Hacker News Reader

Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

New?

Dude, work has been by the rich, for the rich, for about as far back as I know of. Probably forever.

It's comparative advantage, right? You use Uber because you don't want to drive. You use Deliveroo because you don't want to cook. The supermarket workers earn 1/5th what you do. The restaurant staff earn 1/5th what you do.

And so on and so forth.

Anyone who makes the transition from working to middle class knows this intimately. Suddenly you're on the other side of interactions.

Is it problematic? Sure it's problematic. The entire economy is problematic - if everyone were upper middle class we'd melt the ice caps, faster than we do already (damn.).

View on HN

> Dude, work has been by the rich, for the rich, for about as far back as I know of. Probably forever.

And indeed the link is even more basic than that. Once you get past what you can spend to maintain a lifestyle, wealth is basically a measure of how much of societies resources you can call in, and to make more of it the better options are to organise people to do useful work.

It isn't a class thing that the rich organise the work. Organising people is approximately what makes a person rich.

If someone is organising large numbers of people and is poor ... that is more than a choice, they'd have to be working quite hard not to be bouyed into wealth. It is easy and natural to leverage followers into riches.

> Organising people is approximately what makes a person rich.

Which means, if we are to remove wealth inequality, we have to disincentivise everyone from organizing other people.

If an AI is doing it, maybe, but it also has to be unhinged from all of the people programming it or owning it. That was unthinkable until recently.

I'm curious to know how you see that being implemented...

Sounds like a great way to make everyone poor.

This logic doesn't apply well to manufacturing (or agriculture, extraction, or arguably a lot of research and engineering). You use a stainless steel fork, because you... don't want to use your hands? You eat Idaho potatoes so you... don't want to starve? Or you use double-pane windows and gas heating because you... don't like freezing to death in the winter? People worked real hard for all of that, but that doesn't mean they're all making less money than the users.

There are many degrees of this issue. When we lived in Bangladesh, the income gap was so large that the small middle class of professional workers (not capital owners) could easily afford multiple live in household helpers. When we moved to the US you had to be truly rich for that.

> Dude, work has been by the rich, for the rich, for about as far back as I know of. Probably forever

It’s not new, but it’s a sign inequality is getting worse. A hundred years ago, rich people had live-in maids, and then they (mostly) disappeared.

I can tell you where I grew up (third world country), we have live in maids and some treat them as family (we do) and some treat them as slaves. Maybe that is where 'murica is headed with au pairs etc..

Treat them like family? Then why isn't the master of the house cleaning your cousin's house?

Because treating like family doesn't mean they're actually family, but that familial manners extend to them, among whatever their original reason for being part of the family is.

> Dude, work has been by the rich, for the rich, for about as far back as I know of. Probably forever.

There have definitely been jobs and businesses for hundreds of years that pay a living wage providing services almost exclusively to the wealthy: gold and silver smiths, upholsterers, watchmakers, falconers, tile-workers, high-quality tailors, courtiers, handmaids and butlers, etc.

Being a landscaper pays a living wage.

The main difference seems to be that the world doesn't force you to do something anymore, it begins to ask "what can I do for you?".

At some point money becomes more than the hard money you buy your food with, but a means of control. Within some limits you can, at some size even have to, provide meaning to others through organisation.

Instead of worrying about the next paycheck you worry about risk, the perspective has to become ever more "macro", lest you lose money because the world model you use to make investment decisions with isn't close enough to the reality of the world. Which, at the highest level is just a cloud of beliefs, constrained by psychology and ultimately physics.

I'd like to read more about the experience of others, and how much it differs between people who have worked/lucked into it during their life and those who were born and perhaps raised with that knowledge and in this environment (inheritance).

How do you find meaning if everything can be accomplished by a mere decision to invest/acquire/influence?

What are the values of the (ultra-)rich? What does still have value to them?

Can leaders of large, complex institutions have a true connection to the reality of the process?

Is there a way to cope with the massive social responsibilities other than to ignore them or finding a way to accept "small" misfortunes (laying off hundreds of people, shutting down unprofitable companies) in pursuit of a greater good (sound resource allocation, long term strategy)?

Is there still something, beside history, science or religion you can look up to and find instruction? Or does one have to look to ones side, to the few lonely people at the top of the pyramid?

Simply put, what is their perspective on the world?

> It's comparative advantage, right? The rich have the advantage of owning essentially everything and defining where and how people will work. And you have the advantage of having a warm body.

Wonderful.

>You use Uber because you don't want to drive.

Or it makes more financial sense to 'rent' a ride than to own it. You shop at a supermarket because it is cost-prohibitive to buy from the source yourself.

Not every transaction has to be about squeezing out someone else for less money.

it to me also seems problematic from a long term growth perspective. More and more people seem to move from full time employment in productive industrial sectors to low skilled, low productivity service sectors.

In the last few decades this has largely been framed as "natural" and just been shruggingly accepted but I'm not really sure how smart it is to put an increasingly highly educated workforce into a servant economy.

> low skilled

I think this is a flawed intuition. Remember how the early AI pioneers thought that chess would be hard while speech would be easy, and walking easier still? Precisely the opposite turned out to be true: the things humans think are easier are actually the things that we end up with the most skill experience in just by going through regular growth+development.

Jobs that require these such skills are actually highly skilled jobs; just because nearly every adult human being has the skill, doesn’t mean it’s not a skill.

I point this out because people worry about jobs being destroyed by automation “from the bottom up”, with the least skilled jobs first and then more highly-skilled jobs later on. But under such a framework, service jobs are some of the most high-skill jobs, that will be the very last to be automated. At some point, soft skills will be the only skills left.

I'm not judging whether it's a difficult skill in terms of how likely AI is supposed to automate it, it's a low skilled job in that it literally odes not require significant (academic) training, many people can execute it, and as a result it pays little.

Sending huge amounts of people that have obtained high levels of education at the cost of debt into low productivity jobs that are inequitable is a bad idea.

The question we should be asking is why these people are entering servitude instead of starting businesses, moving somewhere else and increasing economic productivity, which in some countries like the UK has stayed flat for a decade, and is barely increasing in the developed world.

I don't buy the narrative at all that we have somehow started all businesses that can exist and invented everything that can be invented so now we're all supposed to be maidens in cat caffees with 20 years of education.

This is what I was trying to say:

> it literally does not require significant (academic) training

It does! It’s just that almost every human is given this training, usually by their parents. Just because a particular skill is common does not mean that it didn’t require a lot of intense effort to learn.

Look at it this way: in the medieval era, only the most highly-educated people were literate. Today, literacy surpassing the average medieval level is something pretty much every human being achieves by age 4.

Does this mean that literacy is an easy skill? Or just a common one that humanity has built an amazing education process for?

If you look at social/soft skills not as “human instincts” but rather as technologies—tools increasing our leverage by enabling access to different (usu. better) Nash equilibria in social-competitive environments—tools that humans at one point invented, and then gradually developed ways of inculcating from birth—then I’m far less concerned with the fact that jobs that require these skills might be some of the only skills left.

Such jobs that require soft skills are not low-skilled jobs, any more than jobs that require literacy are low-skilled jobs. Literacy was once the province of clerics and military officers; soft skills were once the province of courtiers, diplomats and therapists. Now both skill sets are evenly distributed, because we’ve learned to teach them better. But the jobs that require them aren’t lessened as a result of our increasing educational capacity! Your average hospitality worker from the modern era could likely get a medieval courtier laughed out of the room. They have a high level of skill. It just happens to be common.

(And, in fact, many people seek to cultivate their soft skills beyond even the level the education system brings them to, through continued exposure to harsh social environments. What do you think Twitter is, if not a practice court for aspiring courtiers? But, again, we don’t see it that way, because it’s such a common skill that we don’t see the people practicing it as practicing anything at all. We see people polishing their courtly manner as just “playing around”, the same way we see tiger cubs practicing hunting as just “playing around.”)

> The question we should be asking is why these people are entering servitude instead of starting businesses, moving somewhere else and increasing economic productivity, which in some countries like the UK has stayed flat for a decade, and is barely increasing in the developed world.

Yeah, this one really confuses me.

I think a lot of people are 'just comfortable enough'. They see it as a risk to move country, to move town, whatever. Perhaps it means losing friends, family.

The life of someone who earns 15K a year in London is just a joke compared to what it could be elsewhere in the UK or another country. Servitude is exactly the way to describe it.

Low-paid/unskilled jobs in high CoL areas are hell.

Work has been by the poor, for the rich. That's practically the definition of rich -- profiting frmo other people's work.

It's not "profiting from other people's work", it's "profiting from making other people's work more efficient". That includes providing the capital (tools) to multiply the productivity of labor, securing customer contracts, ensuring all legal requirements are met, forecasting market conditions, managing the long-term strategic business plan, ensuring employees get a steady paycheck, etc. These skills are far from universal and those who have them rightfully earn a decent share of the profits. If it were just a matter of profiting from others' work then everyone would choose to be self-employed and keep that money for themselves.

> Is it problematic? Sure it's problematic.

No it's not. That's just a story you're telling yourself. You're either working your farm or you're working someone else's farm. Everyone can choose either. They both have their pros and cons. The former is greater risk but greater reward. The latter is lower risk and lower reward. You have to choose one or another to survive in this world. There's no free lunch. Mother nature doesn't afford any other creature in the animal kingdom a free lunch, why should human's receive any other treatment?

Work predates the rich. Hunt or gather. It's the natural order of things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com