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Comment by ebikelaw | Hacker News Reader

This is the problem with common economic measures. We spend 18% of GDP on health care, but that's just overhead and we should be trying to drive it to zero.

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The people who are that overhead do not want it to be driven to zero.

When blue collar jobs get destroyed, all I hear about is the benefits of creative destruction and the people will benefit through lower prices. When white collar jobs are threatened, everyone loses their shit.

Oddly, I hear a ton about the loss of blue collar jobs. Your rhetoric makes it look like you likely just notice and are annoyed by the people pointing out some change as inevitable.

Ultimately, this comes down to interests and money. Consider how much money is poured into saving a few well lobbied industries. Then look at how many more jobs are lost in the service/retail sector with relatively little press.

I mean, sure, we all talked about Toys R Us going under. How many jobs did that represent? Why no considerations of a bailout? Sears, etc? Tons of discussion to prop up coal, of all industries. Retail? If there has been discussion, I've missed it. (So, definitely possible.)

Blue-collar jobs in manufacturing are mostly gone, unlikely to return. Blue-collar workers are encouraged to train for work in white-collar fields, like healthcare.

Before going on to also gut a large source of white-collar employment it'd be a good idea to figure out what we're going to do with the displaced white collar workers, and the blue-collar workers who have lost a potential source of employment.

> annoyed by the people pointing out some change as inevitable.

I think that it's more white-collar people declaring axiomatically that all losses of blue-collar jobs are inevitable due to rising productivity (while productivity is falling), and simultaneously declaring that massive inefficiencies should be preserved to protect white-collar jobs.

If we're willing to forgo efficiency, of course all blue collar jobs could be preserved. The inevitability come from the fact that white-collar people get to choose in which areas of industry we should be efficient, and in which areas reducing inefficiencies is pointless.

I see blue collar people suggesting the opposite - for example, supporting massive inefficiencies (like repealing NAFTA) in order to protect domestic blue collar jobs.

Humans tending to empathize more readily with people like themselves is a regrettable, but not exactly exceptional or noteworthy, phenomenon.

That’s not regrettable at all when the consumer excess from trade policy hasn’t been evenly distributed across all income cohorts. There is a difference between bureaucracy and labor cost arbitrage.

Efficiency without social safety nets and other opportunities to replace existing blue collar jobs is brutal capitalism, inappropriate for a developed nation.

> Efficiency without social safety nets and other opportunities to replace existing blue collar jobs is brutal capitalism, inappropriate for a developed nation.

This position is not unanimous. I strongly disagree; "brutal capitalism" is both more efficient and more compassionate in the long run. "Social safety nets" merely transfer the burden to more people, increasing it in the process through bureaucratic overhead.

> This position is not unanimous. I strongly disagree; "brutal capitalism" is both more efficient and more compassionate in the long run. "Social safety nets" merely transfer the burden to more people, increasing it in the process through bureaucratic overhead.

The majority of Americans support social safety nets [1], so I won't be arguing that point.

Social safety nets have also been shown to reduce poverty, which reduces the burden on those paying taxes for social safety nets. [2] It would be economically irrational (and I'll go as far as to say foolish) not to support them based on that research.

[1] http://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/2-government-regulati...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/nov/12/...

This view is usually only shared by those who have never had to deal with all the things that come with being poor.

Social Safety nets are just that: safety nets. They are not meant to provide a living for everyone, but to cushion the fall for those who have fallen on hard times. To not let the weakest members of the tribe left out when there is no shortage of the basic commodities for existence.

We tried Brutal Capitalism before. It lead to all the evils of the Gilded age: poverty, inequality and wanton destruction of the environment by corporations gone amok.

""brutal capitalism" is both more efficient and more compassionate in the long run"

I'm not sure about that. I've watched a lot of scuffles in capitalist markets eliminate most of the competition to turn into lock-in via strong brands, control of territory, copyrights, or patents. The lock-in typically lands on a few companies that become an oligopoly of sorts. These are most noticeable in telecoms, operating systems, big chains of any kind, and so on. Once they form, they barely compete with each other. They mostly screw customers and employees over in common ways to maintain high margins. Internally, they usually form rigid hierarchies that push control more than innovation with the evidence showing they're driven by politics more than performance. If they pay a lot of advertising money, the media will also misrepresent their incompetence taking about how they're in a competitive market, struggling, or so on. Quite a few years on my resume was in one of those companies on Fortune 100 with general public none the wiser.

That doesn't even get into all the horrors of capitalism which stim from its incentives and operating environment. These companies systematically mislead people to get talent in the door, demand as much from them as possible, do as little for them as possible, do as much as possible for their controllers, discard them whenever opportune regardless of promises made, externalize as many bad things as possible, and pay bribes to lawmakers to make their evils legal. I don't have to imagine whether that was more compassionate in the long run: we're well into more messed up stuff than I can count that comes directly from financial incentives and moral apathy.

If you want to see some of that, the documentary The Corporation has a nice collection of anecdotes. I'd especially cite the examples of media suppression, taking water from Bolivians, and sweatshops. Author uploaded it in pieces on YouTube for free. I'll post first one followed by those clips.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pin8fbdGV9Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZkDikRLQrw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw5Fon_EjGw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3m5lq9FHDo

Hell, let's add one for parents everywhere who suffer to this day due to the invention of marketing aimed at making kids nag them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi63rXnuWbw

I think it is more sides forming. Folks feel they are either on the side of white-collar or blue-collar. I would love to see a numbers run of the data to see if there are actual patterns.

Ultimately, I think all jobs are on the table as something that will go away someday. That day is a long way from now, though.

One of my favorite tweets from recently was in a theme of "things in your industry that are obvious, but folks out of the industry don't realize." The tweet was basically, "every piece of clothing you see was stitched together by a person." Basically, we get the impression that automation will be the big destroyer of jobs, but there is still a long way to go in that path. And, when it comes to it, white-collar jobs are probably more susceptible to automation than others. Consider, how many secretaries are there nowadays? Clerks? Data processors? I don't think these jobs have actually disappeared, but I do get the impression that they have drastically shrunken.

> Tons of discussion to prop up coal, of all industries.

I believe the argument is that domestic energy production is a matter of national security.

domestic energy production is a matter of national security

The #1 factor in cutting US coal consumption/production over the past decade has been cheaper natural gas from domestic fracking. The #2 factor has been the rise of US wind power, which is also domestic.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25392

Seems dubious. I mean, yes, we should try and maintain energy independence. I don't think we need coal for that.

Nor do I think we should necessarily just flat out drop coal. If there are avenues it makes sense to use, we should do so. However, it is a remarkably bad industry for all but the owners.

That argument does not hold much water. Natural Gas is the preferred source for almost all new power plants, and the US has a LOT of it (Shale oil/gas). Not to mention the shitloads of good ol petroleum in the Permian Basin, Alaska and the Arctic.

Which is also weird, because they seem like a smaller voting block, increasingly so?

Not per se, but they do wish their own health care weren't so @#$#@% expensive, which amounts to roughly the same thing.

Not if the “waste” represents maybe 5% of their spending but accounts for 100% of their income.

Can we re-train them to do something which is actually useful, and which benefits the rest of society? What if we spent 18% of GDP on a new space program, for example..

What if we drive it to 0, and litterally hand those people the money they would otherwise be making.

If you have a way of driving the cost to zero without driving the delivery of healthcare to zero, we'd all love to see the plan. Too much of it is overhead, but not all of it, nor even close to all.

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