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Comment by fanzhang | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's a commonly accepted conclusion that education increases income primarily through competitive advantage (i.e. it's a zero sum game).

Take, for example, being educated on home farming methods to grow 200 cabbages a year instead of 100. In this case your income grows directly as a result of your education.

Now yes there are some cases that may be signaling, but I'd like to see some empirical evidence that education is mostly zero-sum.

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Unless, of course, all home cabbage farmers receive the education, thus doubling the supply of cabbage on the market, which we would expect to more or less halve the price, leading to ... a zero sum game ;)

and now we need half as many cabbage farmers, which means that half those people doing manual labor can do something else, which in turn makes the economy more productive

either way, you get more of something in the economy, even if it's not money for those in poverty. in this case, it'd likely lead to food becoming cheaper and more people being able to eat

I fail to see how education hasn't benefited those in need in this (somewhat contrived) analogy

Except we're now leading to one of the major problems in the current US economy: we now have too many workers, and not enough jobs, due to the large scale improvements in efficiency since the end of WW2.

So, we're back to what started this: people are going to school, getting education, and now they're working as the local McD's night shift manager with a masters in their pocket.

Making better workers only helps if there are enough better jobs to go around, otherwise it is just inflating a massive bubble in the education industry.

Or we abandon the idea that the purpose of people is to serve the economy. This will be a very difficult change to make.

The problem is that neo-liberal capitalism has essentially been the only remaining big "story" over the last 30 years. First it weeded out all ideas of communism and recently it seems to slowly but steadily trump even European social capitalism, eventually it might simply eat itself and turn humanity into a literal "state-machine".

There really seems to be "no alternative" today and consequently people seem to see no way out of that box for the most part.

"The Unnecessariat" which got posted here yesterday was a very sobering read in that regard:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11765581

> Or we abandon the idea that the purpose of people is to serve the economy.

I don't know who believes that the purpose of people is to serve the economy. However I believe that, where no actual disabilities exist, family units should be self-supporting and should also share in the burden of maintaining a free, just and civilized society.

It's a common way of expressing teh question, does the population serve the economy, or does the economy serve the population?

Put another way, should countries protect workers or owners?

(A false dichotomy, of course, and an oversimplification to boot.)

We definitively do NOT have "too many workers". There are millions of jobs out there which are simply not getting done due to lack of a worker willing/able to do them, or due to regulations making the job illegal.

https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...

We have "not enough jobs" when everyone who wants one has a butler, maid, cook and driver. (Or butlerbot, cleaning bot, autocook 2000 and self driving car.) That's not the world we live in today.

Not every "job" is a job. I would totally pay someone $0.01 per hour to clean my house each day.

Yes, that's a perfect illustration of labor scarcity. You want work done but it isn't getting done.

Other work that isn't getting done: childcare for working women, fixing our crumbling infrastructure, building new public works - most left wing types have a massive laundry list of jobs that aren't getting done.

Maybe those folks are just full of it and we shouldn't actually tax the rich to get those things done?

You normally write very clearly, but I have no idea what you're getting at with this particular comment.

Is any of this sarcasm? Are you sincerely suggesting that not being able to find someone to work for 1 cent per hour means that there is a labor scarcity?

What's this business about public funding of municipal infrastructure and how does it relate to the conversation at hand?

Scarcity means that a resource is limited and has an opportunity cost, so, yes, of there is any minimum cost, the resources is scarce.

But people's time is always a limited resource. Even in a utopia where the cost of living comfortably is zero and people are immortal, spending an hour providing a service to another person carries an opportunity cost.

So, under this definition there is always, almost tautologically, a scarcity of labor. The word has little meaning, and discussion of whether or not there is such a scarcity becomes irrelevant to decisions about things like public welfare or economic policy.

The irreducible nature of scarcity is pretty much an underpinning of all modern economic theory, right, and taking about it as a variable thing is usually nonsense, and often cover for talking about supply less (or, in the case of discussion of the absence of scarcity, meeting or beyond) one's personal preferences while dressing it up in language that tries to elevate those preferences to objectively privileged standards.

The word has a clear and useful meaning, it's just not appropriate to many of the contexts where it is used specifically to obscure the subjective character of what people are describing when they use the term.

There is not, tautologically, a desire for labor. I do not desire human computation services at all (remember when "computer" was a job description) or the manual transportation of written information.

You could charge me $0 for these services and I still won't buy any. These are actual jobs that have vanished and there is no scarcity of these services.

You can pretty much automate away specific jobs, like the two you've just mentioned. But there is an infinity of other jobs. And we won't have automated them all away until we arrive at an (impossible?) state of affairs in which there are unlimited, cost-free robots whose physical and intellectual capabilities are on par with humans.

Pick whatever futuristic, heavily-automated world you want to live in: It will still be worth something to you to have someone (for example) spend hours on the web researching a question that you want an answer to (but not badly enough to spend hours yourself).

This only works if the increase was achieved on a sustainable way. In practice it's probably over farming leading to destruction of the soil, eutrification or poisoning of water courses, and other damaging behaviours that are a long term detriment.

Farmers and farms can't be switched on and off to different crop production or different skilled occupations without considerable lag.

> doubling the supply of cabbage on the market, which we would expect to more or less halve the price, leading to ... a zero sum game ;)

No. Noooo. This stuff is all connected. At a minimum, leading to consumers of cabbage spending less money in the market for foodstuffs, instead being free to spend the money elsewhere, leading to an increase in their personal well-being and economic growth in other sectors.

(And that's assuming that there is no change in the number of entrants into the home-cabbage-farming sector.)

From the perspective of the farmer it's still worse than zero-sum because they've paid to become educated while still bringing home the same amount of income. This scenario also assumed that education brought real productivity gains vs. being a signal.

It's actually negative-sum, because it presumably costs some amount of money/work/resources to produce more cabbages. So while cost-per-cabbage increases, sales price decreases.

Compare and contrast to the arguments about "highest worker productivity in history" while wages stagnate.

The farmer from your example benefits both himself and the society because he'll be richer and create more jobs.

The article was concerned about the fact the growth rate of job creation is less than the growth rate of schooled people.

This according to the article is the formula for increased poverty rates.

An educational system that increases job makers - not job hunters, is the cure for poverty.

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