Many hourly jobs love to schedule people at seemingly random times, so they'll never know from one week to the next what times they'll have free and can't make commitments outside of work.
Very few employers seem interested in hiring "part time" workers with higher priority commitments that may interfere with their desired schedule. This extends to "can't work on $holy_days" and things that have legal backing; hourly employees aren't likely to pursue the theoretical means of redress they have for those incidents.
Then add the other layers of suck jobs have now. Instead of being an expert in "what plumbing stuff our store has and where"; a clerk is now expected to meet credit card signup metrics, first, foremost, and only. A retired plumber who wanted to work at the home improvement store has what incentive to put up with this? Serving the community is great but those people have been eliminated as too old and crunchy and too hard for HR to deal with.
> * Many hourly jobs love to schedule people at seemingly random times, so they'll never know from one week to the next what times they'll have free and can't make commitments outside of work.*
A number of years ago I heard Reid Hoffmann on a podcast discussing how algorithms would replace management. How could technology replace the human demands of management? I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
Now I see that this type of thing is what Hoffman meant. The human aspect would be removed.
A faceless, nameless algorithm would take over. Scheduling some of the most vulnerable workers in our society to ensure they don’t cross over the 40-hour per week threshold for work that would require benefits or overtime but also to ensure they don’t get paid to work an extra minute when there may be a bit of downtime.
There's a book that takes this general idea in a direction. It's definitely intended as a commentary on society and the future, but you might enjoy reading it.
I read this a year or so ago. I remember finding the vision of the Utopian future absolutely fascinating, but I always find the sort of dystopia he described happening before that unrealistic. For me at least, it's hard to imagine there not being enormous pushback before society could get nearly that bad.
I'm definitely a bit of a utopianist, but in my mind the power of consumers versus profit driven business people always is cyclical.
I find it much more likely that the technology to autonomously create houses, grow and harvest food, and generally automate a sane, healthy life for a person will advance significantly, and some philanthropist trillionaire will buy up vast swathes of currently uninhabited land and turn it into a utopia.
Algorithms will never replace middle management. I don't care how much code is thrown at it. Part of management is having faith in your leadership. If your leader is the CEO and all Caps and no in-between, it'd be utter chaos between departments. Expecting code to help out for a payroll issue that is clearly wrong but the HR algorithm thinks is right will not only incur legal liabilities, but no confidence in employees. People sometimes stay because they like their coworkers and have a good boss. Lead people with basically skynet and suddenly faith in the system plummets unless it's flawless from the start.
Believe me, if ownership thinks it can work "good enough," they will certainly try until it is. It won't be a robot like you think. Think Uber; an algorithm manages the drivers, they just aren't technically employees. Think Comcast technicians. They drive around all day and a computer tells them their next job and even how to get there.
>Lead people with basically skynet and suddenly faith in the system plummets unless it's flawless from the start.
Fry's electronics used to schedule their workers like this.
- Either Saturday or Sunday off
- No consecutive days are off
- two openings (start around 7 or 8 am, end by 3 or 4 pm)
- two closings (start around 2 pm, end by 10 pm or so)
- one normal day (start around 9:30 am)
This was how they used to 'enslave' their workers: by ruining their sleep patterns (two opening vs two closing); by not doing any productive work on their own (by not giving two successive days off); by preventing people from going to school (through different start times).
Key phrase is "used to". That kind of scheduling is crap some MBA that's never run a business came up with and that no store that employs people is actively doing or at least not for long. It spent a few years bouncing around from company to company in the 2010s. I'd be surprised if anyone still does it.
Your local big box store will regularly schedule people because it's a) free and b) improves employee productivity, reduces no-shows, etc, etc. They'd basically be giving up free money not to. Furthermore these kinds of employees often have complex transportation arrangements to giving them a regular schedule greatly improves their reliability.
The people who are new or the unreliable guy or whatever will still get crap hours because you've gotta have someone to absorb the week to week oddities in the schedule but generally speaking regular employees get regular hours.
A bunch of the big box stores tried this at one point or another. Pretty much all the local stores ignored or overrode it where possible (because it's so bad you don't even need to do it to know it's stupid). And then corporate realized it was stupid and stopped.
The people implying this is typical are only one step of whoever came up with it. Because it's simply and obviously not, and anyone who's ever had to manage employee schedules knows that this kind of scheduling is just not tenable, even less so for the kinds of McJobs where people always assert this is the case. Best case this kind of scheduling is a fast path to massive turnover which wastes money. You can't treat minimum wage employees you on-boarded over the course of a morning like this because the will just go somewhere else and be on-boarded over the course of a different morning. "Cog in the machine" policy and efficient on-boarding are two way streets.
So my kid's sick. I'll need to take the afternoon off to pick them up from school early. Next morning I'll need to take him to the doctor. The following day I'll need to take the morning off again. Or if the other kid is sick a day or so later then it could repeat that same week.
Oops! I'd be unhirable. Or fired. Or slowly "let go". Suddenly poorer chances of advancement. Regardless of employment history. Regardless of turning up every previous allotted day on time. Doesn't matter.
Corporations are actively hostile. Then they complain about not being able to find workers.
hmm... maybe an extra 0.50c/hr from tip outs. But was kind of random; and the whole tip-out structure was pretty unfair to front-of-house that had slow nights.
A schedule like that is EXACTLY about enslaving workers.
They disallow consecutive days off so that no employees are going to have a situation where they feel comfortable leaving town on a trip, so that they will always be around the store. They screw with employee hours so that employees are unable to hold a comparable second job.
You lost me there. When I worked shit retail jobs I was actually laughed at when I tried to schedule 3 days off a few months in advance.
Hell my first job was at a place where they would not tell you your schedule over the phone or over the internet and they would change your schedule the night before they wanted you there. Unless you were willing to drive to the store every day, even on your day off, you would never know about new shifts you had assigned and would subsequently be a no call no show.
The managers used this so they always had a safe reason to fire someone. When you did something they didn't like but was protected by store policy or legality, they would just fire you next time you missed one of these sudden shift changes.
Outside the US, in first world nations at least, it's expected that you get consecutive days off and you don't need to beg your boss for permission to leave town each week. I've never had to schedule a leave from town and don't know anybody who did, because it's plainly obvious that our weekends are our own.
Another problem is companies that intentionally book non-consecutive days off for their workers are also going to do everything they can to discourage workers from taking time off when they want to.
One of the benefits for people working at Chick-fil-a is that they always know they'll have Sunday off. Even five years in the future you can commit to doing something on a random Sunday. Unless you're in management or work at HQ, hopefully you're not still working there five years later but if you are, you always know you have that day off.
When I worked in those situations, it was never about "enslaving" the workers. It was a simple calculation made by the manager to make their lives easier.
First, scheduling was always hard. So they did everything they could to make it easier for themselves, including last-minute changes that they didn't even tell you about. You were expected to somehow check the physical schedule in the store right before the new week started, even if you weren't scheduled that day.
Second, they'd get sick of the complainers, so the worst complainers would get preferential treatment. The best workers ended up with the worst shifts, too, because they were less likely to just call in sick or quit.
I feel like there were more lessons I learned about scheduling back then, but it's been quite a while now. It was always all about the managers avoiding personal hardship, and very little about the company itself.
I think parent's point is that employees care. Employers probably don't care that they're paying employees minimum wage, but if other places pay higher than that the the employees (who do care) would switch to the other jobs.
>I suspect it's deliberate. If you can't plan your life, you are a slave to work.
Are you suggesting they're deliberately doing this so "you are a slave to work"? How does the employer benefit from this?
The workers can't do things like go to school or do anything productive, so they're stuck at that job for a much longer time than if they could better their circumstance.
It also gives the employers the ability to point towards any deviations from being available on short notice as a reason to legally fire people. You either give up your life to your low level job or you provide ammo for them to remove all of your legal protections because you aren't being fired for a legally protected reason, but because you violated policy or weren't flexible enough
>>Many hourly jobs love to schedule people at seemingly random times, so they'll never know from one week to the next what times they'll have free and can't make commitments outside of work.
Some employers do this on purpose because they don't want their employees getting second or even third jobs that might leave them exhausted by the time they arrive for their shifts at the first job.
It does make me wonder if anyone's ever tried "stochastic employment". Instead of having one (or even 2 or 3) jobs, have like ten. Show up whenever they call you in for your shift. If there's a conflict, just don't show up and see how long it takes for them to fire you. If they fire you, no big deal, you've got 9 other jobs. Periodically add more jobs to your collection when you start getting low on work. Basically invest the same amount of emotional energy in each job as they invest in you as a worker.
> If there's a conflict, just don't show up and see how long it takes for them to fire you.
I like your idea but for the vast majority of jobs, the number of times you can fail to show up is in the neighborhood of “1”. You will run out of jobs far more quickly than you can acquire new ones. Assuming there is a fixed number of employers in your area, you will go through them pretty quickly.
I like the idea for full-time remote tech work though, although I’d never have the stones to try it. Sign on to 10 different companies, do the minimum to not be fired, carefully accept the right set of Zoom meetings...
> You will run out of jobs far more quickly than you can acquire new ones.
In urban areas, if you're looking for the garden-variety McJob, that's not really true. There are thousands of different employers in retail, food-service, small-scale manufacturing, etc. in a major metro area. Figure that it takes you 2-3 weeks to get fired at each one, you only need 1000 different employers to get through your working life. Maybe a bit more since you have multiple employers going at once, but still < 10,000.
Plus there's turnover in employers as well - the average business fails within 5 years, so they drop out of the pool and are replaced by new businesses that have never heard of you.
Might work, but the none of these jobs are offering health care. The perks would be working nonstop for years of your life, and maybe free fast food.. not a great haul for gaming the system
I love this idea; you could use software to automatically auction your various skills and time to create bidding wars.
You wake up and have no idea what job you are doing in the morning versus the afternoon, and you could see stats on what skills are making the most money to find training or shadowing opportunities.
Honestly, how is this supposed to work? From the employer's perspective you are basically scraping at the bottom of the labor market and the only reason your business model works is that there is a lot of pond scum (not in the sense that these people are worthless) to scrape off at the bottom of the bucket.
From an economic perspective this is highly inefficient. The free market isn't about propping up nonviable business models, it's about getting rid of them. If you can just fire your employees for arbitrary reasons it tells a lot about your business, it means you actually don't need those employees and as soon as another business pops up that needs them you don't care about losing them. In other words: You don't deserve them.
Just think about it, where is productivity growth supposed to come from if you treat each employee like a slave? If you need to grow your business your strategy is to just get more slaves. You're never going to think about making sure your employees can perform to the best of their ability. You're also never going to use labor efficiently because all "business problems" can be solved by hiring another employee that doesn't complain.
None of this makes sense. Cheap labor was a mistake to begin with, just because corporations got addicted to cheap labor doesn't mean we have to continue that trend.
Capitalism is about providing value to consumers at lowest possible prices, not about maximizing some abstract (i.e. non-monetary) efficiency. If destitute workers are cheaper than robo arms, then the company will obviously have no reason to invest into those arms, and will exactly grow the business via "just getting more slaves" - see Foxconn and other similar empires.
Your point on religious days intrigued me. I wonder if there's a more than casual relationship between "on demand" workers (which is often the case with part-time workers given random schedules week-to-week) and declining religious affiliation. If you don't know if you'll be working on Saturday or Sunday or not, you cannot regularly attend church/synagogue/mosque/etc. It's another barrier to friction, and surprisingly simple things can shift behavior.
Most large-scale employers expect even the lowest paid workers to treat the job like it is the most important thing in their life. This is inhumane, and leads to almost every mistreatment of employees.
There is never lack of workers, it is only question of pay and benefits. This is not something new, there is a story about how Henry Ford increased the pay of the workers, the 5$ work day so that they could afford to buy their own model T, but the story does not tell that the main reason was that trouble of keeping workers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-stor...
At the time, workers could count on about $2.25 per day, for which they worked nine-hour shifts. It was pretty good money in those days, but the toll was too much for many to bear. Ford's turnover rate was very high. In 1913, Ford hired more than 52,000 men to keep a workforce of only 14,000. New workers required a costly break-in period, making matters worse for the company. Also, some men simply walked away from the line to quit and look for a job elsewhere. Then the line stopped and production of cars halted. The increased cost and delayed production kept Ford from selling his cars at the low price he wanted. Drastic measures were necessary if he was to keep up this production.
Yes wages should go up, but the driver of this increase is temporary (global pandemic and fear of it). But once you raise wages, you're kind of stuck there. I think if we can get through this year without going crazy with wage increases we can keep inflation at bay and COVID will go away. So what they're saying is that benefits need to get less and less generous as fear of covid gets lower and lower. The former should follow the latter until those terrible jobs don't looks so bad to some people. And that means some people will land at the bottom rung of the economic ladder and obviously not be happy about it.
When you have moderate inflation the economic system rewards ingenuity, productivity and efficiency. People at the bottom rung of the economic ladder will obviously be happy about it because that is all they have. The rich have money and capital that can paper over those three things.
I'm curious (and quite possibly way off base) - how much of the current trends on corporate culture have trickled down to low skill jobs? What I mean is, when I worked at a grocery store 20 years ago, we came and did our work, effectively labor work, and that was it. Do such jobs now involve constant meetings and trainings about whatever hot topic HR is working on, and reading and having to agree to forms, etc? If nothing else, covid must have definitely introduced all sorts of new rituals and instructions that are not related to the job.
From personal experience, the hardest part of an office job is putting up with all the conformity and bureaucracy and politics. For a lot of people in lower skill jobs, they may just not be interested in that stuff (also a reason people didn't go to more education). And so if front line service jobs are getting dominated by all the corporate stuff we have to put up with, I can imagine that pushing more people out of the system. Even things as trivial as having to email or fill out a job application online probably exclude many people. Not to mention having to be monitored by an app, etc.
Anyway, just a theory, I'm really just curious to know if this could be a factor based on what people's experience is in these kind of jobs.
> Do such jobs now involve constant meetings and trainings about whatever hot topic HR is working on...
If you have a manual labor job, the opportunity to be paid to sit down while someone yammers on about something or other and maybe shows a movie is quite welcome.
Only if it came at the right time. I had to watch several anti-union videos when I started working at a grocery store. I'd already watched other training videos that day and the anti-union arguments in the video were insulting to my intelligence. I'd rather have been stocking shelves than listen to that garbage but I'm sure there were times where I'd been working a long shift (side note: 32 hours was the longest shift I ever worked) and would have been fine with watching some random HR video, insulting or not.
Just because the company only values your time at X an hour, doesn't mean you're content wasting that time for X an hour. Idle time at my old minimum(ish) wage jobs when I was younger was honestly the biggest stressor I had. When we were busy, time flew, it was no big deal. But sitting around idle, that same hour drags on, and can be a real drain on mental health. Especially if you're going to school or something and have better ways to spend that time, but due to the work environment, you can't spend that time accordingly for whatever reason.
Sure, pay is pay, but time is more valuable than any job can afford to be honest, and few things let that reality sink in as much as idle time at a job you hate, but you have to stay and deal with it because you're struggling to make ends meet.
But you could be working during that time, giving at least some stimulation and sense of accomplishment. Listening to someone drone on about nothing you care about only serves to remind you that you could instead be doing something productive with your time.
I've worked plenty of those kinds of jobs over the years.
Your opinion is the minority, a sizeable one but obviously the minority. The opinion of the person you're replying to is the majority.
Nobody wants to hang around and do nothing at work, even if you're getting paid. If the job is done people want to go home and sit on their ass on their own terms.
One hour breaks are always welcome, but one hour tasks that require watching someone go out of their way to bore you is the furthest thing from a break.
And while they might be tolerable when done occasionally, in the age of Agile all the things, where even restaurant staff are now hosting daily standups, those meetings are not occasional.
Anecdatum: slow days at the warehouse were brutal. The busier we were, the faster time flew. Nothing was as dreadful as sitting around waiting for an order to pick, staring at the clock waiting for lunch or the shift to be over.
Many people are more fulfilled when their skills are utilized than when they have to space out while the talentless are allowed to spew jargon that won't actually change anything.
When it is at home, yes. When someone wants to take up your time at work that could be instead spent getting the job done so you can go home, or already be at home, it is not a pleasant experience.
The stuff around internal politics though - little pecking order shit, where the managers and other coworkers can and often do make working unbearable causes many exits and often violence.
>Dealing with rude customers is quickly learned.
>The stuff around internal politics though... can and often do make working unbearable
I'll go out on a limb here and say you have never worked in a retail job before, dealing with the general public. A small percentage of the public are simply fucking awful people who will do absolute anything they can to try and get what they want.
Surprise surprise, dealing with this form of abuse (and more importantly, never knowing when it's coming) on a daily basis destroys your mental health - just as dealing with abusive behaviours from a spouse or parent does.
Businesses should not tolerate this, but they do, because it increases their revenue by a couple of percentage points.
I've worked several customer service jobs and helped many people navigate dealing with customers on a frontline. It can be learned and taught. I'm not saying, "the customer is always right", but negotiation - even on the fly negotiation is a skill that anyone can learn.
No, it's not, many workers I know face repeated and regular stressful abuse, which is almost always worse if they are visibly part of a marginalized group of people, who also get racial and misogynistic slurs thrown in their face. There are dramatic differences in treatment, and many managers don't step in to protect their employees. That's not to say the other stuff you mention doesn't also occur.
It's not even necessarily retail, I know a really sweet Latina woman, she manages and runs multiple bicycle rental places in SF. People will be incredibly rude to her, but when she says, "Hold on, let me get someone else to help you" and gets a white male employee of hers, they are suddenly all smiles and apologetic and understanding.
I honestly would encourage folks here to remember to be good customers, to treat workers as you would want people to treat you, because workers in the US are almost always underpaid and dealing with work related stress.
Try to know what you want by looking online, understand that workers don't owe you happy smiles and social interaction beyond the goods and services you pay for, listen to and ask for suggestions and consider them as expert advice if you are having trouble making a decision, and if possible be polite and say thank you.
If she is the manager and has a staff why is she working the front counter?
I've never seen a manager hand off a difficult customer to a lower employee. As a customer I would ask to speak to the manager if I wasn't getting service never does the manager ask the co-op student to handle this difficult customer they can't.
Something about your story doesn't add up. You say she is the nicest person but is she good at customer service because those are two different skills.
I remember the first time I received on-the-job grocery training when I put myself through college working the night shift at the grocery store.
It was 3 weeks before I graduated from college. I had to drive to another town and sit through 3 hours of presentations on how to do the basic things that I had been training other employees to do for years.
One of the big ones is credit cards/rewards programs. When I worked at target all cashiers had to maintain a certainppercentage of rewards program customers going through their line
> From personal experience, the hardest part of an office job is putting up with all the conformity and bureaucracy and politics.
Sorry, but this is just a staggeringly awful FirstWorldProblems/Karen kind of thing. I mean, sure, maybe that's the worst part of your "office job" (which I'm guessing is, like many people here, a six figure development position in a career you genuinely enjoy), but you say that because you've never had to be on your feet for 8 hours straight bagging groceries or emptying trash cans or entering orders from cranky customers into a POS terminal.
Good grief. Bad training meetings are what you choose to complain about? Really?
Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: "Bro, you don't work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver."
They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it's certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you're an ant.
When I was fourteen I spent two or three years working at a place that gave refunds for recyclables in the bad area of town. I spent eight hours straight on my feet counting bottles and cans that were quite often picked from the garbage, and frequently had dead mice, broken glass, exposed needles, or other biohazards in them. I was _excited_ when I got the opportunity to mop the floor. Even when I had a couple days off, the smell of sour milk would always be in my nose. I got paid something like $6/hr USD at the time.
Quit your whining about your cushy fast food job making almost twice as much, you don't even know what hard work is. /s
It doesn't matter if other people have it worse. That's still something that sucks in that guys life, and the fact that other people have it worse doesn't make him feel better or invalidate how he feels about it.
Fwiw, when I worked a crappy retail job and was on my feet 8 hours straight, I despised pointless meetings and training and would have rather been sweating while hauling boxes or cleaning the store toilet.
This is America.. where employers (small and large like Walmart) schedule workers for part time just so they don't have to provide health insurance. Where low wage workers live paycheck to paycheck, get no time off, and if they get sick they would still be expected to show up for work.
Economists cant seem wrap their head around the idea that being a front line worker being exposed directly to sick people during a pandemic seems to be worth more money than when there wasn't a pandemic.
Incredible. It's like people--including low wage people--understand there's a pandemic going on.
> Economists cant seem wrap their head around the idea that being a front line worker being exposed directly to sick people during a pandemic seems to be worth more money than when there wasn't a pandemic.
The article says this...? It analyzes three possible causes: overgenerous benefits (the covid stimulus), fear of COVID, and inefficiencies in job-seeking. It goes on to suggest that overgenerous benefits are probably not the reason and that the latter two causes are probably more important.
Furthermore, I expect approximately zero economists to not "wrap their head around the idea that being a front line worker being exposed directly to sick people during a pandemic seems to be worth more money than when there wasn't a pandemic."
Why are you going on a vaguely related rant about economists when the article (presumably written by an economist in the wider sense) agrees with you? And why is your low-quality comment at the top of the comments section? What is with the quality of discussion these days?
I’d argue it’s the philosophy of owners of low-wage businesses.
My favorite is the owner of a liquor store in my area. I indirectly know the guy — they are printing money from the pandemic, expanded the business across storefronts to keep up with demand, operate 4 delivery trucks, etc.
The guy gets on TV complaining that he has to pay $17 to hire drivers.
I see that in software business too, some psychological biases are at work here. It's usually because he used to pay $12 at some point, which he remembers better than other times, thinks it was just yesterday. Moreover, people and most of all business owners, don't like to be coerced to accept higher market price like that, if the work efficiency and quality of work did not improve. Same if you go to a shop and suddenly have to pay X% more for a toothbrush and don't really have a choice (alternative is to shop around but it costs time and money).
I think USA is still in a very good position compared to other countries as it is still seen as one of the best places to emigrate to. Other countries have it much worse and declining demographics will kill them faster.
While the USA is a better place than many, it's far from ideal. It's nice to get a high salary for a few years.
The USA still has a lot of private capital to attract talents. But eventually it's going to run out of it or the dollar will lose value. This will be accelerated by the growth of the Chinese renminbi, especially once countries start to use it as a base currency instead of the dollar.
The USA has high salaries and relatively cheap house but it also has high taxes, high cost of healthcare and education, a good amount of social craziness (political polarisation, crime, revolts, gun shootings in school, badly handled homelessness) - I personally think you may be better off living in Europe for the time being.
Still, Europe is a time bomb waiting to explode. The demographics decline and high paid jobs moving away to countries with lower taxation will trigger a pension crisis, eventually. When Italy needs a bailout, Europe will stop being what it is.
I think in x0 years South America could be the next Europe and China could be the next USA.
You're right about a lot of the social problems in the US. You're wrong about almost everything else.
It boils down to the following in the US. If you are upper middle class or above you have a very high quality of the life in the US. Healthcare is excellent, taxes are very low for the wealthy and unlike some parts of central and South America, you're free to openly enjoy your wealth here without fear of retribution. My parents live in the US and would love to retire in Spain. The tax burden alone makes that untenable.
China may end up being the dominant economic power but it's unlikely to ever reproduce what the US has in the last century. While the US has societal issues, it's not (currently) committing genocide and it's not facing a demographic time bomb with no ability to incorporate immigrants into society. For all the problems in the US, within a generation or two immigrants become Americans and participate at the highest echelons of American society. Please call me when that's the case in China.
What has made the US great is that it's been able to convince the brightest people in the world to make their homes here. From Albert Einstein to the Google founders and Elon Musk. I really don't see any of that that happening in China.
You're making a lot of unfounded assumptions here. Nobody in the world expected that China would be in this position 50 years ago. Very few people expected the US to be in the current situation either: a country saddled with debt, with periodic economic crisis, with a shortage of workers, making life very hard for immigrants, with an increasingly unstable political system and unable to solve racial problems that span already more than 200 years. Nowadays every serious analyst of the economic landscape sees that the future seems brighter for China than for the US. Unless the US is able to do a very serious overhaul of its current path, which it doesn't seem able or capable or doing. My opinion is that the US will become a worse Europe: with more money to spend but with a population immersed in third world problems.
I think 'racial problems' is the last thing China gets to throw stones on. When minorities in the US feel oppressed they protest, the system (slowly sometimes) improves and everything goes on. When minorities in China feel oppressed the CCP initiates a program of cultural or actual genocide until such time that the minority is dead or convinced that they are Han Chinese.
The U.S. has plenty of problems but I think moral contest with China in this area is not one of them.
True - I am excluding historical events and looking only at current state. I'm excluding the american genocide of the natives for the same reason i'm excluding historical Chinese atrocities. While these are important events and did influence the cultures and societies of their respective countries I think it's more important to examine what the current generation of living people is actually doing to understand the structure of both systems.
[edit] - I incorrectly identified China as the bad guy in a historical event where they were the victim. My bad. Point still stands.
I like the way you formulate the problem. While I agree we're still not there, China is positioning itself in a way to do so.
They're actually recruiting foreign talent, they're building futuristic and liveable mega cities, they're collecting the capital needed for venture and they're growing their global VC investments.
I really don't like this development and I wished a free country would have achieved what China is doing (I think of them like the Galactic Empire in Star Wars), but I think they'll get there.
People are quick to forget the past and the majority of young people favour socialism. I'm sure they will be quick to move and work for the CCP.
I really don't have much hope left for Europe and the USA, things just keep getting worse. I hope South America will grow its economy and become the free society that can oppose China.
But Europe doesnt exist in the same sense as the US does. It's not a system that can blow up, it s a group of interest that prevent French and Germans to murder each others and their neighbour.
If we can do that without the EU so be it, it's not like we culturally merged just yet.
But not saying the situation is great in each country, but I suppose if Italy dies, we can still kick it out or stop the EU as long as France and Germany find a way to ensure no more world war. This is the only goal for most of us. Every other advantage is a bonus, every flaw a necessary sacrifice.
I see your point and I agree that individual countries would be able to live just fine and cooperate / trade with each other - eventually.
I still think that if the EUR currency were to fail all those countries will face tremendous adversities for quite some time. That could be a chance for countries like Italy and Greece to rebuild a less corrupted version of themselves, but I reckon it would take a long time.
people and most of all business owners, don't like to be coerced to accept higher market price like that, if the work efficiency and quality of work did not improve
This is a very good observation. And smaller business owners often really don't get the increases in efficiency because they skimp on tools and aren't great managers. So it's a double whammy of increasing costs and not getting the increase of efficiency that larger companies enjoy.
Basically, they're on the receiving end of Baumol's cost disease.
And because more expensive labor forces increases in efficiency (more tech, better organization), cheap labor is by far the worst drug for the economy, covering up for stagnation and exploitation.
The US isn't a giant monolith although the rest of the world likes to treat it as such. Life on the coasts is very different than life everywhere else. It's one of the reasons the country is so polarized. We literally live in two different countries. Wealthy coastal cities and poverty stricken rural decay in the middle of the country.
There's plenty of decay on the coasts and cities doing great in middle America. You never hear about them on HN because they're not ideologically convenient in the little filter bubble we've got going on here.
The "coasts rich and good, middle America poor and backwards" narrative that we get plenty of here, on Reddit, etc. is an over-simplification at best.
Yes. Think of all the different cultures you encounter on a long auto drive from Madrid to Moscow. Now drive from LA to Bangor, similarly long, if not longer.
Is it no wonder, then, we might feel like there are "different" Americas in the broad expanse of the US? And "different" Americans?
While I agree with you in part, another argument might ascribe many aspects of a perceived "polarization" to mere geography.
I live outside Raleigh, NC, which is booming. In my exurb, I can drive less than ten minutes to find empty storefronts. I've seen those empty storefronts in every rural area I've been in on the Eastern seaboard. Cities may be booming, there are still people being left behind.
Have a listen to "We Can't Make It Here Anymore", by James McMurtry
I mean, from a business standpoint, let's face it, employees are a pain and more of a necessary evil when needed. I dream of running a lifestyle business where I don't need any full-time employees. Not many people start a business wanting to employ lots of people and be a "model employer" (even though those who do are loud about it)
Business standpoint? How are people that contribute the majority of your bottom line a necessary evil? If anything, employers are the necessary evil simply because citizens fail to sustain/govern themselves.
Less employees means less consumers which means less income for your lifestyle business. Economics 101 bud. But yeah, keep dreaming!
There's a practical aspect of this too. Say you pay 4 drivers $17 an hour and to get the 5th you'd have to pay $19 an hour. The problem is that it's tough to pay 4 drivers $17 and one $19. They'll talk and eventually the other 4 drivers will demand $19 as well. That's why you see a lot of interview and signing bonuses but less wage increases.
> I’d argue it’s the philosophy of owners of low-wage businesses.
I fail to understand why any business should pay more than market rate for anything. I get that you want the market rate to be higher, but I have yet to ever have encountered a business that completely disregards market rate and just blows their wad on the first employee they hire.
The businesses who are crying about not being able to find labor are the ones failing to deal with reality. They either need to pay more to secure labor or fail.
I believe we're currently at 5.8% unemployment for May 2021, down from around 15% during the pandemic.
> They either need to pay more to secure labor or fail.
Yes. Those are the options. The .001% is really cleaning house while smaller businesses are dying. And no way Amazon is going to absorb the cost, so all of this will just end wiping out the earnings and savings of most people while nobody's purchasing power increases.
I’d use gasoline as an example to clarify market forces in action.
If you are willing to pay $2/gallon for gasoline in June 2021, you are likely to have difficulty operating a car. Note that does not mean there is a gasoline shortage.
I have seen a lot of quality discussion on HN comment section even if the comment does not align with the article completely. Usually the comments are related to the topic of the article and not completely to the article written itself. Which is how it should be otherwise we would just have pretty narrowed down comment section.
Well, the article is behind a paywall. Since HN tolerates such articles (and has no culture of expecting OP to provide a way around the paywall apparently), I feel like it's somewhat the fault of HN here. Nothing encourages discussion about headlines only as paywalled articles.
But the economist doesn’t mention poor quality and insufficiently paid jobs - which should be eliminated by competitive pressure. Which is the actual problem.
Firms can’t get workers because they don’t actually have a sustainable job to offer. In a functioning capitalist system encouraging those firms to die would be seen as positive.
Firms should have to compete for labour. Not getting labour and the existential risk that poses to firms drives automation and innovation. They are capitalists supposedly. Deploy some capital, or close and get out the way so somebody else will.
Venerating individual businesses stops capitalism working. It’s time to give up believing firms have a right to exist and that they are doing anybody a favour by existing. Let competition do its job of getting rid of the bad and encouraging the good.
Talking about economists. Personally I can't wrap my head around why the person that provides the food and the basic services I need so I don't starve, or otherwise die of basic needs doesn't deserve at least as much as an economist who's basically the same as a modern day fortune teller or someone who builds the next gen photo/video sharing app.
Could we put Nobel laureates in scare quotes. The Nobel Prize in economics wasn't actually established by Alfred Nobel but instead Sweden's national bank trying to add credibility to their pseudoscience. The official title of the prize is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
Even members of the Nobel family have come out and said the prize is bullshit.
Because we get payed based on perceived value on the market and not based on utility, importance and certainly not based on positive impact. All of these things are incredibly hard to measure and I don't think there is a reasonable objective way to evaluate them.
The more people are willing and able to do a job, the less is the perceived marked value, especially if they are not organized in unions to assert their interests.
Now from what I know unions are generally frowned upon in the US for some reason or another (perhaps because of their obsession with capitalist ideology), and reports say that large corporations are actively oppressing the formation of unions.
So what is left is simply trying to avoid work and perhaps hoping that some companies will come around and provide reasonable working conditions and pay or to start businesses themselves, while trying to survive the bullying tactics of said companies.
This has always bothering me: that people think the money you make and the contribution you make to society is the same. Sometimes it is completely detached. There are jobs which pay in a enormous amount of money but which create negative value to society.
It is interesting, that in free-market economics, you get many of the same effects as in nature and evolution. There will always be parasites.
The problem today, are all the people so convinced of the perfection of free-market economics, that they will insist that even the parasites somehow serves a purpose.
That's because the money you make is a defined by your position in a competitive political hierarchy. Your "contribution" is defined entirely by political status.
The more power you have over others, the more money you make. That's the real "free market" definition of value.
There's a reason climate damage and other critically important side-effects of market dysfunction are dismissed as ignorable "externalities". They have little or no immediate political effect and no independent political agency. Therefore in market terms their value is either zero or negative.
The physical reality is that the game board is on fire and unless something changes the entire game will be over soon.
The US, at least, has not been a free market for a long time.
What we have is some form of (heavily financialized) crony statism, where a bunch of well connected monopolies milk consumers shamelessly (health "care", higher education, etc).
> So what is left is simply trying to avoid work and perhaps hoping that some companies will come around and provide reasonable working conditions and pay or to start businesses themselves, while trying to survive the bullying tactics of said companies.
There is no getting around the fact supply and demand = price. If society wants to change the price, society needs to work on moving the supply and demand curves. So what is left is providing people with the information on the market, such as publicizing pay rates (Colorado has made a good start here), and then providing people with the means to get an education so they can provide the type of labor that the market is willing to pay more for.
Another option is unions, although that is more difficult when the global supply of labor is so high and people around the world are willing to work for 10x less. In this case, tariffs are an option, but then you get into politics and there are other consequences to consider.
No idea why you're being downvoted/flagged on this one. The real answer is that the one who provides basic services is far more easily replaced than the economist.
Economics does have a fair amount of fortune telling. I believe the entire field of technical analysis is bunk and really is "fortune telling" but I think that economists have a lot of value to add outside of fortune telling BS.
Capitalist economies don’t pay based on some moral analysis of what people “deserve”, they work on how much utility you provide to people, how much competition there is to provide that utility, and how wealthy the people are to whom you provide that utility.
> Democracies ensure that - politicians will act to ensure the interest of their supporters.
Will they? I think they are more like adults promising sweets for breakfast to children if they behave (vote). Not really in their interest if you think about it.
The supporters are the PACs and special interest lobbying groups exchanging funding for political achievements.
Voters are just the marginalized workers whose favor needs to be curried every so often to keep critical analysis of our sociopolitical economic reality in check.
It is an ideology that is used to solidify and concentrate power.
"Free trade agreements" that actually lower trade interaction and increase the foothold of multinational corporations in foreign countries to outsource work and avoid taxation.
"Competition" for the workers, while large corporations get massive tax cuts, bailouts and lobby for regulations that benefit them and are a burden for SMBs.
"Market innovation" that is largely superficial and stands of the shoulders of giants, researchers who are paid by the taxpayer.
(I'm being hostile and uncharitable here to get a point across and give some counterweight to the status quo.)
I think Ha-Joon Chang said it best, that a Free Market isn't actually free because every market has rules that the buyers and sellers have to follow for it to function at all.
His previous sentence mentions "pure capitalism" which makes the one you quoted make more sense. No one lives in a purely capitalist system, but it is hel up as an ideal. Which is bizarre, as it would be a pretty hellish thing to live under. There's a very good reason why our capitalism is hybridused with democracy and state run services. And attempts since the late 80s/90s to move closer to a purely capitalist system seem to mainly have caused greater inequality and inefficiency.
> His previous sentence mentions "pure capitalism" which makes the one you quoted make more sense.
I read it as, "why talk about pure capitalism when we're not even in capitalism?" I've seen far more conflation of the two by commenters on HN than not, so maybe that's clouding my reading.
Just a definition check. By 'purely capitalist system', does that mean a world where all of the means of production are privately owned eg: the non-existence of worker-owned corps, co-ops, or any government-owned production?
The more common name for this is Anarco Capitalism. Or ancap. It’s somewhat of a meme on the internet because of how absurd situations become with no government or central police force.
Mostly because capitalism can afford to make mistakes. If the government makes a mistake then everyone will have to live with that mistake. If a company makes a mistake, it has the risk of going bankrupt.
Of course pure capitalism is not realistic nor desirable in practice.
> Firms can’t get workers because they don’t actually have a sustainable job to offer. In a functioning capitalist system encouraging those firms to die would be seen as positive.
Unfortunately - similar as with housing - most people currently don't have a meaningful choice between having a job or not or paying through their nose for rent or not, which is something that way too many employers and landlords exploit as a natural consequence of a captive market.
The obvious solution would be a livable minimum wage and government provided housing or at the very least severe rent control and building out of infrastructure in rural areas, but all of that is often simply decried as communist.
Minimum wage doesn't help in a system that is designed to produce fewer jobs than people that want to work. If you have 20 dogs and 19 bones, then one dog is always going to have to go without no matter what happens.
We don't need a minimum wage. We need a minimum job - the ability to sell your labour hours for a given price.
> We don't need a minimum wage. We need a minimum job - the ability to sell your labour hours for a given price.
Alternatively, we could look at what our ancestors dreamed of: utilizing automation to reduce the individual workload for everyone and spread it over more people. A future that is not 5x9-5 is possible. 4 workdays of 6h each with a 30min break at halftime would be a starter.
We would however first need to re-define our culture that derives much of our sense of "self worth" from our employment status, and we would need to think about which jobs we actually want as society... IMO we could cut out a large part of the plague that is advertising, most of the insurance industry (very easy: forcibly fuse all kinds of insurance provider into a single non-profit government entity - added benefit, rates could get massively lower due to less overhead) and likely all of far-distance truck transportation by expanding rail coverage and capacity.
"utilizing automation to reduce the individual workload for everyone and spread it over more people."
Which is a fallacy of composition - unless you believe you can turn a dumpster diver into a brain surgeon just by applying some amount of training.
It's known as the appeal to fungibility and it doesn't stack up.
Jobs are becoming more skilled, not less, which means that we all have to deploy our hours in solidarity with the skilled who we want to work a full week.
Otherwise they will just stop on Tuesday, once they have made enough for themselves, and have the rest of the week off.
That's precisely my point. There aren't enough people who are capable of being brain surgeons. The majority of us cannot become one. We're just not good enough.
That was always the failure of the 'socially necessary labour time' idea. It assumes complete fungibility amongst people, and that isn't the case.
> > We don't need a minimum wage. We need a minimum job - the ability to sell your labour hours for a given price.
> Alternatively, we could look at what our ancestors dreamed of: utilizing automation to reduce the individual workload for everyone and spread it over more people. A future that is not 5x9-5 is possible. 4 workdays of 6h each with a 30min break at halftime would be a starter.
This won't solve the initial problem. The amount of work which gets done defines the amount of activity in the economy, but unemployment is compatible with a range of amounts of activity.
If the goal is to keep about 3% of those who want jobs and could work unemployed, then you will achieve that whether people are working 20 hour weeks or 40 hour weeks. (Actually, the target unemployment is a lot higher than that, because there's plenty of people who want jobs and could work, but who the labor market prefers to redefine as "can't work" or "doesn't want to work". If two people can do the same job, but one person can only do it at half the pace, then we often exclude them from the market.)
> This won't solve the initial problem. The amount of work which gets done defines the amount of activity in the economy, but unemployment is compatible with a range of amounts of activity.
Right now we have a lot of people that are not working at all even if they wanted... in many households, women stay home for childcare, there are people who don't even register for unemployment because of all sorts of (sometimes willful!) bureaucratic impediments.
By reducing the expected per-person workload to 20 hours a week, society would enable all these people to contribute.
How about..a salary based on the ressources you need/want to survive...so that those who work less (indirectly contributing more to society by sharing their job, childcare, volunteering or just being mentally healthy enough to think of the"next big thing" and directly by ecologically diminishing consumption) get paid more ...? Tax the higher earners and subsidise the "work less" ...then suddenly wages and automation go up as businesses have to compete for a diminishing work pool...
I personally have moved out of the 1st world to avoid the work plague, I help my kids grow up and dig a beautiful garden...my conscience cringes at the "work ethic" which I perceive as government propaganda to help milk peoples time and keep them politically silent... the easiest solution to global warming is to work less, we saw it with covid (at least a whispering) but maybe politicians are avoiding doing anything realistic because...power corrupts...
Somewhere around 70% of restaurants fail within 5 years, which seems like a reasonable amount of competitive pressure to eliminate bad restaurant jobs, which obviously hasn't been the case.
It sounds a bit like the're saying benefits are the lever we control to balance between one disaster and another.
On one side there is inflation which ruins the economic recovery (too generous benefits) and on the other side you have mass suffering (too stingy benefits). As the primary driver of the shortage (the fear of COVID) goes down, we also need to scale back benefits while maintaining that delicate balance between too generous and too stingy. And we can't stop decreasing benefits until people begin to accept those less desirable jobs again. Failure to do this would push us over into inflation.
And here I was thinking that undesirable jobs have to pay more to attract employees.
Instead, because the power relationship between companies and employees is imbalanced towards companies, who can afford to not hire a few employees while individual employees can't afford to starve, these employees have to accept suffering for a pittance because hey, there's a slight risk of inflation (while companies have been bailed out to the tune of a few trillion).
> The article says this...? It analyzes three possible causes: overgenerous benefits (the covid stimulus), fear of COVID, and inefficiencies in job-seeking. It goes on to suggest that overgenerous benefits are probably not the reason and that the latter two causes are probably more important.
The article didn't have anything to say about those who work multiple part time jobs, which I suspect is important. Getting paid 50% more to work half as much will leave many low income workers in a precarious position. Worse yet, the threat of job loss (either due to mandated closures or a business failing) introduces the risk of being denied benefits should they be needed again.
There is a presumption amongst a lot of software engineers that they are the smartest people around and every other field can be corrected and revolutionized if they spent 5 minutes at it.
It follows, therefore, that economists are stupid and couldn't possibly think of everything they did.
I have seen them being dismissive of mathematicians as well. I think only physicists are spared their scorn.
Even within software engineers they consider themselves the smartest. They are also simultaneously dismissive of Google's interview process, if they fail it; while respecting Googles engineering prowess.
> It follows, therefore, that economists are stupid and couldn't possibly think of everything they did.
There are times when perspectives from the outside should be considered and be given the dignity of a credible response. Even though that appears to be happening more often now that a microscopic virus has thrust a grand social experiment upon us, it has been all too rare in the past. It is also worth noting that software engineers are far from the only ones going unheard when speaking up. Many outside the discipline have done so when the reality of economics didn't reflect their reality.
If this is an oblique reference to a covid19 lab leak, you must know that the possibility of a leak was pushed forth by virologists, not software engineers or trumpsters. Just like in this thread, software engineers can only add negative value to fields outside their area of expertise if they show up to instruct instead of showing up to learn.
For the record, no. My position on lab leak speculation is it is highly politicized and counter productive. The reference to a grand social experiment was purely in the context of our response to the pandemic, rather than speculation about the origins of the virus.
It’s kind of sad how almost none of the replies to your comment are even related to anything you said. It’s almost strange to read. All of them except one or two seem to just be people who had their own message they wanted to say and replied to you because your comment is close to the top.
The only exception is the commenter who implied you were an out of touch ivory-tower academic because you called the pandemic benefits overgenerous. It’s the only reply whose author seems to have actually read your comment and it doesn’t even make an argument, only calls you names.
To answer your question as to why the top comment was someone just bullying economists based on a misinterpretation of the headline, the reason is because the left was never inherently more pro-science than the right. For a long time, the right denied climate change and the left embraced it because the right was representing coal miners who felt like their jobs were at risk and the left was representing environmentalists who appreciated having a rock-solid justification for why we needed to switch to forms of energy production that emit less carbon (which usually means they pollute less). This got converted in the cultural conciseness to the left “following the science” and the right distrusting it and thinking they’re smarter or more knowledgeable than people whose job it is to study the topic at hand. But that want why, it was just because the obvious prescription coming from science was bad for the population the right represented and good for the population the left represented. (If you still feel the reason the left supported climate change is because they believe what scientists tell them, why does the left broadly oppose nuclear?)
Now, the cultural battleground is moving from climate change and social issues like gay marriage where the science is either neutral or on the side of the left, to economic issues where it’s not so clear cut. For example, there’s wide agreement among economists that the corporate tax is one of the most distortionary and least efficient taxes, and should ideally be reduced to very low rates if not zero. Yet this is broadly ignored on the left, who want to instead make “corporations pay their fair share”, as of whatever you intuitively feel is a corporation’s fair share is the economically optimal corporate tax rate.
Economists are also not united in supporting a federal $15 minimum wage. (Actually if I remember correctly the majority opposite it.) If the left was truly pro-science, they’d ask economists what they thought the minimum wage should be, possibly fund studies to help determine the socially optimal amount, then implement whatever number they say. But that’s not how the number was chosen and now since there’s disagreement among economists about whether it’s a good idea, the left needs to justify why they suddenly know better than the people whose job it is to study this stuff, and that manifests as calling all economists stupid or in the pocket of big business whenever the topic comes up.
Obviously this post wasn’t about minimum wage, but what I’m trying to communicate is that economists are now seen by the left (mostly the young online left) as agents of the enemy, and many see it as their prerogative to make sure nobody has a good impression of them. In their circles everyone knows that, while you should follow the science, these economists either don’t really know what they’re talking about or are being actively deceptive and so their opinions can be safely disregarded. How else can you explain why the GP comment felt the need to call economists stupid before even reading the article to figure out what they had to say?
First, there was no need for the political rant… the answer to the above question is simple: people just read the headline, not the article.
Second, economics isn’t “science” any more than any other “social science”, so the left being “pro-science” or “anti-science” doesn’t really apply.
Economists are not seen as “agents of the enemy” by the left. That’s absurd. There are many economist across the left spectrum: from Stieglitz to Picketty and Kelton.
Stop it. You can’t try to make a point about “sides” having an agenda and then write… this. It looks foolish.
"To answer your question as to why the top comment was someone just bullying economists based on a misinterpretation of the headline, the reason is because the left was never inherently more pro-science than the right. For a long time, the right denied climate change and the left embraced it because ..."
It didn't start with climate change, that was just a sequel to asbestos and smoking denialism.
The benefits are designed to be only as generous as they need to be to ensure that all of the least desirable (though necessary) jobs in society are filled.
It's not about feeding and clothing everyone who needs it. It's about seeing if there are any jobs out there that people feel are beneath them and if you find any, lower the floor a bit until the jobs don't look so bad.
You’re saying that on Hacker News though, which means you’re probably well (i.e. expensively) educated with good prospects and an income significantly north of the minimum wage being offered in these jobs.
lower the floor a bit until the jobs don't look so bad
Surely you can see how this reply reads as “let them eat cake”? (And thats the most polite way to put it I could think of).
I don't think that was the parents intent. I read it as descriptive of how the system currently functions, not as justification for it being that way.
I've been thinking about this, how a society can get necessary work done without forcing some people to choose between doing it or starving. Perhaps if everyone was guaranteed to be fed, to be housed, and to have medical care, then the market would find a fair price for collecting garbage or cleaning floors.
Please delete my question once it has been answered but " why is your low-quality comment at the top of the comments" could it be that your sane reply attracted the attention to get him to the top? and btw how can I sort by new?
> Furthermore, I expect approximately zero economists to not "wrap their head around the idea that being a front line worker being exposed directly to sick people during a pandemic seems to be worth more money than when there wasn't a pandemic."
I guess I count as a “low wage worker” these days and your claims in the first paragraph simply aren’t true for myself or most of the other low wage workers I know.
I deliver for DoorDash and make around $100 dollars a day from about five hours of work. My girlfriend (who’s disabled) rides along with me, so it’s sorta like I’m just getting paid to drive around and hang out. I drive a 2005 Honda Civic, so I spend less than $15/day on gas and the car is old enough the depreciation is minuscule. I buy my health insurance on the exchange. It’s excellent and with the premium subsidy I only pay $22/month. I have several chronic health conditions, so good health insurance (and particularly drug coverage) is really important to me. I’ve been able to get my insurance to cover all of the many medications I’m on (many of still under patent and not generic) and my copay is only $45/month. Visits to my primary care doctor are free and I’ve got a $500 deductible for everything else.
I can work as much or as little as I want on pretty much whatever schedule I choose. I tend to stick to about five hours a day because it doesn’t feel like a ton of work, but it’s enough to cover my expenses and then some. Rent is my only other major expense and I pay just $550 for my one bedroom apartment. I rarely cook at home, but even after spending way too much eating out, I regularly have $500-$1,000 leftover at the end of the month, so I’m certainly not living paycheck to paycheck. Since I save some of that extra money, I can take time off whenever I want (although I rarely do, since I enjoy getting out of the house and working). Sure, if I get sick and don’t work, I don’t make any money, but that’s why I keep a bit of money in savings.
It might be Uber or Lyft or Instacart instead of DoorDash, but I know several people in a similar position to me. And honestly it’s a pretty sweet life. I’ve got all my needs met and then some. I enjoy my work. And I’ve got lots of free time to purpose my intellectual interests like coding.
That was my situation. I had a sales job the was primarily commission based and I had health insurance. I had a bad bike accident and got sent to an out of network hospital. I went from a six figure income and no medical bills to almost no income and a six figure medical bill. I was devastated.
Probably the hardest part was how depressed I was, even as my body was recovering, I simply wasn’t prepared to start hustling to get my sales income back up, pay for physical therapy, deal with the hospital & insurance company, etc.
For-profit healthcare should be criminalised. It's hard enough to recover physically from an injury, but adding the need to recover financially from it as well is cruel.
The problem is not for-profit healthcare, but how it is implemented in the US. Lots of countries have for-profit healthcare without the users of that healthcare every worrying about recovering financially.
At the end of the day, it's always "for profit". Either it's the doctors getting paid by the state getting paid by citizens, or the hospital getting paid by the state getting paid by citizens, or the hospitals getting paid by the insurers getting paid by citizens, or very often a combination of the 3.
The issue in the US is the setup, not the fundamental principal
Getting paid for your labor isn't the same as "for profit". Hospitals can get their stuff paid for without there being "profit", and you don't have to expect sick folks to have extra money to pay for middle men.
> Hospitals can get their stuff paid for without there being "profit"
They can, but it's not necessary. There are lots of private hospitals in France and it works just fine
> you don't have to expect sick folks to have extra money to pay for middle men
There are always going to be middlemen. Too few and resources are allocated inefficiently due to a lack of management. Too many and it's a waste of resources. The trick is to find the right balance
"There are always going to be middlemen. Too few and resources are allocated inefficiently due to a lack of management. Too many and it's a waste of resources. The trick is to find the right balance"
Yes, agreed, though I'd argue that middlemen aren't actually needed - as actual middlemen are folks getting paid when they aren't really necessary. It is kind of like car dealerships don't really need to be as they are, but that is part of the service you pay for with cars. Instead, you simply need enough people to get things to work - and sometimes that can be lessened. For example, standardized medical billing and coding in the US would reduce the labor required to deal with insurance - and suddenly, fewer people are needed at the office. Fairly standarized coverage would help as well (fewer misunderstandings) and decoupling it from employment (US based: Would take away HR jobs, but reduce burden on companies).
But the main point really was that sick people, who could easily be missing work to see the doctor, shouldn't be expected to pay for everything.
I imagine most contract delivery workers have considered this and factor it into their decision making. I don't think these positions are meant to be a perfect improvement across the board to traditional starting wage jobs, but it's up to the employee to make the judgement based on their own risk tolerance.
Like many folks here, I worked full-time minimum wage for years before eventually entering the professional world, and I can say given the choice now, I'd absolutely prefer the make-your-own-hours contract model to obligation of a fixed-hour in-person position. Of course there are drawbacks, like the lack of health coverage (though I'm Canadian so I'm not sure how this would work in the states exactly), but given the option, I'd still choose the former.
> If a car smashed into me and I couldn't code, my company wouldn't pay me either?
Mine would (not a company, a university). For the first two weeks, I'd use accrued Sick Time then switch to their Short-Term Disability that would cover 100% of my pay (for some positions with fewer years of service it would be 75%). Short-Term Disability coverage lasts for six months, beyond that my employer doesn't pay any salary replacement but I pay a few dollars a month for long-term disability insurance that would.
I think the federal Family and Medical Leave Act only guarantees I can return to my job for 12 weeks but Massachusetts increases that to 20 weeks. By policy, my employer won't dismiss someone on Short-Term Disability (26 weeks) and may not beyond that either.
In this case, driving a car is part of his job, so indeed it would be like having an industrial accident - your employer is going to cover you for a work accident
These gig job workers are classified as contractors, not employees (except where a judge or a local law says they must be employees). I don't know how, or if, workers' comp applies to contractors, I suspect it doesn't apply at all.
Let me know how your gig economy retirement plan goes. May you never have an accident on job. May you never need healthcare. I don’t see much future in such gig economy jobs. Our grandparents often worked for the same company all their lives. Your gig economy is a one way trap with no exit or promotional path. You have the equivalent of a fancy summer college kid job, but it’s not a career path.
Imagine a world where people were provided free health care, a benefits system, good employee rights and state pensions! Oh wait, it already exists in most of Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
Did you read the comment? They have healthcare and said there's $500-$1000 leftover each month, which is a healthy amount for retirement investment. More than enough to max out a Roth IRA. That's on top of social security too.
And you appear to have no dependent, and living in an area where cost of livings are rather low according to your rent cost.
I'm not implying we should all afford a living in San Francisco, but an anecdote that represents the average case would be more relevant. The prospect of having a family with a couple of kids to take care of is quite the norm (still)
Really interesting to hear some insight it from someone who is actually doing it for a change. Not having lived in the US for a while I wasn't aware that insurance was available for this rate with pre-existing conditions. Sounds a lot more reasonable than what i've heard - do you have more information about your insurance plan?
Theirs does sound like a good plan (won't find that in every state) but they're also relatively poor and receiving a large subsidy to cover most of the monthly premium.
Thanks for providing some factual real-world insight to the topic of US healthcare where most information that bounces around Europeans is along the lines of "yeah, well Americans have higher salaries because healthcare costs are so extreme so everyone without a tech job is living paycheck to paycheck and can easily be bankrupted by illnesses".
I have absolutely no data, but I wonder if a decline in public decency is also playing a role. It isn’t hard to find videos or articles of service workers getting harassed or physically attacked by customers.
A lot of companies (e.g. uber, Amazon, etc) have made it much harder to get any kind of satisfaction from the management who is actually at fault for problems people have, and leave the front line folks to face the anger they incur. Easy example, I have had lots of problems with uber that are almost always app related, but I am asked to rate the driver every time. I try to always give a good rating or none at all, but I imagine the drivers (who are mostly just executing specified instructions) are bearing the brunt of any frustration with the company. This is true for most customer service roles now, companies have completely offloaded their accountability onto the front line who is usually the least responsible.
My couple of years experience in retail taught me that people are generally horrible when they’re not around their peers. I feel there should be a mandatory 1 year of service in retail for every American. It would humanize them.
Same experience here. I am friends with a pharmacist who worked retail with me, and she was starting to get impatient at the guy at Staples because the print job was taking too long, even though he was clearly stressed with a full line of customers.
I fear that, much like the student debt reduction talks, would just result in people saying things like “I had to suffer through {xyz} so you should too!” leading to little net change in customer attitudes.
The front line workers absolutely have it rough and they get taken advantage of constantly but they've been getting the shit end of the stick throughout history. I think these mega companies have just been able to leverage technology in order to scale the distribution of a ridiculous amount of shitty sticks in quantities that haven't been seen before.
That being said, I still agree that empathy in general seems to be trending downward and my assumption is that online life makes it a lot easier to dehumanize other people which makes it easier to treat people like shit.
I have a question about the Walmart thing - is healthcare not pro-rated according to how much you work? Or is this casual work where you get a higher hourly loading to compensate?
I'm trying to translate it into the Australian work context, but we don't tie healthcare to employment so I'm a bit confused.
No. While most people (especially higher wage workers) get health insurance through their employer, it is not guaranteed that your employer will provide that benefit.
Prior to Obama, low wage workers might be scheduled to work full time without health insurance. If they're poor enough, they might get Medicaid from the state; otherwise they get to ruin their credit and claim bankruptcy if they show up at the emergency room.
Obama passed ACA, which required employers with full time workers to provide health insurance or pay a fine per worker. Full time is defined as 30 hours per week or more by ACA. So in low wage jobs, employers responded by scheduling people for 29 hours.
So if you work multiple jobs or a job+doordash/uber/etc... you may work full time, and not have any health insurance because no one employer is going over 29 hours.
ACA also expanded Medicaid, but some states decided to decline that expansion. So whether that covers a low wage worker depends on where they are, the size of their household, and their total household earnings.
For many of these workers, it's not just the risk of unexpected medical bills that they can't pay... they rarely have savings, so if they miss a few days of work (say because they contracted COVID), that can spiral into a series of missed bills. And with the eviction moratorium coming to an end, that now includes losing their home.
I very much face-palmed when Obama pushed through the "full-time" bit. The counter-move was obvious and it happened just as I would have expected. Surely Obama and his advisors would have seen that one coming, so I have forever been left wondering why that particular loophole was left open ... what was bought with that?
Obama tried. The Affordable Care Act barely passed. He had to make last-minute compromises with members of his own party to get it voted through at all.
It’s not a loophole in the sense that it’s an unintentional exploit. Everyone involved knew full-well what the point of that provision was. If Congress voted in something more stringent, their corporate donors (e.g., Walmart) would have been pissed. That’s a deal-breaker for most Congress-critters.
The much more famous one probably being Liberman single-handedly killing the idea of the government directly providing insurance even if it is in fair competition, and then with Scott Brown briefly being elected in MA (which had Romney-care anyway and the ACA barely impacted most of us) everyone assumed it was a referendum on the ACA and was too scared to push any further.
It was very distressing watching the news spin it all as being about the ACA when it was definitely much more about his opponent since everyone here already had something analogous to the ACA. But that's how spin works I guess, it's certainly even worse now.
People can also buy health care plans directly through the exchange and use essentially a pre paid tax credit to directly pay part of their premiums. For example the monthly premium for a couple may be $1000 but the cost to the customer could be $300. At the income point just beyond medicaid eligibility this will virtually always be cheaper than what your employer offers.
29 hours a week is about 130 hours a month. Assuming a wage of $15 an hour, that's $1950. Spending $300 of that, about 15% of your pre-tax income, on health insurance is a decision few people would be happy about.
Isn't that what your employer would pay on health insurance in any case?
Speaking as a French person, 15% of my pre-income-tax salary sounds close to what I pay for state-sponsored healthcare (I pay more than that, but it includes retirement contributions and stuff).
the trick, of course, is that your 15% gets you /healthcare/, while our 15% gets us a /healthcare-related financial product/, which will require even more money should we ever use it.
Isn't that what your employer would pay on health insurance in any case?
In the case of the UK where I live, approximately 20% of all government spending goes on healthcare. Taxes on businesses, retail sales, house sales, wealth, capital gains, etc all contribute to the cost of healthcare, not just income taxes. That means a lot less than 15% of anyone's individual tax is spent on it.
No one is happy with the American Healthcare System unless you have America's exclusive socialized Healthcare, Tricare. You're also calculating it off of part time hours.
For foreigners or Americans without much exposure to the armed forces, and to save you a search: Tricare is what members of our military receive, active duty and (IIRC) those on full retirement.
However, depending on how you define "socialized", lots of people are covered under several "socialized" programs by the US government, not just Tricare. Medicare (old or disabled people), Medicaid (the very poor), CHIP and things like that (poor kids). Also, if you're counting Tricare, probably any health insurance provided by any level of US government (federal, state, county, city) to government workers should count.
In the end, the US government pays for healthcare (or, at least, much of it—US prices for healthcare are very high, and the way our insurance works means that insurance is just part of how the bills get paid, though a large part) for an high percentage of our population, one way or another.
Over 80% of my family is and was in the forces. They were all on Tricare, and complained. The ones that transitioned out now have to deal with private insurance and, in retrospect, Tricare was a teddy bear compared to what they are dealing with now.
I'm calculating it on part time hours because that's what this thread is about - how employers keep people as part time in order to avoid giving them health care benefits.
Because you can imagine the incentives if a company had to pay for health insurance for a part-time worker who works 10 hr per week?
All those part time jobs would disappear since what kind of employer pay $5-10k per year in insurance premium for an employee who earns $600 per month before taxes?
And you might say “great! Who cares about part time work?” and you’d be wrong, plenty of people don’t need or can do full time work.
This isn't really the same thing that Walmart is doing at all, they are scheduling people so they never get more than 32 hours a week, not scheduling them based on need for 1.5 hours/week.
There's room for a class of contractors that do small number of hours for many different employers, either many within a quarter or many throughout the year.
One practical alternative would be universal health care.
Within our current system of insanely bad group negotiation for rates, establishing a house cleaning union that could negotiate as a class would probably be the second best alternative.
The third alternative is the Obamacare one, which is to pay your employees at a rate high enough so they can buy their own subsidized insurance on the health exchanges.
I like how baked into this question is how a practical single-payer solution is not practical due to purely political reasons. (Where your house cleaner's taxes pay into a large risk pool and their healthcare costs are based on their income)
> Aren’t you technically paying a company for said service? Even if that company has one employee, your house cleaner?
Plenty of people are hired for work like that without forming a business entity, and sometimes under conditions that qualify as employment rather than contract work.
You're not wrong. But how could this apply to OP's situation? Given a 40 hour work week, three hours every other week is a mere 3.75%.
For the sake of conversation, let's consider the cleaner to be an employee and OP to be the employer. Even then, unless OP has 50 full-time and full-time equivalent employees, there is no requirement for the employer to provide group health insurance, according to the ACA.
Interestingly enough, that’s exactly how it works in France. When you pay your house cleaner you also pay the employment contributions, including pro-rated disability/maternity/retirement
Obviously if she only has one client that’s not going to be a lot, but it stacks with all the other employers
Your house cleaner is a legitimate contractor, with all the freedoms and risks that entails.
You would never be obligated to pay for their health insurance, it would be up to them, or their employer, to figure that out.
Walmart on the other hand has clear employees which are expected to turn up to non-negotiable shifts and wear a Walmart specified shifts. They’re currently forced to take on the risks of a contractors, but with none of the freedoms.
Pretending this practice started with Obamacare is just not factual. Full time is a commitment to 35 hours a week, most retailers avoided that as much as possible.
My recollection from working at CompUSA in college (a big box Best Buy like store) in the 90s was about 50-70 hourly employees, with 10-15 full timers.
But ACA created a large market for individual insurance, and 30 hr workers don't get mandated free insurance, they only get the right to buy into a group plan.
These plans are crap, you pay hundreds of dollars that you don't really have to get stuck with a deductible of thousands. Obamacare needs to die, maybe it does with the pandemic.
I hate to break it to you, but most employer plans, even in tech, will have someone paying hundreds of dollars and still have a deductible of thousands. Only a few companies pay all of it (and, because we're talking tech, it's not that big a deal anyway since cost of plan + max out of pocket is < $15k).
The fact it's easier to afford if you make more money is...well, sort of the reason why people want it to be universal, and covered by taxes, so the rich can offset it for the poor.
What I'm saying is that at the low end of the wage scale Obamacare is a public health hazard. You have people avoiding necessary healthcare because the money for deductible or medication isn't there.
I believe what you are saying is true in some instances at some scale, but I wonder if what you say is the median case or a sample case that you’ve been fed by an anti-ACA source.
My anecdata for people on ACA is that it works pretty well, with a caveat that premiums are high due to various misaligned incentives in the US health care system.
I’m not sure what your experience with it was, but in California it can be fairly cheap. Some anecdata:
- bartender friend of mine got laid off due to covid. With unemployment at ~$3k a month, he paid about $200 a month for insurance that had very low deductibles and overall seemed to be a good plan (silver). It was better than the plan I had as a university professor at a “good” university.
- another friend of mine started her own business. Very low income the first year (maybe $20k?) and was living on savings. She ended up paying about $100 a month for similar insurance to the bartender friend above.
The “downside” of these plans is that they scale aggressively with income. For reference, the entrepreneur friend’s business took off in year two, and now she’s paying about $1100 a month. This sounds high, but that’s what her group plan cost at her previous employer when you factored in the company contributions.
What? I’m on one of those plans and frankly it’s pretty darn great. The premiums are cheap because they are heavily subsidized. The subsidy goes up the less you earn. My generic prescriptions are cheap. The co-pay is $45 for most Dr. visits. I think the Emergency copay is $150.
The threshold is 30 hours on average in a given month [0]. So, presumably, if you work 31 hours one week they'd make you work 28 the next to avoid you being labeled full-time.
Full-time is determined by whether or not someone works 'an average' of 30 hours a week. To qualify as a full-time worker, you have to work 130 hours a month. So your employer would just cut back your scheduled hours the next week to stay under 130 hours.
And employment contracts for hourly works are incredibly rare and pretty much nonexistent for part-time workers.
Unfortunately, in most areas, low-wage workers get no contract whatsoever: YOu can pretty much be fired at any time for almost any reason except for a few federally protected ones. Those are easy to work around.
I'm not sure if going over one month does anything, and it most certainly doesn't do anything in a week: Some places will schedule folks around 40 hours for a couple weeks and then nearly nothing for a week to get the average down.
I have worked retail, and almost been physically pushed out the door at the point that my manager was risking a subordinate going over X hours. They are held accountable for it.
* American healthcare is too expensive. The problem is long known and nobody wants to solve it. That problem is administrative inefficiency. Solving that problem means terminating the a large segment of a massive industry (destroying a massive number of jobs). Drugs are expensive too, but drug pricing problems impacts specific persons that when averaged across the entirety of the population become only a tiny part of the industry wide problem.
Since medicine is expensive everybody is reliant upon insurance. The options are private insurance (expensive), employer offered insurance, and government insurance (designed for low income people and poor choices/service).
The exceptions are Obama care and military. Military has a wonderful health insurance plan called Tricare. Tricare is great for the patient because they cover just about everything but they are really hard about releasing funds to medical providers so some medical providers refuse to take Tricare.
Obama care is a new private insurance option from the government that provides an affordable insurance option partially subsidized by government funding.
I have known people who are not insured and refused to get insurance then just never go to the doctor. Wonderful medical insurance is a primary reason I remained employed by the military for a number of years.
> * American healthcare is too expensive. The problem is long known and nobody wants to solve it. That problem is administrative inefficiency. Solving that problem means terminating the a large segment of a massive industry (destroying a massive number of jobs). Drugs are expensive too, but drug pricing problems impacts specific persons that when averaged across the entirety of the population become only a tiny part of the industry wide problem.
My impression from looking at this for many years now is that the problem is everything. Every single individual and entity involved—and that's a whole bunch—is taking too much money. That's why it's so hard to point at any one problem and dig deeper and fine all the money. Every time, you find some of it, and usually a lot, but not all of it.
Doctors and other people actually providing care? Too few of them, and (or, "therefore") they're making too much money. Hospitals? Consolidation of hospitals and smaller providers into "networks"? Yes and yes, but still, that's not all. Administration costs? Yep, but not all of it. Insurance overhead? Yes, but... well, you get the idea.
> is healthcare not pro-rated according to how much you work?
No.
> Or is this casual work where you get a higher hourly loading to compensate?
No.
It is precisely as horrific as you would imagine for those low-wage workers who want full-time jobs to obtain those healthcare benefits, but keep running into this issue in job after job. The official tax-oriented definition of "full-time" [1] is a bit more nuanced than what you will colloquially hear in discussions, but in broad terms, once you are put into the HR system for more than 30 hours in a week of work, the threshold to full-time is triggered. It is a binary switch, no spectrum, no gradient.
This doesn't even begin to get into how capital-inefficient and service-poor so many of the healthcare plans are once you do get access to them as a low-wage worker. Nor how so many of these workers are so completely unequipped and unprepared to comprehend the fiscal realities of engaging these plans.
It's an all-or-nothing cutoff wall, so that if an employer schedules someone for 29 hours/week instead of 30, (for example) they don't have to provide anything.
And so of course 90%+ of the companies that can short on this, do. It's as awful as you think.
It varies by state, but typically part time employees get no employer funded healthcare at all, whereas there are required minimums for full time employees. Result: employers schedule everyone at 30 hours or less, in order to maximize shareholder value..
Forcing many people that want to eat to figure out how to work two jobs but nobody wants to hire someone for 10 hours so people are more apt to work 2 25 hour jobs.
If you're full time you do, which is why Walmart and other big non-union companies strive as much as possible to have a part-time workforce. If you're part of corporate, or management, you're full time..
"Beyond competitive pay, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include 401(k) match, stock purchase plan, paid maternity and parental leave, PTO, multiple health plans, and much more."
Healthcare costs would be in a better place were it not tired to employment. The problem right now is institutional/cultural momentum, bad leglistlation and how most of the high value customers are already locked down & better milked by the status quo.
Six months ago. I’m not sure it’s fair to say “there’s a pandemic going on” anymore. The vaccine is readily available. There are cases where this might not be enough to end the pandemic from your perspective (immunocompromised family member, etc) but we wouldn’t expect very many.
Only 41.6% of the US population is fully vaccinated with many more either planning to get vaccinated or in the process of getting vaccinated. The mere existence of the vaccine doesn't mean the pandemic is over.
Everyone who wants the vaccine can get the vaccine. If you get the vaccine, you have a minuscule, almost zero chance of having a bad response the virus. If you don't have the vaccine and you get the virus you have a small chance (if you're healthy) of having a terminal response to the virus, but if you do, it's on you, you chose to not get vaccinated. I believe it's safe to say we can back off the panic phase of the virus.
Last I checked 3% of deaths are among vaccinated people. That isn't what "almost zero" looks like. It's really good but it aint zero. Next up with 58% of the population not being fully vaccinated yet we have plenty of opportunity for problems if we don't take the ball all the way to the end zone especially with vaccinated people not being exactly evenly distributed.
I give you the fine state of Mississippi where only 1/3 is vaccinated and they are only doing 15k vaccinations per week. If the population even wanted a vaccine at this rate it would achieve immunity some time in 2023. Its like a nice little virus lab where there are plenty of unvaccinated hanging around for existing strains but the first strain to successfully attack vaccinated will gain a huge advantage.
So are you stating that 3% of the daily deaths from COVID-19 are of fully vaccinated people? I cannot find anything backing this up online, and even that seems like it would be a near zero number if you're measuring against recoveries.
I heard it on local WA state tv news which makes it harder to dig up. The thesis of the story was that almost all the deaths were people that hadn't vaccinated ergo vaccines work.
What I am seeing from the CDC is around 535 break through deaths out of 3016 hospitalizations as of June 1st but this isn't broken down by time frame so I cannot compare a time frame to see what percentage exactly are break through deaths however looking at the rough magnitude of breakthrough deaths vs deaths makes me doubt that 3% is accurate nationwide.
I would expect the 58% to be children and Republicans. Children aren’t in the labor market and the “COVID is a hoax” people weren’t changing their behavior over it in the first place. Is there some evidence that many Americans who want the vaccine still don’t have it? What is stopping them?
Approx 85% of the population is over 12. 75% is over 18. The percentage who say they wont vaccinate or wont vaccinate unless its required are 20%.
This means that 15% are too young at this point to vaccinate and 17% (20% of 85%) wont vaccinate. This means full vaccination of everyone who intends to vaccinate would be about 68% of the population. This means that 26% of the population is still in progress.
Part of the issue is that some of the public facing high risk jobs, like line cook, are hard to fill because the people who filled them are fucking dead. Of Covid.
The reality is that they're being paid to stay home. A lot of people (myself included) would have loved the opportunity to take one of those $12/hr greeting jobs when I was 16. Instead, I managed to get $9/hr setting up a companies internal network.
You're correct, this is America. You can work hard and build something. America is intentionally setup NOT to give you anything, but to make as many opportunities as possible open to you. That's why people brave deserts to come here.
There aren't any static classes (although the education system is quickly becoming one), that's what makes america great. Honestly, health care isn't what most of the poor care most about (having been there, it is a concern, just not #1); medicaid and medicare cover you if you're poor enough, hospitals will drop 80-90% of your bill if you're over that, etc. etc.
> America is intentionally setup NOT to give you anything, but to make as many opportunities as possible open to you.
How did you come to this conclusion? Is it the lack of social safety net that opens opportunities? Does the lack of parental leave open up opportunities for mothers to breastfeed? Or having to work multiple jobs open up opportunities to spend time with one’s family and participate in the community?
What lettergram wrote is very beautiful and moving prose in the abstract, but as you note, the reality of life in America if you are poor is incredibly ugly and painful (and not in a "healthy" way that spurs growth, unless you are very very lucky)
lettergram is also a guy who believe he pays over 60% in taxes, which is something that is damned near impossible to do even if you're trying to, so take him seriously at your own risk.
> lettergram is also a guy who believe he pays over 60% in taxes
I'm sorry, but it's not a belief, I've estimated it fairly accurately and you can as well.
Effective tax rate (from my income):
Income Tax:
- 26.72% Federal
- 4.33% Social Security & Medicaid
- 4.95% State
Investments:
- Investments 15-45% (EDIT: on capital gains)
Additional Tax Burden:
- Sales: 10% (of goods purchased)
- Property: 2.35% (of home value)
- Inflation 4% (of wealth maintained)
Then there's all these others fees & excise taxes: licenses, fuel, tolls, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, etc, etc.
Finally, you have import duties on any goods you or any company producing goods for you are importing, typically 0-10%.
You may think tolls are something cheap, but it's $3-5 per toll (I pass 200-500 a year). Licenses for my vehicle(s): $500. Fuel: $0.392 tax per gallon.
Investment income rolls over into total income tax, it is not possible to add those separately.
Why are you calling it investment revenue? Its either income or a capital gain or its stuck inside of a C Corporation and doesn't really have to be paid to you?
You are also adding inflation as a separate line item. Wow.
And on everything else, even Illinois isn't that complicated.
You are being penalized because you aren't paying attention to the market and somehow doing the most inefficient things.
I'm guessing a pass through LLC designated as an S-Corp importing humans from a sanctioned country and making them pay rent in your house after ferrying them up the Mississippi river all the way to Chicago and driving them in your pre-catalytic converter truck to the suburbs. Have you tried SaaS?
Fair, will edit to make capital gains. It's late, tired -_-
> You are also adding inflation as a separate line item. Wow.
Inflation is a separate line item and it's effectively a tax. Since 2000, the dollar has lost >35% of it's value, i.e. you can purchase 35% less. They've also changed the way inflation is calculated in that time, it's likely even higher. As an exercise: If you gave someone land, but every year took x% of it -- they'd call that a tax.
> You are being penalized because you aren't paying attention to the market and somehow doing the most inefficient things.
Not really sure what you mean, if it's regarding taxes, I was pointing out how I could be paying 60%+ in taxes. I know there are rebates, discounts, etc but (A) a lot of people don't know these and (B) when you earn enough that disappears. The general point was 60+% taxes is real.
Yeah we got that, anyone that talks about inflation that way is talking about it that way.
As it not something you pay to the state, why not add your healthcare premiums while you’re at it.
If you have assets look into charitable contributions. You can donate a portion highly valued illiquid business interests to any charity that will take it and reduce your own taxes for years.
Why shouldn't inflation be considered a tax? It's a major reason for lack of social mobility, i.e. keeping the poor poor without them even knowing it. The end result is the dollars end up in government pockets, so what's the difference?
Inflation has a mixed effect on the governments too.
Municipal governments are affected the same as you are.
And the federal government which issues the currency is also mostly adversely affected while marginally helping it (and all borrowers) defer paying off its debt. The additional money in its coffers is from its own creation* and doesnt help it purchase more (for long) as it has the same purchasing power and liquidity in the global market.
Its revenue sources, which are mostly tax these days, are distinctive from inflation.
*us treasury issues USD bonds, fed buys USD bonds from everyone including the us treasury creating new USD at the moment of transaction. Sometimes the US treasury is the recipient, other times the other investors are
>Inflation is a separate line item and it's effectively a tax.
It's not a tax on income. It's a tax on past income. If you keep switching jobs and invest your money you shouldn't have to worry about inflation at all except when it's too low.
The reason why it exists is that we don't want old money to dominate the economy, the other reason is that demand for USD is legitimately going up.
It was the lack laws preventing you from charging whatever you wanted for your own labor, and the lack of laws that forced you to give away a significant portion of that wage.
Like today? It has always been a race to the bottom, that is why things are cheaper today which means life is better today, and that is why we invent technology to momentarily be on top of that race because it can't be stoped, that's why we have to keep inventing it.
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
> Is it the lack of social safety net that opens opportunities?
There are a LOT of social safety nets. I pointed out one in my prior comment -- Medicare and Medicaid. I'd argue that's actually the cause of our price increases in medicine, but they do provide effectively free healthcare. I'm not sure how many poor people you know? But I grew up in a poor area, and I can tell you, no one had their primary concern as medical care. No one was worried about food, no one was worried about shelter. I've lived with people who their entire lives have never found or wanted to find a job, they've survived entirely off what the government provided. I know at least ten people (several in my family), who live like this.
> Does the lack of parental leave open up opportunities for mothers to breastfeed?
What type of question is this? You have to choose to be a mother, if you cannot figure it out, you probably shouldn't have children.
> Or having to work multiple jobs open up opportunities to spend time with one’s family and participate in the community?
My entire family has worked multiple jobs at one point or another? For reference, if you work on a farm (as some of my family has) you work every day; usually ten hours. I don't really see the difference here.
> Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
I understand the history of that term, but in this context it seems inhumane. Asking for additional sacrifices from people who are already struggling to afford access to medical care is deeply fucked up. Giving back (to your country/community/world/whatever) should be an ethical obligation, sure, but not one that kicks in when you're still struggling to attain some very basic needs.
Like, I understand your point that safety net programs are available to many (though I don't necessarily agree--food insecurity numbers and medical bankruptcy rates seem like pretty compelling counterpoints). But coming out with "ask what you can do for your country" when talking about a country's least affluent population seems crass and disingenuous.
Please don’t generalize to all poor people because you know at least 10 poor people. It’s not your place to speak on their behalf.
Why should I expect that hospitals will drop their bill 80-90% after I go in? My expectation is that bill collectors will try to get reimbursed for as much of the bill as they can. This article mentions about half a million went bankrupt in 2019 due to medical bills.
You mention America being a land of opportunity, but now that I’m self employed, I’m looking at places outside of the US to persue entrepreneurship. This is partly due to the sky high medical costs here.
> Please don’t generalize to all poor people because you know at least 10 poor people. It’s not your place to speak on their behalf.
We all have a right to speak. I also suggest you have an open mind as these are topics I've experienced and then further researched. How is it your place? I've shared my experience being poor and what I have seen. I try to share what personal research and experience has taught me.
> Why should I expect that hospitals will drop their bill 80-90% after I go in? My expectation is that bill collectors will try to get reimbursed for as much of the bill as they can. This article mentions about half a million went bankrupt in 2019 due to medical bills.
I used to work at a medical billing service, they managed tens of millions in monthly billing (with millions of accounts annually). I personally used to reduce bills for hospitals by 80-90%, typically for hundreds of people a day (I was one of many). If you speak with a hospital and are below a certain income, they will reduce your bill. It's subsidized by those with insurance, hence the high medical costs nationally. Typically, insurance is paying 3-20x the medical procedure cost; medicare/medicaid pays around 20-50% of what insurance will pay.
> You mention America being a land of opportunity, but now that I’m self employed, I’m looking at places outside of the US to persue entrepreneurship. This is partly due to the sky high medical costs here.
I mean, do what suits you. But I find this interesting, I spend ~$9k a year for some really great health insurance (my family included in this), with potentially $5k out of pocket. I can also tune it (unlike taxes) and could really only spend $1-2k a year with a potential for $20k out of pocket. I did that for many years, because I was healthier.
Currently, I receive far better treatment than the nationalized healthcare in the EU for instance (particularly the UK or Ireland, where I was considering moving). I also have the potential to make 5x what I would for my profession in the EU. That more than makes up for the differential.
> We all have a right to speak. I also suggest you have an open mind as these are topics I've experienced and then further researched. How is it your place?
I was pleading that you stop representing you know what poor people worry about on the basis of knowing at least 10 poor people. I don’t think you or I should speak on poor folks behalf. I never claimed to know what their worries are. Your opinions are your own, but I think it’s important to not take a chance and misrepresent people, especially when the stakes are high like with health care.
> I used to work at a medical billing service, they managed tens of millions in monthly billing (with millions of accounts annually).
I need to know the odds that the hospital that I happen to be around when I need treatment will reduce my bill by 80-90%. It’s not enough to know what your billing center was doing.
> I spend ~$9k a year for some really great health insurance (my family included in this), with potentially $5k out of pocket.
The cheapest quote I received from FL ACA marketplace is $12k a year for two people on a bronze plan and a potential $15k deductible. I view these plans as next to worthless aside from keeping me from immediate bankruptcy jeopardy.
I can live in Central America or India for less and be treated better by the locals in all likelihood. It doesn’t matter where I live in terms of my income potential.
> I used to work at a medical billing service, they managed tens of millions in monthly billing (with millions of accounts annually). I personally used to reduce bills for hospitals by 80-90%, typically for hundreds of people a day (I was one of many).
How do we know that your personal anecdote can be extended to all hospitals in the US?
>What type of question is this? You have to choose to be a mother, if you cannot figure it out, you probably shouldn't have children.
Ok, no more children. Honestly, haven't you though about why it is not economical to have children? Isn't it absurd that children drag their parents down even though they are going to be future tax payers?
>I've lived with people who their entire lives have never found or wanted to find a job, they've survived entirely off what the government provided. I know at least ten people (several in my family), who live like this.
It's better that way. Their children will do better.
> health care isn't what most of the poor care most about
Every time I've been in that category, it's been my #1 concern. Medical bills are also the #1 reason for bankruptcies in the United States.
> hospitals will drop 80-90% of your bill if you're over that, etc. etc.
My experience is... different. Not only are adjustments more modest, not only are they harder to get than you're implying in the first place, I've found that hospitals will hound you for a $100 copay they think they didn't receive because when you paid it they accidentally credited it to the wrong account (glad I could dig up the receipt).
There's things to value about America's enterprising spirit and some of its policies, but health care is pretty far from it. Overall it's a drag on the rest of the economy, and the incentives are wrong for there to be private solutions.
You bring up an interesting point about those “situations” and “bankruptcy”.
So, real experience for me in priorities have always been:
1. Food
2. Shelter
3. Clothes
4. Transportation
5. Employment / Income
6. Healthcare
You’re correct bankruptcy is an option and I know of multiple people who’ve done it for medical reasons. Honestly; it didn’t seem to impact them, as much as I suspected, but I didn’t see their internal finances. I do know they restructured and paid some and got on a plan to pay the rest. The first five on my list aren’t impacted by bankruptcy (typically) due to healthcare issues. That’s why I think a lot of people are okay taking the hit.
But I think you bring up the key question which is “drag on the system”. There’s a reason our system is so expensive and it’s regulation and litigation from that regulation. Why do they limit the number of doctors graduating medical schools? Or zone hospitals such that all are profitable? Or have Medicare pay a fraction of what the private health insurance pays (increasing premiums for those with insurance?)? There’s a ton of systemic issues and it’s almost entirely from well meaning laws turning into a hellscape of rules. Bankruptcies are accounted for in the lending rates of banks, so that’s also impacted.
Finally, I recommend asking the hospital for charge codes and looking up what Medicare will pay, pay that. It’s basically 20-50% of what your bill will be.
If you're facing risk or serious insecurity to any one of these, consider that health issues (especially those insurance matters for) often (a) produce costs that are higher to nigh-unbounded (b) may well present as issues that are upstream of all of these things ("Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call/job/meal when you are unable to speak/work/keep food down?"). #1-5 may be more foundational in some kind of pyramid of needs than mild health concerns, but serious health care concerns are equal-to-more foundational. Also, #1-5 are also more easily provided by friends and family or community charity on an episodic basis.
> Honestly; it didn’t seem to impact them, as much as I suspected, but I didn’t see their internal finances.
A merely low credit score has substantial financial impacts and will cut you off from some possibilities outright. A bankruptcy will close more doors. It's less an "option" than a salvage operation.
> There’s a reason our system is so expensive and it’s regulation and litigation from that regulation
Specific regulations sometimes do introduce compliance costs, and like code, can often be reviewed for optimization. But criticizing "regulation" in abstract is like criticizing code in abstract. And litigation is how legal accountability happens.
Additionally, more heavily "regulated" systems than ours control expenses better, so it seems unlikely that's necessarily the source, and there's other explanations available in incentive analysis.
> Why do they limit the number of doctors graduating medical schools?
Ask the AMA. I expect part of it is incentives, though... how many more doctors do you think could be reasonably graduated?
> I recommend asking the hospital for charge codes
I've actually asked hospitals for charge masters before, even ahead of time. Answers ranged from "I'm not sure what that is" to "we don't do that." That was pre-ACA, so perhaps things have changed, but if so, it's thanks to regulation.
There aren't any static classes... that's what makes america great.
Socioeconomic mobility in the US is amongst the lowest of developed countries.
If a lack of static classes is what makes a country great, then can we assume that a great many other developed countries with much more socioeconomic mobility are greater?
If what makes America great is all these opportunities, as you say, then something must have gone very wrong since so few people are using these opportunities to move up.
You're correct, this is America. You can work hard and build something. America is intentionally setup NOT to give you anything, but to make as many opportunities as possible open to you. That's why people brave deserts to come here.
The majority of people don't want to move to America. This is simple math. There are about 7 billion people on Earth. 300 million are already in America. Approximately an additional million people move to America every year legally, and some number enter illegally. Even if twice as many people enter illegally, that's only 3 million people, which is just 0.045% of the people on Earth.
Many Americans believe that everyone is desperate to leave where they live and move to the USA and chase the American Dream. This belief is wrong.
It seems you believe that anyone who wants to come to the States (or any other country) can just buy a ticket, get there, and stay. I have to disappoint you, that's not the case for most of the countries in the world including the US.
>You're correct, this is America. You can work hard and build something. America is intentionally setup NOT to give you anything, but to make as many opportunities as possible open to you. That's why people brave deserts to come here.
I don’t follow the jump from that to “people must work in a grueling fashion just to survive unless they’re lucky”. That is inhumane, and what makes America’s form of capitalism especially sinister. Have some damn compassion.
I was being pretty inflammatory with that, no doubt. The US also has some of the most advanced healthcare in the world, so it's not accurate in that dimension. But what good is that if it's not accessible?
For some US' citizens, there may as well be no healthcare, as they're not willing to take on the burden of medical debt. They could technically access it, but not without changing the course of their life for the worse forever. That's not an issue for citizens in most developed nations.
There are countries far far lower on the economic leaderboard than the US who do provide reasonable access to healthcare for their citizens, and of course the majority of developed nations do as well. The US is behind, and it's not because of increased opportunity.
(I'm not the one downvoting you by the way, I don't mind the conversation)
What good does having the most advanced healthcare technology do for the country if only a tiny select few can afford it? It is better for a country to have average healthcare that is accessible to all rather than very advanced healthcare that is accessible to very few
People brave deserts to come here because life is a little bit more tolerable in the imperial core [1] than in the regions that the core extracts natural resources and cheap human labor from.
I've been thinking about this for a long time. I don't think it's because wages are low or working conditions are bad. Both of those things are about the same as they were in 2019, before the pandemic. If a job at McDonalds was good enough then, why isn't it good enough now?
I think it's because people stopped spending as much discretionary money as they did before. People couldn't go out or travel because everything was closed. "Dinner and a movie" turned into "Netflix and a pizza", which is allowed people to save money for a year.
Some people are spending that saved money on real estate or crypto. Others, I believe, are giving up part time work that they used to do for extra income. A spouse can afford to quit their part time job and stay home to take care of children. Someone can get by on a stipend that wouldn't have been enough when people were spending more money.
If this is true, we should see a rapid return to low wage jobs as the country starts to re-open in the coming months. The federal unemployment increase runs out in September (I believe). If people don't start going work after that then this could be a larger societal shift.
It seems that the pandemic has created a de-facto mass decentralized union of low-skilled workers. I believe that before the pandemic, most low-skilled workers felt that their working conditions were unfair but they didn't have the means to protest. The pandemic sent everyone home and gave everyone the opportunity to quit at the same time (via unemployment benefits and stimulus checks). Now these workers are collectively yet passively bargaining for their rights. Social media has given them a tool to relate their experiences to each other, which empowers everyone. But since it's not a real union, time will show if they lose their power once unemployment benefits are cut. Alternatively, if people truly hate their jobs, companies may be forced to raise wages to convince people to come back to work.
I don’t know. I personally know people who worked at low wage hourly jobs like that who were exploring buying a second home during the pandemic to have as a rental property. Often these people are what some people might call “handy men”.
They are married, so they have multiple incomes, meaning multiple people who were receiving stimulus checks and UI.
It may surprise some of you making $300k/yr and buying $2M houses in San Francisco to learn this, but the people who make your food and deliver your things have lives as wrll. They aren’t just servants.
This is an interesting idea that I haven't seen before. I wonder how many of these jobs that are going unfilled were second or third jobs before. I don't know if there's any way to measure that, but it makes sense. People didn't give up working altogether, they can just get by with one job now because they spend less.
> Both of those things are about the same as they were in 2019, before the pandemic. If a job at McDonalds was good enough then, why isn't it good enough now?
Because people have had enough. We saw the way companies treated employees during the pandemic—that is to say, like firewood that they could burn for profit, replacing them as they went through them—and many people are no longer interested in allowing themselves to be exploited for a pittance.
It's not a terribly uncommon phenomenon for people to be in a bad situation that seems, or has been treated as, normal for a long time, but when the situation changes temporarily, find that this sort of opens their eyes to how bad it had been all along.
We have a shortage of workers, just like we have a shortage of people who want to get beaten with sticks, or a shortage of $5 kilos of gold. When large corporations are sitting on enormous piles of cash that they refuse to translate into wages or benefits, the audacity of talking about “worker shortages” is mind boggling.
It's always the lower class' fault. Because the wealthy own the media and write the narrative. Blame their lack of virtue or work ethic while being dishonest and greedy.
It doesn’t that a rocket scientist to figure out what happened. Those that were working in a restaurant, that got closed because of covid. Either claimed unemployment as long as they could. Or found work elsewhere in another field. For example depending on their education could’ve went into manufacturing. Around my area a lot of factories have decent health care and retirement plans. Plus paid vacations. So it could be tempting to someone with a family.
One key factor that is crucial to understanding the current systems: over a number of decades, the American worker's general experience and compensation has been ratcheted down, one bit at a time. Each year brought less pay (adjusted for economic growth), less autonomy. More efficiencies, more consultants. While pay stagnated.
Quarantine has given people a chance to decide if that's what they want to do, at the previous wages.
“Adjusted for economic growth” is doing a lot of work here. Economic growth is happening for reasons like the growing addressable market for smartphones and the development of clever algorithms that make cheap sensors take good photos. The line cooks at my favorite roadside diner in Des Moines may well feel that this means they deserve a raise, but nothing has happened to the passing motorists’ willingness to pay for the cheeseburgers they can make each hour. Unless one of the few thousand people involved in those projects happens to be among them.
Especially after adjusting to life without restaurants, bars, hotels etc. I don’t see consumers suddenly paying the prices that would support significantly nicer lifestyles for all the workers involved in these things.
When you loose your job, that tends to give you a jolt that forces you to change your life. When the government gives you money at the same time, you go improve your situation in a way you couldn't before because you didn't have a spare $100.
I’m not sure I follow? Can you give an example? Do you means people are learning skills and moving up? That doesn’t seem like it could account for all the help wanted signs I see all over.
That, or taking the time to start their own business (you don't have to see a lot of success to beat serving), or etc.
But part of it is also that the government has continued unemployment past the point they normally would, due to the pandemic. The decision between working 40 hours a week for $400, or being paid $300 a week and not working, is pretty obvious. It will be interesting (in a cynical "oh my God what the hell is wrong with this country" sort of way) to see what happens in the states that are slashing those benefits, and whether that leads to reduced help wanted or not.
Such a large scale shift in employment seems unlikely. The manufacturing / warehouse industry isn't large enough to absorb 20% of the restaurant jobs in the US. And if that did happen, you'd think it would be very easy to see in the data. I guess we'll have more accurate jobs sector numbers in a few months and we'll be able to see
I can't claim I know the answer, but I know what I wish was the reason. I'd like to hope that millions of workers in low-end service jobs, such as food service and retail, saw that their jobs kept their heads above water but gave them little chance of ever progressing and decided to take the opportunity to move on to jobs with more opportunities to learn and advance into something with better long-term benefits.
Maybe this is a hot take, but maybe if a job doesn’t make a living wage, then it’s a job that shouldn’t even be offered? If someone can’t make it on a cashier job then the public shouldn’t be afforded the convenience of having a cashier. Same thing with any other service people provide. Maybe minimum wage destroying jobs (if that even actually happens) would be a good thing.
You seem to be thinking that removing these jobs is removing choice from these peoples' lives, when in reality it's the opposite: Having to take those jobs removes the choice from their lives--because, as OP said, those jobs "kept their heads above water but gave them little chance of ever progressing."
Where OP suggests "maybe minimum wage destroying jobs ... would be a good thing," this would require the minimum wage to be high enough where people in those jobs would have the ability to exit them if they so desired--they would have the ability to make choices to do something else.
Which returns us to your question: if there exists a number of jobs that people would very happily _leave if they could_, but are unable to (either because they can't accord to take a day off to interview elsewhere, or they don't have a car to widen the range where they can look for other jobs, or because they have to accept the healthcare their current job offers even though the pay is way worse / the job itself horrible), these jobs are in effect exploiting people who are trapped in those positions. Those jobs should not continue to exist simply because they offer some measly payment in exchange for portions of a human lifespan. Our system should instead be structured in such a way where people do not have to be exploited to survive.
This means leveling the playing field by offering a living wage, and healthcare as a human right, and related activities.
Related quote, by Terry Pratchett[0]:
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
> Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances.
> A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.
> Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
> But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
> This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
The problem with that sort of argument is that you're not actually fixing anything, you're just shoving it under the rug at great expense.
Minimum wages do not improve low wage earners lot in life, they simply make it impossible for them to survive because it becomes illegal to hire them.
Once again, what effect do you think that making it illegal to hire someone who is unproductive will have on that person's life?
Arguments about a living wage, and other appeals to emotion are very nice, and certainly convince a lot of people who did not think through the full extent of the incentives at play, but at the end of the day their only result is to harm those it supposedly is seeking to help.
Could you explain more the relationship between there being a minimum wage, and it being illegal for a person to be hired? I'm not understanding that causal relationship, and it seems essential to your point.
The minimum wage is simply the process of illegalizing the hiring of labor for less than a certain value. This means that hiring anyone whose productivity is below that value is financially non-viable.
The practical result is that people whose productivity is below the minimum wage are only able to find gainful employment by illegally receiving less than minimum wage.
Your arguments seem to be from the business perspective, of the value of labor. My arguments are from the human perspective, in terms of the value of a person.
> hiring anyone whose productivity is below that value is financially non-viable
I would argue that the minimum wage is an indicator of the minimum humane value of an individual's time, in the eyes of the government. That is, if someone is paid less than that for their labor, it is humanely non-viable.
> the practical result is that people whose productivity is below the minimum wage are only able to find gainful employment by illegally receiving less than minimum wage
Again, this just feels exploitative. Take someone who hasn't finished highschool, for whatever reason: by your measure, likely not a very "productive" worker, and your argument implies someone like this may not "deserve" the minimum wage. But this person now has no way to rectify this situation: they have to work more than one job, beyond "full time", just to have enough to survive (because by your measure their limited productivity means they don't deserve enough money to feed and house themselves--a "living wage", as GP said above). Working multiple jobs to earn enough to survive means they don't have the time nor energy to continue to educate themselves, so they cannot raise their value as a worker, in your eyes. They are now trapped in this cycle.
Admittedly, "minimum wage" is perhaps not the best tool to address this problem. I would argue that something akin to UBI would be the best way to approach this--guarantee that every citizen has access to some minimum standard of living, with access to housing/food/education/information, and then let the labor economy exist on top of that. However, in the absence of such a system, and with intense resistance to anything like that kind of system, minimum wages are one of few tools available to address the problem of giving people options to exit living on month-to-month paycheck lifestyles.
> Your arguments seem to be from the business perspective, of the value of labor. My arguments are from the human perspective, in terms of the value of a person.
Well, given that we are talking about the market itself, that is and should be the only thing that matters.
Ultimately this is an economic issue, and you will not get away from the economic incentive structures by appealing to emotional arguments.
>I would argue that the minimum wage is an indicator of the minimum humane value of an individual's time, in the eyes of the government. That is, if someone is paid less than that for their labor, it is humanely non-viable.
You can argue that however much you like, it will not change the fact that such a policy will only have the effect of reducing peoples options and make life harder for the very people you are claiming to want to help.
This is plain mathematics, if the value someone produces is less than the value they cost to employ, then they will not be employed.
Companies are not, and should not be, charities. And forcing them to behave like charities will simply result in those costs being passed on to their clients, and to society at large through greater inefficiencies that will result in less wealth to everyone.
>Again, this just feels exploitative. Take someone who hasn't finished highschool, for whatever reason: by your measure, likely not a very "productive" worker, and your argument implies someone like this may not "deserve" the minimum wage. But this person now has no way to rectify this situation: they have to work more than one job, beyond "full time", just to have enough to survive (because by your measure their limited productivity means they don't deserve enough money to feed and house themselves--a "living wage", as GP said above). Working multiple jobs to earn enough to survive means they don't have the time nor energy to continue to educate themselves, so they cannot raise their value as a worker, in your eyes. They are now trapped in this cycle.
How can providing someone with the best option they have available to them possibly be exploitative?
And indeed, how can removing that option be anything less than exploitative?
Adding a minimum wage does not result in those workers being paid more, it results in them being unable to legally work. And work is the primary way that they dig themselves out of that situation.
The idea that people working for low wages will remain trapped in that situation forever is plainly not true, and indeed even if it were, that is a better situation than the alternative, where they are unable to even work at all!
>Admittedly, "minimum wage" is perhaps not the best tool to address this problem. I would argue that something akin to UBI would be the best way to approach this--guarantee that every citizen has access to some minimum standard of living, with access to housing/food/education/information, and then let the labor economy exist on top of that. However, in the absence of such a system, and with intense resistance to anything like that kind of system, minimum wages are one of few tools available to address the problem of giving people options to exit living on month-to-month paycheck lifestyles.
Why do you think offloading social work to private companies is a good idea? That has costs, and they will be paid for.
Having private enterprises subsidize your pet projects is a great way to make everyone poorer.
I'm going to try to illustrate my point differently.
You keep saying that businesses, in effect, ought to be the sole arbitrator of what the value of labor is, and any infringement on that ability somehow limits people's options and that said limitation is more exploitative than whatever the business is doing.
You've gone further to say that it would be better for someone to be trapped in poverty working some dead-end job that pays only the absolute minimum to get any worker, with no possible avenue out via education or entrepreneurship or whatever, than to not have access to any job at all.
This system is deeply flawed in that it allows for the potential value of a person to be "zero", in that they cannot access base necessities of life (shelter, food, water, healthcare, etc) much less the "luxuries" of equity like education.
I suggest what if the system was flipped? What if the population got to decide what was best for itself, instead of businesses. Instead of businesses setting the sole value of slices of a human life (which they've done in the past and has led to things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire), we define an absolute minimum value of life by providing the base necessities (shelter, food, water, healthcare, education). We, as a society, agree on roughly the things that everyone should have access to, and provide those things. We already do this in part through public education, which even in some cases provides the "food" and "shelter" components. (This is obviously limited by the rest of the student's socioeconomic circumstances, but the point remains: this is not a foreign concept in US thinking.)
If citizens had access to this base standard, it (a) prevents the problem of human life being valued at "zero" and having such a thing as a poverty cycle, (b) removes the burden of healthcare from businesses' pocketbooks, which will equalize the playing-field between gigantic corporations and small-town businesses, and (c) give a lot more flexibility to the population in the choices they can make.
To this last point: In my school district, there was a group of anonymous donors ~20 years ago who assembled a fund that would pay for the college education of any student who graduated from that district, with some minimum required GPA. In effect, free college, if you make it through the public school system. (The assumed motivations of these corporate donors being to increase the highly-educated labor pool with ties to the region, that they could then hire from.) We had a graduation rate of less than 50%, in part because most of the families of the students were so poor that they absolutely needed the added income of the student to stay afloat--and they couldn't work a job and manage school at the same time. So they dropped out, and merrily became part of the poverty cycle. UBI, or something like it, would have prevented that.
As I said before, we have systems like this in place already: public education is a powerful equalizer. Still deeply flawed, certainly, but a fine step in the right direction, and it benefits the whole population.
You (rightly) say these things have costs, and you're absolutely correct--but it's a fallacy to think that we don't have the resources to fix it. There's dozens of political platforms with plans to fund UBI and Universal Healthcare endeavors. Beyond that, even just mild increases in taxes on the ultra-wealthy would fund plenty of these endeavors. Hell, two days ago ProPublica dropped a report about how the mega-rich can legally avoid taxes on an insane portion of their wealth, and how much more weight the rest of Americans (including those in the poverty cycle) have to then carry [0].
I find framing many of these questions in terms of "is it in the population's best interest?" helps illuminate flaws in various systems. For example, is it in the population's best interest for private insurance companies to control access to healthcare? What if all the money that flowed to insurance executives instead went into funding additional research? Is it in the population's best interest for energy companies to gain access to frakking permits via lobbying? Would investment in new nuclear power systems be more beneficial in terms of environmental impact and energy production?
The attitude that businesses and their accompanying markets somehow are the best vehicle to approach and address these issues, to me, is missing the forest for the trees.
Let's me just start by saying that I understand and respect your argument, and your motivations for them. I am sure you're a good hearted person, who just wants to help his fellow citizens, and that is a good thing, and one in which i feel we can agree as a goal to achieve.
Please do not take my arguments against your proposals, as insulting or demeaning, that is in no way my intention. I only mean to point out where their flaws lie, and why they will not work as you expect them to.
Let's break your arguments down to their core:
>You keep saying that businesses, in effect, ought to be the sole arbitrator of what the value of labor is, and any infringement on that ability somehow limits people's options and that said limitation is more exploitative than whatever the business is doing.
>You've gone further to say that it would be better for someone to be trapped in poverty working some dead-end job that pays only the absolute minimum to get any worker, with no possible avenue out via education or entrepreneurship or whatever, than to not have access to any job at all.
>This system is deeply flawed in that it allows for the potential value of a person to be "zero", in that they cannot access base necessities of life (shelter, food, water, healthcare, etc) much less the "luxuries" of equity like education.
You misunderstood the argument here. I state that the economic value of hiring someone can be less than the cost of hiring that someone. In addition, I stated that if a minimum wage is imposed, unless that minimum wage is so low that every persons value added is greater than it (in which case the minimum wage would affect no one), then such a minimum wage would merely result in those people who are affected go from X to Zero.
The problem that you're having here is you are confusing the cost of labor (and value) with peoples necessities for modern life, when the two things are not related at all.
>I suggest what if the system was flipped? What if the population got to decide what was best for itself, instead of businesses.
The population already decides what is best for itself, indeed it is a minimum wage that actively prevents them from doing so by closing off their best options and condemning them to subsisting on the public dole.
>Instead of businesses setting the sole value of slices of a human life (which they've done in the past and has led to things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire), we define an absolute minimum value of life by providing the base necessities (shelter, food, water, healthcare, education). We, as a society, agree on roughly the things that everyone should have access to, and provide those things. We already do this in part through public education, which even in some cases provides the "food" and "shelter" components. (This is obviously limited by the rest of the student's socioeconomic circumstances, but the point remains: this is not a foreign concept in US thinking.)
>If citizens had access to this base standard, it (a) prevents the problem of human life being valued at "zero" and having such a thing as a poverty cycle, (b) removes the burden of healthcare from businesses' pocketbooks, which will equalize the playing-field between gigantic corporations and small-town businesses, and (c) give a lot more flexibility to the population in the choices they can make.
I am going to assume that you are talking about doing so via a UBI, as you discussed in a previous comment, rather than through some central planning system of goods production and distribution?
If so, then that would actually work much better than the current system with means test, bureaucracy and other massive inefficiencies.
That being said, you need to consider the terrible incentive structure involved with the statement "we define an absolute minimum value of life by providing the base necessities (shelter, food, water, healthcare, education). We, as a society, agree on roughly the things that everyone should have access to, and provide those things."
On a fundamental level this implies that the cost involved with providing these benefits are "fixed" per person, and scale with population, regardless of the economies ability to sustain such expense. What happens when the expense gets so great that it cannot be sustained?
And if you "index" it to economic performance, how do you feel that cutting everyones benefits in the middle of an economic depression will go in an election?
Do you truly believe people will be content keeping such a system as is over time? What stops the creeping increase of benefits?
Furthermore, if the benefits are sufficiently large, what sort of motivation will people have to work at all? And indeed, those who do work and generate wealth, why must they be punished for it (by being forced to sustain those who don't even try)?
Finally, a final question, you say:
>will equalize the playing-field between gigantic corporations and small-town businesses
Why is this a goal of yours at all? Why do you think that interfering with the way businesses work will increase the pie? Why do you want to pick winners and losers?
>To this last point: In my school district, there was a group of anonymous donors ~20 years ago who assembled a fund that would pay for the college education of any student who graduated from that district, with some minimum required GPA. In effect, free college, if you make it through the public school system. (The assumed motivations of these corporate donors being to increase the highly-educated labor pool with ties to the region, that they could then hire from.) We had a graduation rate of less than 50%, in part because most of the families of the students were so poor that they absolutely needed the added income of the student to stay afloat--and they couldn't work a job and manage school at the same time. So they dropped out, and merrily became part of the poverty cycle. UBI, or something like it, would have prevented that.
The problem is that such benefits would have the opposite effect, because the thing that most keeps people in poverty is not lack of money, but lack of motivation and lack of options. UBI would remove motivation, like any other form of ameliorating their situation would do. And Minimum wage laws (and other restrictions) would remove their options.
I understand we're you're coming from, but I have seen first hand how those sorts of policies don't work, and how lack of cash and education isn't as much of a barrier to escaping poverty as creeping regulations are.
My grandfather was born in 1929 in a tiny village of twenty people in a poor mountainous area in interior Portugal, growing up he had to walk 20 kilometers each day to the nearest town to attend primary school, which he attended for only 4 years. This is not a rich area, and the conditions there, both at the time and today would be considered absolute poverty. For reference, electricity and running water (and sewage) only arrived to the area in the 1990s. His father was a woodchopper, and his relatives and ancestors were subsistence farmers.
At age 13 his father gave him a bus ticket to lisbon, enough money for 2 nights at a shared hostel, some food and enough cash for him to purchase a bus ticket back home. He went to Lisbon and began working in construction. He eventually resigned and started his own company building apartment buildings, single family houses, and other such construction work. He was never wildly rich, but he was able to build himself and my grandmother a perfectly respectable middle class life.
He did this with 4 years of schooling, a bus ticket and a couple of days of "runway". There was no minimum wage. There was no health and safety regulations. There was no public health service. There was no free education (beyond the 4 years of primary education).
The reason he managed to do this wasn't because he "had a leg up on everyone else".
He did this off the back of his own hard work, good decisions, a little bit of luck, and most importantly because no one was stopping him.
If there was a minimum wage back then, he would not have been able to be hired or hire people himself.
If there was restrictions and licensing requirements on construction, he would not have been able to build the houses he sold.
If there was age limitations on being able to work, he would not have been able to come to Lisbon at age 13.
Each of these limitations and regulations may individually make perfect sense, however collectively they ossify any form of social mobility.
If I were born today in that village, I would not be able to take the same path out that he took. I would have to find something else, or I would be stuck in that poverty cycle you described, and I would be stuck there not through lack of intelligence, or because the poverty is keeping me there, but because the well intentioned policies you are supporting would keep me there and prevent me from escaping.
I appreciate the tonal check in—I very much enjoy conversations like this, and appreciate the effort to maintain a civil and productive discussion. Thank you very much for that effort.
We keep mixing the domain of our discussion; sometimes I'm talking about a hypothetical ideal situation, and sometimes it's a "reasonable" step we could make from the current economic structure. I haven't been clear on when I've been making those distinctions, and will attempt to be better.
I would generally agree that the humanitarian value of a person's life vs the economic value of a person's life are separate concepts, but they are intrinsically related by the fact that in our current system of resource distribution, e.g. capitalistic economy, the humanitarian-value is intrinsically associated with the economic-value.
In my ideal system, this would not be the case, or that association would at least be loosened. I believe we can make some progress towards this ideal in the ‘real world’ through the existence of ‘force multipliers’: Food and housing production have skyrocketed since industrialization. There are similar effects in terms of housing and infrastructure (water, sewer, etc) for a population. I think it is very possible for us, with our current level of industrial output as a species, to feed/clothe/house/whatever the population of the planet.
I do not think it is possible for us to do that with indefinite population growth, to your point:
> What happens when the expense gets so great that it cannot be sustained?
In the maximally-ideal world, the population would self-regulate to stay below the carrying capacity. We see this even now in effects of education suppressing birth rates, so this doesn’t seem like an impossible goal.
In summary,
1. I believe our current technological and industrial capacity would support a UBI-like system for everyone, right now
2. I do not believe that it it would be sustainable to do so with unchecked population growth
3. I do not know what the best real-world avenue to prevent outgrowing the capacities of such a UBI-like system would be, but suspect there are tools we have now (education) that we could explore that may help.
4. The fact that such a UBI-like system would be difficult to impossible in our current economy is not an indictment of the concept of UBI, but of our current system of resource distribution.
Onto the core of our disagreement:
First:
> The population already decides what is best for itself [ ... ]
and second:
> The problem is that such benefits would have the opposite effect, because the thing that most keeps people in poverty is not lack of money, but lack of motivation and lack of options.
I fundamentally disagree on both points.
While the USA does exist in a democratic system, there are many examples where businesses have overpowered the general population, or where those interests have turned groups of the population against each other. As far back as the founding of the US, white businessmen fought to restrict voting power away from the general population, and worked to pit working whites against enslaved blacks. In the Mexican-American war in 1846, business interests sought to clear a path across the continent to California, bulldozing Mexico in the process, using conscripted forces. Recent examples include nuking Japan to secure economic control under the USA, despite strong indications that Japan wanted to surrender, or the false-WMD pretense to invade Iraq for control of the region’s natural resources.
Less extreme but still insidious examples include Citizens United, the slipshod state of campaign finance regulation, or modern tax code being fundamentally friendlier to the ultra-rich than the far larger middle- or lower-classes.
Notably, “the population” is not a homogenous group, and can have flawed reasoning for reasons beyond conspiratorial interference. It’s still clear that “the population” has not been able to “self determine” in many ways, due to the interference of the wealthy elite.
Secondly, I fundamentally disagree that a lack of motivation keeps people in the poverty cycle, and that providing UBI-like benefits would reduce their options.
I find the notion that people exist in poverty due to lack of motivation to be naive at best, and deliberately disingenuous at worst--especially when juxtaposed with the motivations present in the adversarial system that is our economy. Businesses' core interest lies in maximizing profit, which in turn means minimizing cost-of-goods-sold: primarily, labor. This means widening the labor pool as far as possible, limiting the amount paid to labor, and preventing labor from ever gaining real power. To ignore the actions the wealthy elite have taken to achieve those goals and instead blame the poverty cycle on a lack of motivation for those trapped in it is, again, disingenuous.
Are there people who will choose not to put in effort to take advantage of opportunities? Yes. Are there people who will 'exploit' e.g. unemployment benefits when they don't need them? Certainly.
Is motivation the primary reason people exist within the poverty cycle? Absolutely not.
How would those trapped in the poverty cycle work multiple low-paying, high-effort jobs where they have to deal with angry, entitled customers day after day, with little to no opportunity for advancement, and an entire economic system arrayed against them, if not for motivation?. I guarantee you that my middle-school video production teacher, who worked at Lowe's in addition to her job teaching at the worst school in our district, spends more of her time doing 'work' than any of the Walton family.
None of the dozen or so homeless people I see along my walk to work are "unmotivated" to address their situation, or "unwilling" to do work. But how many jobs require an address to run a background check? Or banks to open a checking account? How are they supposed to interview for work when they haven't had access to a shower in days? And that's assuming they're not also dealing with mental health issues, or addiction, or medical issues, or any of a dozen other things that could complicate their life.
There are certainly anecdotes about people who have overcome these circumstances, as there are outliers in any case, but focusing on them and ignoring the majority who cannot escape is a mistake.
> UBI would remove motivation, like any other form of ameliorating their situation would do.
UBI would not remove their motivation to escape from the cycle of poverty; UBI would remove them *from the cycle of poverty.* They are no longer restricted to the maximally-exploitative job you've been hypothesizing, they can go to school, go into construction, decide to become an artist. If their activities end up not being economically-valuable in the capitalistic sense, who cares? So long as we have sufficient people to turn the wheels of the systems the population depends on (which should be trivially easy between the supply of people motivated to do so and a mild incentive to engage in those systems, i.e. a reasonable wage) it doesn't matter what these people choose to do.
> If there was a minimum wage back then, he would not have been able to be hired or hire people himself.
The labor movement of the ~1910s in the US has plenty of examples of where raising the minimum wage--or in some cases, instituting one--in fact did not result in the loss of jobs, but the creation of them, and the ability for people to become more upwardly mobile in terms of socioeconomic status--at the same time that businesses were fighting tooth and nail (literally assaulting strikers and labor group organizers) to prevent people from achieving those gains.
The current state of the wealth inequality divide in the US is testament to there being money available in the system to absorb the cost of an increased minimum wage. See the commonly cited statistic of Denmark having a significantly higher minimum wage than the US, with a nominal rise in the cost of (say) a Big Mac, and with significantly less unemployment than the USA over the last 10 years.
While your grandfather's achievements are remarkable and respectable, they are a poor metric by which to decide that regulations and minimum wages and age limitations on work are problems preventing those trapped in poverty today from improving their standing. Again I'll cite the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire: without regulations and safety standards, you end up with hundreds of people burning to death in preventable circumstances. Or bridges collapsing in high winds. Or children being poisoned by the powders used in textile mills. Or buildings collapsing due to poor structural support. Or cities being poisoned by lead in their water supply pipes.
While I can understand and am aware of circumstances where "regulations" are indeed frivolous and impinge development, I am not convinced that age restrictions and licensing requirements are the core things at fault for others stuck in poverty cycles. The implication that they are somehow at fault is to completely ignore the exploitative nature of the businesses which recklessly endangered their workers--including children!--when they weren't subject to these kinds of regulation.
I suspect your grandfather’s success has more to do with the luck of being poised to enter into the industrial explosion of the time, and your extrapolation that he was able to do so because of the lack of minimum wage, regulation, etc, is simply survivorship bias.
>While the USA does exist in a democratic system, there are many examples where businesses have overpowered the general population, or where those interests have turned groups of the population against each other. As far back as the founding of the US, white businessmen fought to restrict voting power away from the general population, and worked to pit working whites against enslaved blacks. In the Mexican-American war in 1846, business interests sought to clear a path across the continent to California, bulldozing Mexico in the process, using conscripted forces. Recent examples include nuking Japan to secure economic control under the USA, despite strong indications that Japan wanted to surrender, or the false-WMD pretense to invade Iraq for control of the region’s natural resources.
>Less extreme but still insidious examples include Citizens United, the slipshod state of campaign finance regulation, or modern tax code being fundamentally friendlier to the ultra-rich than the far larger middle- or lower-classes.
>Notably, “the population” is not a homogenous group, and can have flawed reasoning for reasons beyond conspiratorial interference. It’s still clear that “the population” has not been able to “self determine” in many ways, due to the interference of the wealthy elite.
I think perhaps you misunderstood what i meant here. What i meant was that each individual person had a choice as to whether or not they will work for someone, and for how much they will work for.
You may argue that they don't have alternative options that are better than "being exploited", but that would not change if that exploitative option were to be removed from them.
I was not making a comment on government policy.
>Secondly, I fundamentally disagree that a lack of motivation keeps people in the poverty cycle, and that providing UBI-like benefits would reduce their options.
>Are there people who will choose not to put in effort to take advantage of opportunities? Yes. Are there people who will 'exploit' e.g. unemployment benefits when they don't need them? Certainly.
>Is motivation the primary reason people exist within the poverty cycle? Absolutely not.
>How would those trapped in the poverty cycle work multiple low-paying, high-effort jobs where they have to deal with angry, entitled customers day after day, with little to no opportunity for advancement, and an entire economic system arrayed against them, if not for motivation?. I guarantee you that my middle-school video production teacher, who worked at Lowe's in addition to her job teaching at the worst school in our district, spends more of her time doing 'work' than any of the Walton family.
I have to completely disagree here, and I do not believe we will be able to find any common ground on this issue.
I have discussed personal finances with many people, and only a small minority as ever shown themselves to be willing to take the actions necessary to actually improve their lives, even when such actions are not particularly strenuous to them.
The idea that people are trapped in a cycle of poverty from which they cannot escape regardless of how much they try is a common one, but one that is simply not true. [4] The fact of the matter is that even when you're not exceptionally gifted or fortunate you have a good chance of moving up in income, and that chance has not meaningfully changed over long decades. It takes time, it takes effort, and sometimes it takes a bit of luck, but everyone has a decent chance to do it. Both the top and bottom quintiles in Income change regularly and dramatically over time.
>UBI would not remove their motivation to escape from the cycle of poverty; UBI would remove them from the cycle of poverty. They are no longer restricted to the maximally-exploitative job you've been hypothesizing, they can go to school, go into construction, decide to become an artist. If their activities end up not being economically-valuable in the capitalistic sense, who cares? So long as we have sufficient people to turn the wheels of the systems the population depends on (which should be trivially easy between the supply of people motivated to do so and a mild incentive to engage in those systems, i.e. a reasonable wage) it doesn't matter what these people choose to do.
And what of the people turning the wheels? Why should they be sacrificed?
Ultimately every dollar given in benefits is taken from a productive person who could have put it to better use.
>The labor movement of the ~1910s in the US has plenty of examples of where raising the minimum wage--or in some cases, instituting one--in fact did not result in the loss of jobs, but the creation of them, and the ability for people to become more upwardly mobile in terms of socioeconomic status--at the same time that businesses were fighting tooth and nail (literally assaulting strikers and labor group organizers) to prevent people from achieving those gains.
Except unfortunately that is just not true, mathematics does not work that way and neither does the economy. [5]
Minimum wages always cost jobs, except if the wage is so low that no one is affected by it.
Not only that, but by implementing minimum wages you're reducing the most important tool someone has to acquire a job experience, and eventually move himself out of a poor and desperate situation. And furthermore minimum wages, and other government regulation benefits the large companies that you are complaining about, by creating meaningful barriers to competitors and reducing their competitive advantages. There is a reason why amazon wants a 15/hr minimum wage, and it's not because they are a kind hearted company.
>While I can understand and am aware of circumstances where "regulations" are indeed frivolous and impinge development, I am not convinced that age restrictions and licensing requirements are the core things at fault for others stuck in poverty cycles. The implication that they are somehow at fault is to completely ignore the exploitative nature of the businesses which recklessly endangered their workers--including children!--when they weren't subject to these kinds of regulation.
Have you ever tried to build a house?
I have, and it's almost impossible. In order for me to build a 200K€ house I would need to spent 60K€ on licenses, taxes, fees, etc...
The result is i cannot own a house.
Every regulation creates friction and additional costs. Those costs are often hidden, but they are there, and they make everything we do more expensive, slower, and less efficient.
If you would like to define a certain value for life, and apply it equality and in a standard manner to everything, then maybe we might be able to begin work on clearing regulations and implementing others. But the incentive structure simply isn't there for such a system, and neither is such a system reliably stable over long periods.
>I would generally agree that the humanitarian value of a person's life vs the economic value of a person's life are separate concepts, but they are intrinsically related by the fact that in our current system of resource distribution, e.g. capitalistic economy, the humanitarian-value is intrinsically associated with the economic-value.
>In my ideal system, this would not be the case, or that association would at least be loosened. I believe we can make some progress towards this ideal in the ‘real world’ through the existence of ‘force multipliers’: Food and housing production have skyrocketed since industrialization. There are similar effects in terms of housing and infrastructure (water, sewer, etc) for a population. I think it is very possible for us, with our current level of industrial output as a species, to feed/clothe/house/whatever the population of the planet.
Unfortunately that ideal fails when it meets with the reality that is the fact that no matter what sort of economic system you are under, whether free market capitalism, Communist, Anarchism, Feudalism, etc... There are limited resources and efficient ways to allocate them.
Those costs you want to disassociate from the individuals responsibility still need to be paid, and just like with everything where those who receive the benefit do not have to pay a proportional share of the cost, those costs will increase because people will use and use and use because they get all of the benefit and none of the cost. If you'd like a clear cut example close to home you need only look at the U.S. Mint[1]
>1. I believe our current technological and industrial capacity would support a UBI-like system for everyone, right now
>2. I do not believe that it it would be sustainable to do so with unchecked population growth
>3. I do not know what the best real-world avenue to prevent outgrowing the capacities of such a UBI-like system would be, but suspect there are tools we have now (education) that we could explore that may help.
>4. The fact that such a UBI-like system would be difficult to impossible in our current economy is not an indictment of the concept of UBI, but of our current system of resource distribution.
There's a lot here so let's go over point by point:
>1. I believe our current technological and industrial capacity would support a UBI-like system for everyone, right now
No doubt about that, but the same statement could be said of any point of history. The question isn't whether such a system could be supported, its whether the cost of such a system is sustainable.
I'm in no way disputing that the US (and every other government on earth) could provide a UBI of 1 cent per month to everyone.
The question here is, is the cost of such a system going to be more, or less than our currently unsustainable system? [2]
If the cost of that is more, because the benefits provided are greater than what they currently already are, then clearly it is not sustainable without increasing taxes, which in turn reduces income and wealth across the board.
No doubt you will argue that tax increases are sustainable and a good way to redistribute wealth from the other team to your team, as you have in previous comments, however such a position has the following problems:
1 - Taxes in general have an effect of reducing wealth creation and income creation. This is because people are no longer able to allocate that money in the most efficient possible way to maximize their own individual wealth, resulting in less wealth overall.
2 - Non-Flat taxes, or taxes that are intended to punish/rewards to specific things are necessarily causing specific distortions in the market, which in turn causes even more inefficiencies in wealth creation. Furthermore they are extremely susceptible to being taken over for political reasons, in order to reward/punish supporters/opponents and to subsidize specific politicians pet projects, which in turn brings about additional costs and inefficiencies to the economy in general.
3 - Given that these tax increases are explicitly going to support and sustain groups that are unproductive, these negative effects are magnified because the expected return on these taxes is less than the return from say a new bridge or road.
In other words, this is the economic equivalent of taking someones worm fishing bait, and giving it to someone else so they can eat it. Had you just not done anything, there would be a fish in someones hands, rather than a worm in someone stomach.
>2. I do not believe that it it would be sustainable to do so with unchecked population growth
Why not?
Because there would be an increasing amount of unproductive people versus productive people sustaining them? What dynamic changes here?
>3. I do not know what the best real-world avenue to prevent outgrowing the capacities of such a UBI-like system would be, but suspect there are tools we have now (education) that we could explore that may help.
If we have such tools, why have we not used them against the continued and consistent expansion of welfare throughout the developed world in the past 100 years?
Let me be clear here, the tools do not matter.
The reason you cannot and will not be able to prevent the outgrowing of welfare systems is simply because the incentive structure in place encourages their continued growth until it is stopped due to unavoidable practical considerations.
No politician will remain in office for long in a democracy by cutting welfare payments. And indeed why would they want to? Such payments look good in the newspapers, and can be used to reward supporters.
The only time that those systems will be reduced is when the money to pay for it actually begins to run dry. That is why whenever social securities nest egg begins to run out, you see a whole heap of changes to reduce the benefits paid, and the doomsday is pushed back another couple of years, with the inherent issues involved.
Such restructuring of the welfare system too also bring their own problems, and often result in outright seizures of hard working peoples private retirement plans [3], showing yet another moral hazard involved in the entire welfare system.
>4. The fact that such a UBI-like system would be difficult to impossible in our current economy is not an indictment of the concept of UBI, but of our current system of resource distribution.
The problem if that it does not matter what the system of resource distribution is, when the incentive structure is such that it is filled with moral hazards and pernicious incentives. If you'll re-read my replies to the previous points, you'll note that they are applicable in every system, from free market capitalism to centrally planned communism.
The incentives will define the results.
[[continued in my next repply since this one is too long]]
The labor force participation rate will keep falling as America transitions to a post-scarcity economy. This means an increasingly large % of Americans will be able to have their needs met without working, whether it is govt. programs, remitances, inheritances, cohabitation, living with friends or relatives,etc. On Reddit, a lot of young people living with parents longer instead of moving out. Also, assets are appreciating so fast, such as stocks and and real estate, that wealth is able to trickle down making work unecessary for people who know someone who has money. I know people who don't work because their parents have a lot of money and stand to inherit it, ad infinitum. 20% annual returns for the S&P 500 means a lot of people will be able to earn $ doing nothing and that $ will spread out to family and friends. As private sector wealth keeps compounding and exponentiating at a rate that exceeds pop. growth, the probability approaches unity that someone will know someone who has a lot of money and thus does not need to work.
The broad money supply has shot up by almost 33% in roughly one year: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL. Even though some prices have already gone up, we haven't felt the full effect of this yet because we're still emerging out of the pandemic and money velocity hasn't reverted to trend: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V. Roughly speaking, price level = money velocity * broad money supply.
Money supply isn’t a thing which varies randomly, impacting the economy but not impacted by it. The money supply hasn’t shot up as some random event which will remain static if money velocity reverts to trend, it shot up specifically as a policy response to low velocity, and increasing velocity is one of the signals which will cause 8t to be reeled back in.
That's a pretty bold assertion when the M2 chart itself demonstrates that broad money supply has never contracted in any substantial way. Federal and corporate debt to GDP are also at historic highs, which is precisely the environment in which the Fed prefers to let inflation run hot.
As a direct response to the original post, it mentions 20% returns and doesn't seem to treat that as an outlier. That would indicate some serious inflation somewhere.
"transitions to a post-scarcity economy" (emphasis mine)
There are no post-scarcity economies currently in existence, but with increasing automation such a thing may become possible in the future, and the transition may take a long time. There's no physical reason why homes must remain scarce forever, for example. That said, I don't think what paulpauper describes sounds like post-scarcity, as it's just about money; I think of things more like Iain M Banks's Culture.
This is such a silly and naive concept, though. It’s literal children’s logic. No one with the means to provide significant value to the masses is going to do so without commanding even commodity prices.
Are coffee beans free? No. Will they ever be? No. And yet, the world over produces tons of the stuff. What’s going to change in the next 50 years that would make them free? Nothing.
If anything, they’ll be more expensive then! Enjoy a cup while you’ve got the chance.
You are arguing against a science fiction concept used as figure of speech
Are sure coffe beans wouldn't be free if we had Dyson-sphere leves of free energy providing magic-like stuff like replicators? Because that is a context in which post-scarcity is used literally
Some items have already reached post scarcity though? Take books for example. New books still have scarcity. A copy of any already written book however is effectively free when provided over the internet. The marginal cost to produce a copy of said book for another person is an infinitesimal percentage of a penny
You've hit on why people are easily seduced by the concept of post-scarcity.
Bits aren't free, but they are too cheap to meter. If I divide the time it takes to download an ebook by the amount I pay for Internet per month, it comes out to bupkis, even after I try and account for the percentage of my storage it uses up.
But a cup of sugar, and anything else made of atoms, is fundamentally different. There's no obvious route to sugar being too cheap to meter.
An old English idiom for getting something very cheap was "I got it for a song". So this kind of post-scarcity has been with us for a long time: anyone can sing a song, singing was never scarce.
Being too cheap for individuals or society to consider in their transactions and being completely free, are effectively the same to me.
You may feel otherwise, but if the distinction never makes a difference in the practical world then it does not enter my mind. Based on that metric, we already have post scarcity goods like already published books
I’m fairly certain it’s the other way around. I agree that when you get to physical goods there’s no way it’s literally infinite. What I’m saying is that after a certain point it doesn’t matter.
If we had a sun sized amount of sugar available to humanity then it would be post scarcity even though it was actually getting used up by a measurable amount
> The labor force participation rate will keep falling as America transitions to a post-scarcity economy.
America isn't in any danger of transitioning to poat-scarcity anything anytime soon, and I mean that with “soon” on a geological time scale.
Also, “post-scarcity” and “economy” are mutually exclusive; “economy” is the mechanism by which scarce resources are distributed. If you don’t have scarcity, you don’t have (or have any reason for) an economy.
I've heard random uber drivers on the other side of the world talk about Dogecoin so you might want to include crypto in your list of why less people need to work now.
Those Uber drivers either have confused unrealized gains with wealth, or have realized those gains by leaving someone else holding the bag. Probably someone else just like them.
Thats not the case. Certain asset classes are productive, for example stocks return cash to owners without the owners needing to divest themselves from them
The only reason anyone buys those assets is because of the divine share buybacks. Anything else is purely speculation and always reverts back to the mean.
Over the long term effectively 100% of all stock market returns comes from either dividends (and buybacks) or the companies increasing ability to pay dividends (through earnings growth).
I'm not sure why you think having a place to live ( or to rent to someone else) is not productive... mind explaining?
>The labor force participation rate will keep falling as America transitions to a post-scarcity economy
What's the evidence that this is happening, or is going to happen? The top 3 categories in the CPI are housing, food, and transport. I can't imagine any of these transitioning to "post scarcity" any time soon. The only thing that can plausibly head toward post scarcity are education and recreation, which can be delivered digitally, but those only make up 3.0% and 5.8% of the CPI respectively.
None of this has anything to do with productivity growth. You're just getting free stuff from China and that can't last. Sure, take advantage of the free stuff to build a great nation that can do well without China and create a second China so you can transition from one source of free stuff to another because those are optimal strategies but don't rely on them exclusively.
I suspect this differs by geography. Texas never really completely shut down for the pandemic. People where I live remain eager to work. The lower paid service jobs are mostly staffed by young people but people remain eager to work.
My wife was just driving through Kentucky and West Virginia to visit some relatives. She is seeing a radically different world there. Job postings and labor shortages are everywhere and most of the people she is visiting are unemployed and don’t do anything.
According to the BLS current population survey (CPS), the unemployment rate for Texas fell 0.2 percentage points in April 2021 to 6.7%. The state unemployment rate was 0.6 percentage points higher than the national rate for the month.
According to the BLS current population survey (CPS), the unemployment rate for Kentucky fell 0.3 percentage points in April 2021 to 4.7%. The state unemployment rate was 1.4 percentage points lower than the national rate for the month.
So much for your anecdote. Unemployment in Texas is way higher than in Kentucky.
That's because of the history of coal mining/factory jobs in KY. When The coal jobs dried up and the factories closed a fair portion of the people who were previously employed dropped out of the labor force and never went back.
The other piece is this:
Population of Texas in 2020: 29,360,759
Population of Kentucky in 2020: 4,477,251
Anecdata: Driving through Florence SC a couple weeks ago, a McDonalds was advertising $500 hiring bonus.
A few days later in either Arkansas or Missouri I was inside a McDonalds offering $200 signing bonus, $100 after 30 days, $100 after another 30 days.
Yesterday I was at the Walmart distribution center in Houston (I'm a truck driver) and they had a banner stretched across a street-visible building for starting warehouse wages of $17.50/hour.
No idea whether any of those jobs get you more than 29 hours/week.
Help wanted signs are everywhere. Metal working. "Labor." Truck stop cashiers. There are signs as well as audio in the truck stops, and they brag about "flexible scheduling." Maybe that means you can schedule around school, or maybe that means "it's slow today, go home."
The big three truck stop chains (TA/Petro, Pilot/FlyingJ, Loves/Speedco) used to always be clean and serviced. Recently that's become spotty, all over the country.
Unemployment benefits right now are paying more than your average unskilled job. You may not want to hear it but many people are using this provision knowing there are jobs out there for when it comes to an end, so guess what they collect unemployment.
Once it goes back to pre-pandemic then the issues are still pay sucks, job sucks, no retirement options, no to little healthcare etc...
The one thing we have been seeing and will only get worse is the skill gap. Many skills you cannot learn overnight and many people are assuming 'other' jobs will be there for them.
Short term govt. checks. Short/Long term skill gap.
In Texas, there's been a lot of gnashing of teeth about the low labor supply, as a talking point against the unemployment bonus (which the state is opting out of). It seems to ones the most effected are places likes restaurants, who often pay the $2.15+tips rate. Then I noticed today that HEB (grocery chain often rated as one of the best in the country) was hiring warehouse workers at $17.50/hour. I suspect they have no issues finding workers.
I can attest. I have two friends who were hired on the spot at places that were desperate for workers. One makes $8/hr, the other makes like $10/hr. No breaks, no benefits, no scheduling regularity.
The company I work at has no trouble finding employees, but I have a well-paying swe position.
I've definitely seen a pattern among the companies and businesses complaining about this. They treat their employees terribly.
I haven't heard any of these complaints from two of America's largest retailers that are known for providing full-time work with relatively good Healthcare and time off benefits (amazon and costco).
You don't really hear complaints from them because they are actually doing things and even if it was effective it would still waste too much time. You know the old saying about business models, "winners innovate, losers litigate"? Replace innovate with "adapt to supply and demand in all areas" and litigate with "write whinging articles not realizing they are admitting to the world that they suck at their job".
US unemployment isn’t particularly high though. It’s higher than 2019, but 2019 is literally a low bar in terms of unemployment. Even after the pandemic, which isn’t completely over, the unemployment rate is much lower than it was in 2009.
U5+ is at Jan 2015 levels and U6++ at June 2015 levels. The 25-54 employment rate is where it was in Dec 2014.
I agree that the current situation doesn’t need much explanation. Things are not exactly where they were pre-covid but the employment situation seems pretty darn healthy considering the year we just had.
+ Total Unemployed, Plus Discouraged Workers, Plus All Other Persons Marginally Attached to the Labor Force, as a Percent of the Civilian Labor Force Plus All Persons Marginally Attached to the Labor Force
++ U5 plus Total Employed Part Time for Economic Reasons (i.e. involuntary part time)
Its all these jobs that want you to already own a car when you apply so they don't have to pay you enough to a) live somewhere b) eat food c) keep your phone on d) keep your lights on e) keep your internet connection f) much less g) buy a car
I think you'll find a good correlation between a lack of child care / in person school and a difficulty in finding people wanting to come to work, which is something I didn't find in a quick search in the article.
Since half the kids were doing Zoom-school at home thru May, probably a lot of parents needed to be home to "parent" them.
Also, hard to find a job where you can leave at 2 or 3pm to pick up those kids from school. And after-school care isn't cheap ($20-40/day). Tough if your making $10-15/hr.
Jobs in health care, recreation and hospitality report the highest level of job openings, relative to employment. Many of these involve plenty of person-to-person contact, making their workers especially vulnerable to infection (a study from California earlier this year found that cooks were most at risk from dying of covid-19). By contrast, in industries where maintaining social distancing or being outside is often easier, labour shortages are less of an issue. The number of job openings per employee in the construction industry is lower today than it was before the pandemic.
Those are also the industries that unceremoniously dumped a large portion of their workers a year ago. Many of those workers undoubtedly moved to other industries and now that they have gone to the trouble of switching, they aren't going to switch back without getting a much sweeter deal.
In an Australian (really, Sydney) context, I'm seeing a trend that employers are really struggling to fill senior technical roles, but are unwilling to raise pay.
Since labour shortages are economy-wide, not just at the lower end... I think it's almost certainly macro related.
In any case, this is a good thing. When unemployment rates are high, the least employable people tend to be unemployed. When unemployment is low, the least attractive jobs are unfilled.
The "we'll pay you for an interview" stunt was a great marketing gimmick but it actually acted as an intentional trap: if you turned up for the interview and declined the job, they'd report that you turned down the job offer which may cause you to lose unemployment benefits. In practice it acted as a signing bonus with free publicity, not the "no strings attached interview bonus".
You might say this is obvious because TINSTAAFL (or "paid interview" rather than "free lunch") but the target demographic is less likely to be aware of contractual nuances like this.
Where are all those robots that make us need UBI right about now? A burger flipper bot and a fully automated cashier kiosk seems like something that would prevent McDonald's offering $50 interview payments.
Fully automated cashier kiosks exist and are available at a lot of McDonald's. From my own anecdotal experiences, the problem is people don't like to use them. There have been several times I've gone to a remodeled McDonald's with several automated kiosks available and usually only one backup register at the counter. There would be a line of people waiting for the human at the register to place their order while several kiosks sit unused. I've experienced a few times of ordering at the kiosk and getting my food before the people I would have been behind in the line even placed their order.
This hasn't been for just McDonald's either. I seem to recall seeing a similar setup at a Jack in the Box location before McDonalds started implementing the kiosks. They ended up tearing out the automated kiosks because nobody used them and put back in another manned register because people ignored them.
I really wonder what drives people to prefer placing their order with a human being at the register instead of an automated machine. Personally I prefer the kiosks as a well done one sometimes shows options I didn't even know existed and its far simpler to review my order before sending it off. I've yet to have a bad experience with a kiosk, other than one completely crashing halfway through accepting the credit card making me wonder if the order was placed or not.
The kiosks have a terrible UX, for one thing. Ordering a Big Mac value meal with a drink should take one or two actions, but for some reason it takes about 10.
Also last time I was at McDonalds the kiosks were displaying a Windows BSOD.
They might have terrible UX but the human cashier has even worse UX, especially if you want to customize your order, or want to know what customization are available.
What's so difficult about UX? You just need a machine with a bunch of buttons and a card reader. If someone wants an order not on the machine they can go to the sole cashier the restaurant has hired.
My experiences with the kiosk at McD's have trained me to make the order there and then walk up to the counter to pay, because it would never let me pay at the kiosk. I like using it to order because it doesn't mishear me like the cashier usually does, so I also make bigger, more complex orders. But they do not have the full transaction worked out, last time I was there.
OTOH, I use the Starbucks online ordering all the time to have my order ready the moment I walk in. It let me feel like I was "getting out" during 2020 with minimal risk.
I prefer the kiosks, and when between equidistant McDs, choose the one whose kiosks are working. I'm pretty good with UIs, though, as a computer professional. Most of the people I see ignore them, and at two out of three locations near my house, they've been broken and down for months on end.
Plenty of McDonald's cashiers aren't great at using the POS, I don't know what we're expecting out of the average customer. 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate.
In all fairness... as someone who worked at McDonald's growing up just a decade or so ago, the POS was absolutely an awful experience at the time. Tons of very tiny images, similar colors, small text, prioritizing "meals" over individual items in lists. I wasn't particularly motivated to memorize the UI to make myself a more profitable wage slave either, of course, but I empathize with anybody who has to use that POS POS on a daily basis.
I'm not trying to be unfair, just audibly wondering why people think that the same people who can't design a UI that employees who spend 29 hours a week on can master are going to design a UI for people who spend 10 minutes on it a week.
UX has always been given short shrift when you can train someone to use it. When making it so trivial anyone can figure it out leads to reduced employee costs, you suddenly have a lot more incentive to get it right.
The kiosks work good for simple things. When it gets complicated though, sometimes the kiosk throws up its hands and escalates to a human attendant (self-checkout at grocery and home improvement stores are horrible at this). By the time the attendant tends to the machine, often more time has passed than just going to the human cashier. This trains people to avoid the kiosks.
Which is such a bad experience that the stores tend to tweak it to improve it.
I remember when grocery store checkout lines used to flag weight mismatches because the front door was open and it was a windy day. That particular chain has dialed them -way- back on their sensitivity; I think I need to flag an attendant down 1/100 times I use one?
But either way, that's handling payment of goods that aren't determined. A far harder problem than an order kiosk at McDonald's. -Those- are great, and yeah, I've never had a problem, even ordering very customized meals that many servers aren't even aware are possible (i.e., getting a burger lettuce wrapped).
Just my anecdotal experience but we've had the kiosks in Australia for a while now, and I've seen queues for a kiosk while there was a person waiting at the register with nothing to do...
...and I stood in the queue instead of going to the register...
My experience with using computer ordering like kiosks and fast food apps is that you can easily make complex orders, but since the actual steps after involve humans you won’t actually get those orders.
Like, Starbuckses are usually out of more than half the things on their app. And lower end places are just going to ignore your requests.
For delivery that doesn’t even include the surprisingly high rate of the driver just giving you someone else’s order - I wonder who loses on the refund in that situation.
These kiosks miss very basic use cases. There's no equivalent to the verbal "can I have a (free) cup of water with the meal" on a McDonald's kiosk UI. You can purchase bottled water, however.
My guess: it's so far turned out to be impossible to build a robot that works and tolerates the humidity and grease of a kitchen, and has an hourly amortized cost of ownership less than what it would cost to pay a human.
Industrial food production has had this problem nailed at scale though. I'm not even sure the technology isn't there - I think there's just not enough people working in the space to find the right design.
Industrial robots work repetitive tasks for high efficiency but have high capital costs. Fast food beat out automat style resturants for several reasons but one of them was the versatility of human labor. It seems to be a case of "we know how to do it but not do it cheap enough to be worth it".
(1) Lack of workers with the required skills (a matter of making such education accessible, possibly at-work, and prioritizing that sector)
(2) Pay below what's livable / better options (a matter of increasing pay and making sure certain employees can't just hire illegal immigrants which they pay less by taking advantage of their illegal status and lower expectations)
I've only visited the US twice, so most of what I know about the US low-wage labour market is from here or the media. From my understanding, it's a toxic place for employees and I'd never want to work in it:
* No job security - if your boss decides they want to fire you, you are SOL figuring out how to pay this month's rent
* No healthcare
* No paid time off - not that the standard 2 weeks for higher wage earners is much better
* Having to deal with abuse from management and customers with no recourse
* Scheduling hours so you effectively have no free time outside work
* The legal minimum wage, being expected to be propped up by tips, so you can actually survive
* The only incentive to work better is from the fear that what you do have could be taken away at any moment
When I was younger I worked a grocery store and it had none of these issues. There were full time employees there who were pretty happy (the wage was low, but you could live a meager life without struggling). Is it really a suprise that it's hard to find employees if you treat then like they are worthless?
If you've ever tried to get a low-paying job in the US these days, it's very difficult. Many first have to take several tests first to prove they're a "good" Human.
My bf applied for at least 100 minimum wage casual jobs a few years ago and didn’t get anything. Now a few years later and 1.5 years of a software development degree finished, he applied for 2 programming jobs and got one.
Sure the second part could be luck but the first part has become a statistic. These low wage jobs are absolutely flooded with applicants.
It is very clear that people are collecting unemployment until it runs out. Sure, this implies an unstable situation and a job will eventually need to be found, but what could possibly be the rush? Summer is here, its beautiful out, if you're making full paycheck on unemployment then WHY would you possibly want to jump into a low end job?
Wages will temporarily increase, but once things return to normal and we no longer subsidize unemployment as we presently are, I would assume the glut of job supply will go down. This will likely spur further investment in automation or other ways to reduce business reliance on labor, especially at very large scale.
We've had a perverse incentive in place for fifteen months that encourages people not to work on the bottom end of the scale. Piled on top of all the other perverse incentives that discourage marginal workers from earning extra, unless it is significantly extra.
Libreralism’s creed is that free market will balance itself through price discovery. Except for labour.
Just increase wages a lot and there will be no shortage of labour. And if employees cannot afford higher cost of labour they could just drop out of the market.
Fun fact: we have surnames largely as a result of another pandemic, the Black Death in the 14th century. The Black Death killed an estimated 1/3 to 1/2 of the population of Europe at the time (really!) and created a huge labour shortage. Peasants were largely serfs and tied to the lands of their lords. Surnames were an indicator of profession.
As a result of the labour shortage, wages went up and workers became more mobile, which created the need for surnames that weren't strictly profession-related. The King even passed a law to try and limit wages with mixed results.
This pandemic may well end up being a huge boon for real wages.
As many have noted: there is no labour shortage. There's simply an unwillingness to pay what the market demands. Additionally, the last 12-15 months have taught many people that commuting into an office is completely unnecessary and is essentially wage theft since you aren't paid for those 1-2 hours of commuting time.
A fallacy of youth I've found is to fall into the trap that things are only getting worse. A benefit of having some more experience and perspective is the realization that things happen in cycles.
We had union movement spring up, which were a huge boon for working conditions and real wages. In many cases the pendulum eventually swung too far in the other direction and unions became a tool for political power and an excuse for inefficiencies that paralyzed industries.
And then in the last 50+ years in the US we've had the cult of Ayn Rand acolytes take hold and sell people on the idea that they need to be beholden to employers. It's partly (IMHO) why we've largely seen near zero real wage growth in 40 years.
My hope is this is a turning point where we'll start to see it's unacceptable to not provide living wages and not to provide basic human rights like affordable health care.
This won't be a quick process but the main purveyors of pro-corporate propaganda, the Republican party, is essentially in its death throes. It is a now a minority that can only govern through voter suppression, disenfranchisement and gerrymandering.
Here's something I want any defenders of billionaires to consider: if you give people a living wage, what do you think is going to happen? They're going to spend what they earn. This is the fabric of an economy. After all, who does a trillion-dollar market cap company sell to if only 0.01% of the people on Earth have anything to spend?
It can be combined with a Federal jobs guarantee, where the Federal govt becomes a job provider of last resort. This sets a wage floor rather than a minimum wage and give real bargaining power to workers. I like this idea better than Universal Basic Income, because it prevents workers from becoming lazy and subservient to the state. Also, a lot of people find purpose through their work, so this helps people from losing meaning in their lives. The actual work to be done can be determined by each community, which knows best about what work is required (e.g. child care, landscaping, etc.).
It actually just means that the business needs to charge more for whatever it produces. For a restaurant, for example, the general guideline seems to be that 30% of the costs are labour. So increasing the wages by 20% means costs increase by 6%.
If a business can't survive that then the business simply isn't viable.
Why exactly should we expect people to work below a livable wage just to keep a non-viable business afloat?
If you can’t pay a living wage to your employees, you are either a bad business owner or simply don’t have a viable business. You can’t clamor for the ruthless efficiency of Capitalism and then complain that you are its victim.
The problem is that the maths doesn't work anymore. Wages have been flat for so long that the slight increase in costs, distributed around a person's life, caused by the pandemic pushes McJobs into "working there makes a loss" territory.
Every single employer that crawls out from under their rock and howls some version of "nobody wants to work anymore" is saying "I pay crap wages for my crap job, and expected to do so forever". When the boss and all the customers spend every moment of every day taking a dump on you, they should be grateful when the worst that happens is you stop turning up.
> Every single employer that crawls out from under their rock and howls some version of "nobody wants to work anymore" is saying "I pay crap wages for my crap job, and expected to do so forever".
Even worse, they also expected to make obscene profit off the backs of those workers being paid crap wages.
McDonald's, as one example, makes $10B in profit every single year. [1]. Their profit went up during the pandemic, 13% YoY.
How anyone thinks they shouldn't increase wages and be content with only a few billion in profit is insanity.
That’s not how it works. Most fast food restaurants are franchised, not company owned. An average McDonald’s owner (franchisee) only makes about $150k per year off it [1]. And that’s after investing a rather large sum of money into the business in the first place. I’ll let you do the math on how much wages could go up for workers before that number turns into “I would make more money doing anything else with my capital”.
> I’ll let you do the math on how much wages could go up for workers before that number turns into “I would make more money doing anything else with my capital”.
Then that is exactly what should happen.
The world isn't better because McDonald's is in it and everywhere. If there were less, there would be more locally owned burger joints, and more "regular" folk making money instead of corporate giants.
>Workers should choose to walk away from the current bad deals.
Right, but they should also face the consequences (ie. not getting paid). Imagine a world where a SaaS vendor rejects an offer from a customer because they think the price is too low, but the government steps in and pays the SaaS vendor anyways.
McDonald's has been reducing their number of workers and franchising as per their 2016-2017 plan. So most of the people that work at McD are not even their employees (since McD the brand is now just a real estate/leasing business).
Is this actually true? I remember my grad level engineering classes in which I was the only American. And these weren't tiny grad classes either, at least 10-20 students.
Now I'm starting to think all of this is simply the endgame of our education system.
You seem to be contrasting the proportion of US citizens in postgrad education (in your experience) to GP's point about supply and demand in the labor market for low skill, low wage service jobs. What's the relationship there? I don't understand at all.
Yes you are right. However, my gripe is related. I've seen tens of articles posted here about the lack of available talent in engineering and thought there may be parallels to less skilled work.
Actually, I would argue that is simply economic rationality.
1) A PhD is generally an economic disaster. For 6+ years you are making less than minimum wage, and only the most technical fields benefit from it economically. Those 6 years put you almost $250K behind someone earning a decent engineering salary--and the working engineer has a 6 year experience record and corresponding professional network. If you have to spend a couple more years as an underpaid Postdoc, you never catch up economically.
2) A quick Master's generally makes good economic sense in a technical field--get it as cheap and fast as you can. It's generally worth a nice salary bump, and it puts you into a slightly different category when layoffs and stuff come around. (Master's degrees often can be considered for "R&D" positions that a Bachelor's is considered unqualified for even with 20+ years of experience--HR rules are stupid.)
3) Advanced degrees in non-technical fields are a HUGE net negative economically.
In addition, a non-trivial amount of foreign grad students are sponsored by their government to be there. Colleges love them because they pay full, non-resident prices in cash.
I'd say a large majority of Americans complaining about student debt today have advanced degrees in non-technical fields. The extra earning power you get in the U.S. for STEM degrees far outstrips any cost of college or healthcare compared to Europe.
What you're ignoring is that employers have been using "has a degree" as a filter for decades now.
Any type of position, including the lauded "learn to code" ones, starts with "do you have some type of degree?". This is the rule, and while exceptions exist, they're not common or reliable. It is still generally looked down on to only have a high school education.
I concur. As an engineering manager, I had recruiters question my decision to hire people without degrees, even after they had verified work history and has passed objective tests proving they had the necessary skills.
At the same time, there are a number of perks that come with getting a Ph.D. that are hard to get without one. For instance in my job as a lecturer, which requires a Ph.D. for the position:
- I only work 9 months out of the year, and I'm paid a salary most people don't earn over 12.
- I get 9 weeks paid vacation each year (5 weeks between fall and spring semester, 2 weeks at the end of spring semester, 1 week in the fall semester, 1 week in the spring semester).
- I only work 4 days a week during regular semesters. Of those 4 days I work maybe 4-5 hours a day.
- I can choose to work over the summer semester if I want more money, or I can just take off for 3 months.
- I don't really have a boss. The department chair is essentially just another faculty member who fills the role for a while. If I wanted to I could even step up and do it for a couple of years. But other than getting my classes assigned to me, I'm completely autonomous. There's no one monitoring when I come to campus or when I leave. As long as I show up to class, no one cares.
- I have the option to go for tenure which gives me unparalleled job security.
- I get an assistant to whom I can offload the more boring parts of my job (grading).
- I get full tuition for myself if I or any of my dependents want to take classes. This more than makes up that $250k if I want to put my kids through school at my institution.
- I can spend 20% of my time contracting for extra income. I've found people pay a premium for the Ph.D. after your signature for things like expert testimony, credential evaluation, and tutoring (rich people who want their kid to get into a top college will pay $300 per hour for a tutor with a Ph.D.).
- I have access to a campus community including the libraries, fabrication labs, gyms, pools, cafeterias. You might find these at large tech companies, but you typically won't also find a theatre, sporting events, and concerts right outside your office.
- I don't have to work in a high cost of living tech hub. My job is in-demand basically everywhere in the world. If I want to move for a year I can be a visiting professor somewhere else for a while and come back.
I don't know of any other job that's really comparable, and a Ph.D. is a hard prereq. More than worth the early economic hit in my opinion.
I was a lecturer for a semester, many years ago. In my view the wages and working conditions of lecturers is highly variable. Your case may be unusual, or you're in a specific field where lecturers are treated particularly well.
In my case, there were no full time lectureships, only half-time, which came with no benefits. (I simultaneously applied for positions in two separate colleges of the university, which made up 100%, and then they had to give me benefits, but that's a freak event). The policy of no benefits for part-timers predates Obama.
You are not a permanent employee, but have to re-apply for whatever is available each semester. You sign a form waiving many of your labor rights. In my state, public employees can't unionize, except for the police.
Lecturers in the humanities get paid a pittance and often have to work at multiple schools to make ends meet.
In most fields, the fact of being a lecturer disqualifies you from applying for a tenure track job because you have not been doing full time research to build up a publication record and funding proposal. Lecturers and post-docs face the same brutal odds against ever getting onto the tenure track.
> Lecturers in the humanities get paid a pittance and often have to work at multiple schools to make ends meet.
Lecturers in technical fields get paid a pittance. I can't imagine how bad it is for the humanities.
I got paid $5000 for a 14 week CS course that was about 40 hours/week of work. To put that in perspective, if I give that course to professionals I easily pull that $5000 in a single 40 hour week.
So I need to figure out how to translate my recently acquired OMSCS degree into more money, apparently. My current company gave me a lot of 'attaboys' but it has no value otherwise.
Have you asked for a raise, and ideally also for increased responsibilities? My experience is that people don’t usually get raises without asking for them, and specifically without seriously looking at other jobs. By far the best way to get a raise is to find another job you like, get the offer, then give your boss the chance to match. But if you like the job and would rather keep it, then I recommend telling your manager about this before you start interviewing, so they have time to work the machinery and try to materialize an increase for you if they want to keep you (and have any internal leverage).
Unfortunately most company HR programs are f*** up and won’t authorize anything other than token raises for existing employees, whereas the recruiting team will authorize much higher pay in order to actually sign candidates that managers want to hire. Thus you’re really anchored to wherever you started at any given company, and if you want to see a big change in role and comp it’s almost always necessary to change jobs.
> By far the best way to get a raise is to find another job you like, get the offer, then give your boss the chance to match.
Don't do this--especially if you like your boss.
Invoking "job offer match" machinery is a royal pain in the ass for your boss. If there's a solid chance you'll turn it down anyway, you've just pissed off your boss for no good reason. Just give notice.
It's better to simply leave on good terms saying "It's just a really good opportunity" which blocks match offers but leaves open the door to come back in a couple of years for a much higher salary.
And, if they can't take that, well, then you probably don't want to be working there anyway.
>Wages have been flat for so long that the slight increase in costs, distributed around a person's life, caused by the pandemic pushes McJobs into "working there makes a loss" territory
Just to be clear, you think working at a McJob actually costs you money?
Job may require you to have a car/commute or pay for public transport, pay for services you'd otherwise have time to do yourself, to pay to put children into childcare (my childcare is AU$122 per day, per child).
Businesses have operating expenses that mean they operate at a loss despite selling product, why is it in conceivable the same might apply for laborers? Transport, shelter, food, tons of jobs offer pay such that at the end of the month, you're losing money and still living in substandard conditions.
Whether you make enough at a McJob to pay for everything is a different claim than the one the GP made. Their claim, at least how I read it, is that you lose money by working a McJob.
"We start our back of the house cooks at $17 hour and up. For full time employees we also offer health insurance."
That's clearly not enough, especially during a pandemic before there was a vaccine.
"For those of you who think you can just pay more and raise prices by a nickel, you are out of touch. As a point of reference, in 2020 the minimum wage increased from $12 hour to $13.50. The increase in costs to my business based on 2019 hours was over $65,000 which is most of my profit. Then covid hit."
If the only way some businesses are going to stay afloat is by paying low wages then maybe they shouldn't be in business.
Although I agree with this, I'd point out that the final line has significant implications for American life in general.
The entire restaurant business is fundamentally predicated on paying most of its workers below-living wage rates. If restaurants paid its workers reasonable rates, the cost of eating out would rise (not by the same amount as wages, but a significant proportion thereof). This would have dramatic impact on the frequency and social breadth of dining out.
I'm not arguing that this is good or bad, just pointing out that it's about a bit more than just some specific businesses.
When I lived in Denmark, I did indeed eat out at restaurants less, but probably ate socially about the same amount. It's legal to drink alcohol in public, so on nice days, we'd either get takeout, or a single-use grill and some burgers and beers, and picnic in a park or on the waterfront. On particularly nice days you can see tens of thousands of people doing this in Copenhagen. On less nice days, just go to someone's apartment.
Now I'm back in the US, where it seems going to a restaurant is the default way of eating socially, even for just informal meetings with friends. Partly because it's cheap I'd guess, and partly there is less public space and more legal restrictions on what you can do in it. Overall I don't really like that aspect of the culture. Seems unnecessary to me to have the whole formality of a waiter who takes orders and serves you plates and whatever just for a random weekday meal with friends. But I'm presumably not representative.
Yeah. I kind of alluded to that in another part of the comment tree. In fact, I have bought food from the McDonalds in the main Copenhagen train station.
I think between Uber Eats delivery prices and generous delivery driver tips, a whole ton of people have been used to paying a lot more for their food, with most of it not even going to the restaurant. They can probably get away with raising their prices more now that we seem to be more or less "back to normal".
Maybe you got used to paying more for your food, but we just stopped eating out. A restaurant meal without shipping costs is just barely cheap enough for us to justify. Adding the cost of a delivery makes it not worth it to us.
They also had delivery convenience and even the expenses are VCs trying to make up for negative profits on margins. I wouldn't take that bet as a resturant given the sheer power of convenience on sales.
Given the type of food restaurants make (oil and sugar rich - it's why restaurant food "tastes better") this would probably be one of the bigger improvements in middle class health.
Wouldn't the chain restaurants be best positioned to survive a squeeze like this? They have efficiencies of scale with administration, training, marketing, etc. With the mid-range restaurants pushed out (rent up, wages up, etc), more people would head to chain restaurants and eat increasingly poor quality food?
Nope. The cheapest restaurants will still exist but they will charge $10-15 or more. The exceptions will be hot dog stands and McDonalds, with the McDonalds sporting a long line.
Regular people will be forced to cook most days of the week. That doesn’t mean that they will cook healthy food though.
While it's certainly possible to cook unhealthily for yourself, it's a lot harder to do - making huge amounts of butter and sugar work in a food is actually pretty difficult - but more importantly, you have to actually be adding it yourself. Raw ingredients generally don't start out that way.
> Regular people will be forced to cook most days of the week. That doesn’t mean that they will cook healthy food though.
When I was a ramen-level college kid literally budgeting at the penny granularity with a back of house job that started out just a dime above minimum wage, the way I got out of that trap was once-a-week cooking, with as many meal components at once-a-month scale my freezer space allowed, even purchasing at retail (though with an eye towards periodic specials). It saved me a ton of time, I ate far healthier than many contemporaries, and I put the time to use in two ways.
First, it turns out when cooking at volume, there was a lot of repetitive wait periods I didn't get when cooking one meal at a time. I studied more while cooking at even these modest volumes than I did cooking on-demand. Second, with microwave-zapped meals I skipped all the lines and waiting at the food court/cafeteria options everyone else used; more time studying. I was exhausted running on the low-wage treadmill during the weekdays, so I really appreciated time shifting the meal prep effort away from those weekdays I was so tired from studying and working, to the weekends when I could recover better. Because the meal prep was only the most intense on the one weekend a month I had to prep what I could fit for the next month into the freezer, the other weekends' meal preps were not as intense.
The studying paid off in a much better job in less than a year (it was do-or-die for only about 10 months), and it was a ratcheting compounding effect from then onwards. If I didn't have to set aside that time to study, I could have carried on that way for years (though age and how US personal finance and healthcare is structured would have caught up eventually and made that a very punishing choice).
I voluntarily chose very repetitive menus because I didn't want to spend the time to figure out more options, and I'm fortunately wired such that I can tolerate that way more than most. After the Internet's Younger Dryas era ended and we got our deluge of content, it became far easier to assemble menus, shopping lists, and prep plans cooking OAW/OAM when I kept meal prepping to save time instead of financially survive. Not glamorous, not "one weird trick", but accessible to anyone even at brutal retail pricing levels on low-wage incomes.
Another possible way out for regular people that I have been wondering about ever since is communal cooking. There are people who do this in the meal prep communities, but I'm wondering if more automated online-assisted coordination is possible.
It takes organizing and time together, mostly empty freezers and refrigerators, possibly getting some freezer containers, but that and a non-profit filing as a food-related business is all that is necessary to start with a couple neighbors. With that you can go into a restaurant supply store and purchase many raw ingredients for way cheaper than even Costco. Once-a-week and once-a-month weekend cooking between several home kitchens splitting up the work, yields refrigerated and frozen prepared ready, nutritious, wholesome meals. Depending upon what you prepare, you can hit $N USD per meal per person with what you would normally pay 2-5X at a restaurant.
The big savings come not from the ingredients though that is welcome, but from time and monetized time. Bring down the per-meal time to even just near the time it takes you to earn sufficient money for the eat out/take out/order in/subscribe alternatives, and it becomes quite attractive for certain personality types. If you hate to cook less than you hate to lose money, then at least it packs all the misery in one compact chunk of time to get it over with as quickly as possible.
Get enough people coordinating (about 100 is sufficient), and you can access distributor-scale savings, or go straight to producers for some ingredients. Raw food ingredients in the developed world is ridiculously cheap once you cut out the many transactional layers, and if you're willing to absorb the labor cost/time by turning it into a social activity, then it is a non-trivial cost savings for lower wage income stratas. But it takes sufficient time and willingness to plan ahead and organize. It doesn't need much at first, but the hurdle is real.
With an income much higher than median letting me access the bulk quantities at the restaurant supply store and the space and equipment to freeze/store them, I found my time savings still quite significant compared to preparing at retail quantities and times, even though the cost savings as a percentage of income while appreciated were a small fraction of what I would enjoy at a lower income level.
This can scale up in complexity as much as the community desires and has the labor/resources for. Gather enough neighbors to go in together on a very plain building that only contains an airtight door, with Lstiburek-type walls using plain Styrofoam insulation, 4 meters thick (even the floor and ceiling), treated with the AeroBarrier system to make extremely airtight, up on concrete piers. Stick a big enough heat pump on it, and you get a walk-in freezer that can serve as large a community as you want that is better than most walk-in offerings on the market (most leak like a sieve by comparison through thinner insulation, modular DIY adding insulation isn't possible, and no one offers such thick insulation), and you can really start to toy with buffering price fluctuations of freezable commodities.
I'd love to find out someone has built a site that walks someone from those baby steps of my ramen student days, all the way through to entire neighborhoods doing massive communal meal preps with communal industrial freezers they use for much longer times between meal preps.
I know that eating out varies by lifestyle in ways beyond wealth, but are resturant meals really that significant a portion of health? Even with old office commute "eating out heavily" was five meals per workweek.
Labor market shortages due to short term government incentives are going to lead to long term capital investments that automate manufacturing and service work happening sooner rather than later.
That was going to happen in a decade or two regardless. But if there's been one common thread in the insane policies of the last year, it's accelerationism. People will be caught in between without the skills to navigate it.
Then government should protect them, instead of preserving jobs that left them working nearly full-time and receiving transfer payments. Transfer payments going to full-time workers are simply subsidies to their employers.
For how long? I'm talking about people in their 30's who don't realize that there is never going to be a job for them again in the industry they were working in back in February 2020.
Mass UBI is not going to be the utopia people imagine it to be.
If we don't need their work because productivity is so high, then forever. If we do need their work, we should funnel them into the training they need to do it.
The people complaining about immigrants never check on if their facts are actually correct. “Illegal immigrants from Mexico” haven’t been a thing in years - the US has net emigration to Mexico atm.
For restaurants I think a lot of it relies on informal family labor, or 2nd generation cooks who are indeed often Latino.
Illegal immigrants could actually be a net positive since they’re additional customers and don’t use the services they pay taxes for.
Agribusinesses certainly rely on illegal labor. Look at what happened in Georgia even before Covid. California is no different.
Hospitality is often from the illegal labor pool. Sure, Mariott doesn't pay below minimum wage--they just subcontract such that the subcontractor can't possibly be paying minimum wage.
Construction work is also quite often from the illegal labor pool. A raid has shut down every worksite I know who had an unannounced one.
Shall I go on?
> Illegal immigrants could actually be a net positive since they’re additional customers and don’t use the services they pay taxes for.
1) Illegal labor depresses the wage of those not willing to do the work below minimum wage.
2) Payment to illegal labor is generally cash and dodges taxes. Most do not have bank accounts that they could cash a check at anyway.
Yes, I've noticed people say "taxes" when they mean "income taxes", but it's not possible to dodge property and consumption taxes like that. I suppose cutting down on rent by living 6 to an apartment does evade property tax, but that is called efficiency.
> And I've noticed people say "immigrant" when they mean "illegal alien".
Being illegal is what makes them pay taxes without using services. It's like a tourism economy but more exploitative - but you're the exploiter here so you're winning.
> It's also called increased competition for housing and jobs, by someone who is in the country illegally, aka "illegal competition".
Adding people to an economy does not take your job or even really compete for it, because immigrants are customers. That is the lump of labor fallacy.
It can also add housing because they're usually people who are better at construction labor than you are.
> It's like a tourism economy but more exploitative - but you're the exploiter here so you're winning.
Great, let's stop exploiting them and deport them all immediately, as the law indicates should happen.
> Adding people to an economy does not take your job or even really compete for it, because immigrants are customers. That is the lump of labor fallacy.
Yes it does. Adding workers to a worker pool drives wages down. Illegal aliens are not customers of landscaping, construction, restaurants, hotels, housekeeping, etc. They aren't adding any demand here, they are only increasing supply and thus pushing wages down for low-skilled citizens and LEGAL immigrants. Your labor theories don't hold up to reality.
> It can also add housing because they're usually people who are better at construction labor than you are.
Illegal aliens aren't sitting there building homes from scratch on plots of land they purchase. They are most often renting, which again, drives rents up because of increased competition for resources.
There are 12+ million illegal aliens in the US today. Negative net inflow from Mexico is meaningless when we still apprehend nearly 500k attempted border crossings. Who knows how many get through?
> Illegal immigrants could actually be a net positive since they’re additional customers and don’t use the services they pay taxes for.
They are not a net positive.
Illegal aliens often avoid paying many taxes by being paid in cash, while others fraudulently use fake SSNs. Meanwhile they use many benefits meant for citizens, while also depressing wages for low-skilled labor and increasing housing costs.
> All three national studies concluded that illegal aliens in the
United States generate more in costs than revenues to federal, state,
and local governments combined. [0]
> 2013 estimate pegged the cost of undocumented immigrants — the cost of services received minus their tax contributions — was about $54 billion a year. [1]
When you get hundreds a week to not work, why is it any wonder that people choose not to work? When you start working at a $10/hour job and lose $20/benefits for being poor because you pass a threshold, is it any wonder people can't get off of government "assistance"? When it makes more financial sense to remain single and get benefits than it does to get married and create a stable family, is it any wonder?
The American Government is taxing the successful, rewarding the lazy and acts surprised when it has obvious effects... They are feeding the bears and making them dependent on handouts.
Rather, the pandemic has provided an opportunity to shore up ailing unemployment insurance schemes in a time when lots of types of work were inherently unsafe. As a result, we've shown people levels of dignity that they've never seen before, but should have been granted. If nothing else, the stimulus checks were unnecessary and the UI benefits were substandard.
Full stop, the reason why American workers are hard to find and hiring is difficult is because companies aren't paying enough money. Executives and shareholders have had decades of amazing wealth accumulation, but that has to end. The unwinding is happening and the gains from productivity, automation, and innovation belong to everyone and this moment in history may force government to adopt policies to make it happen.
> hiring is difficult is because companies aren't paying enough money
What i don't understand is why can't they simply raise the costs and pay more? Surely all their competitors have the same problem. If a business is not viable at these higher costs then you don't really have viable business.
There is another variable in what it takes to be paid enough - conditions. Minimium wage for a convenience store clerk job while in college where you can openly study may be enough money from the nice side benefits and fits into your schedule.
A $25/hr job working in a sewage plant which certainly does not isolate the smell, unpredictable shifts, calls for unclogging human waste with an obnoxious arrogant, micromanaging asshole boss with rage issues? Not enough money.
Renumeration expectations are entirely malleable and subjective. When you've been riding the gravy train, even $15/h looks a pittance.
> Executives and shareholders have had decades of amazing wealth accumulation, but that has to end. The unwinding is happening and the gains from productivity, automation, and innovation belong to everyone and this moment in history may force government to adopt policies to make it happen.
What does America have to offer in 2021 that would prevent said executives (at the potential behest of shareholders) from jumping ship?
Won't work. Customers are generally not going to figure out your UI, and even when they do a special case is going to come up once every five or so checkouts that requires employee intervention.
> 2. become a charity
This is a better idea. They should include e.g. 50¢ in the price of every Big Mac that will be donated to the workers who cooked and served it.
I might be missing some obvious point, but I think that your premise assumes (all/majority) of people are lazy. From the greatest utility viewpoint, if being unemployed (vs "lazy") gives liveable monetary benefits vs the employment's barely-scraping-the-barrel-and-dieing-at-it unliveable one, it is only logical for one not to work, and "laziness" shouldn't really even be considered a factor.
Unemployment benefits should (at least?) provide for/cover the living essentials.
Therefore, the question should be "what if the (minimum) wage/pay provided (at least the same) liveable value"? [Or, rather, that is the problem.]
Coupled with the potential ability to advance above the minimum wage and earn more, majority of people would choose to work.
I believe that well-known USA minimum wage stagnation graph says enough.
(Disclaimer: I am not a citizen of USA, but I believe I am, frankly, more familiar with its policies vs my own (EU) country's... and that has only taught me that I shouldn't even contemplate living in the USA. [Personal opinion based on an informal cost/benefit/risks analysis.])
I don't think laziness is their premise, but rather the result - I think GP is referring to:
> Therefore, the question should be "what if the (minimum) wage/pay provided (at least the same) liveable value"? [Or, rather, that is the problem.]
Unemployment was boosted during the pandemic to where a large percentage of low-skilled workers had exactly that cost/benefit to consider: Unemployment paid more than the job they lost, and now employers are looking to get them back without a raise.
It's not the premise - although there are a lot of lazy people in the world (I'm one of them without hesitation or denials).
This is the brunt of it: It's not worth it to work when the benefits of being unemployed is more than a "low paying" job. Those low paying jobs aren't worth more (Flipping burgers can only generate so much money - same for stocking shelves and other low experience jobs).
Raises or not the fact remains its better to be unemployed than having a number of jobs. The fact that people choose to remain on benefits instead of working is only tangentially related to "laziness".
If I can be unemployed and get 50k/year in unemployment, health care, free phones, living assistance, food stamps, etc... or I can do a minimum wage job and make 30k and lose all the benefits?
The math is simple... it's more "profitable" to be unemployed for most people.
My original post may be phrased wrongly - people seem to be hung up on the world "lazy". It could be phrased differently but the fact remains that the US "benefits" system is broken and is a large part of the problem. We need help but we shouldn't have such large portions of the population enslaved to "handouts" with a massive benefits wall in the way of personal freedom.
> The ‘Welfare Cliff’: How The Benefit Scale Discourages Work
> ...
> The dramatic rise in welfare spending has created a “welfare cliff.” As more people have become eligible for increasingly larger benefits, the “penalty” for working—lost benefits due to increased income—has steepened and been described by analysts as the “welfare cliff.” This has been especially true for workers near the poverty line who are eligible for multiple programs (e.g., food stamps, Medicaid, the EITC, TANF, and subsidized public housing), as workers reach a point where every additional dollar earned can result in a more than 50 percent reduction in benefits.
> ...
> For example, the CBO study found that households with incomes just above the poverty line—or between $23,000 and $29,000 for a family of four in 2012—stand to lose 60 cents of every additional dollar to either taxes or lost federal benefits. In the face of such a high penalty, many low-income people choose either not to work or, as CBO finds, “put in fewer hours or be less productive.”
I have no idea why I got upvoted and you got downvoted, these are the exact same phenomena (a local maxima that's hard to get out of), just at different income levels due to different sources of unemployment benefits.
I think it's the wording from my first post (all the focus on "lazy" - bad choice of word I know. Completely sidetracks my real point and can't edit the post at this point to word it better.) and sometimes that's just the way these things ebb and flow.
I grew up with help (food stamps, dried milk and government cheese and all that) and think it is needed... to an extent... but I also think that the incentives create a "wall" that's hard to get over where as you make more money, you make little more and lose a LOT of "benefits". You have to go from, say, $20k/year to 50k/year go not "lose" by working more - and that's a HUGE hump that a large number of people look at and say "Why?".
But I digress.
I'll make similar statements in different threads and get up voted or downvoted at seemingly random. The internet gods just aren't happy with me today.
> The dramatic rise in welfare spending has created a “welfare cliff.” As more people have become eligible for increasingly larger benefits, the “penalty” for working—lost benefits due to increased income—has steepened and been described by analysts as the “welfare cliff.” This has been especially true for workers near the poverty line who are eligible for multiple programs (e.g., food stamps, Medicaid, the EITC, TANF, and subsidized public housing), as workers reach a point where every additional dollar earned can result in a more than 50 percent reduction in benefits.
If you scratch out the word "lazy" and instead have me say that the government is handing out benefits that create a perverse incentive to stay unemployed/underemployed because it's literally a cut in pay to get a job for a large number of people.
> For example, the CBO study found that households with incomes just above the poverty line—or between $23,000 and $29,000 for a family of four in 2012—stand to lose 60 cents of every additional dollar to either taxes or lost federal benefits. In the face of such a high penalty, many low-income people choose either not to work or, as CBO finds, “put in fewer hours or be less productive.”
These people are trapped in a place where working for $20k a year isn't worth losing $40k a year in benefits (or more)
The article mentions that the unemployment benefits don't fully account for it:
> In the early part of the pandemic the UI supplement was even more generous, at $600, but its expiry in the summer had “little effect on overall employment”, according to a paper published in February by Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Likewise, in the areas where the current $300 is a relatively larger boost to income, employment growth has not weakened since January, when that uplift was introduced.
I've made a couple other posts in response to how people seem to ignore the forest for the trees. The benefits for not working is a perverse incentive that stops large numbers of people from working - laziness IS the wrong word... but large numbers of people are still trapped in a system that rewards not working.
It may not be in rich West Coast cities with NIMBY problems where the cost of everything is 3x what it should be, but $10/h is easily livable in flyover towns. The primary cost of living is rent and rent in places with functioning city councils is low. I'm talking $500/mo for a decent sized apartment. $10/h is $1600, you're not paying taxes with that low of a wage. Add in car payments, car insurance, health insurance, and food and you've probably got $100 to spare every month.
Seriously, the only reason wages need to be so high for low skill jobs in California is because the idiots governing here can't wrap their head around building more housing and every little social justice issue blocks construction approvals. If you cut the rent prices by 5x in the Bay you'd make $10/h a living wage.
> Add in car payments, car insurance, health insurance, and food and you've probably got $100 to spare every month.
So... you put up with a difficult job (flipping burgers), you have no job security, no or limited health insurance, no career prospects... for a $1.200 by the end of the year.
No wonder no one wants to do any work anymore. They were basically wage-slaves.
Your reward for an entire year of miserable work is maybe being able to afford car maintenance and xmas gifts or a brief and cheap local holiday! Relax on holiday for a few days and then it's back to the grindstone for another 360 days.
Most people are wage slaves, they biggest difference between them is the quality and quantity of beads and trinkets they receive to sweeten the misery.
Flyover towns certainly have $10/h jobs. Amazon pays $15/h and it's in plenty of flyover towns. If you live in a bubble where you think flyover towns somehow don't have $10/h jobs you need to get out of the Bay. They don't have high paying 6-figure salaried jobs, though.
The people in places where living expenses are high are getting $18 minimum and often times $22-25/h. The $15 "living wage" myth is garbage because HCoL areas already have higher wages and LCoL areas aren't that expensive that you couldn't live on $10/h. If you raise the minimum you won't change the shitty living situation in HCoL areas and you'll just drive closures and automation in LCoL areas. Source: Bay Area restaurant job listings
> The idea you're going to cut rent prices by a factor of 5 is about as detached from reality as it's possible to get.
I never said you'd be able to cut rent prices by 5x, merely that doing so would alleviate basically every concern about a "living wage". I know that West Coast NIMBYism would never let the level of density needed to achieve that happen. In China you can get an apartment for <3k RMB/mo even in a city like Shanghai, but in China the government can tell you to GTFO and bulldoze your apartment and replace it with skyscrapers which would never happen in the U.S. If you just tore down anything in SF under 10 floors and replaced it with 40 floor towers you'd instantly increase density by 20x.
You are correct that fixing housing policy is a major thing that we aren't doing to help people at the bottom. We absolutely need to put far more effort and political will into fixing this.
However, I don't think your math works out. There isn't any money in there for child care, healthcare deductibles, education, utilities, paying down debt or any of the other costs that tend to be much higher to people with less money and/or bad credit.
Edit: Your "500 a month for a decent sized appartment” seems inaccurate. Take a look at craigslist for St Louis or Omaha and you will struggle to find anything at that price point.
Raising wages without corresponding increase in productivity just leads to inflation, which disproportionately benefits asset holders. If everyone's wages go up, no one's wages go up, barring an increase in productivity. We are seeing that play out as we speak across the United States. CPI grossly underestimates real inflation, particularly in inelastic categories like housing, education, and healthcare. Massive improvements in technology have hidden the inflation of basic needs like food. A loaf of bread is still the same loaf of bread 20 years later so CPI doesn't adjust its price downwards even though in real terms that loaf costs much less to produce and ship in 2021 than 1980 due to technology. But the real price of land and the real cost of a skilled human's time (for housing, education and healthcare) haven't changed so we see massive inflation there, even though food prices seem like they're following CPI. In effect, the wage for unskilled workers in the 1980s was artificially propped up by the minimum wage, and now we're seeing the market reset to the true real (in an economic sense) value of their productivity as real world inflation outstrips CPI but minimum wage indexes to CPI. Meanwhile the nominal wages for skilled professionals have kept pace since their real value wasn't artificially propped up by minimum wage.
You can argue for a higher minimum wage now (say $25/h) but 10-20 years down the line you'll be back where you started. Housing, education, and healthcare will increase faster than CPI until the new equilibrium is reached and the minimum wage represents the true real value of the productivity of an unskilled job. The real solution is to automate all of these jobs away and fund free community college for STEM majors and trade schools so that you get real productivity gains rather than more monopoly money to play with.
$100 a month is really not that much. It would take years to save up enough money just to cover a financial emergency, let a lone save anything for retirement. So, even if you are diligent, you are only a few large expenses away from falling into a debt cycle
And now you see why no one is having children nowadays. It's the natural order of late stage capitalism. Having children is just not rewarding from a cost-benefit analysis
You can’t live out of poverty in the average American city on $10/hour, even if you’re single.
I see your name mentions Boise - believe me when I say Idaho, ranked 39th in state population size, is decidedly not representative of the US at large.
I'd advocate the same path I took: Better yourself and stop being worth minimum wage.
I worked fast food, Walmart, etc. I was worth minimum wage. I got an education, developed skills that are hard to find and become worth more.
My other posts point out that my phrasing was wrong (people are hung up on the word lazy) but my points remain: The US has a perverse benefit system that makes it worth more to work less before a certain point.
Main skill is Programmer although I can do Admin and Network Support. 10 years+ experience and growing. Took years of school and a few low paying jobs to get the experience.
Please touch grass. You are either exploiting people all day, taking the money they make and putting most of it in your own wallet, or you're being exploited and you're just experiencing Stockholm syndrome.
Very few employers seem interested in hiring "part time" workers with higher priority commitments that may interfere with their desired schedule. This extends to "can't work on $holy_days" and things that have legal backing; hourly employees aren't likely to pursue the theoretical means of redress they have for those incidents.
Then add the other layers of suck jobs have now. Instead of being an expert in "what plumbing stuff our store has and where"; a clerk is now expected to meet credit card signup metrics, first, foremost, and only. A retired plumber who wanted to work at the home improvement store has what incentive to put up with this? Serving the community is great but those people have been eliminated as too old and crunchy and too hard for HR to deal with.