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Comment by mozumder | Hacker News Reader

The only way to offer the middle-class non-commodity non-factory foods is to reduce labor costs. It's impossible to do so otherwise.

You can't get the sort of service they're trying to provide for the middle-class without having a lot of poor people. This is where neoliberalism free-movement-of-labor is needed, where we can import a class of low-paid labor because Americans don't want to do that job for a low a price. (Obviously raising prices means no more business, so that's not happening.)

But first, Americans have to decide if they want to spend all their money on food or not. And then they have to decide if they want to eat commodity factory food or not.

And the people that say labor costs should remain high are basically saying "Poor people should never eat at restaurants" and that "Poor people should always eat factory food".

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A) labor costs in the US is very low (compared to other industrialized countries)

B) the real question is whether you want servant class of citizens who are essentially exploited?

Personally, I prefer only going out to eat on special occasions, paying well, and knowing that the people serving me makes a living.

Note: in some utopian world restaurants would automate the kitchen and reduce labor requirements, without having said automation impair quality. Maybe one day :)

Unrelated to original discussion, is the phrase "industrialized country" even relevant anymore? China is an industrialized country but very different from other developed countries.

> B) the real question is whether you want servant class of citizens who are essentially exploited?

It's absolutely necessary. We are being harmed economically because we don't have enough of an unskilled servant class.

Right now, women can't effectively work a job if they have a baby. You can see a situation where every household could have one servant, just to allow a woman to work - never mind all the other segments of the economy that could use low-skilled servant class. This may total to about 30-40% of the population.

Meanwhile, only about 10% of the US population doesn't graduate high school. So, where are we expected to gather the rest of our unskilled labor force?

We need to import this class of labor because America can't provide it, and we need to provide basic human services for this class of labor as well - health care, retirement, etc..

Inequality serves a useful function in any economy. When everybody is a high-skill worker, economies breaks.

If everybody is a PhD computer scientist, who raises babies while they are at work?

> If everybody is a PhD computer scientist, who raises babies while they are at work?

In Nordic Countries that would be the daycare/kindergarten (that usually accept 1+ years old kids) teachers, who have an MSc in Education or a community college or vocational school degree. This way also both parents can go to work.

If everyone is a PhD computer scientist - then the wages of babysitting will rise to the true value of that service, and a babysitter will earn as much as a computer scientist. Currently due to abundance of availability of low skill resources - their wages don't depend on the value of the service and instead on their willingness to work for whatever amount to get the job, but once the resource scarcity becomes inverted their wages will be tied to the value.

Great. Since everything costs as much as a high-skilled computer scientist, no one can afford anything.

We're now back to limiting the economy because we don't have enough low-skilled workers. People are now forced to work suboptimal jobs for their skillset, and our economy stagnates because we're now fixing broken windows we broke.

Child care at least has an intrinsic value that will create wage equilibrium because it directly frees up someone else's time for high value labor. It should track closely to the income of the people you are serving, and it mostly does even in the US. This is ignoring the educational and social benefits that good childcare services can create which act as a future labor multiplier.

I'm guessing you wont be part of the servant class

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