The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess
newyorker.com
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People work incredibly hard, long hours and often with very little to show for it. It's surreal.
This is a danger of American TV shows and movie studios remaking shows for the American audiences. They don't get to see that Europe is mostly a developed place.
Salaries for professionals are markedly lower, we live in much smaller houses etc. I get the feeling that when you're winning at life in America, you're really winning. But when you're losing you're really losing. In Europe the ups and downs of life are more smoothed out.
I'm a high school drop out and we each make less than the median nation income and I feel we are better off than if we lived in the UK. Though I admit life from 18 - 25 would have probably been less of a struggle there.
Really curious because if the next smaller house in size is a trailer then the UK sizes must be weirdly small.
US @ 77 sq meters per capita vs UK @ 33 sq meters per capita.
We're a crowded island, we have small houses.
The UK has a lower population density the than both Belgium and Holland, both of which have larger average houses than the UK. So there has to be more to it than simply being 'crowded'.
I've also lived in enough places with various levels of health-care and insurance (and lack of insurance) to see this as a potential problem.
So, instead of reading imperiousness, how about worry?
The problem with the housing crisis was people had variable rate mortgages that made their payments quickly balloon up under them. We have a fixed rate so that can't happen.
This was before the ACA though, I don't know how it works now.
Sure, you prioritizing having a big house over not worrying about having to cough up $5k in even of an illness. Or worrying about losing your health insurance. Medical expenses are covered somewhat by insurance but you're still getting a huge bill if you're significantly ill.
I was damn lucky I could afford it but if I go sick a few years earlier I'd be totally and completely fucked. Of course, if you can't imagine it you can't appreciate it.
We got here by saving together and living in a one room apartment for 5 years. We don't have new cars or iPhones and we go out to eat about once a year (that we pay for her mother offers to take us out from time to time). I just upgraded my 30 inch CRT TV to a 50 inch 4K after a decade of loyal service. Its not for everyone but its certainly not impossible. I make about 43k a year pretax and she makes 37k for reference. Median income nationally is 55k or so and about 75k in my county so I suspect a great many people have the opportunity to do just as we have done.
Inequality is the result of people earning different amounts, such being compensated in proportion to the value they generate - rather than everyone earning the same irrespective of that.
Inequality is the result of reaping the rewards of your own work: someone is more effective, so they earn more. Why is it bad? How can any market economy even function without it?
If an author writes a really good book, then it will sell and they'll make a lot of money. They earn a lot more than the author who writes bad, unpopular books. That's an example of income inequality.
A great comedian will draw large crowds and his shows will fetch a high price. That's an example of inequality too. What's wrong with that? How will anything work if it were otherwise?
Inequality is arguably not the right economic easure to care about for social issues. Imagine every human in year 7000 is rich enough to own entire planets, but the super wealthy own 100 planets. Who cares? Why is that a problem? If your concern is about a particular class, then you should look at their standard of living and progress in it over time, not compare against how much someone else has.
Few people object to higher rewards for those more talented or harder working.
Let us make an experiment and drop Paul Graham in a rainforest to see how much value he manages to extract.
Then, once he has starved to death or died from some random infection, let's think again what makes IT jobs more valuable than garbage collector jobs.
The point he and Mr Graham are trying to make is simple. People are not same, and by that definition are not equal.
The fact is that this inequality manifests itself in far more different ways before it appears as income/wealth inequality.
Far before some one is rich and poor, they are good and bad at playing the piano, writing a book, programming or anything for that matter. Wealth inequality comes far later.
You attribute far too much of a person's wealth accumulation with skill. Is Bill Gates the best programmer of all time?
>People are not same, and by that definition are not equal.
It's hard to argue with this, but I don't see it coming up much in the gender or race discussions. I wonder why.
>It's hard to argue with this, but I don't see it coming up much in the gender or race discussions. I wonder why.
Because in "modern" society it's not politically correct to recognize, let alone discuss, any differences whatsoever between age, race, sex, education, skill, etc. If you have the gall to try, you'll immediately be torn apart by the howling "progressive" masses.
Bill Gates is good at a lot of other things including programming.
And I'm not talking about skill. Its also work, persistence and variety of other things that add up.
>>It's hard to argue with this, but I don't see it coming up much in the gender or race discussions. I wonder why.
People are only equal by rights. They are definitely not equal with regards to hard work, persistence and range of other skills.
Isaac Newton being better than me in Physics, isn't exactly racism.
According to the metrics our society uses to reward him, he's quite litterally the 85.000.000.000x dev.
And here's us thinking 10x devs don't exist...
If you are poor enough, chances are fairly good you will never get to touch a piano to even find out if you can be good or bad at it.
So no, it does not come far before someone is rich and poor. If you are poor, a whole lot of avenues close off to you early regardless of skill, and the odds of you remaining poor is overwhelmingly higher than that you will be able to overcome it, irrespective of how hard you work or how smart you are.
What I'm questioning is not whether people's merits are unequal, but the tool used to measure them. My point is that a measure is inherently relative.
The thought experiment I offer is another way of measuring someone's utility. It is inherenthy flawed and unfit to the needs of our society. But again, the person I responded to didn't establish that his measuring tool is an optimization function for our society either.
Also this is not related to whether two people are compared on their job, but to whether two people good at different jobs are compared.
More recently I’ve come around to embracing the notion that peoples’ emotional state regarding their relative place in society and their future prospects is as important as their absolute standard of living.
Sure, as it's been argued by PG and many others, in material terms even the poorest in modern western societies are far better off than wealthy people of hundreds of years ago.
But everyone still has some degree of need to better themselves, improve their circumstances, and aspire to live more comfortably and prosperously. And crucially, the ability of young people to find a partner and have a family is strongly influenced by their prospects for upward mobility.
So if societal inequality is such that a young person trying to make their way in the world sees no opportunity for meaningful improvement of their circumstances, and therefore no real prospects for finding a good partner, raising a healthy family and achieving a good level of status in society, then the motivation to remain part of mainstream, productive society can easily be lost. This is what leads to people "dropping out" and ending up in a life of unemployment, depression, substance abuse, crime, violence, etc.
So, sure, some level of inequality is inevitable and healthy, to the extent that it rewards people for effort and ingenuity and gives people something to aspire to. But too much inequality becomes more of a de-motivator and a source of resentment, and can cause societal breakdown, and I think this is what is happening to some degree across the western world.
The reality is that if you were born somewhere poor, odds are overwhelmingly that you would earn a tiny fraction of what someone born somewhere where they are provided proper education and an environment where better alternatives are available.
So maybe you are compensated in proportion to the value you generate, but the problem with this is that this is only superficially connected to the effort you put in and how effective you are.
Some people who do well do so in part because they put in exceptional effort, but the biggest predictor of your earnings and success in life is how where you live and how wealthy your parents are.
This is the problem we have with inequality: It has very little to do with effort or skills, and a lot to do with pure chance.
This is one of those things that is worse in Europe than in the US. Inequality is perhaps less in absolute value, but it's more sticky. The upper class of the US has plenty of immigrants and people who were born poor. Yes, being born rich still provides advantage, but it's clearly not impossible.
In the EU, the upper class has
zero immigrants
very few people born poor (upper middle class minimum) (out of the top10 riches Frenchmen, one was born to a family with less than 100 million francs at the time they were born. One. And he wasn't poor by a reasonable definition at all)
My uncle became a surgeon, and my parents become engineers, through the means of a free public university, which propelled them to upper middle class.
There is still much to achieve in French social mobility, but these kind of stories are plenty. Having spent some time in the US now, and seeing the stories of people who go on to go to engineering/medical/etc schools, I can't say that I see comparable things happening. Everyone I know who went to med school comes from upper middle class family AND had to take on tons of debt.
You shouldn't be looking at the top 0.001%, but the top 10%, perhaps even 20-30%, and how they live/what kind of social protections they benefit from.
Of all OECD countries, only in Slovenia, Chile, Italy and the UK are the intergenerational correlations between the earnings of fathers and sons stronger, for example.
The rest of the OECD, including most of Europe, does far better in that respect.
Representation of immigrants is something I haven't looked at, and it may very well be that the US does well there, but there are a number of confounding factors, and it in any case doesn't change the fact that social mobility is poor in the US.
[1] http://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobil...
That's not true, and exactly the kind of misleading statement that leads to people voting against their own interests.
You'd just prefer if the Democrats were even more towards your preference on fiscal matters. I can agree with that, whether it would fly with the American voters sufficiently to overcome the rural/republican tilt is another matter entirely.
Maybe occasional rewrites could be a solution, but if they happen without the customary devastating violence, I'm afraid that the rewrite would only further entrench existing corruption (and even devastating violence is far from a guarantee that this won't happen, quite the opposite actually).
Maybe have a dozen or so mixed teams create separate drafts in isolation, vote out the worst half and then select one of the remaining by chance? Something along these lines might greatly help rewriters to forget about their own personal or group interests for a while and focus on what would be good for society as a whole. It's most likely just a theoretical design, right?
People aren't voting 'against their own interests' in the sense that they're stupid. They're voting for their own interests in a party which also has interests they're against because it's the only practical option. For example, someone who wanted less immigration and pro globalism rules (aka US protectionism) but then also thought things like equal rights for trans people and gay marriage and allowing abortion were the right would be up a creek without a paddle. Either option (with a decent chance of getting elected) is against their interests in some way.
Similarly do they want Obamacare repealed because it's a "disaster" and they've been promised better cheaper insurance by someone who doesn't actually have any kind of plan to deliver on that promise?
Is there only a debate about gay marriage at all because it's been turned into "an attack on traditional marriage"?
Are the liberals intentionally ruining the economy because they've joined the global warming religion that is basically an excuse for communism?
Some of this is ignorance and being conned, but some of it is stupidity as well. It's probably not wise to ignore that reality.
This is not the paradox that people think it is.
If you're a coastal, progressive elite, you've already gone "all in" on an urban, socialized, statist (for good or for bad) social arrangement. You've shifted towards a pole and you might as well keep doubling down on those strategies/policies.
But if you're rural (or, as is the case with most of red-state US, sort-of-semi-rural), you're not down that path at all.
There are costs as well as benefits to social benefits and welfare programs. Many of those costs may be intangible, but they are costs nonetheless. Consider: what if a very large portion of your self esteem and "face" was tied to being self-sufficient in certain realms ?
And so therefore, if you're not already at the urban-progressive-socialized pole of attraction, it makes sense that people resist the costs (and the benefits) of going down that road.
First, inequality is needed so that there is a reward for working harder, doing more. The one who coasts through their education doing only the minimal needed before getting a job doing the same should be rewarded less than the one who gives it their best. BUT, inequality should never be so great that the kid who coasts can come from such a privileged position that they are forever in a better position than someone who works hard. For a lot of American's, working hard doesn't really get rewards, so you could say we have exceeded the optimal amount of inequality and thus need more equality. But if we envision a fully equal system where everyone is equally rewarded, there is far less incentive to do more than the bare minimum. Even supporters of basic income think that those who go above and beyond should be rewarded with extra income above the level of basic income. I've never heard of anyone supporting a basic income plan where all income beyond the basic income level is taxed at a 100% rate. Even a 50% or 75% tax rate indicates those who do more should have more, with the difference being how much more.
For this, we need to make sure the inequality is high enough that effort is rewarded, but keep it low enough that birth does not convey special privileges.
Second, equality will never exist in all areas of life. Even if we had total financial equality, some people are more sociable, better looking, etc. As such, what people have access to in our society is still unequal. In a financially equal society, the one with vastly superior social skills, or who is attractive (look up the Halo Effect), has access to more resources and thus inequality still exists. Allowing some level of financial inequality allows people a way to do better when they lack the above skills.
Consider some modern day developer who is slightly autistic but highly functioning enough to hold a good job. Their ability to earn more can, to some extent, help offset the lowered levels of social skills in the extent it allows them to achieve their life goals.
The only way to have full equality beyond just financial equality would be to implement a tax on anything that can be considered a good or service in the most abstract of methods, and I think we would find that even the most ardent communist are all out libertarians in regards to these social goods and services.
That said, I still feel that the system is better than the US system, there's less inequalities, less worry of disasters because you know that you'll be protected by the system and brilliant kids have a chance of getting a good education even if their parents are poor.
If having more money and a bigger house is winning that's true, but many people don't see life that way. Being happy, having time to enjoy life with your friends, doing worthwhile and interesting things, raising your kids well, etc are also ways to win. In general if you talk to an older, wealthy person, they say those are things that should have done instead of working so much.
Try enjoying your time with friends and long vacations when you work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week! Ah, you can't! See!
There's a balance to be struck. Having no money isn't fun, but having no time isn't fun either. If you talk to people about their regrets, it's much more common to hear people lament working longer hours than not having had enough money.
This is an age old debate, and it's very hard to compare one vast continent to another. Regional differences between US cities and European cities are at least as large or larger than the difference between the avereages of US and European salaries/living standards etc. The difference between central manhattan and rural Apalachia is just like the difference between the fancy parts of Stockholm and rural eastern Europe. There is just no comparison in Salaries, Life expectancy etc.
When it comes to those of us that are "winning", the difference is there, especially for some professions like doctors who can basically make a killing in the US but not in Europe. That is probably to do with that it's an economic risk/investment to get the MD in the US, whereas in Europe it's normally free. When you are a finished doctor you aren't entitled to a fancy car - we just paid your MD so you better get to work and be thankful ;)
To make a fair comparison between me (a software dev) and a comparable person in the US (in a similar metro area of ~1M people) you'd have to make a pretty tricky calculation involving costs of healthcare, childcare, money saved for retirement, pensions etc. On the bottom line I think the US person would make a bit more money, but on the other hand would have a worse work/life balance.
While we're correcting misconceptions, in the UK it's most definitely not free.
But I believe it's still a lot cheaper than the US. The universities are capped on the fees they can charge, and your student loan is regulated by the government (you only start paying back when you're earning over a threshold).
Wage inequality, parental leaves, employment security, higher education etc.are decidedly "non-european" in the UK.
So yes when I talk about "Europe" in the context of "Europe vs US" I think the UK needs to be considered separately.
(to the Americans: In many European countries "US conditions" is commonly used in political discourse as a way of scaring voters with the image of chaos and suffering)
Relative to the US, absolutely. Relative to Scandinavia, not really.
No. No you don't. :)
What is the political situation now in the UK wrt. free higher education? It seems like one of the biggest social justice/social mobility issues a society can have. Is that not a top issue for Labour?
In Scotland at least, student loans are only used for living expenses, similar to your experience. Tuition fees are paid by the Scottish Government, as education is a devolved power [1].
In England, tuition fees are paid by the student, usually through a student loan, and are capped at £9k/year.
[Warning: political] I couldn't answer on Labour's priorities. They're becoming increasingly irrelevant north of the border, and increasingly impotent south of the border.
Personally I'm surprised that there isn't a lot more anger from English taxpayers about this. It would be very interesting to see whether an independent Scotland could continue this policy.
Stats here paint are more nuanced picture: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/are-the-s...
An experienced engineer at google or facebook make 200k with a sizable signup bonus. As far as I know, theres no comparison between what a soft dev makes in the us and what he makes in europe.
This is from someone that lives in south america, and is considering moving to either europe, NZ or America, and hands down america pays so much more than anything else.
Not to mention that people criticizing work-life balance of engineers in the us havent visited google offices.
Office are part of work, not part of life
Your priorities, of course, may be different.
Getting new hires up to speed is expensive enough that they'd be pretty stupid to actually do this. Sure a few do, but it isn't common.
Also, a couple minutes with google turns up this: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=AVD_DUR . If it says what I think it says, getting a new job really is easier in the US (like it should be, because as any economist will tell you this is what has to happen when a bad hire is less of a disaster for the employer).
I think it boils down to whether you want to take care of yourself, or if you let the state do it for you.
In part, yes.
But also, there are two approaches to reducing downtime. You can increase MTBF (make things more reliable, make it harder to get fired); or you can reduce MTTR (make things easier to fix, make it easier to get hired somewhere new). Europe goes with the first approach, the US goes with the second (which I very much prefer, because it doesn't gum things up).
Separately, there's also making downtime less of a problem (failover systems, all the various other social safety net things). The US is generally known to kinda suck at this.
I believe the point they were making is simply that they can. You're not protected (aside from the small handful of reason that actually are protected).
I live in a country where you have to pay insurmountable amounts of money to fire employees. The salaries that us pays are about 8x. Gimme at will employment.
> I would definitely take the 60K if it includes awesome public transport, unemployment money, affordable healthcare, a month of holidays, and having free time in the evenings for hobbies.
I had plenty of free time in SF to do whatever i wanted when I worked there. Maybe i was lucky, but i did not find work-life balance to be particularly out of whack. Europe is more relaxed, but also less ambitious in terms of culture. That can be frustrating as well.
> I would definitely take the 60K if it includes awesome public transport, unemployment money, affordable healthcare, a month of holidays, and having free time in the evenings for hobbies.
You are paying for all those things, its not like they are free in europe. You can also pay for them in the US on software engineer salaries. Google has ample pto, facebook has parental rights, etc. You can always take unpaid time off, something easier to do in the US than in other countries.
Adding restrictions on employer's ability to fire makes employers far less likely to hire. It enriches the already employed at the expense of the unemployed. If anything it makes more sense to have at-will employment in countries with strong social safety nets because unemployment is less disruptive there.
I'm in the Boston market and median salary for devs is around 80-90k when you include all skill levels, but every single dev I know has roommates or an hour+ commute into the city and higher healthcare costs than Germany.
I'd believe that you would make more overall money in the US once you got to the higher end of the market, but it's not as simple as a calculation as you are making it out to be
They should probably look for housing near a commuter rail then
If nothing else it's much more pleasant, anyway.
There are many perks to Berlin over SF, but salaries and net income are not it.
Im just emphasizing that the fact that europe has benefits, it does not necessarily (or likely) outweigh the difference in salary from one to the other. You are certainly taxed more by a lower wage and by a higher tax rate that could compensate ubering every day and private schooling.
Higher costs, lower stability, and no safety net... I think that I would prefer that Berlin salary (and I'm a US resident).
That said, speaking as a New Zealander: don't come here. There are no jobs, and if you find one, you will be underpaid. If you're looking for the weather and standard-of-living combination offered by the southern hemisphere, consider Melbourne or Sydney instead. Very few of my graduating class at the University of Auckland will end up remaining in the city, I suspect.
I just heard NZ was doing a state sponsored world-wide call for workers. Is it because people are leaving? Where are they leaving to?
If people leave, normally they leave for Australia (because it's very easy to do so).
I think Silicon Valley megacorps are exceptional outliers. Obviously people can make silly money at Google, but so do athletes in the largest leagues. It's just not a useful comparison between continents with millions of employees. Exclude the top 10% and bottom 10% makes for a more reasonable comparison.
[0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Housing is the main difference: you can get a fairly large place in berlin, and you can have a family there. But SF is one city, there are pleny of other cities in the us more family friendly (if not any other city).
I remember recently a map showing the purchasing power by salary per state, and the biggest purchasing power was nebraska.
Google and other tech companies in the U.S having nice offices doesn't mean the work life balance of Googlers is something to envy. Probably the opposite actually (three meals a day makes you stay there for dinner, nap rooms to let you stay even later). Not a great work life balance.
Source: know Googlers, have been to Google offices
While Berlin is a great city, it is very far from being a top-pay city in Europe.
Moving back to Berlin, I went part time because it was sufficient.
Arguably that's due to constrained Supply - http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/03/the_high_price.h...
There are plenty of tasks doctors are commanded with that do not require mastery level of expertise, and that enormously raises the cost of medicine. You dont need to study 10 years to read an EKG, someone could learn all the EKG patterns in a much shorter time.
A funny story about this in argentina: anesthesiologists earn more money than surgeons. Surgeons are not unionized, but anesthesiologists are.
Where are you getting this information from?
It's really not - in the EU the difference between median net income in say Norway 41 483€ or Denmark 28 364€ and Romania 2 315€ and Bulgaria 3 332€ - that is over 10x differences between poorest and richest countries. US doesn't have that level of disparity between states even if you count Puerto Rico.
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/gdp-and-beyond/quality-of-l...
If you're working as a professional in the US it's pretty rare that your health insurance isn't at least mostly paid for by your employer, if not completely paid for by them.
But like you said, that's why it's a tricky calculation. All of which varies if you're single or married with children.
I'd imagine that for the young and healthy people without children, it isn't hard to sock away more in the US.
When a substantial portion of "success" (especially monetary) can be attributed to luck, isn't this the sort of environment you want?
Depends on what you mean by winning.
If by winning you mean having lots of money to buy your family a bunch of stuff, then yeah.
However, if by winning you mean having the time to build a strong relationship with your family and maintaining your own physical and mental health, then you might have a more difficult time with that.
When people spend most of their wake hours in a cubicle smaller than the bedroom where they sleep in something is very wrong.
What is your implication, that the government should require all businesses to be closed on Christmas Day? Does that happen where you're from?
>Would the religious right not support that?
Perhaps you have a bit of a boogeyman image of the 'religious right'. Regardless, the question is moot because just about everyone celebrates Christmas in the US, religious or not. A better place to examine the question would be Easter weekend, where only 26% of businesses offer PTO for Good Friday and 6% offer it for Easter Monday. I try to follow religious and political news, and I've never heard of anyone try to make a push to make Good Friday a federal holiday. I'm sure some politically active religious folk would support it if asked though (and it can be achieved by secularizing the name, making it "spring holiday" or something like that[1]).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_holidays_in_the_United_... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday#United_States
No. But if the government requires employers to offer a day or two of paid leave, employees could get Christmas or a nearby day off.
As you point out though, this may be moot as most employers offer this anyway. But other holidays might be a good target.
> Perhaps you have a bit of a boogeyman image of the 'religious right'.
Huh? I was appealing to why they might support something, not oppose it.
I might not have read it in the tone you intended, and boogeyman might not have been the right word I was looking for. I'm used to the discussion of religion on this forum having a suspicious or negative tone, so I apologize if I projected that onto you incorrectly.
It seemed strange to me that out of any number of political forces in the US you chose to mention religious right, as though they're this monolithic group that are preventing mandatory holidays and could get it done if they wanted to.
I don't know if it's really even as partisan of an issue in a liberal/conservative or Democrat/Republican sense; it's just not part of the culture here, at least not on the federal level. I'm thinking about blue laws here, because religious influence did translate to mandatory days off for a lot of businesses in times past. But as far as I know, most of that was state-by-state. I'm not aware of federal blue laws, or any kind of federal mandate on holidays.
So, you'll typically get 8-10 PTO days, independent from vacation policy. That'll be different in the service industry - it's lucrative for some restaurants, gas stations, hotels, etc. to be open - but a lot of times hourly workers will get time-and-a-half for their troubles.
[0]: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/snow-dismissal-pro...
It depends on the company.
Or that it would collapse into Greek-levels of poverty.
1) In the U.S. you can work for years at a company before getting more than 1 or 2 weeks paid vacation.
2) Most Americans don't travel much outside their own state or region, let alone country. Most don't even own passports.
3) Even when not on the job, either at night, on the weekends, or on vacation, Americans tend to stay attached to their job via email or phone.
It's true that American salaries can be a lot higher than European ones, especially for developers. But Americans also typically do a lot of side jobs or have households with 2 or more full-time jobs per family, 2 or more cars per family. So one has to ask if it is all worth it?
If American's were enabled to take the time to see the world a bit more they would be less reliant on media stereotypes to understand it and might question their lot a bit more often but perhaps that's not in the interests of the people who run America.
Americans could use a little less prejudice in their lives.
I can't help but think that passport ownership is one of the fundamental cultural divides in the US. It's difficult to understand the value of travelling abroad if you've never experienced it and don't know many people who have.
Geography is no excuse - Australians are prolific international travellers, despite the size of their continent and their oceanic isolation. Spending a year abroad is the norm for young Aussies, but it's still regarded as a rare privilege for young Americans.
True but America is a wide enough place that you can have most of that without leaving the continental USA.
Growing up in Podunk, USA makes people from Big City, USA feel like foreigners (and vice versa). I'm not saying don't go outside the USA (quite the contrary!) but there's quite a bit you can do and see here without a passport.
> I can't help but think that passport ownership is one of the fundamental cultural divides in the US. It's difficult to understand the value of travelling abroad if you've never experienced it and don't know many people who have.
Very true and I don't know anyone that's traveled extensively that doesn't comment on it being a positive experience in hindsight (aside from business travelers complaining about going back to the same places they don't particular like month after month).
You absolutely, 100% can't. America has no end of wonderful places to visit, but there are so many parts of the experience of foreign travel that aren't remotely replicated in domestic travel.
Being on the wrong side of a language barrier is profoundly dislocating. A domestic visitor to Big City USA won't find themselves asking for directions in pantomime, they won't have to point at something on a menu and hope for the best, they won't walk into a supermarket and realise that they can't tell shampoo from conditioner. There's a deep sense of vulnerability when you can't communicate effectively, a sense of marginalisation and remoteness.
American tourists have a reputation for assuming that everyone accepts greenbacks. It's a profound experience to realise that the money in your wallet is absolutely worthless to the people around you, that the pieces of paper you sweated to earn might as well be monopoly money to anyone outside of a Bureau de Change. The simple experience of having a pocketful of unfamiliar coins has a lasting effect on your understanding of the nature of money.
Except that most don't make those trips around their own country.
Other than the currency part, we've got that in the US...
Except for New Orleans.
Many, many Americans travel extensively or are children of immigrant parents who travel to their home country often.
If you live in the MidWest where most Americans live, then your report would really surprise me.
No we don't.
I have 5 weeks of holiday a year, total. I take 2 weeks around christmas. Maybe a week somewhere in Spring, that leaves 2 weeks summer holidays. Plus, you want to keep a few spare days in case you need an incidental day off for whatever reason.
Most people only get 5 weeks of holiday a year total (4 weeks is the legal minimum) and they usually spread out those days over the year. If you can travel the world for 6 weeks every summer then you have an above-average number of free days and probably an above-average income to be able to afford that much travel.
We do get vacation money (8% of your gross salary, usually paid in may) but that's not nearly enough for 6 weeks of travel unless you saved up a lot.
You say people "only" get 5 weeks of holiday, but that only supports my main point about the huge difference between that and what Americans are used to.
I've literally never seen a cadillac over here, except for a few US left-hand-drive imports.
And yes, an Escalade looks almost comical on UK roads, it's just too big by every measure.
Cadillac is produced by General Motors.
On my most recent trip to Zurich I saw cadillacs and chevy camaros, etc., out driving around.
They are crap cars but I think there's some counter-cultural cache that they possess in a place like that.
It was the fact they showed the awful plasticy dashboard. It looked so cheap and nasty.
I was quoted a salary of $ 30k for a deep learning position. Now that is third world.
In the EU you don't pay as much for the same services as in the US, especially healthcare.
I'm not sure about Japan but it could be the same thing there.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/suburbs...
I'll accept "having more than one child" but not "having a bigger TV".
On the limited upside, the wages are not all there is to working for a Japanese megacorp. In addition to the thick wad of non-taxable allowances, there are also non-monetary benefits. As patio11 notes [1], “Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly.”
[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/
A society where everyone is missing one leg will still function and be largely productive, up until they have to compete with a society where everyone has two legs. That leg is something like health care, maternaty leave, vacation, VAT, higher taxes. In the USA policy indicates that they'd rather give up their literal leg, than risk being #2.
Tax calc for me:
Employer pays $8k
Payroll taxes deducted: $2k
My gross salary: $6k
My income tax: $2k
My net salary: $4k
If I make one big pruchase for all my $4k, the VAT is (with some exceptions, 25%) so I buy goods for $3k + $1k tax.
So basically, of $8 paid by my employer each month, I can buy goods or services for $3k. That's pretty steep! If you look at the income tax above, you'll see it's only 1/3 however.
You make $8k a month:
You pay $2k in taxes (Employer pays an additional $1k in tax), so your income is 9k.
You pay $500 in health and other benefits (employer pays another $500)
If you spend remaining $5.5k, you'll usually pay $250-$500 In sales taxes.
In other words, you have $5k remaining to spend on shit that you probably don't need.
I don't know what the grandparent poster was trying to say "employer pays $1k payroll tax so you make $9k"? Just shows how confusing this is (apparently)
Denmark is an example of the opposite of this: Employer social security contributions make up 0.8% of total tax wedge, and they've rolled all of the employee contributions into the income tax, which makes Danish income tax look really high compared to most other European countries that have much higher employer contributions, and presumably contributes to the idea that the Nordic countries are particularly high tax, while Denmark overall is actually roughly average for OECD.
> I don't know what the grandparent poster was trying to say "employer pays $1k payroll tax so you make $9k"? Just shows how confusing this is (apparently)
He clearly misinterpreted you and though $8k was your gross salary, rather than gross salary + payroll tax, hence my original comment to him.
I'm a software engineer and work is a means to an end for me, to feed my family, give me financial security, and enable me to do the things I want to do when I'm not at work. For the most part I enjoy what I do but I would strongly prefer to spend less time at work and have more "me" time. I certainly don't want the responsibility and stress of my own business.
The epitome of happiness is certainly not starting your own business for most of Americans.
How did the employer paying an extra k mean you make more? I think it's only relevant to talk about 2 figures: a) the expense to the employer and b) your take home (net) salary.
Everything in between there is "taxes" and who pays them and when is less important. If the employer needs $9k to hire you that's what it costs. Then the tax man takes $1k payroll, you get $8k, pay $2k income tax. That leaves you $6k after all payroll and income taxes from a starting $9k making the income+payroll taxes 33%.
Just because your employer is the one writing the checks doesn't mean that the tax burden is really falling on them. The employer side of FICA, for example, is essentially a tax on employee's income.
For average earners, the tax levels you outline are possible in Belgium, Austria, Germany, France, Hungary or Italy, based on OECD numbers. All of which outdistance the Nordics when it comes to taxation.
Again when looking at averages, of the Nordics, Sweden is highest with ~42.7% of total labour cost going to taxes for an average earner (of which 23.7% is employer payroll taxes). Norway has 36.6%, with 11.5% employer payroll taxes. Denmark 36.4% with 0.8% employer payroll taxes. Finland 43.9% with 18.7% payroll taxes.
Your VAT calculation is vastly exaggerated in any case, as from your net salary you also have to deduct housing costs, food and other essentials, many of which are tax exempt in most European countries. Last time I calculcated how much of my gross salary (excluding payroll taxes) went on VAT, while I lived in Norway, it was closer to 4% (of gross wages, so lower as percentag of total labour costs to make it comparable with the numbers above) despite earning way above average and having a higher disposable income after housing costs etc. than average. For lower earners it will typically be lower, as a lower earner tends to have less disposable income to spend on products that are rated at the full VAT rate.
Yes, I'm above average income for Sweden. Roughly my employer pays 1/4 payroll and 3/4 to me as gross salary. I pay 1/3 tax on gross salary and keep. 2/3. That means the net share of the employers' expense is roughly (2/3)x(3/4) which is 1/2 or 50%.
For a median income, the calculation would roughly instead be: the employer pays 1/4 payroll and the employee 1/4 income tax on that, meaning the employees take-home earnings are (3/4)x(3/4) ~ 0.56 so about 44% taxes (Which is surprisingly close to the figure you had there of 42.7%)
The VAT in my calculation was obviously the most exaggerated one because as you point out - a lot of my expenses have lower vat, or even negative tax (I pay a boat load of interests every month, which effectively have a -30% tax since they are completely deductible, even from earned income not just cap gains).
Oh: A source of great injustice in Sweden is that renters (predominantly low income earners) don't deduct interest rate expenses of those who own property (their landlords) while those who own their property deduct a crapload of interest, especially since we have a weird housing system with lots of huge long-term loans (100y mortgages are norm). Basically anyone who owns a flat or house deducts $5-25k a year of interest rates from their income tax. Essentially it's a huge transfer of money from renters to owners. A very regressive tax if you ask me.
I've cross checked the OECD numbers many times, and they are very precise. Any discrepancy tend to be year to year changes in deductions etc.
> Oh: A source of great injustice in Sweden is that renters (predominantly low income earners) don't deduct interest rate expenses of those who own property (their landlords) while those who own their property deduct a crapload of interest
This is interesting. Norway has that for a long time as well, and I believe the US allows it, but very few other countries in the world does and didn't realise Sweden also allowed it. Norway allows deductions of all debt interest, which makes it one of the most extreme examples of this, and is one of the big confounding factors when people look at tax rates without taking into account that e.g. even credit card interest paid gives a deduction towards taxable income...
In Norway at least I believe it's largely been seen as an incentive to reward home ownership, and making the average worker a home owner has been as one of the big goals of the labour movement, to the extent that any growth in proportion of population renting has come to be seen as a sign of collective failure.
It's pretty obviously a failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_interest_relief_at_so...
Our defense and war spending is very much a black hole. I'm sorry if I fight being taxed to death in regards to this. Not all of us have a tiny military like your country does.
Worse, federal taxes are just one piece of the pie for Americans. We're usually taxed heavily on the local level with property taxes, state taxes, etc. With those taxes we can certainly see providing value. What the federal government takes goes into a budgetary black box that pays for some pretty odious things. Currently my taxes pay for NASA to stop studying climate change and for the White House family to constantly vacation and live in places other than DC. Things like medicare and social security are taxed separately anyway. So I can see those as individual items and largely don't have an issue with them.
I think a lot of anti-tax attitudes here in the US aren't ignorance, but a protest against a corrupt system wasting money and using it for a net negative for us and the world (Iraq conflict, endless drone strikes, sabre-rattling with China, etc).
There's a moral position for the left to criticize taxation. Imagine if your country spent the kinds of money we did on defense. Would you be so happy with it?
I think US defense (which is really very little defense and mostly power projection) is completely bizarre. A reasonable level would be perhaps 3% GDP which would still be huge. The Swedish military is tiny, and by GDP it's a joke (around 1%). We should be spending at least 2% and I think we will pretty soon, the way things are going now.
> I'm sorry if I fight being taxed to death in regards to this.
But are you fighting taxes or arguing that money is being spent on the wrong things? I.e. are you saying "I oppose high taxes because they just get spent on X!" whereas in most countries you'd see people say "Let's spend less of the tax money on X".
> Currently my taxes pay for NASA to stop studying climate change and for the White House family to constantly vacation and live in places other than DC.
I think a lot (most western?) countries have funding for space exploration, climate research etc. I certainly pay for ESA research just like you'd pay for NASA, and we obviously have climate research etc. I think the cost of the US presidency seems like a blank check if the president himself is able to choose where to go/stay/live.
I also pay for the living and security expenses of a prime minister. They obviously are nothing like the US expenses of the same kind - but that's because I'd vote to change that if it was too high. Now that I'm thinking about it, my (official, ceremonial) head of state is the King. So I pay for a King to live in a castle!. I don't mind doing that though. The costs are "reasonable". Any excess is immediately causing headlines and calling for a republic...
> Worse, federal taxes are just one piece of the pie for Americans.
That's not unique to the US. Obviously in every single country of the world you have administrative divisions on various levels (cantons, counties, regions, states, ...) and often several of these administrative divisions have taxation. In Sweden i'm income taxed on 3 levels (local, regionl, national). But it's deducted in one place from my paycheck so I don't notice much. The state level taxes are also used to pay our expensive EU membership which effectively makes that a fourth level, a kind of federal spending - so my tax money is for example subsidizing farmers in eastern europe.
> I think a lot of anti-tax attitudes here in the US aren't ignorance, but a protest against a corrupt system wasting money
I realize that. But it seems like an indirect and inefficient way of protesting wars and corruption! Don't starve government, change it. Vote. If voting doesn't change anything then change that (i.e. change first-past-the-post elections, gerrymandering and all those other defects - until voting actually changes things). Especially since in the US, budget cuts tend to kill things like meals on wheels before it kills foreign wars.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven...
Long answer (includes speculation). One primary function of the nation state is to provide its people security. I think most European societies include healthcare and unemployment in their concept of security. This means that spending on these things is seen (by a majority) as a primary function of the state in European cultures. Whereas in US culture these things are seen by a majority as outside the primary scope of the nation state's role in providing security to its population. (NB the UK falls somewhere in between and these things are in flux all the time.)
Belgium is the extreme - at 55.3% it's the highest in the OECD. Three European countries (UK, Ireland, Switzerland) come in below the US on this metric.
The numbers are basically all over the place, and depends more on overall culture and priorities than things like healthcare etc. by themselves.
In terms of what is directly visible to the employee, US is at 25.6% of gross wages (note the difference - these numbers can not be directly compared to the ones above, as the ones above are percentages of total labour cost including the employer contributions) compared to 23.4% for the UK, 36.1% for Denmark (Denmark is one of very few countries that don't "hide" hardly any of labour costs as part of employer social security contributions), or 28.4% for Norway, 24.7% for Sweden or 42% for Belgium. So still all over the place.
It also depends greatly on how much you earn, and how progressive your specific country's tax system is.
The only thing that's clear is that the US does not stand out as being nearly as much of a low tax country as people sometimes like to think. E.g. the OECD average (which to be fair is pulled down by several non-European countries) of employee contributions is 25.5%, so slightly below the US.
[1] http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/taxatio...
[2] http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/taxatio...
Nb income based taxes are only the start anyway property tax aka Council tax is quite a burden on lower income households in the UK.
The median salary in the UK in 2015 was roughly 27,500 GBP.
Let's do the numbers as percent of wages first. This won't match perfectly with the OECD numbers as I haven't matched up the personal allowance rates etc. by tax year.
But currently, 27,500 means your taxable income is 16,500 (after subtracting the personal allowance). On this you'd pay 20% income tax, or 3,300 and 8.5% employee national insurance for roughly 2,332. Your total tax would be 28.5% of your taxable income, but only 20.5% of income once you factor your personal allowance back in.
If w're looking at employer contributions, I don't know exactly what they stand at this moment, but it used to be 12.5% of gross salary. If we adjust the numbers above, that means 3437.5 in employer contributions for a total tax wedge of ~29.3%. Note that I have not taken into account the lower earnings threshold etc. for employer national insurance contributions, which I believe you should, so I think the total would actually be lower, but even so even when applying it to the full amount you actually still end up below the OECD figure.
Both of the above excludes council tax. Council tax is of course tricky because it depends on the property you live in and your council, and whether or not you live in the property alone.
Now in my property that adds 1600/year for a family. Though you wouldn't live here if you were a single earner family on an 27.5k salary, that'd drive the total tax wedge up to 34.5%. As a single, you'd get half off, and end up with a total tax wedge of 31.9%. Looking at the gross wage percentages, it'd bring taxes to 26.3% (couple) or 23.4% (single) respectively.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/health-costs-how-the-us-...
I live in the US and know more than one person working a 6/6 cycle (6 month of work, 6 month of rest and travel) which they would never be able to do with old, rigid work arrangement.
I think for skilled workers with skills in demand flexible work options can offer huge benefits. For cashiers and conveyor workers it's the other way.
I also have several friends who work 3 day a week (24 hrs) by choice so they have more free time.
And remember, a lot of people came to the cities in the first place because the work there was favorable compared to farm work. The outcome of your factory work was generally more predictable as well.
All this to say that, in light of historical perspective:
1) The notion of calling the United States of today "third world" strikes me as extremely hyperbolic. The average human in 2017 (at least in the OECD) probably works way less than the average worker at any point in human history, and probably lives better.
2) The notion of "working to excess" is probably overstated.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressed_Steel_Car_strike_of_19...
This, I believe, is a misconception. There's only so much farm work and population increases means work had to be found elsewhere. On top of automation lowering the number of farm hands one needed, and worse, a lot of that work being temporary seasonal work that paid very little. The Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle show the brutality of this period from both urban and rural perspectives.
A lot of urban dwellers in that period would have been fine with farm work. If anything, it was safer and healthier than factory work.
I don't have a source handy, but I remember reading that for farmers who didn't own their land, it was really difficult when bad weather ruined the crop and you couldn't make rent as a result, not to mention the fact that you didn't have food that season either. That's what I was referring to.
I don't know anyone who works more than 40 hours a week, in tech or elsewhere. Those of us in the corporate world have 15-25 days of paid time off (not including holidays, to be clear), based on time with a company. As an employee, I would love to see this increase. As an employer, I would see it as a recruiting opportunity that many job candidates would value.
Most people I know own a home, and others rent houses or apartments at relatively low cost. And probably significantly larger and nicer than European expectations. And they all have plenty to show for their hard work, though much of it may not be enriching our lives substantially.
On the healthcare side, maternity leave is usually only 30 days (not very much, I know, but much better than none). While our healthcare is not "free", I feel like the higher compensation, lower taxes, and lower cost of living in the area enables my family to afford paying higher premiums for better insurance.
Having said that, I still feel anxiety about the future. Losing my job doesn't just mean I lose my income, I also lose my health insurance coverage. I'm not sure how quickly I could switch to an ACA plan with an income-based discount, and I wouldn't be able to afford it otherwise if I had no job.
Unfortunately, I don't think switching to a single payer system alone will address the deep issues in the US healthcare system. People are quick to blame the insurers, but much of the blame also needs to be placed on the providers who charge astronomical fees. The source of the problem, in my opinion, is lack of transparency in pricing resulting from the presence of a middleman (the insurer) and the inability to shop around for many medical services that could be commoditized.
So while I agree that in many ways Europeans have it better (but not without cost in terms of lower wages, higher cost of living, or high unemployment), I don't think painting such a dismal view of the US is warranted. Based on my experiences traveling in Central and South America, a comparison to the third-world, even if limited to work/life balance, is highly inaccurate.
Disclaimer: others' experiences will absolutely vary.
of course it is. calling the US as a whole, a third world country is absurd to anyone who has actually been to one.
that's not even taking into account that the US is what literally defines what a first-world country is, warts and all.
For some reason, there are smart people who think that meritocracy works: work hard and things will be good for you. The problem is that in many cases working hard (as in building up a startup) does indeed give people the opportunity to rise in society. But it is not true in all cases at all. And so the negative statement "if you are struggling you didn't try enough" is completely flawed.
First, in capitalism, a work's remuneration is supposed to be related in a way to the perceived utility of that work for society in general. Second competition means that a work's remuneration is inversely proportional to how easy it is to perform.
Using those 2 propositions, it becomes obvious that jobs with little utility and high competition have a remuneration that tends to go down to 0 (fast food, taxis, etc.). So in these cases, no matter how hard you work, your pay can only go that high.
This is a misconception, I think. A work's remuneration is related to the utility perceived by the person providing the remuneration. Society in general doesn't pay people. Specific people pay other people. Find something enough people want and give it to them. It's not any more complicated than that.
I have never seen that to be a problem.
How would propose that we "fix" that problem ?
"The problem is, that while in many cases working hard (as in building up a startup) does indeed give people the opportunity to rise in society, it is not true in all cases at all; so the negative statement 'if you are struggling you didn't try enough' is completely flawed."
i.e. the problem is that hard work does not always (or even not often) equal success in society.
"setting the terms" is a bit over-the-top here. If I want to go from here to the airport, and you have a car, and I offer you twenty bucks, is that okay? Does it somehow become bad if we meet online in a chat room? How about if a thousand people in this city make this trade on a chat room today? So somebody sets up an online app. At that point do the people setting up the app "set the terms"? Does it happen when they have standards for who can use the app?
In that last statement, where the app creators start setting standards for who can participate, we run into problems -- mainly because if you're the gatekeeper, you can charge rent on both parties seeking the deal. Other than that, there's nothing amiss or terrible going on here.
Western literature has this childish and somewhat verklempt tradition of taking something that's new and making it into an emotional outburst. Thoreau goes out into the woods and laments the arrival of trains, the stresses of the city, and the war against Mexico. Dickens with his cutting criticism of Victorian England.
When done well, it's a thing of beauty. Most of the time, however, authors get a little too tied-up in belly-button-gazing and confuse "things that I can become emotional about and rant" with "things that are important and transcend time" We all take the shortcut of "if it's important to me, it must be important"
I am a bit concerned about Uber, Lyft, and the gig economy. On one hand, I am concerned that companies are exerting so much control over the marketplace that they're not innovating as much as they are creating monopolies. On the other hand, however, I am concerned that because this destroys the concept of "a job" for so many people, and the relationship to their employer and country -- they are going to push hard for limiting all sorts of free trade under the rubric of "something must be done!"
In this case, quite literally, the writer begins her essay with an example of how people might feel that something must be done for the children.
My first wife worked a 9-5 W-2 job during her labor with our second child. I didn't tell her to do it, we didn't need the money. She said she'd rather be doing something than hanging out at home or the hospital. I guess I could tell the story of our second child in much the same way as this author told the story of the Lyft driver in labor -- how some folks "might" look at it as exploitation. But I'm not 17 any more, and I don't tend to view individual choices as being some kind of massive battle between forces that I must take sides on. It was her choice and she made it. For me to come along later and use it as an example for any kind of political bullshit is whack. Rant all you want about whatever topic you'd like, but never take agency away from folks simply because you think you might get a little extra mileage out of your essay.
Maybe your wife was enjoying work during her pregnancy and it was her choice. But then maybe the woman described in the article didn't have a choice - maybe she really needed money to pay for the hospital bill and all the other expenses that come with having a child.
In a wealthy, healthy society, women shouldn't be forced (directly or by 'choice") to work until they give birth in their cars. People shouldn't have to do 'gigs' for $5 either.
That's just the state of the economy that gives rise to these kinds of rackets.
The 'system' is not just the set of rules and regulations, but also the beliefs and convictions of the people - what they think is fair and 'normal'. For some people it's normal for 10-year olds to do hard physical labor, for others it's 'normal' to eat dogs. We've decided these things aren't 'normal'.
Seeing the world through the ruthless capitalist work-till-you-die, climb to the top lens is detrimental to the future of the world. We should figure out new ways of living in a society, using technology as a way to reduce injustice, rather than generate newer and newer versions of it in exchange for profit.
I said there's a case to be made that companies are setting up monopolies and hurting both parties in the exchange. If you'd like to make that case, do it. I'm all ears.
But please (and I speak to the author of this piece more than you) -- don't fuck with me, jumping up on a soapbox and telling me how the world should be. Hell, I never thought they should cancel Gilligan's Island. How the hell should I know whether or not some random person is being exploited unless they tell me? And even then, this is an argument to be made using statistics alongside personal stories used as examples. Anybody that can put a sentence together can preach. All that takes is a lot of emotion and some rubes that like getting emotional. I'll be more blunt: the author needs to get a better game or go home.
I'm open to the discussion if it can be made in a reasonable, adult manner. Grandstanding, chest-thumping, and emoting? It's great if you like drama. Just ain't hitting on much when it comes to reasoned discourse. There are a lot of folks in the world who'd rather appear as a talking head on a cable TV show yelling at another talking head than simply open their heart and try to find consensus.
Are you confusing 'labor' and 'pregnancy'? The Lyft driver suspected she was in labor (i.e. experiencing contractions) and continued to work, operating a vehicle no less. Is the same true of your first wife?
Maybe we just have too much of that protestant work ethic?
edit: Sarcasm on HN is a bad idea. Obviously earning 400x a worker's wage is bullshit, there's no amount of work that justifies that.
I don't think it's unfair, or that there's too much capitalism, but it's the nature of the system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig_qpNfXHIU
edit: Sarcasm on HN is a bad idea. Obviously earning 400x a worker's wage is bullshit, there's no amount of work that justifies that.
Well, look at what Steve Jobs did for Apple. Regardless of whether he would've done that if he was paid less, how many workers was he worth? The natural follow-up question is then, why not pay them what they're worth?
One reason CEOs are paid so much is to prevent them from making short-term decisions that optimize their stock price at the expense of long-term planning. If their entire compensation is tied to the stock price, there's no incentive for any CEO to try to do better than increase the stock price at any cost.
The seriously rich get to chose how much they want to work, if they want to work at all. Surely you know that?
Edit: sarcasm is best perceived when the argument leads ad adsurdum. Now people at the top working very hard and taking risks happens all the time and your "Surely you don't believe that?" could have been just an arrogant attitude, so your sarcasm was hard to spot. But I'm glad to hear it was just sarcasm :)
I don't think that's obvious, but let's stipulate that it's true.
While there may be no amount of work that justifies it, there is an amount of ownership that justifies it.
Not everyone is a up-the-ladder CEO that gets placed into a firm and then rent-seeks for a few years while waiting for a golden parachute. Some people founded their firms and reap the financial gains directly from what they've built - and if that is 400 or 500 or 600x what the janitor makes, so be it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...
Instead, for too long the ideology that The Market is perfect and self-regulating and automatically works for the greater good, while Government/taxes/regulations/unions are all evil, has triumphed.
Working to find a good balance is so much more difficult and so much less attractive than believing in a very well narrated oversimplification. But, instead of working in that direction (the good balance), lots of people are opting to believe in even worse oversimplifications - the ones that populists all over the West are spreading. Not an easy situation to fix.
Competition is good. Aristocracies are not [1] [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...
A consequence of worshipping money. Even a human is valued by the amount of money they make or what they can afford.
Other societies have agreed that there are some fundamental things that they will all share the burden for collectively and the rich are going to contribute a larger share towards those collective resources. Thus, humans are not reduced to what they make but how they live and what their values are. Happy faces sharing a dining table, celebrating large families and friendships that last a lifetime.
It's not protestant work ethic. It's ass on fire, all the time for 70 years (save 18 years before college) and hoping you don't meet a "man-made" disaster like healthcare disaster, divorces, bankruptcies, lawsuits, prisons (completely ignoring natural disasters).
Really hitting at least one disaster in your life seems almost inevitable, and the system is waiting there to profit from you.
I'm definitely of the more socialist bent, in that I know that if people around me aren't healthy and safe, everyone is more at risk. But I feel in the minority these days.
We only feel alone because both parties are bought and owned by multi-nationals, and don't give a shit about what most people want. First Past the Post ensures a 3rd party will cause carnage if it ever did rise, splitting the vote and not electing the candidate most voters would prefer.
Look at Wolf PAC in Connecticut closing 26 points of a 36 point gap by beating the streets with 500 volunteers[1], or Bernie in West Virginia going to town hall after town hall and talking to people about the very real issues that affect their lives.
We can convert the "unwinnable" "red" states if we only dare put in the effort to beat the streets and call people, have one on one interaction and talk about issues that matter. Jobs, healthcare, workers rights, when you connect to people, even if you disagree with a person about "divisive" issues, they can often feel you are out there fighting for a better future for them and their family.
So get out there, go join Wolf PAC, Our Revolution/Woke, go to a Womens Day protest, a BLM protest and fight for a better future. If we take action, we can create change!
0 - http://www.gallup.com/poll/191504/majority-support-idea-fed-...
1 - http://www.mediaite.com/online/the-message-we-want-to-send-i...
The US system was ok in the 18th century but now it's a relic. Some things don't age well.
George Carlin puts it best, "America was founded by a group of Salve owners on the premise that all man are created equal."
My observation is that America is the land of law & order as every illegal & unethical practice becomes law. Its owned by 1% and wages war for the 1% in the pretext of spreading the seeds of democracy.
The thing that worried me the most as a non-American is that people around the world think that America is a democracy and all the "bad dudes"(corrupt self-interested 1%), gain power in America and try to impose their will on rest of the world by using Hollywood, CIA & US defence force.
What are the consequences of each of these choices and who is the right person to make them? There is no perfect voting/political system - all of them have side effects.
Worse is subjective in this arena. So what are your metrics? What do you define as better? I'm not terribly keen on prop rep, for example - I think it actually gives too much power to extreme parties. Maybe you disagree. Maybe you think it would be better? If so, why?
Notably, Brexit was caused by the small party UKIP stealing votes from the Conservatives, and then by Lib-Dem voters fleeing to Labour because they previously teamed up with the Conservatives. So a leftward shift of voters, sent the result rightward, giving the Conservatives a clear victory which meant they had to deliver a referendum that they never thought they'd have to.
Too late now to change it, but it seems likely the UK wouldn't be tearing itself apart at the moment with a better system.
Definitely we need to get rid of First Past the Post, but while our parties are polarized, they are both far to the right of the vast majority of voters.
> What if I like guns but I want universal healthcare?
That is actually fairly common. Gun control can be done in a nuanced way, and we can have more guns with few instances of gun violence esque Switzerland if we train our populace to properly secure and disarm their guns when not being actively used.
Comparatively, people like my great grandfather thought it was fine to leave a dozen or more loaded guns of varying types all throughout the house. Not great when a shotgun falls out from behind the stove and nearly gets ya.
> What if I want a smaller government but I also want great environmental policies?
Hard to do, small gov't = small town corruption if you look at areas that take this approach.
> The US system was ok in the 18th century but now it's a relic. Some things don't age well.
Definitely, we need to update our antiquated political system.
Would a law requiring guns to be safely stored (i.e. in a safe) be acceptable? I assume the gun lobby would scream at the thought, but what would the majority think?
Likewise, would a national register and limits (i.e. every serial number is bound to a person in a national registry, the number of registered weapons to an individual is limited, and carrying a weapon not in the registry is a felony) - would that be acceptable?
I think all these countries with tons of guns e.g. Switzerland, Nordics, Canada, the key is they are to a large part hunting weapons. Hunters are usually completely fine with keeping their guns, or in some cases just vital parts of each gun, in a safe. This however means you can't keep a handgun in your bedside drawer, for example. But that's no problem - no one is using guns for "protection" anyway. I think the difference to the US is that in the US people still believe in using weapons for personal protection. Not being able to carry guns outside or have them lying around the house then sort of removes the ability to use them for protection.
I consider myself a pragmatic Libertarian, so my personal political views don't really align with either of the major parties, but are definitely more conservative in terms of limited federal government than most of the rest of the world view, exceptions to essential infrastructure, which to me includes water, power, communications/internet, transportation, preserving public lands, and education (though in need of some revision). As to corrupt local governments... those are easier for local citizens, and even states to address. Of course historically that hasn't always worked out so well.
In the end, what keeps Germany from being corrupted vs. Belgium... the States in the U.S. are slightly more coupled than the EU nations, but it's not too dissimilar, discounting the same language for the most part here.
And, although it's not mandated by law, gun owners do tend to keep records on private party sales. Nobody wants to be in the situation of "we found this Glock at a crime scene, and it appears to be yours?" and not be able to provide evidence to the contrary.
So a registry doesn't really offer any real utility... except to confiscate those weapons down the road.
If you want to promote safe storage, the best solution would be a tax benefit for buying safe-storage equipment. Gun safes are expensive, at least if you want something that can't be crowbarred open in a few minutes.
Something else that I would love to see, and stealing a page from the Swiss, is universal gun education.
There are more guns than cars in the United States, and I find it negligent that not every American learn not just gun safety, but also how to safely store, handle, and yes, fire a gun -- even if they never plan on owning one.
Yes, a tax benefit seems like something you would probably need to add to a bill requiring safe storage, just to get it past lawmakers and special interest groups.
> Something else that I would love to see, and stealing a page from the Swiss, is universal gun education
That sounds like a good idea. Not sure if having it mandatory even for never-to-be gun owners is the best use of resources, but at least having it as a requirement for a license sounds reasonable - just like driving.
Being a Swede we have (and had) mandatory gun education. For men at least. Same thing in Switzerland. Conscription! (now everyone is again elgible for conscription but far from everyone will be required). So that problem is at least solved in countries with conscription armies. Obviously, neither Sweden nor Switzerland ever trained everyone in gun safety but there is mandatory training before ever using a gun at least, because the licenses require it. So owning a gun for hunting requires passing an exam, Military obviously includes a lot of training, and owning a gun for sports of personal protection is simply not a concept.
Personally, I think it would do a lot to connect Americans from different walks of life. I know a lot of people in SF that have no idea what rural California looks like, and that works the same way in the other direction.
As far as licensing goes, that's off the table for historical reasons, and also why I say that we should make gun education universal.
Pretty much every gun control law in the United States, starting after the Civil War, and up to and including California's Assault Weapons Ban and Open Carry Ban, have been primarily to limit gun rights for the poor, and for minorities. It's why the laws are so patchwork, and make so little sense.
So, given that history, public education is the most sensible way to promote responsible gun culture and firearms safety, without imposing the licensing burden that is still used today as a means of discrimination.
lower quality of healthcare
Not overall, but arguably yes for people with perfect healthcare plans at the moment. I think that everyone having 90% "rated" healthcare is better than a split of 0%/50%/100% by wealth bracket.
Increased government spending
Yes. Absolutely - you have to tax people the money that would otherwise go to insurers and spend it as an insurer. Since the US currently spends the highest proportion of GDP on healthcare for incredibly unequal healthcare you can decide for yourself whether even big government could manage to be less efficient.
Increased chances of corruption
No.
Creating a moral hazard of not working to earn what is consumed
Sure. It's a problem when there's zero cost involved in healthcare - something many systems struggle with. Often in european countries you'll see some kind of excess/copay so people have a little "skin in the game" before using the system. The UK uses waiting lists and gateway doctors (GPs) to assess need.
Rationing of healthcare on a basis of need, rather than wealth seems smarter to me from a population basis.
There are many healthcare systems, all have trade offs. Most of the first world is unconvinced that the current American system is optimal
On the very top end of healthcare? Maybe, but countries with public healthcare aren't doing too bad on that side either. On average? The quality is insanely higher. Until budget gets cut because some dimwit thought it would be a good idea to stretch their resources thin.
>increased government spending
Covering everyone costs money, yes. But considering the amount of money that is already being invested by the US govt. into health care and the abysmally poor results it gives, it can't really be worse.
>increased chances of corruption
Very little. And it solves lobbying, doctors being paid by companies, etc. It's usually a net positive.
>creating a moral hazard of not working to earn what is consumed
Screw that. People have a right to live decently, even without earning it. That's why we made societies. That's why we keep elders alive, and not immediately send them off to the glue factory as soon as they retire, that's why we keep children and feed them and teach them until they're able to be a useful member of that society. In most sensible systems, their education is largely free too.
Would likely have cost less, reduced redundant agencies and staff, and had a chance at making things better.
While our emergency system is often at the point of creaking it at least isn't anywhere close to American levels of having to deal with what should be primary care problems. There's also the massively real hazard of what happens when you have a large proportion of the population who can't access basic healthcare, for instance a greatly increased communicable disease risk. Then there is the economic cost of people unable to work, or work as well, due to potentially treatable medical conditions or bankrupted by medical bills. On a purely economic basis there is a case for universal healthcare.
How much of this "creaking" is intentional underfunding or political meddling by politicians looking for a payday from American medical insurance companies when they ruin another nations healthcare is debatable.
It's very similar to recent Trump moves of putting people who hate what a government department does in charge of that same government department. Jeremy Hunt the former Health Secretary previously called for the NHS to be replaced with an insurance system. So how can you trust that he's not trying to achieve that goal by crippling the existing system?
No. US does not have better health care indicators than other countries with similar development levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality_o...
> increased government spending
Maybe... But you will spend much less overall on healthcare, so it'll be a net positive for normal working Americans.
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.PCAP?year_high_de...
> increased chances of corruption
Countries with better healthcare than the US also have less corruption perception. I'm not suggesting public healthcare causes that, but it certainly does not cause the opposite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
> creating a moral hazard of not working to earn what is consumed
Moral hazard "occurs when one person takes more risks because someone else bears the cost of those risks". How does this affect healthcare?
We know that a lot of diseases have a strong genetic factor, so moral hazard isn't an issue there.
Of course, behavior is also an important factor. But working insured Americans are already subject to moral hazard (since they're on a group policy, their disproportionate costs are already supported by others). Medicare and Medicaid recipients are also already subject to moral hazard.
So moral hazard will be created for uninsured people and people on an individual policy, for behavior induced health problems. If that's a deal-breaker for you, you should be against federally funded healthcare.
The Lyft story of a driver who still takes rides while in labor wouldn't be "controversial" in Europe, it would be universally appalling. I don't think any corporate PR, however clueless, would even think of telling it.
It was never a right in the US, although it's true that Obamacare brought us closer to that ideal.
I disagree -- if money was truly worshiped, why would discussing salary be taboo? I think it has more to do with things like a just-world hypothesis [0] run amok, a long-term political trend in decreasing union power, and a lack of awareness about exactly how much surplus value is being siphoned away before the average person sees any of it.
I mean, "stop worshiping money" almost feels like victim-shaming. To the extent that the average person worships it, it's because they didn't have it in the first place.
Your employer, however, is happy to keep all that money.
This is why we need unions. Because as a single person, you have absolutely zero leverage over your employer. Sadly, fear on each side is what makes the agreement work, properly.
* Applies more as you go down the chain of responsibility, or salary. Needless to say, software developers are not doing that badly in the grand scheme of things.
Perhaps worship isn't the right word- it's more akin to fetishization. The religious right does a similar thing with sex, with similar results.
The crazy thing is that if you want one of those high paid jobs where you work all day and all night then you don't even get those first 18 years.
I worked at such a job and an easy majority of my colleagues went to universities that require high achievements at the school level.
In the best case you get your first 14 years.
A large minority of my colleagues went to secondary schools with highly competitive admissions and another minority had achievements that require a very early start (olympiads, olympics, college sports, etc.).
Many of these people started when they were between 6 and 10 years old.
This was fine in America for a long time, but
1) As colleges degenerate from being an intellectual addition, to a pre requisite for jobs well paying or not
2) several classes of jobs disappear, especially those which could be done by common sense and training
It results in posers. People who are high functioning, cynical and clear about what it takes to live a decent life.
I probably point it out a lot on HN and other places - but you see this in action in India and China (and other developing nations).
Very few people actually are interested in doing math or math derived work all the time, but if they don't society and the jobs market will be unmerciful.
So they pretend. They hate it, assume everyone else is pretending, and go through the basic motions required to get to the other side.
These are the people who are badly affected by the whole process. The ones who would not have been happy becoming engineers, lawyers or olympiads.
But that's the game, and people will always play it.
At least in the Anglosphere, elite colleges were elite finishing schools before they were tickets to middle class elite jobs. I'm not sure that they are degenerating in the way that you imply.
It's also not clear to me that academic pursuits are somehow better than commercial pursuits. They're certainly not better for society.
> Very few people actually are interested in doing math or math derived work all the time, but if they don't society and the jobs market will be unmerciful.
I feel like I know more people who are interested in doing math, but are not doing math because the job market is not kind to those who do math. Indeed I am one of those people. I do agree that I took a somewhat cynical approach.
Replacing math with CS would make more sense in the context of the conversation. There are many 18 year olds today who are saying "I guess I'll study computer science".
When I took the first semester CS course at my alma mater the class size was roughly 300 students. Now it's regularly 1200+.
Personally, I'm doing my best to get to a point where I can feel good in an outfit I've had for years, feel good with a cheap haircut, feel satisfied reading and meditating to relax and being able to leave work at work and sleep soundly no matter the occurrences of the day. Judge me by the way I treat you not by the number of zeros in my bank account.
To me, it just seems like too many see that initial hamster wheel and jump on without thinking much about things. Then again, they lack proper education. I'm not even sure if it's about teaching them how to trade and invest, instead people need to be taught how to think critically and break out of the victimization trend. Then again, I'm not sure if that will help things much either.
If it became mainstream it would just mean more volatility which for me.. volatility is a good thing. Yet were not even close to that, not many trade. Which is fine too, adaptability is key. I think the "you can't" stuff really flows out to other areas of the economy, e.g. starting up etc. So we get into this thing were people don't even try, or they try and fail once and don't bother getting back up. Granted, having a family etc is problematic .. though I do know someone who failed thrice starting businesses while being a mother of 5. That has to be pretty challenging and seeing her persevere tells me many more can be successful if they get past the initial hurdles.
If that were possible, then it would also be possible for no-one to ever have to work, which might be possible in the future, but not right now.
If you're going to brag online about your investment performance, post your anonymized brokerage statements. Otherwise, you're just another person who's full of it.
The Nordic countries have had an extreme Protestant majority ever since the Reformation. In 1950s Finland, 95% of the population was a member of the national Lutheran church! That's practically everyone.
At the same time, these 95% Protestant societies were heavily unionized, built up strong social safety nets, and offered long vacations, public health care and other worker-friendly policies.
So it seems too simple to blame the dysfunctionalities of the American work environment on reformed Christian ethics -- at least, the Nordic example shows that a different, more employee-friendly interpretation of the same ethic is possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...
Even more interesting because I consider Netherlands the closest you get in Continental Europe to a Scandinavian country (socially/economically speaking).
May be protestantism is the origin of this kind of work ethics, probably exacerbated by american history (colonising a new world, carving a new place for themselves in a barely-known land...).
It's not the same protestant ethic. In nordic countries most are counted as members of a church nominally still today, but they hardly believe in anything. Only 20% or polled Danish even say they believe in Christ for example, another 20% states they are atheist, and the majority is totally indifferent.
The US got all the religious hardcodes, calvinists, the Puritans, Quakers et al, and let the define the national ideology beyond the church, and piled an Old Testament mentality on top of it.
Even today when the nordic countries have mostly atheists or totally indifferent nominally religious people, the US has a large population deep on Old Testament.
>At the same time, these 95% Protestant societies were heavily unionized, built up strong social safety nets, and offered long vacations, public health care and other worker-friendly policies.
In the forties and fifties, that is post war world II, the US was "heavily unionized" too. It was the golden era of the unions. But that (influenced by the tradition of leftists and labour rights activists in the US and the post war boom in the economy) didn't last long (e.g. after McCarthy), whereas in nordic countries, if not the unions themselves, those "safety nets" and worker-friendly policies remain respected.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHNONAG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M0829BUSM065NNBR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP
More people simply don't work. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
Consumption (note: figure adjusted for inflation) has only increased.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A794RX0Q048SBEA
Looks like that protestant work ethic/capitalism/etc is working pretty well for us.
(As for the per capital consumption, does it add mr. Gates with Joe Average? Even so I'm sure they will be an increase in Joe Average's consumption, but is that because Joe Average has more buying power than a worker in the 60s, or because they have to spend more to stay afloat, as everything's more expensive, and they don't have much cushion left in the bank?)
Even so I'm sure they will be an increase in Joe Average's consumption, but is that because Joe Average has more buying power than a worker in the 60s, or because they have to spend more to stay afloat, as everything's more expensive,
That's definitely not the case, since the numbers I cited are adjusted for inflation.
To determine whether average Joe has more buying power, simply compare the goods and services available to him to those of his parents. That's a clear win - when I was a kid, avocados were an expensive luxury to be consumed only once in a while, and I was often bored with nothing to read.
Inflation adjustment doesn't take into account costs that are prevalent in an era but totally absent in another: like internet access, cellphone bills, and such. Nor how much one not puts into their retirement account / savings to spend on daily needs.
If it was just supposed to be relative to the past, we would all be content for living better off than the pilgrims. Who needs a fridge, for example, when they didn't have any either? So, if we have fridges now and stuff, and even the garbage man has a cellphone, it's all dandy.
Empirically, people older than you that have lived throughout those decades know the numbers a bogus as an indicator of purchasing power, whether they were inflation adjusted or not. One could buy a house with a regular blue collar job as a household's single earner back in the 50-60s. Today, and for a few decades, not so much. Same for things such as college education. You could pay for it back in the day by working laughable gigs by today's standards.
So whether you can have "avocados" or not, if you can't as easily have a house, an education, or a steady job, is a moot point.
Note how: "after adjusting for inflation, today’s average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power as it did in 1979, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then. In fact, in real terms the average wage peaked more than 40 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 has the same purchasing power as $22.41 would today".
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...
I'm glad you've agreed with me that life has done nothing but get better. We're all winners, whereas by modern standards our parents were all losers.
As for the other things you bring up, basically none of the facts fit your story.
Homeownership has ranged from 64% to 69% since the 60's, but houses are twice as big.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...
http://www.realtor.org/RMODaily.nsf/pages/News2007032701?Ope...
Apparently there's no difficulty owning a home.
College enrollments (as a % of new graduates) has done nothing but climb.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/2010/ted_20100428.png
Note how: "after adjusting for inflation, today’s average hourly wage
That's because we get more non-wage benefits and fewer dollars per hour. Real compensation per hour has done nothing but rise.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB
Why not google these facts before making nonsensical arguments?
Only in the sense that being a loser with a cellphone makes you a winner over a winner in the 60s without a cellphone.
But I don't think "availability/access to gadgets and avocados" is of primary concern when one considers whether "life getting better" over access to housing, steady employment, healthcare access, savings, and other such things.
An example of this "winning":
In 2015, when researchers Ann Case and Angus Deaton discovered that death rates had been rising dramatically since 1999 among middle-aged white Americans, they weren't sure why people were dying younger, reversing decades of longer life expectancy.
In a follow-up to their groundbreaking 2015 work, they say that a lack of steady, well-paying jobs for whites without college degrees has caused pain, distress and social dysfunction to build up over time. The mortality rate for that group, ages 45 to 54, increased by a half-percent each year from 1999 to 2013.
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/52108333...
>College enrollments (as a % of new graduates) has done nothing but climb.
That's the problem of numbers, they say nothing without context.
Though this one is so obvious I'm not sure it's worth discussing.
Isn't it obvious for example that college enrollments have mainly climbed because getting by (getting a job above minimum wage) without one is not as easy as it was in decades past, and are thus becoming de facto mandatory?
Remember those "middle age despair deaths" I mentioned above? "But whites with college degrees haven't suffered the same lack of economic opportunity, and haven't seen the same loss of life expectancy."
And isn't it also obvious that this "climbing of college enrollments" is happening only with increased student debt (from even 0 back in decades past), that has reached enormous amounts for millions of people?
If people in the 40s and 50s has a gun in their head to get a college degree to find a job, and if they took huge loans to be able to afford it, then they would have the same percentage of "climbing college enrollments" too...
>That's because we get more non-wage benefits and fewer dollars per hour. Real compensation per hour has done nothing but rise.
Yeah, wonder what these millions of working class losers are complaining about... Entitled scum, the whole lot of them...
I'm sorry you feel that reduced status for white people is a problem, but we just need to accept that we're no longer automatically at the top of the heap. I similarly agree that the lack of work and easy ability to be idle is harming people's psyches. But this is a totally different problem.
Not an American, not a horse in the white males losing their status race, etc.
So don't particularly care for the weaselly "frame his sending this link as racism/white anger" angle ("I'm sorry you feel that reduced status for white people is a problem").
The issue pointed to is increased unemployment and scarce of blue collar jobs. It takes some twist it to turn it into some "reduced status for white people" problem in the sense of racist rhetoric. In fact it's a totally irrelevant reading, if not purposefully bad.
Reduced status as pertaining to white vs other races is irrelevant to whites losing their blue collar jobs. Whites could be getting less unemployment and still lose their status as superior to other races in American society, or they could lose their jobs and still retain their racist/top-of-the-heap status (and in fact racism often increases when unemployment rises -- just ask the Weimar republic. Germans were never poorer, but they sure increased their "top of the heap" status over jews).
And of course it's not just for white people -- it's just the demographic the research focused on. As if blacks for example have no issues with lack of blue collar jobs and lack of degrees (two things mentioned in the article). It's just that for blacks, premature deaths like mentioned in the article (and worse) have always been common, and nobody bats an eye.
I'm merely pointing something your "we're winning vs decades past" idea forgot, and which affects tons of people.
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/5FB2/production/_...
You seem to be focusing on whites when they are the exception. Weird.
I'm also not sure why you are discussing a lack of jobs now. Wasn't the original topic that we work too hard? And what evidence do you have that we lack jobs?
Given that virtually all of your factual claims have been disproven, I think you need to offer some evidence before I take this seriously.
Yes it does. Have you looked at how the BLS calculates the market-basket they use for CPI calculations? It's determined by actual spending by actual people on actual goods. This information is public:
"Knowing that consumers are constantly offered new items to include in their market basket, how do changing market baskets influence the CPI? The answer is not unambiguous and depends on the importance of the change in terms of total expenditures by consumers."
The CPI calculation does take into account "new expenses", but in a backwards way from what I asked for above and for the reverse purpose (to hide the negative changes).
Instead of just adding something like a cell contract into the "new necessities" in the basket, they substitute lesser goods instead of comparing like for like across periods, as if it's reflecting a difference in what people want to buy (aka the "burger vs steak" substitution) instead of what they can afford to buy. They have even long substituted home owning costs for rent. So, yeah, "it's not inflation", it's just a declining standard of living instead of a fixed (or progressing) one.
As you conceded above, that would be pretty cheap.
Just curious: Do those graphics take into account the people that don't work as 0h? or has the working hours not gone up among those who do work?
> Looks like that protestant work ethic/capitalism/etc is working pretty well for us.
Judging by economic growth and consumption, may be. And those might be good metrics.
But are you happier for it? Are you enjoying the rewards of your hard work?
Not trying to imply you aren't, by the way. And I say "you" because I'm a westerner, but not from the anglosaxon sphere and I don't see quite the same work ethic around me, although not too different either.
"Average weekly hours relate to the average hours per worker for which pay was received and is different from standard or scheduled hours. Factors such as unpaid absenteeism, labor turnover, part-time work, and stoppages cause average weekly hours to be lower than scheduled hours of work for an establishment. Group averages further reflect changes in the workweek of component industries. Average weekly hours are the total weekly hours divided by the employees paid for those hours."
I don't know how to measure how much happier I am as a result. Happiness measurement - particularly across cultural boundaries - is more or less meaningless.
You get a very skewed perception of reality reading human-interest pieces, because nobody wants to read an article about someone who is doing better than them in every way, having more fun too, and is going to act like a douche and crow about it to the news media. And if you have half a brain, you don't want that article to be written about you.
It is currently more profitable to have very large sums of capital itself (and invest this in other capital, financial instruments etc), than to work, no matter how hard you work.
As such you have to work even harder than that or drop out of the game entirely. Systemically, the correct winning strategy is already to have huge sums of capital. I'm not sure if there's a half-measures strategy for starting with only a little capital: perhaps it's primarily luck, as it is for most/all big investors?
But there's certainly no strategy for beginning with only sweat equity and having that turn efficiently into capital, so the 'protestant work ethic' is a mighty sad and inappropriate thing to have right now. I think the combination of this ethic and huge capital holdings is largely a thing of the past, and can hold people back from larger wealth because they're looking for ways to expand that involve work, and this competes against more efficient, purer capital strategies based around pure capital manipulation (which is strongly incentivised, for instance with tax incentives).
Currently?
And why would "how hard you work" play any role?
A surgeon doing 20 hour shifts gets way untold times less money than e.g. Tim Cook or some absentee CEO -- as their pay, not as their returns from capital investments.
And let's not compare a miner who risks their life (and lungs) underground with some cushy executive.
The above quote from wikipedia article on mobility in the US [1] highligts an important point. The US as the land of opportunity is clearly a false image, since you have a lower chance of climbing out of poverty there than in a lot of other countries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...
The UK has Protestantism as an official state religion and yet it has the NHS, mandatory paid holidays etc.
In fact the Church of England if often jokingly called the closest thing a church has to atheism.
Don't conflate nominal state religions with actual ideas at play in citizen's heads...
http://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-upward-mobility-study...
Actually, that's testable, to a degree ...
The largest and most potent concentration of "the protestant work ethic" produced switzerland, which is the nicest and best place on earth.
I don't think too much PWE is our problem.
Without a moral compass the only thing they can deliver is a dry soulless unfeeling dystopia stripped of any hint of humanity. Those who don't want present day SV to be replicated in their regions should be wary of the ideological underpinnings of SV startup culture and American capitalism.
The lack of a properly defined moral compass from those from non privileged backgrounds struggling through life guided perhaps by upbringing or religion but with no time to ponder or reflect can perhaps be understood but for a privileged well educated elite to display this level of apathy towards humanism is a truly shocking state of affairs.
Ultimately its our humanity, our relationships, our capacity for feeling and emotion that enriches our existence, not money.
Canadian government keeps stating that inflation rate is less than 2% but reality is, in Toronto, it is probably running in excess of 10% for last 10+ years. However, the companies keep pretending that for their existing employees, if they are lucky to get a raise, that raise should be 3% or 4%.
In Toronto, even modest vacations feel like luxury and entertainment options seem to be leave you with a feeling that your pocket is on fire.
Now before my pro-Canadiana countrymen come here and lecture me on how great Canada is (and yes, the free healthcare!!), let me tell you: I like Canada and definitely feel it is the place to be. I am just stating in context of the article, that is all.
Houses are commonly being bought ~25% over asking price at the moment apparently. And it's because Agents are using it as a tactic to drive up offers. Also, a lot of people here are agents nowadays.
Canada right now is basically getting divided into two classes: those who happened to own real estate a decade or two ago and their children, and everyone else.
That's not success based on how hard you worked, or how much you contributed to society, or proportionate to the amount of risk you took. It's just (mostly) Chinese money randomly landing on some of the population, and causing real issues with quality of life and serious opportunity costs for the rest. That is not something we should be happy about, and it's something that we should have better numbers on.
Goebels would be proud. The granny is a lyft driver (1) by choice (2) it helps with her loneliness (3) she gets affirmation of her value to society.
Of course, the reality is that drivers drive Lyft through necessity, and it is lonely job much of the time.
The real kicker, though, is that the advertisement is not even to try and get more drivers. It's used to asuage middle-class guilt who are underpaying for the labour of one of their peers. Middle class people should think 'Hey, these people drive by choice, and it's fun. Win win!'
It offers to connect drivers with an insurance broker, and helpfully notes that “the Affordable Care Act offers many choices to make sure you’re covered.”
..a lot of sub-text here, for example.
One piece of the sub-text coming up in my internet & human bubble is "technological unemployment" which I have a slightly different take on then a lot of what I read. I think we're seeing it already and it manifests mostly as wage disparity, not unemployment.
On the subtext of that quote, it seems to be on the side of what we generall call "labour socialism" in Europe. The idea that laws should focus on increasing low leverage emloyees' bargaining power and/or mandated benefits.
IMO, this is a dated position. We've seen relatively consistent success with government provided primary services: health, education & transport. This gets called welfarism, though I think centralism is a better term. We have not seen that kind of success in the labour-socialist sphere. In fact, example like France suggest a problematic trade-off between "good" employment and unemployment. I think the main problem is labour-socialism's tendency to corporatism.
I would really like to see employment (including the gig economy) be free-er but suplemented with free or subsidized basic services (health & education mostly) and a basic income. If housing prices are not pathological (as they often are), the gig-worker would be a lot better off. Instead of chasing our tail trying to force uber (or regular taxi companies) to provide stabilty, the state can just subsidize the citizen and provide stability on some fronts. It doesn't even require "big government" for the most part.
In most of west Europe, we should be able to implement this relativley easily. Redundant conditional welfare benefits (dole, pensions) already spend 25-40% of what a UBI would cost. Another 25%-40% could be taxed back as income tax without disadvantaging workers (IE, your UBI is >= tax increases). That's most of the way to funding it. This remaining gap mostly represents the uber driver, workers earning well below national average dealing with insecurity and on the wrong end of employer provided benefits (like health insurance).
I don't think the US can do it anytime soon though.
Of course the solution would be to tax these companies fairly (which at least in the UK, is slowly beginning to happen), but eventually when taxed fairly enough, doesn't the burden for the companies end up being the same? The only difference is that the state would be footing the bill for the admin overhead of supporting these workers.
UK corporate & capital gains taxes make up less than 10% of overall taxes. This is normal. I'm a pragmatist. Happy to support any realistic plan to shift tax burdens upmarket, if possible but my starting position is that we have X resources to work with. X= about 40% of gbp in most countries. I don't think economies can support much more. I'm not counting on any of the politicians promising to tax multinationals. If they succeed in bringing in VAT-like sums without taking it from the pocket of workers I will change my mind. For now, work with what we got.
Me neither. Wife...family..kids meanwhile Kalanick gets his $6bn...NICE.
(though those were in Europe)
I came her to agree with the gf comment. It may be partially geographic, as I'm in Miami and about 75% of the drivers I've spoken with are Venezuelan, arrived in the last 2 years or so, and are very happy with their life change and their job driving.
And the other 25% are largely either other immigrants or former taxi drivers who are, after talking with a number of them about how the economics worked in taxis and with Uber/Lyft, significantly less exploited than they were working for taxi companies. They see Uber/Lyft as an upgrade, a big one.
Trying actually talking with them and asking enough to get to their real opinions. You might hear some spectacular stories, like the Cuban driver I spoke with who walked ashore in Key West on July 4th, and the beachgoers paid a taxi to his family's house in Miami (a 3 hour taxi fare). Then, after he ended up on the street he panhandled and saved enough to rent a car and drive Uber/Lyft while he began working to get his electrician's license in the US (he was an electrician in Cuba). He was just a few weeks from getting his license.
Tenacity. Pure tenacity. The gig economy was working very well for him. And he was quite happy with how he was able to use it to improve his life.
Perhaps I read too much into it.
Part of good customer service in the US is pretending you're really really happy to do whatever it is you are doing for your customer. "It is my pleasure to serve you." The staff at Texas Roadhouse wear shirts that say "I love my job," for crying out loud. It's extremely unprofessional to complain to your customers so you're going to put a positive spin on everything.
Doubly so if you are really jonesing for a tip.
If I were in a customer service position and my customer asked me how I liked my job I'd tell them I loved it, no matter if it were the truth or not. I'd lie through my teeth because its my job to be positive, not honest. That's not to say you're always going to be dishonest.
It's just like when a stranger asks you "how you doing?" You say, "good, how about you?" Even when you're miserable. It's just a social nicety people do and has no bearing on how someone is actually doing. Pointing that out isn't implying that every single person who says "I'm doing good" is secretly miserable.
Who knew that Mexicans work 500 hours a year more than the Japanese?
I wonder if the data is being skewed somehow, perhaps by different cultural norms around women working, or something like that?
If anyone can shed any light on this it would be really interesting.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#OECD_ranking
intern = a person who works for free or next to nothing on the promise that they will benefit in the long run, while you make sure that they get no benefits and assign every demeaning job possible to them.
If you live in a Western country, gigs like driving an Uber, doing a task through TaskRabbit or providing service at Fiverr / Upwork can be considered a modern day equivalent of waiting tables or babysitting. Obviously, if you consider the later as full time jobs then you have to burn your a-- to make the ends meet.
For those living in the developing countries, the gig economy is a gift from skies. More and more people from Asia, Africa and parts of Europe are joining the gig economy to supplement their income. Considering the cost of living in these areas, they are even in a position to generate full time living from doing these gigs. Not to mention the digital nomads who are escaping the stressful lives in the US / Europe and traveling to less expensive regions - living off gig economy.
Looking at the positives; gig economy gives you freedom to live your life. You do not have to spend precious hours of the day in commute, waste time in useless meetings, bear office politics and bend over to get a raise. Reduce your expenses, get a few well paying clients, work when you feel like it and enjoy your life.
All hail the Gig Economy ;)
Obviously there aren't enough jobs to go around, this is not caused by the gig economy. Some regular jobs don't pay well enough, this is also not caused by the gig economy.
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...
Aren't Trump's anti-immigrant attitude considered bad in part because we might lose immigrant labor we are dependent on?
Just look around any developing country. There always seem to be people almost begging for work, yet there seems so much more work that needs done - infrastructure needing repaired, litter being cleared, healthcare...
Or as the anarchists say, "Work 50 hours or starve" isn't a choice, it's a threat.
(edit: nitpick misspelling)
Damn nature, we'll get back at her somehow, we will.
Thankfully I'm not American and I'm not working in the US, so I don't care.
Somebody finds a system that reduces the salarial expenses to zero and all the hard-capitalists are over-joyed, secretly dreaming that they could apply this model to their own business.
In the mean time workers, while owning the means of production, are still liable to pay all the running expenses, to invest their time and work and give a percentage to a stranger, for some odd reason.
This is a form of feudalism.
I am not anti-capitalist, but I fear that this form of economy on the long run will not allow individuals to flourish economically through the merit of their work.
Look it up, gypsy cabs are not new at all. Most people kept a low profile and stuck to their own ghettos though.
Anyways, the conversation is not substantive anymore, both of our points where made.
As any respected free-market advocate will tell you, it's better than dying from starvation.
Yeah, that's not a very high bar...
Epitome of race to the bottom
I don't think it will ever get better anytime soon.
Kuznets claimed that there were cycles in capital allocation of a certain type, in between some other's determination of characteristic scale, the business cycle, the Kondratiev wave. This is probably not the case, and it's just all a jumbling 1/f wave. So it might be 1 month till your statement proves not to be the case, or 1 millenium.
It's part of their "Entrepreneur campaign" - using that cliche "entrepreneur hustling"
getting paid $11/hour for it is the problem.
Even when your water breaks, the hospital will tell you not to come in immediately. With my first kid it was like that, we had hours before anything started happening.
A few minutes extra to drive someone doesn't seem all that bad.
How many people have actually had the opportunity to live a decade or more of their adult lives in different countries? A very small minority.
Canadians love their single payer healthcare. They have no problem waiting a year or more for surgery. They don't think paying a 15% VAT is a burden. They don't know any different.
Americans would shit themselves if they had to deal with that.
Citation needed.
This woman was told she'd need to wait 2+ years.
Bennett was referred for surgery on her right hip in November of 2013 and said she’s been told she won’t get in until early in 2016. She said her joint has deteriorated so much she is unable to work or even function without strong narcotic painkillers.
[1]http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/patients-live...
Yes, I pay some spectacular taxes, and on a somewhat lower salary than I would probably have in the US, and as a result, live in a smaller house and drive a cheaper car. But the six weeks of annual vacation soften the blow, and being able to leave my nice bike lightly locked in front of my house and in front of a pub in downtown Nuremberg on a Saturday night makes up the rest of the difference.
As for the medical, my anecdata is that I've never waited more than two hours in an emergency room (each time, non-life threatening, just weekend) and that care was far less expensive than in the US, even as a private payer. One example while skiing in Austria: I fell and injured my thumb, ski patrol insisted I go to the hospital. I paid 20 EUR to take a cab to the next town. The emergency room looked at my passport and took my word on my address in Germany. A few x-rays later (no break), I had a packet of pain pills for the next three days.
A few weeks later, the bill arrived: 125 EUR.
Generally, yes we do. And here's a single datapoint: I paid lower taxes in Ontario than in CT, on the exact same salary.[1]
A decade or more ago I was paying less than 10% tax in Michigan on a $60K salary. I ran the numbers for Canada and it would have been closer to 20%.
Are Americans some kind of special subspecies where the bottom 80% of earners inherently enjoys being screwed?
Going from the system today to "no you can't go to that hospital" or "you'll need to wait 6 months for surgery" or "no we won't pay for the latest cancer drug" would piss a lot of people off.
...which works very well in Western Europe, where you don't have to worry losing everything when you get ill, lose your job, etc.
I am in favor of a fair bit of (regulated) capitalism. But in the US people are taught that capitalism is good and socialism is bad [1], and the industry at large exploits it to get extremely cheap labor.
There is a life outside work.
[1] How universal healthcare can be bad is beyond me. The US spends more on healthcare per capita than Western European countries and has worse outcomes. See e.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/09/which-countr...