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Comment by maltalex | Hacker News Reader

> I often wonder what civilization would be like if adults asked the same question to themselves and then lead a life where they focused on that instead of being pressured into "making a living".

I imagine we'd have an abundance of pilots, and actors and a severe lack of toilet cleaners.

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Personally I think there are more people than you think who would be perfectly happy to clean toilets as their contribution, so long as they were compensated fairly for it.

That would mean raising prices, and thus the toilet cleaner him/herself wouldn't be able to buy the things that you want them to reach anyways.

Yes, and then pay the toilet cleaners even more, raise prices again, and so on. A virtuous upward cycle which would eventually bring their lives more in line with everyone else's.

How did it bring someone's life in line with everyone else when they're still unable to buy the things other people can buy? Do you realise that once the cleaner is more expensive than a Japanese toilet is to maintain, the cleaner will be fired and will have nothing instead?

So the toilet cleaner retrains to become the toilet repair person? What's wrong with that? We all get better toilets out of the deal, too.

The public bathroom still needs cleaning itself, though. Unless you're suggesting that a Japanese toilet is a robot that cleans the whole bathroom? That would be interesting!

> So the toilet cleaner retrains to become the toilet repair person?

I once had a summer job as a manager of this issue - my job was to find a cleaning company and assure quality in one company building (roughly 500 toilets, around 30 cleaners). From my experience, these people were unable to properly do their jobs (not the cleaning part, stuff like opening windows so the toilet doesn't smell like acid and actually dries, not forgetting to clean something...). None of these people would be able to or would want to invest the time to learn to repair the incredibly complex Japanese toilets - they will rather live on welfare. Of course it's anecdotal and I'm sure that a lot of people will do just what you said - most certainly not everyone though, and there won't even be place for everyone, rather like every hundredth at most.

> Unless you're suggesting that a Japanese toilet is a robot that cleans the whole bathroom?

Yes, there are "toilet boxes" that can clean the whole thing including floor, ceiling and walls.

Futile - one repairman needed for every N cleaners. Same with all automation - in fact its the entire point of automation - its cheaper to use machines that require very little human intervention including repair, than humans, to do some job. Until that's true in fact, robots aren't used because they aren't cheaper. In a total cost of ownership sense.

Rather, the toilet cleaner would be able to buy things previously unattainable, and the person who hired the cleaner would have less free cash to spend on other objectives, which would cause a slight drop in the price of those other objectives.

Raising the income of a toilet cleaner doesn't correspond to a general rise in prices. It might mean the development of self-cleaning toilets, which isn't a bad idea.

Legislatively redistributing profits from investors to workers has the predictable long term consequence of reducing the rate of return from investing and with it, the volume of investment and labour productivity growth.

Margins aren't as generous in other fields as in IT.

Isn't that the entire point of the free market? To find the price that incentivizes the necessary level of production of a good/service?

The alternative is a central authority setting prices, which has historically had disastrous results.

The "necessary" level of production as far as people are able to pay for it. In the iterated free market game power is not equally distributed, which directly affects people's ability to negotiate pay for their work.

Another way is to keep the free market as a price discovery mechanism, but introduce a mechanism that counteracts the tendency to accumulate wealth.

Well, in romantic theory, yes. But unfortunately, society doesn't value folks that clean toilets and folks that clean toilets need income to buy food, shelter, and other things. The balance of power seriously works against the person cleaning toilets, and they have no real power over the wages they are paid.

The market forces that determine pay are more competition between folks that hire others to clean toilets. If all of your competitors pay twice as much as you, you might not have quality employees... or any at all, if a job is readily available. If you have a lot of folks desperate for income, you can pay less. If there are few folks that are willing to clean toilets, you probably pay more. You could go without folks to clean toilets, but your average Western accountant probably isn't going to clean the office toilets or breakroom willingly unless it becomes standard for office jobs everywhere. Many places simply cannot leave dirty facilities - and in some jobs, you probably would rather have separate staff cleaning (hospitals, for example).

Luckily, there are a lot of levels between "unregulated, free-market-will-take-care-of-it" and complete control from a central authority. Minimum wages, worker rights, workplace safety, safety nets that ensure less desperate people, and so on.

If the supply of people able and willing to clean toilets is great compared to the demand for toilet cleaning service, the wage for toilet cleaners will be low.

We can redistribute profits from investors to low wage workers like the people who clean toilets, but the consequence of that is lower return on investment, and with it, lower rates of investment/economic-growth.

In the long, policies that lower economic growth rates are very detrimental to all classes of workers. What increases wages for people like toilet cleaners is high levels of production relative to population.

Investment is the mechanism by which we increase production, and profits are how 1. resources are distributed to those who are most effective at growing the economy's level of production 2. people are incentivized to invest to increase production.

There's no escaping economic laws, and no free lunch from policies that redistribute income from high income earners to low income earners.

There are other alternatives. Money isn't only kind of compensation that counts. Once I've covered my expenses - food, housing, transport (that can be public transport if I'm in an area where it's adequate), and medical, I don't care much for extra money. I know this is true, because I have fairly slack hours at the moment and could use my free time to make more money, but I choose not to because I have enough.

Other compensation that I'd accept instead - social status, respect, ability to spend my time in beautiful places and talk to interesting, educated people, opportunities to work in interesting buildings or locations, opportunities to work for organizations that I believe in, ability to have more kids, and live in a community that sees childrearing as a community responsibility. All these things are easier to find if you have money, but they're not exactly things money can buy.

The salary of cleaners would rise until enough people are willing to do the job or it is more profitable to install self-cleaning toilets.

Why do pilots and cleaners need different wages, Is there something a pilot needs to live comfortably that somehow a cleaner doesn't?

The confusion here is because you are mixing up "wage", "a living", and "lifestyle cost".

Wage is compensation for labor and follows all of the normal market rules of supply and demand.

A living relates to the amount of money needed to pay for them to live. Rent, food, etc.

"lifestyle cost" is the above plus non-necessities.

Wage has zero relation to a living, and lifestyle cost. Your wage doesn't go up just because you want to spend more money at brothels in nevada, and it doesn't go down just because you stopped needing to spend as much money on food because you got a costco membership.

Or to put it simply, the rate of your labor has zero relation to your wants and needs.

Hmm, so minimum wages don't exist and when the cost of living rises wages never adapt to accommodate it. I think these concepts are far more linked than you suggest.

>Wage is compensation for labor and follows all of the normal market rules of supply and demand. //

It only follows those rules because those able to influence it have brought in that regime -- USA has been wetting its corporate pants over the idea that the hierarchy of wages might be broken by communism for some time. (Not to say communism is good, just it amuses me how they had to demonise communists - coming over here with their egalitarianism, trying to treat everyone as a person, embodying the maxim of 'being created equal' - in order to maintain capitalism and keep the peons/proles in their place. I digress.

Wages can reflect a person's worth to the owners of a company (they're worth X, because they bring us X+Y leading to profit) ...

OR they can reflect that people are "equal before God" and that one person's time is worth the same as another.

But, my time is worth more than their's -- well great, you can benefit society all the more.

But, no-one will work unless you use greed, selfishness, subjugation of others to motivate them ... well let's just keep mass murdering each other every 50 years or so we can keep the corporate masters in the style they're accustomed too.

>Why do pilots and cleaners need different wages

supply and demand

"The last few years I cleaned toilets for a living, but I decided that sucked, so this year I'm a project lead at Google."

I'll bet there are trash collectors that earn more than commercial pilots on second tier carriers.

Wasn't that myth debunked since it essentially happened to only a bunch of guys in NY ?

I personally know a small group of second tier pilots that only get paid peanuts. Something like $40k/yr, and unlike cleaners, they're mandated by a federal agency with teeth not to take a bunch of overtime.

Here's a pretty good introduction to how labor pricing works:

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-economics/chapte...

Adam Smith pondered this 250 years ago. His writings on the subject are still some of the best.

> The salary of cleaners would rise until enough people are willing to do the job or it is more profitable to install self-cleaning toilets.

or we could pass laws to bring in temporary workers from other countries and keep the wages down.

"and a severe lack of toilet cleaners."

not a problem because we probably would have selfcleaning toilets by then by default.

Toilets built by the underemployed pilots and actors? :)

You know not everyone is interested in becoming a pilot or an actor, right?

You know you're missing the point, right? There are some jobs that people just don't tend to enjoy or find meaningful. You can incentive people to do them by paying them lots of money, but that doesn't necessarily make people happy or fulfilled while doing the work, which was the original topic of this discussion.

We already have some for public loos.

They're somewhat terrifying cubicles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fw9hxMCBdU

I don't think it would be as extreme as a full career change. There exists a very large startup cost to becoming a pilot. I'd think to measure the number of people motivated to those as "failed actors", people who tried to make their career as an actor but eventually moved on to other things. Isn't that what we already have today?

Maybe that would lead to all adults cleaning up their own shit so that "toilet cleaner" wouldn't have to be someones job title. I think that might be the least likely of all the hypothetical outcomes though :/

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