least 735 billionaires in the US, and at least 2668 worldwide [3].
There is nothing preventing governments from seizing all that excessive wealth gain and redistributing it, or to limit corporate hoarding of cash and assets, corporate payouts like dividends or stock buybacks - the latter, most egregious practice, was only legalized in 1982 [4].
FFS - what happened to the Ford-era tradition of paying people enough cash for their work so that they could actually live on these wages and buy all the products?! That was the key for the post-WW2 economic success wave, after all.
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/
[2] https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleLee.shtml
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
[4] https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity
Wealth and consumption are different things, though. And CPI inflation is mostly driven by consumption, not assets.
As it is, the wealthiest people still do not make up a very large part of total consumption. In fact, this is a core reason why they're accumulating so much wealth.
My point is that by taxing assets then, sure, we can transfer wealth from the rich to either governments or poor people. But this will not necessarily make it possible for "regular people" to consume more. Once people try to buy more in aggregate than what is produced by the economy, inflation will instantly bring prices up to a level where consumption is brought down to the production capacity.
Also, this idea leaves out a core mechanism. A lot of people that gain nominal wealth tend to want to use that wealth to buy more spare time. They work less, retire early, etc. Increased taxes on wealth tends to only make such choices more rational.
And when people work less, less is produced in aggregate and so less can be consumed. This effect can easily be much greater than the reduction in consumption (private jets etc) within the billionaire class. In other words, the wealth transfer may actually lead to the contraintuitive effect that the ability of "normal people" to consume actually goes down.
In countries that take this kind of wealth transfer to the extreme (Venezuela, for instance) this is exactly what happens. At first, it seems nice, but pretty soon aggregate production goes down so much that everyone (except the corrupt leaders) become poor.
Now I'm not arguing for the other extreme, either. Too little demand in an economy with excess production capacity is not much better, and that's why the Ford-era stimulus approaches work in such economies (either through wages, Ford style, or government spending, Keynes style).
But the reality is that most western countries are already close to a perfect balance between the supply and demand sides (for the purpose of maximizing consumption ability). This is why the extra liquidity that has been provided recently has been leading to so much inflation, world wide.
In practice, though, if you want to transfer consumption ability to poor people, you have to transfer it from demographics that actually contribute to a large part of total consumption, which basically means the upper middle class. This is how it's done in Scandinavia (where I happen to live), and it actually does work for minimizing the Gini coefficients.
Venezuela actually has an income-gini-coefficient not very different from the USA, even if they're a lot poorer, while the only countries with total wealth close to the US while still having low inequality are social democracies in Europe.
No, people buy more wealth with it. There are more and better ways to do that if your budget is larger.
You get giant piles of money looking to extract wealth from productive people.
Some will invest it, some will spend it. That's how it's always been. I'm sure you know some people with good incomes that still live paycheck to paycheck.
Whether it’s possible for enterprises to suck up the reductions in profit – that’s a different question. For developed societies being all about The Economy.
Free market!
But for most other groups, it may lead to a reduction in real salaries, due to price inflation. Fewer carpenters makes housing more expensive, and fewer tech workers can make many businesses (especially those outside core tech that still depend on such workers) more expensive to run.
And for workers in global hubs, one could argue that the concentration in one geographic location (including immigration) has actually lead to higher demand due to the increase in vibrancy and rate of innovation, leading to an increase in salaries.
Just speaking generally, labour tends to be a market in which there is massive govt intervention (this is particularly the case in the UK). The normal rules of economics do not hold.
One very big factor in the UK is universal credit. You can Google this for yourself but the relevance here is that it acts as a wage subsidy for employers, this gets people into work but there is very little incentive to work more hours (despite the govt being able to remove universal credit from people who refuse to work more).
The UK has got read of the persistently high unemployment under left-wing govts of the 2000s but has failed to improve productivity. We employ more people but they are barely producing more on aggregate. Immigration, more women working (universal credit generally supports more women more), it is all coalescing, nothing is working properly.
> We employ more people but they are barely producing more on aggregate
Yes, and this is a management/underinvestment problem. Either better working practices need to be introduced or capital investment to substitute for labour.
No, it isn't. Because labour is not a substitute for a machine, you can get rid of a worker for a machine but a machine doesn't vote, can't riot, etc. You still need to feed and clothe a human. The UK has, literally, millions of people who need work and will be unable to support themselves with the economy at the current size. I don't know what the solution is, but we won't be able to grow our way out of this (we tried in the early 2010s, it didn't work, we tried in the 2000s, it didn't work). One issue is that we spend massive amounts of money on subsidies but don't invest in skills (a lot of the problem today is with older people...so improving education won't work there).
The scale of the underemployment is probably ~5m people...in a working population of 32m...it is far bigger than people think AND we are bringing 1m people a year into the economy whose fertility is significantly higher...it is a very big problem.
Yes, and this is a demonstration that benefit cuts to starve people into working are not going to work.
> main issue with UC is that it is too generous
People at the foodbank are not going to agree with this.
> scale of the underemployment is probably ~5m people...in a working population of 32m
[citation needed]
> don't invest in skills
This I can agree on.
> The UK has, literally, millions of people who need work
The headline is "labour shortage"? There's no evidence of a vast hidden army of the unemployed, this isn't the 1980s.
Ask any person whether they deserve to earn more? Your point is completely devoid of any attempt to reason objectively. We have a minimum income system already (UC was designed to be a taper like NIT or UBI). People are quite happy to accept free food if it is being offered, but look at how much we spend on welfare...it is staggering (if you look at stats on food bank usage, you will also see that usage is highest amongst groups i.e. single people who don't receive the really valuable UC benefits i.e. CTCs...food bank usage is generally terribly uninformative though because if you give free food, people will take it).
Yes there is evidence of a hidden army of unemployed, that is why I mentioned repeatedly that people often don't understand.
If you are familiar with DWP stats, you would know that unemployment benefit is now being phased out totally. But some people on UC who do not work are not recorded as unemployed (this numbers 3.9m). And there is evidence that a lot of the people on ESA are claiming because they are also unable to work (at least, 500k iirc). And, of course, the point of UC was to get people back into work...but it has led to people earning £15k/year working min wage for 10 hours/week, that gap is money that would have been unemployment twenty years ago but isn't now. So we have swapped paying unemployment for a wage subsidy...again, you don't appear to understand this, the point was: we will pay people to work rather than sit on the dole (through offering a subsidy that lifts low wage), this should have led to more output...it didn't.
Btw, this is all obvious without having detailed knowledge of DWP statistics...you are saying how desperately poor everyone is...unemployment is the lowest it has been for five decades, how does that make sense to you? Wage growth is 4% below inflation, how does that make sense to you? Just saying lol, increase productivity...okay, that is what UC was for...this has been tried before, the problem is that there far too many people in the UK and not enough work (it is zero-sum because population growth is so far in excess of productivity growth).
> And, of course, the point of UC was to get people back into work
You cannot get people back into work if there is not enough work!
> zero-sum because population growth is so far in excess of productivity growth
"Productivity" is usually computed as a per-person number.
1970s style "stagflation". That term is coming back.
In before the lump of labor folks wake up, low immigration can't simutainously explain why inflation is high (due to high wages) and also not cause lower wages when you increase it.
Edit: made more clear, added context
We can see real time in the UK the effect that mass immigration has on wages: it keeps them way lower than the market rate otherwise.
Btw, something interesting about the UK is that there has been zero growth in the natural population for (I believe) almost three decades. All the growth has been immigration and natural growth from immigrants (who often have significantly higher fertility).
Personally, I don't know how the UK puts up with it. My colleagues over there make 1/3 of what I make, have 1/3 the size house, and pay 5x as much for it.
The issues that the UK are similar to a lot of developed countries just worse, and made worse by unusually bad govt interventions over decades. The frustrating thing about the UK is that a lot of the hard stuff is done well but it is just thrown away by nonsense policy in other areas (i.e. we have a great tertiary education system, and absolutely horrible primary/secondary so relatively few Brits can actually get value of more education...it is just nonsensical)
If planning/housing was solved conclusively, it would resolve 75% of the issues impacting consumers.
You see this in London and some cities outside (Glasgow is one) where there are primary schools with one or two white students (not making a racial point here, I making a point about immigration, Scotland is 99% white so these people have to be immigrants) in a class of 30 students.
- wage rises are suppressed
- labour is used instead of capital investment
Labour should always be in short supply and 'reassuringly expensive'. That way there is an incentive to replace it with machinery - which is where productivity and an improved standard of living comes from.
If a firm wants to use 'foreigners' then they should build the factory where the foreigners live and repatriate the profits. That way social capital is maintained.
We shouldn't judge economic success by how far away from your mum you have to live to get a job.
This is multi-faceted. The rise in health problems is related to the collapse in the NHS. Early retirement was related to the Covid stimmy (and you are seeing people come back). There is a massive issue with training, with how companies hire...but it is also the case that high levels of immigration aren't helping (particularly at the low-skill end, the NLW is £10/hour...how are you supposed to compete with someone who will work for £3/hour cash-in-hand because they have govt-subsidized accommodation and don't pay tax).
I don't see how this gets fixed. If you talk to most Brits they will tell you that H2/21 was the best labour market for workers for years, there was unprecedented job switching...that happened to follow a period when immigration was low, ignoring this kind of stuff because you think immigration is always good (it isn't for the countries that are left with no workers either) is committing the same error that you accuse others of.
I don't think megacities is the solution. I'd rather have a living rural area.
What is really going on OSS that aristocracy and slavery are, and really already have been reconstituted in a different form.
Importing/exploring brown people to serve the will and whims of the ruling class at the expense of the native/ their own population. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s of course exactly the foundations of slavery and aristocracy.
And yes, it has gotten worse because the process by which the ruling class had defrauded and swindled trillions of dollars and euros from the pockets of their own abused populations has not faced any opposition at all worth mentioning, let alone something serious.
You are making it sound coozzy. I'd say 4-10 unrelated 20-30yo males cramed into an apartment is closer too the truth for The Really Cheap Labour.
this is the definition of a conspiracy theory
My hunch is that many tech cos will soon realize that they're short-staffed too, and will have to start to hire again.
But it could be generationally different than many industries with a disproportionate number of the workers being younger genX and millennial compared to other industries. So I don’t see it as weird.
Tech companies have a staff distribution problem: Meta, Twitter, Google - they all had way too many engineers chasing after the "next big thing" to achieve an early foothold and then expand the massive scale of these companies to utter dominance, while they neglected stuff like content moderation or customer support.
US tech companies are still massively and ludicrously overstaffed.
Tech jobs in the UK aren't even particularly high skill, tons of applicants for every role but hiring is run by people who have never hired before, have no business knowledge, and end up rejecting everyone...and then they lobby the govt for easing visa rules...it is all very puzzling.
Btw...there are businesses in the UK that hire almost anyone with a degree, put them through a three-month bootcamp, and then hire them out £70k/year pro-rata rate. According to most tech companies, this should be impossible...yet these guys do it. The skills required aren't even complex, and we are struggling...shocking.
This year that was coordinated lobbying to increase visa numbers to the UK. The result was that 2022 was the highest level of immigration...ever.
And, of course, this started out with only being "skilled labour" but was quickly expanded to professions earning £20k/year. Productivity has gone nowhere, there are millions either unemployed or under-employed (there is reason to believe that the UK is under-reporting unemployment significantly due to how the welfare system works)...quite simply, whether you believe immigration is bad or good in theory, the supply of labour is massively in excess of demand in the UK.
So you have someone on a student visa from West Africa (this is overwhelmingly the source of this problem), they bung £10k to someone who runs a "university", they bring over their extended family (5-10 people), and there is basically no way to deport them now even once the student visa ends.
I agree, the statistics are basically unknown precisely...but the context would indicate that the size of flows are understated (the reproduction rate of non-migrants in the UK is not enough to produce population growth...since 1990, UK population is up 18%).
How? Being a student only entitles you at most to bring over a partner and dependent children. https://www.internationalstudents.cam.ac.uk/dependant-visas
They are also required to be financially self sufficient : "As part of the visa application dependants must have sufficient funds to cover living costs in the UK. This is £680 for each month the visa will be valid, up to a maximum of 9 months. This is a total of £6,120 per dependant if the visa will be granted for 9 months or more"
> basically no way to deport them now even once the student visa ends
Bearing in mind the hostile environment - if your visa has expired you can no longer work, rent or have a bank account - and the fact that the government can and does deport people; I think this isn't true.
That very page you linked says "However, the estimates of emigration by former student immigrants are experimental, and the ONS advises against using them to calculate net migration of international students"
Because the UK does not do passport checks on exit, unlike Schengen, it's impossible to properly count people who've emigrated again.
Being financially self-sufficient makes no difference because they are still using more resources. We aren't selling citizenship like St Kitts, it isn't a car boot sale.
What hostile environment? Every other country in Europe is deporting Albanians, we can't. Denmark is returning Syrians, we can't. If your visa expires, there are ways to claim right to remain if you are already here.
Okay, and that is why I gave the gross number...which is the highest number ever. And again, the evidence suggests that the UK is retaining more students than expected now (it was the opposite a few years ago).
Show me in the legislation where people who are non-child dependents of a student can get a visa.
> We aren't selling citizenship like St Kitts, it isn't a car boot sale
That's the "Tier 1 (entrepreneur) visa".
> Every other country in Europe is deporting Albanians, we can't.
[citation needed]
https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/albania...
I think you just need to read the news more my friend.
That is not how entry works: at the point of entry, passport control require each individual to have a valid visa. https://www.ivisa.com/united-kingdom-blog/united-kingdom-sta...
> read the news more
The news lies about how easy immigration is! That's a big part of the problem. You need to speak to some actual immigrants.
I don't honestly believe in the infinite wisdom of markets. I like markets. But they're not infinitely wise. That is the peak "/s"
But at the same time, those who live by X can die by X. And since plenty of people were happy with the market's wisdom when it helped them, (like many CEOs, the current governing party in the UK etc), they cannot change course now without being hypocrites...
You can try unions, but then they get greedy and you end up like the US auto industry did fifty years ago.
The UK's housing issues are largely a housing policy problem.
Its not that the UK has a shortage of accommodation units, its largely that the free market rewards property value speculation over actually occupying those accommodation units in areas of high demand, and having actual tenants is seen as a liability.
There is an imperial assload of empty residential units across the UK (and especially in London) where the owners are deriving greater value from pure speculation than rent seeking.
There's other aspects to the issue than this, but that's one of the bigger issues that could be resolved with policy changes to penalize the fucking absurd practice of keeping properties empty.
If you've squeezed the life out of working peoples baby budget you just wont have fresh bodies for your own parasitic class to suck the life out of.
Should we wonder how their empire got this small?
To do that, the society would have to strip out all the nonproductive parasitic layers that accumulate over time, and then redistribute excess wealth.
Those actors will resist strongly, so good luck with that.
This isn't exactly true.
The Mal Comms laws are a fucking travesty, but the reporting on them has tended to be wildly inaccurate.
Most incidents of "suspected mal comms" are resolved with what's called "words of advice", followed by no further action.
Words of Advice happens like so: you call Karen a slag on Facebook, Karen reports you to the cops, the cops are obliged to "do something", so a neighborhood officer swings by and let's you know its been reported, don't do it again, no further action is taken.
More serious cases tend to involve an invitation for a voluntary interview, usually resulting in no further action or (rarely) a caution or (even rarer still) the CPS deciding to prosecute.
Voluntary interview is a bit of a misnomer - if you refuse to come in for said interview, there is two possible outcomes. Either it gets no further actioned and binned off, or they now have the option to arrest you for the purposes of an interview.
Most of the time when someone is actually arrested for "malicious communication" its something high profile and/or they already refused that so called "voluntary interview" and/or they have been repeatedly given said words of advice.
Personally I think the UK is a fucking hellscape and a police state, but I find the online commentary about the Malicious Communication laws - especially on primarily American forums - wildly inaccurate.
You mean a sink of human capital that would in the process destroy the social fabric of the neighboring countries by robbing it of their best, while at the same time give no reason for a country's most profitable companies to feel inclined to raise how much they are willing to pay for labor?
Or you meant a way to ignore that a country does have a way to make young workers and expand towards attracting outside young workers, while ignoring the reasons the local sources of young workers fail?
"socio-political degeneration absorbs and neutralizes a decaying trend of techno-economic advance"?
wow, what a great idea.
Good news! It turns out that while your thesis sounds reasonable it is in fact not the case.
Here in the US our two largest immigrant groups are people from Indian and China. It turns out that both of these countries seemed to have benefit greatly from the exchange. While many very talented migrants have chosen to remain in the US, a sizable number of taken the skills and experience they've learned here and brought them back to their home countries.
Not only that but during our period of highest immigration, salaries from those very companies hiring the most migrant workers were some of the highest in the world, much higher than typically seen in, for example, the UK. At the same time we've also seen salaries rise in India and China.
I'm guessing on seeing that your theoretical concerns don't pan out in the real world you'll likely change your stance on the issue. If not that there must be some other logic I'm missing that is guiding your opinions on the topic.
You are not. Rather, you are being facetious.
> It turns out that while your thesis sounds reasonable it is in fact not the case.
It's not a thesis, but meant to derail a conversation, implying there's one true answer just like the comment I was replying to did. And yours as well, as you don't address what I raised.
> Here in the US
The UK is not the US.
> It turns out that both of these countries seemed to have benefit greatly from the exchange.
So you agree damaging the country that provides young workers is bad. Thank you.
> While many very talented migrants have chosen to remain in the US, a sizable number of taken the skills and experience they've learned here and brought them back to their home countries.
So to have some immigrants go back is desirable? Can you phrase it as policy? Something like "we don't want you to remain here for as long as too many of your cohort do the same". It goes against the comment I was replying, that specifically asked for low barrier to move and work.
> Not only that but during our period of highest immigration, salaries from those very companies hiring the most migrant workers were some of the highest in the world, much higher than typically seen in, for example, the UK. At the same time we've also seen salaries rise in India and China.
It says nothing about what they would be should there have been not as much immigration.
> I'm guessing on seeing that your theoretical concerns don't pan out in the real world you'll likely change your stance on the issue. If not that there must be some other logic I'm missing that is guiding your opinions on the topic.
You missed that this was not a conversation, and you did not make it one. The comment I replied to assumed there was only one answer. And you assume all the counters I raised are misplaced because they can be countered with your comment. Answer my main points.
Does brain drain not exist? Do you want to exfiltrate the young generation from worse off countries? Do you want to incentivize young workers to leave their native countries instead of whatever else you must think young workers can contribute there? Do you want to signal to the local young workers they are wrong in refusing the local salaries because someone from abroad will take them? Do you want to signal to the local population that there's no incentive in raising the next generation because the solution is to have people born and educated abroad to come here to work temporarily and then abandon (with their savings, I assume) the country once they had enough? Do want to continue to degrade the social fabric by insisting in economic advancement instead of fixing what leads to lack of workers?
> Does brain drain not exist?
Of course, I've seen it within regions of the US. Imagine how insane it would be to say that NY city should resist hiring workers from NJ because it hurts small NJ towns. My experience is that the root cause of brain drain is the regional government, keeping talented individuals there only stifles the growth of those individuals, it doesn't improve the region. In fact we see this locally a lot, many more people do move back to NJ from NYC than do to PA from NYC since the former tends to have a lot more to offer returners than the latter.
> Do you want to exfiltrate the young generation from worse off countries?
Of course! From what I've seen either two paths are followed. When local governments have no plans to improve the country they lose all their talent and those individuals succeed. The other path is the China/India path, they improve their economies through exchange eventually become attractive and more youth return and newer generations are more likely to stay.
> Do you want to incentivize young workers to leave their native countries instead of whatever else you must think young workers can contribute there?
Absolutely! It's one of the reasons the US has been able to rise to the level of technological success it has. Most of our greatest scientists where fleeing countries in decay. My experience both locally and globally is that talent staying in an area that is in decline only hurts the talent. Typically it is the governments of failing countries that try to halt immigration out first.
> Do you want to signal to the local young workers they are wrong in refusing the local salaries because someone from abroad will take them?
Yes! I've worked in poor US towns and I always encouraged the best and brightest students to go to a major metro area, expand their skills and get paid more. Would you not encourage a brilliant student from an area of the UK in decline to head off to London to further their career? If the poor town shows improvement they can return and improve the town and live with their families, if the town does not improve then they at least don't waste their skills.
> Do you want to signal to the local population that there's no incentive in raising the next generation because the solution is to have people born and educated abroad to come here to work temporarily and then abandon (with their savings, I assume) the country once they had enough?
I'm not sure the logic of this question. Again, I live in the US where nearly the entire population has their origins in immigration at one point in time. We've never had a challenge with raising the next generation while being open to immigration. Our biggest problem is not immigrants coming in, but jobs going out (as far as manufacturing goes). Your critique of "abandonment" also doesn't make sense given your earlier points. I have plenty of Chinese friends who have stayed in the US and start the path to citizenship and plenty who have gone back to take leading roles in Chinese companies. I consider both of these paths to be a net win.
> Do want to continue to degrade the social fabric by insisting in economic advancement instead of fixing what leads to lack of workers?
I think by definition nobody wants to "degrade the social fabric", and I'm not sure what you mean by this? Do you mean you don't want foreign people mixing with your locals? Again, as an American my experience is that diverse ethnic influence is precisely what makes communities stronger. One of the favorite parts of my neighborhood is the Polish butcher (I have no Polish background), I love being able to go to a Chinese neighborhood and not hear a word of English for an entire afternoon.
Can you point to a single example of a country that has halted immigration and "fixed what leads to a lack of workers?"
It seems like the UK is experimenting with tighter controls but from what I've witnessed it&...
Yes, how insane would it be if some entity or some coordination between the two states existed that would allow both to prosper, in the eventuality that it became true that New Jersey human capital was leaking into New York? Not too insane, I imagine. Do you want New York not to feel responsible for the incentives it creates in the region? Or New Jersey to feel happy to leak generations? Maybe New York could but New Jersey and just use it a breeding grounds. Maybe administer their schools and hospitals.
> My experience is that the root cause of brain drain is the regional government.
The regional government of New Jersey did not not make New York the center of the world. It's a feedback loop.
> keeping talented individuals there only stifles the growth of those individuals
Find a use for them. It's people that could build community bonds. Would you say the person with the best potential should be placed where they can enact the most impact in the world? How about every 25 years we scout the world for the latest litter of humans and shuffle them about to where they can have the most impact? Sounds like a great reductio ad absurdum, we could take all the "talented individuals" (borderline eugenics here, be careful) and just shove them into the best pipelines. People are just talents, are they? They are not. It's not a closed matter. That countries bordering (lol, India?) the UK leak good people is something for India to prevent and for the UK to notice what it signals to the locals. Not to be ignored and up to the free market, free flow of capital (human or not).
> [exfiltrate?] Of course!
Another path is to understand that things create feedback loops, and the feedback loop of "people leave" is "governments have no plans for people that leave". You seem to have it down to "let's ignore the present and let things even out later". It's an answer, in that letting a fire burn down is an answer to a fire. It's giving up. Just be clear in your answers: "everyone, listen, we do not care about your particular situations and your particular worries today, because tomorrow someone will have managed to reach the future and live there, and it will be good for the economy and for them, maybe. Die out, emigrate, I can't care any less."
> [incentivize young workers to leave their native countries?] My experience both locally and globally is that talent staying in an area that is in decline only hurts the talent. Typically it is the governments of failing countries that try to halt immigration out first.
I mentioned nothing that implied I would halt immigration. I raise concerns I hoped you would agree with. Instead, you welcome them. Your experience is the experience of a factory. Inputs, outputs, time passes. Life is not a factory, it's the shared day to day. Yes, let's make everyone believe the standard is to move around, not to make places livable.
> Would you not encourage a brilliant student from an area of the UK in decline to head off to London to further their career?
One person. We discuss incentives at the scale of countries. The purpose of the area of the UK in decline is not to decline.
> if the town does not improve then they at least don't waste their skills.
Yes, why would anyone waste their skills by living with their families. Maybe people should even be made to forget they have families, if it dampens their individual intuition (lol) to go where they can best be exploited by whatever is built there.
> Again, I live in the US
Ok.
> I think by definition nobody wants to "degrade the social fabric", and I'm not sure what you mean by this? Do you mean you don't want foreign people mixing with your locals?
You managed to include the implication of xenophobia, leading m...
What if shareholders were happy with a bit less money, and companies used that money instead to provide a decent wage? Seems more sustainable to me than mass migration of the working poor.
They keep getting even more money every year, and they won't stop just for the good of humanity.
Look around you, the economy is trying to rebalance itself but leaders around the world via central banks and immigration policies are fighting it tooth and nail. Leave it alone and higher wages will follow shortly.
As a primary effect of covid, the public has been scared the public away from the healthcare field, which was collapsing and is now collapsing even faster. Its a good time to get out of healthcare and a bad time to get into healthcare. If they would just hurry up and collapse the system quickly so as to enter the stable rebuilding phase, then they could get workers.
As a secondary effect of covid, massive income instability in hospitality has scared people away from that field. Those jobs are all going to be replaced by apps and service robots or go out of business anyway. Conveniently many ag jobs opened with brexit and that field is doing MUCH better than healthcare or hospitality. Hospitality used to be very low pay, but at least it was extremely reliable. With covid lockdowns that job could go away in a sneeze and they're all being replaced by apps and robots anyway. Hospitality is the new bottom of the barrel job and as such will always have staffing problems going forward until it goes away entirely. A society can function quite well without overpaying someone else to hand you a beer or kebabs to avoid getting it yourself LOL.
Because attracting more people into the labor market assumes that there are people sitting on the sidelines, waiting for higher wages. The labor force in most western countries is already tapped out, exhausted and cannot do any more work.
Many decided to retire due to:
- fear from covid
- COVID restrictions
- office racism & political ideologues (aka blocked promotions, struggle sessions, etc)
- rejection of vaccine mandates
All the above I’ve seen multiple people (in each bucket) retire for in the past two years. I also know multiple young people who switched roles for the same reason.
One buddy of mine worked in an out patient surgery center on contract (he’d work / sell machines for a fee per-surgery). After a 12-18 months of sparse work he had to switch jobs (and was living on food stamps at this point). I hired him for odd jobs to help him pay the mortgage. He started his own business and is doing okay now ~12 months in.
God forbid we return to the 20th-century solution of throwing more bodies at the problem (uncontrolled mass immigration), which will only exacerbate the underlying issue as immigrants settle and age.
The reality is that the first waves of immigration from the EU (skilled workers from developed nations) were hugely beneficial for the UK economy. But as the EU expanded into destitute former Soviet states, later waves of immigration were not the same demographic, from an economic point of view.
At some point we have to weigh up the benefits of cheaper fruit and veg, nannies and cleaners versus the cost of providing subsidised housing and wildly expensive public services to immigrant workers on the min wage, who are a net burden on the Treasury. It just doesn't stack up, from the perspective of productive taxpayers.
Housing and public services currently have a crisis of demand, not supply. The Tories increased the NHS budget by £40bn in real terms since 2010, but it's still unable to cope with the weight of demand.
Good on the people who are dropping out. Make the exploiters squirm.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/05/health-gets...
Yeah, I'd like to see an occasional article describing the same facts as an "opportunity abundance" instead of a "labor shortage". Isn't anyone in the media or government on the side of working people?
From a worker's perspective, having lots of available jobs and the leverage to negotiate for better pay seems like a good thing, especially after decades of decreases in real worker pay.
Only when it's profitable.
The market is always portrayed as efficient money-for-time but reality is the market is often based around risk minimization and pounding square pegs into round holes and "proving" there's no one available for our immigration or other government program paperwork.
Plenty of openings are posted with no intention of filling them.
This means that the only reason there is a shortage is because labour is choosing to not charge higher rates for their work. When the media/government states that there is a labour shortage they are saying: "Hey workers, charge more already!" If that's not pro-labour, I don't know what is.
While I've not personally dug into the numbers, the reporting I've come across suggests decent portion of the inflation we've seen wasn't a result of labour shortages leading to wage spirals and supply shocks.
That inflation then destroys any gains made due to salary increases.
Definitely not. Here in the EU some newspapers published articles saying "the hyper inflation is caused by workers earning too high wages, pushing the prices up. So if we cut down on wage growth, and we cut down on unemployment benefits to force people to take any job, we can solve this"
It's definitely not caused by opportunistic companies and conglomerates that compete on who can raise prices the fastest, seeing massive profits and shareholder returns in this market, especially in the energy sector. /s
If they lower the rents, perhaps people feel that it is worth working again.
Supply and demand does not work in the labor market if worker supply is unlimited and 90% of your income goes to rent seekers of various kinds.
This type of 'teleprescence' technology from what I have seen is evoloving fast, where things cant be fully automated or a human might need to step in, this concept opens up a countries labour market in a whole new way.
Of course the knowedge/service sector has been doing this for over a decade via outsourcing.
It may be that I'll be forced out of my career somewhere around 60 or so (I'm currently 40) due to ageism. However, I'll probably just have to pivot to a different career at that point.
I'll have savings and investment money to live off of, but probably not enough to sustain a reasonable quality of life until I expire. And everything I'm paying into Social Security will probably end up taken away by the government for some concocted reason or other before I can use it. So, that means I don't get to retire.
If this is in reference to programming, somebody will have to maintain the mountains of C++ that all the younger devs don't want to learn.
Personally, I'll probably be working 10-20h a week or so by 60 as consultant. Your retirement burn rate is much, much lower if you have cash coming in, even if it isn't covering all expenses.
Don't know how old you are but why do I have the feeling that by the time you're 60 the following could happen:
"The AI tool subscription we have is already trained on the mountains of existing high quality C++ code written by seasoned graybeards such as yourself, so thanks for training it, but sorry sir, your services are no longer required." "Watch this: Hey ChatGPT 9.0, fix this codebase. Done." "What we're looking for is devs experienced in the latest MonkeButt frontend framework as it just came out so there's no trained models for it yet." "Enjoy your early retirement sir" :)
They appear to be more autocomplete on steroids, then programmer replacement. It will make devs more efficient, but I doubt it will replace us.
I might start writing the most obtuse code ever so that all the models get skewed by ludicrous amounts of template nonsense, overuse of auto and tonnes of lambda functions where an ordinary function would do (or maybe many static struct with operator() to confuse matters and make the call stack obtuse). That'll guarantee job security.
The fact of life of a pyramid shaped employment structure, is almost everyone is forced out eventually anyway, regardless of age.
Its extremely sector specific. No shortage at all in FIRE or retail, huge shortage in hospitality and healthcare.
Most of the hypothesis in the report seems to boil down to COVID caused everything followed by raw data disproving that. hospitality is extremely low paying but USED to be stable reliable income, but now someone in China sneezes and your income disappears for months, so people will do anything to avoid hospitality as a field. It seems the low end job of choice is agriculture now. As for health care, I suspect that however trendy and cool it is to compliment our brave health care workers by making congratulatory social media posts for karma, very few people want to get involved in that mess. Much like voluntary soldier recruitment after an unpopular war is an uphill battle for awhile.
A truly remarkable number of older people are out of the job market on disability. Cardio trends are flat (edited: slope 0) to declining so its probably not obesity related although the UK is certainly not getting thinner? Mental health is on a flat growth rate (edited, flat line upward slope not slope being zero) of about 2% additional of the population per decade which is starting to add up significantly over time. Fewer students than ever are going to school while working, the market seems too competitive to risk their grades by working and/or student loans make more sense than working. Between those very young and very old ages there is little change.
There is some inevitability to the UK problems, because as per Chapter 3's intro, the current problem is caused by a 2% decline in working age labor force participation rate, which would have happened anyway in a decade due to the 2% increase in mental health disability cases per decade. I mean something like the future is distributed unevenly, and in a sense this is all a straight line extrapolation of more than decades old trends and the UK is economically speaking in 2032 rather than 2022. Everything happening now was going to happen in a couple years, not now. Any surprise about the situation is fake PR.
Several graphs explaining access to health care in the UK is in a long term collapse, 1 in 20 adults are on a waiting list of some sort, etc. The report strongly implies without stating that ongoing collapse of the medical system is not helping old people stay in the workforce.
It seems most of the UKs problems are frozen by divide and conqueror approach; after the health care system completely collapses and is replaced (by what?) the situation will resolve itself, but interests on all sides are too entrenched to fix anything until after it breaks.
>Changes to the structure of migration have had an impact on vacancies, which recently hit record high levels. In recent years many EU workers, who filled lower paid roles (especially in sectors like agriculture and hospitality), have left the UK. In numerical terms, their departure has been counterbalanced by the arrival of non-EU workers, who were granted visas under the new immigration system which prioritises skilled workers. This has contributed to a mismatch within the labour force, accentuating vacancies and labour shortages in certain sectors.
Good for them. I hope whoever filled those lower paid roles found a better life elsewhere. I can't stand the false equivalency between immigration and labour shortage. I live in Italy and our media is always sharing sob stories from tycoons who "just can't find hard-working employees anymore". The issue is that the very foundation of our economy is built on masses of disenfranchised serfs forced to e.g. pick veggies for 3€/h. but instead of questioning the dehumanizing working conditions of blue-collar jobs, the real problem is always finding more suckers who have no other choice.
Amazing. UK Gov has moved on from COVID deaths.